6/3/25: China Popularity Soars, Zohran Surges In NYC, Palantir Surveillance, Biden Spox Admits Lies

World today, which I'm excited about. In addition, before I forget guys announced this yesterday, we brought back the monthly subscription, which I'm super excited about. I think it comes at a really timely moment when you know, economics are a little uncertain. That's actually what we're starting the show with today, and we are doing a free monthly trial right now. So if you want to try out being a premium

Breaking Point subscriber, go to Breakingpoints dot com. The promo is BP free, so you can get that monthly trial subscription. All right, So here's what is in the show today is go ahead and put the show bar up so I can read it and not have to use my memory, which is a little bit suspect. We're going to talk about the latest with regard to Tariff's back and forth with China. We've got the continued fallout from that extraordinary

Ukraine drone attack. Wanted to get Marshall's take on that in particular, and some reaction from Steve Bannon that was kind of interesting.

Looks like the Trump administration is trying to assemble a mass database of all of the information that they have on every single American. Yes, you should be terrified about that. I certainly am so. Ken is going to talk about that, and he is also going to talk about Matthew Miller, former State Department spokesperson under Joe Biden, basically admitting that he was lying the entire time he was at the podium and asserting that Israel had committed no war crimes.

So definitely want to look at that. So, Marshall, before we jump into the news, a lot of rising and breaking points. Fans know you already. You've undergone as all of us have, I think, somewhat of a political evolution over the years since you started being a guest on the show. So before we jump in, why don't you just sort of like set up for everybody who you.

wrong with you. So Sager and I have known each other forever, so we started a podcast called The Realignment, and the Realignment was really rooted in responding to this twenty sixteen moment from both the right and the left, and I think as someone who's sort of contrarian by nature,

I'm from like the center left Portland suburbs. I was alway attracted to the right, especially in the twenty tens after the twenty twelve election, where everything was up for grabs right like Mitt Romney loses to Obama, you have gay marriage passing at the Supreme Court. It seemed like we were moving in one direction as a country, in

a more progressive direction by twenty fifty. So the question of how would the right respond to that moment, I think was genuinely the most fascinating question of the time. Then that really got me into those spaces. I covered a lot of those topics. The Realignment's first guest was JD Vance before he was well. I met JD before he was famous, But our first guest after JD was a little more famous was JD on the show. So

covering that space was huge. After twenty twenty though, I think obviously what kind of happened with everything from January sixth to sort of COVID I think made pretty clear that the I think most hopeful version of that right populist project wasn't going to end well for anyone. It wasn't going to lead to like a stronger United America, was just leading to more division and the lack of

actual certainty on these questions. I started getting more interested in the left and frankly started going back to my roots. So just in the same way that like twenty thirteen was like this big error where like the central questions were, how would the right respond to how the twenty twelve election really shattered their story? The question right now is how is the center left? How is the center, how

is the center right? And how does the further parts of the left I think you represent, really well, how are they going to respond to that moment? So I think my politics have naturally drifted towards where the big questions are interesting.

while this is playing out in court. So the big question has been how is the Trump administration going to respond. Are they basically going to take the out and be like, oh, well we tried and we're just going to move on now. And effectively, all the indications are that they are not going to go in that direction.

seen by Reuters. So effectively they're saying that on that you know, the Liberation Day, which the tariffs went into effect on April ninth, they're giving them a deadline till July eighth, and then if there isn't some sort of deal into place, Trump is going to levy whatever teriffs

he decides to levy. A bunch of administration officials, including Howard Lutnik, have been asked about the court real ruling and if it makes a difference in terms of how they go about this, and effectively they're all saying, no, we're going to do what we want regardless of what the courts say, and we'll figure out some other provision to use. If it isn't a EPO, which was the original provision, let's go ahead and take a listen to that.

on what really is going on here. I think Trump loves the tariffs because it consolids a lot of power in his hands, and I don't think that he is going to let go of that easily.

that this is their priority. They see terroffs and immigrations as their unfinished business that they did not get done. Therefore, they are going to push as hard as they can on this issue. That's just like the number one thing here. If you don't understand that Trump just truly believes in this more than almost anything else, you're going to sort of miss the fact that they're going to keep pushing forward.

is a psycho and a white nationalist and is you know, going full force with the anti immigrant program that he wants to. But it seems like, the part of the agenda that Trump has really taken the most interest in and actually asserted himself in is the tariffs. And so what is your view, Marshal of you know, the tariff program, of the possibilities for do you see any upside here? You know, what is your kind of like broad view of what's going on and what the impact could be economically?

I won the popular vote. This time, I'm going to do a social security of form, even though the voter base wasn't actually there in this case. And you see this, you know, leading up to the you know, twenty twenty four election, Trump's theory of the case was, once again, I'm coming back. I'm going to finish the job. And this has been something I've talked about since in the nineteen eighties when we were talking about Japan and other

East Asian countries. I am going to past tariffs. I'm going to reindustrialize America by taking that specific route that has always been his sort of approach. And the big problem with these like mandate theories and these big like this is my big agenda project that I come in, is that mandate or that idea isn't actually sinc of what the American people are failing. You're going to run

into a huge issue. The huge issue they ran into is that if there's one lesson and we'll talk about this during the Zoran segment, if there's one lesson that we should take from the twenty twenty four election, it's that pretty much the main thing Americans care about is how unaffordable everything is right now, every single level. And it's easy for people in the Trump administration just to say, like, oh, you know these cheap goods and do you need thirty

dollars You just have two dollars. If we look at what's happened in America over the past fifty years, like education, healthcare, housing, in those sectors, everything has gotten way, way, way, way more expensive. The one thing we've actually kind of kept relatively cheap at the cost of manufacturing, at the cost of like in many ways, like our domestic politics and

domestic economy have just been these consumer goods. So coming out of the COVID supply shock, coming out of Biden ignoring this issue, we needed to pay attention to it. Having your theory of the case be I'm going to launch a massive trade war within the first three months without doing the long term planning, without getting the industrial policy together, without going to companies and businesses, even some

of the small businesses. I'm sure you saw a lot of those small business owners who v whatever for Trump's saying wait a second, like I wasn't ready for this. I needed time to prepare for this. And what's really frustrating and crazy about the whole program here is that even if you buy Trump's case for tariffs, this is just not the way you would actually do this. The starts and stops ninety days. Now we're extending ninety days. Actually, no,

We're going to get this other deal. Tariffs and reindustrialization and bringing manufacturing jobs back to this country is a medium term project. Starting a new factory, rejigging your supply chains. That is so complicated in such a heavy lift for small, medium, and large businesses that you have to have a consistent policy so they can make investment decisions based off of it.

If you and I we're going to launch a factory in Ohio, we would not launch a factory based on this current dynamic because we could have an entire situation where if you'd premised your reindustrialization plans on what was happening in February, March, in April, you could be totally screwed right now, yeah, because wow, are those tariffs going to be there? Is it going to make sense? Is

he going to get a big deal? And the last part of here too is that, in many ways, the big problem of his trade policies they're doing so many different things at once. So on the one hand, the tariffs could serve as a new form of revenue. They could lead to like a income tax decreased. But if we're actually decreasing the income tax and we're actually like making money from this, then it's not going to reindustrialize the country right right, So it doesn't really make sense.

And you really needed a different version of this administration that actually took those three months to say we're doing these five things. They make sense for this reason, and we're going to stay strong on it.

You know, in recent modern history, typically what happens is there's a recession, manufacturing drops and it never comes back right for a variety of reasons. And this was the first time that they had bucked that trend. And when you're talking about EV's when you're talking about battery production, when you're talking about you know, green energy, when you're talking about semiconductors. It was the policy was actually working

because you paired the protectionism with industrial policy. And that's the piece that's completely missing here, is any sort of a strategic direction. And at the same time, the parts of that Biden policy, which I'm first to say it was like inadequate and wor should be done and it wasn't transformational for people in their daily lives, and you know,

and wasn't sold with all of those things. But the parts that were actually working are also being attacked and dismantled by a Trump administration which just you know, hates Joe Biden, hates green energy, anything that's smacks of like liberalism, like evs, you know, EV batteries, any sort of green energy. They just want to destroy. And so they've taken a chainsaw to those pieces, and you know, are actually destroying the part of our industrial policy that was actually working.

It didn't deliver. It didn't deliver fast enough. Like I have a lot of like maga and laws, and like if you tell them about like the actual policies that Joe Biden pursued, they were like they are literally skeptical and do not believe it was happening. But as you didn't see this, there was lots of like really great reporting on how despite the fact that they put a lot of these jobs in red states and in purple and swing states, it just wasn't actually felt on the ground.

So at a political level, it did not work. At a policy level, I think what's been so frustrating about covering this tariff topic is if you actually talk to most people left right and center, what they will say is, wow, we actually came to kind of a consensus after the first Trump administration and the Biden administration. The Bio administration could have jettisoned all of Trump's tariffs when they came

in twenty twenty one. They didn't, though they kept them because they a bought into the idea that we couldn't just treat China entering the world market as this like chill thing that was going to work out for everybody and magically keeped everyone's jobs together. They kept that part, but then they once again added the government spending and industrial policy site. So we found a mix that, to your point, needed to be implemented better. So in a

better version of the Trump administration. To the point I was saying earlier, you would have said, Okay, here's what didn't work with the Biden approach. Here's what didn't work far approach in the first term. Let's combine this into a mix that actually builds us into something productive. And and the key thing here, there was consensus in the business community, in the labor with labor, and with policymakers

on the left and right around that mix. Jettising in it just because it's like Bidenomics or because it's Biden tied is like a huge disaster.

This is again global average net favorability. This is a poll conducted by Morning Console the US. When Trump comes into office, the view of the US falls off a frickin cliff, and at the same time the view of China has been significantly on the rise. So now you have a positive, you know, almost nine point margin in favor of China, and the US is underwater at minus

one point five, which is no surprise March twenty. You know, again with the incoherence of the trade policy, it would be one thing if you're like, we're going to specifically focus on China, We're going to create a block of our allies to you know, have some policy solidarity and to try to isolate China. But instead they went to war with the entire world, including like Canada and the EU and countries that only have you know, places that

only have penguins and the whole thing. And so of course much of the world is like screw you, like what are you doing? So in that respect too, it has been thoroughly counterproductive and is really strengthened China's hand going into these trade negotiations.

like cheap goods versus people actually having jobs here. No, Trump just broadly is hostileal trade, which just blames why we are doing a trade fight with Mexico, which explains why we're doing a trade fight with Canada. And if you talk to the Canadians specifically, you know, the Mexico side of this thing has always been much more complicated because you know, going back to like NAFTA in the nineteen nineties and the Makuila Dories, like a lot of

jobs like went south. So I think people had within their mental framework the idea that, Okay, the US and Mexico are going to kind of have a hostile trade relationship, and I think a dynamic where that is a fight doesn't lead to that fall off of support for the US in terms of these global polls. What the Canada experience just revealed is just like a real lack of trust.

Like if you talk to Canadians about this, if you talk to people across the kind of world, they would say, wait, like, if they're just coming after us on this, why would we assume they're trying to find the right deal for this? Why is this about sort of us getting a good deal with them, us getting something from you know, us being Canadians. The Canadians they get something, Musk, we get some of them. It's all just domestic politics.

absolutely no good. Not to mention the just completely like chao and schizophrenic nature of how the tariffs are on and off and they're up and they're down, and you know, he's chickening out and then.

is ideologically committed to is tariffs. There and not to mention, you know, if you had told people going into the Trump administration that we would be at the level of tariffs that we're at right now, and this is at a time before you know, we get to July eighth and he once again does like another Liberation Day announcement or whatever that's going to be, people would be deeply concerned about what that would mean for the economy because

it was an extraordinary increase. Even just the levels we're at now are an extraordinary change and increase over where we were previously so I'm a little bit I under stand where it comes from, because he has backed off the most maximalist positions of like one hundred and forty five percent tariffs on China, which just completely ended trade

between giant in the US, which was completely insane. But on the other hand, you know, I think it is I think it would be foolish to understate where we are and what he could potentially still.

of just sort of doing this, Hail Mary. We're going to reconfigure the way we conceive of trade policy and the trade policy with the administration to do versus actually Congress, because if you get knocked down at the courts, even

though those are being caused by the pos Court. Right now, why would China negotiate the other thing that really is important to here too, And I want to go back to the comment about how China's perception is going up, is that the real problem that we're facing here is that we sort of root our approach to China in sort of two different periods. So a lot of people route their approach to China. In two thousand, we let them into the wto. They're a low cost, cheap manufacturer.

They take a bunch of our jobs and not all basically happens there. In exchange, we get cheap consumer goods. That's one version of China. The second version of China is the China the Trump face down during the late twenty tens. We now in the year twenty twenty five are facing a new China where they now have BYD who are producing the best, the cheapest electric vehicles in the world, and they are penetrating and the most advanced.

They are penetrating European and global markets. So if I'm sitting in let's say Germany, or I'm sitting in an East Asian country, and we see China delivering not just oh competing for jobs of US, but actually delivering like industrial first world technological advancement that the United States cannot match right now. But also, weirdly enough, the Trump administration says they're just totally uninterested in China looks really great right now, Like that's just like the key role context.

You can't just treat China like it's the two thousands, the twenty eighteen.

capabilities in some areas. To your point about BYD and evs, they are out pacing the US. I think they're on par in terms of AI development at the very least, And so this is a very different China. Not to mention, the trading dynamics have changed as well the US. If you consider ossion as a block. The US is no

longer China's largest trading partner. They trade more with ossion you have an entire rest of the world, So it was easier for China to acquire more customers than it is for the US to, you know, recurr all of the supply lines and all of the manufacturing capability that has been outsourced to China and other countries too, by

the way, over the years. And it always seemed to me wild at the beginning of this that there was so much confidence from the Trump administration that it would be China that would have to come to them, and China that would be in the more difficult political position in terms of these trade dynamics, because that too, there isn't public consensus around what Trump is doing, whereas in China, because we're the instigators here who started this war, there

does appear to be a sort of rally around the flag effect and a willingness to withstand whatever it is the government policy in order to fight back against what the US is doing to them.

They've prepped for this, They've set the national narrative. You are not going to see Chinese aside from the politics of it, you are not going to see Chinese small business owners knocking on She's door saying this is a disaster for us. This doesn't work. So they have set the table to fight a actual trade war, and what

we have just literally not done. And I don't care if you're on the right and you like object even if you are on the right and think we need to take a totally different approach to trade, it would have taken multiple years of preparation to actually get our economy to the point where we could stand off against China. To your point, to the degree of which Trump wants to trade off on. I want to also go to LTINX comments about like national security, and that's why we

need to really do this. I hope no one takes away the idea that you and I are dismissing the idea of that there are national security concerns here. My favorite topic on this is, like, we are incredibly dependent on China for pharmaceuticals. It's a huge problem to huge risk. This isn't just like a China Taiwan thing. This was like a COVID thing. Like there are so many critical, critical things that we're over dependent on China on and in an era where we have to be ready for

supply chains to break at any any time. Once again, separate from your views of war and peace, we need to be more resilient in that category. The National Security Emergency supports the argument that, Wow, we should really really concentrate on these five specific areas. So once again, like we really really really should have focused on semiconductors, which

is what the Bide administration is doing. Wow, even if our pharmaceutical goods are cheaper because of the fact that we get them from China, we can't be overly dependent on any one country and all of the cost that's happening right now. So if they'd come in and said, hey, here are these five to ten areas, we're going to hyper focus on them, and maybe if it turns out that makes pharmaceutical drugs more expensive, because we're reassuring we'll have some sort of subsidy or pursue some sort of

industrial policy for purpoceutical goods. That would have been met not only with more policy consensus in this country. You wouldn't see the courts fighting, you wouldn't see the the you wouldn't see even Republicans, Republicans in Congress fighting. You wouldn't see angry, angry town halls where Republican congressmen and women cannot even articulate the case for this policy. That would have been the right approach here.

the making. They used it appears civilian supply chains, trucking in these drones on large trucks, leaving parking them in key positions. The drones were like hidden in the top of these crates, and then at the appropriate time, the crates were remote control opened and these little drones you know that looked like toys, were able to go out and to tremendous damage to the Russian air fleet. So

we've got some interesting ban In comments. But before we get to that, since we didn't have you here yesterday, just tell us sort of your overall view of the significance of this operation.

too sort of in favor of Selensky's approach. The Hawks were tit pissed because the US wasn't authorizing strikes in to Russia. We wouldn't. We would say, hey, if we're going to give you missiles, we're goinging you ammunition, ammunitions, you cannot use them to strike Russia's potential nuclear accids. Because, to build on your point, these weren't just like warplanes like these were like Russia's like strategic that's right, strategic.

also can be used to drop launch nuclear weapons. So the fact is now that Ukraine has this capability of utilizing the druids the way they use them. This isn't something that US control anymore. So it doesn't matter if we're not sending the missiles to launch these types of strikes. They have built their own drone industry. They've effectually become in many ways, and this is kind of an overstatement, but it gets to the point they've become a drone

suit power. This has really changed the way they could approach and take this strategy. Another really interesting thing that I learned too, and this is why we were speaking earlierbout how we're entering in a really new era we need to think differently. It should be noted all these planes were out in the open. These were things that people could see. That stems from the fact that ever since the Cold War, it has been in a basic rule that there's a degree of transparency with nuclear forces.

From a pure deterrence and awareness and safety perspective, it's unclear that after this attack, any country of nuclear weapons could afford to let their strategic bombers out in the open, even if it means that previous nuclear limitations treaties required, they'd be out in the open so we could monitor. That was a very good thing. That's the type of thing that you need to have in a cold war situation.

That's not sustainable anymore if you can get civilian drones in or if you could convert civilian drones into military use and then launch these attacks within the country.

seventh where Hamas. The first thing that they were able to do was to take out the very high tech fence, multi million dollar fence that Israel had built along the Gaza border, including you know, automated machine guns and surveillance. So they're able to take those out, and that's how they're able to effectuate their attacks on October seventh. So, you know, this was a complicated operation that Ukraine was able to pull off. The US claims they had no

idea this was coming out. Don't know whether that's true or not. There would be some interest both from the Ukrainians and the US if they did collactate to deny that there was any sort of coordination or collaboration. So I'm not sure if that's true or not. But this was a complicated operation to pull off. At the same time, the tech is very easily available and very low cost, and so you know, obviously the reason for Zelensky to do this at this particular point in time is because

there are peace talks ongoing. The general consensus is that Russia is in a much stronger position than Ukraine is because they have much more manpower and they might have

much more industrial might than the Ukrainians do. And so this is an effort to say, look, this is not you know, the playing field is more level than you think, and we can inflict damage on you deep into your territory that you know, and it doesn't require the assistance of the United States of America to be able to pull this off.

the Biden administration did. I think obviously the Zelensky JD events blow up at the White House was a disaster on like fifteen different levels. But what I think it really accomplished in a way that the Biden administration. I've read all the report, I still don't understand why this

never happened. I think what the Oval Office blow up forced the Ukrainians to finally reckon with is the idea that they cannot take for granted that the United States will supply them with intelligence, to apply them with weapons, always have their back no matter what, always be pushing for them to sort of get some sort of settlement

in the exact way it's most maximumly Ukrainian. What happened this past weekend is what happens when Ukraine grows is it has to be much more independent and be able to actually back itself up without just begging the United States for war.

I think that was not true at the time. I think that really did reflect his sort of perspective that Biden had bungled this among all the other things that Biden bungled, and therefore you could have gotten a deal like once Trump was actually there. If the US just walks away from Ukraine and not just like walks away in terms of like giving every single ammunition they asked for, or like saying we're going to back some fort of NATO or like EU membership, just actually walks away and

leaves the table. Russia isn't going to settle like. I think it's very clear that Trump wants a settlement. I think in certain ways the Ukrainians and the Russians wants and eventual settlements. It's clearly neither side at this point is getting their end goal right. Like it should be noted that, like Putin, we should define his end goals. Putin launched this war claiming that Ukraine was a delegitimized, illegitimate Nazi state. Denoxification, debasification like this really should be

unders this really should be understood. Is Rusia's Iraq War here in all of the disastrous ways that that metaphor really matters here, Ukraine's going to exist. Ukraine is a name.

of settlement at some point. However, the issue though, is if the US walks away and the US makes cover and not going to back Ukraine at least or even participate in the process, why would Putin stop from that perspective, and that's the other reason why we should understand Ukraine's need to launch an attack like this. Ukraine has to launch an attack like this to make clear that they

are still in this, that this is serious. And even if the Russians are going to take miles of territory in eastern Ukraine, if they're going to slowly but surely match march forward, even though things are sort of still kind of stealmated, Russia isn't going to get its eventual total aim. Therefore, you have to get to some form of settlement.

I mean, to be honest with you, I'm somewhat sympathetic to the Trump administration here because I do think it is such a mess and so difficult to untangle at this point. You know, you're talking a little bit about the Biden administration policy. In a lot of ways, it really was the worst of all worlds because obviously they short circuited and undercut the original peace talks, so there wasn't pressure early on for some sort of a settlement.

I think that was a grave error, you know, underscoring the fact that listen, there's no guarantees obviously that there would have been an ability to have a resolution at that point. But I've also become more sympathetic to the sort of more hawkish faction that says, listen, you're just letting them bleed out slowly rather than and over time the Biden administration kept going, Okay, well you can't. You can have these particular weapons. You can have the long riage,

all right, you can strike inside of Russia. So it's like, well, if you were going to do that anyway, you may as well have actually given them the tools to be more successful earlier on, push for a piece and be able to get some sort of a settlement that wouldn't be a complete and total disaster for the Ukrainians. So I do think that people who say that the Biden administration policy was kind of the worst of all worlds

are absolutely correct. And at this point, it is a disastrous, brutal, bloody, horrifying mess that lands in the lap of the Trump administration. And I don't think that there is an easy resolution. There's certainly not a resolution that is going to make literally any side happy at this point.

ways that it went. But I think a key thing that was achieved during the Cold War is that we limited nuclear proliferation.

So the well maybe this, maybe that's to your point they're saying, okay, no F sixteen's, okay F sixteens, no missiles, Okay missiles was because they, I think, took very very seriously the idea that Russia could potentially nuclear escalate. Russia didn't. Russia was bluffing. Like the actual thresholds for what Russia would say for Russia claim would lead to escalation were passed years ago. So the Biden administration slowly, slowly, slowly

like dripped in. And I think we're probably over cautious if we look at like the pure like what are like the best possible world that could have came here. But they start to really manage that. But once again, they came to an uncomfortable, unpopular position because they're just trying to manage a nuclear conflict and that is like the primary thing. And once again Steve Bannon's position, I'd be more sympathetic to that if once again this was

Azerbaijan versus Armania. The consequences of this war going the r on direction our order. Maybe Poland gets a nuke, Maybe other countries become convinced like, oh wow, like we're all in it on our own. We can't be guaranteed that the US or the EU or other powers or have our backs. We need to get a nuke. Maybe South Korea needs to get a nuke. I think just tamping that down is why we have like an exit. And here's the key thing too, And this is what

the Hawks did not do. US helping to bring this conflict to an end does not mean Ukraine gets an unlimited sort of amount of munitions or weapons. It doesn't. And this is what the Bidomen efficient also did not do. They should have made much clearer because they knew this internally that the American people did not support a US Ukraine policy that equaled they take back Crimea in every single part of Eastern Ukraine. That was never the actual

in the administration consensus. What the American people want is a situation where this war comes to an end and Trump participating and negotiating and driving this process, him serving as the third force that's pressing these two sides who know in their heart of hearts they need to settle in some ways, but our incentivized not to do it. Like once again, more New York Times reported that I'll shout out of breaking points, you know, space to the

mainstream media. Mainstream media has its actual functions. I'll pointed out that part of what's driving Russia's unwillingness to take the negotiation, and seriously, like they sent junior diplomats, not serious senior level diplomats, is they're like, actually, we've got a summer offensive. It's kind of moving. Let's take as much territory as we can over Things slow down in the winter. So that's really the situation that we're playing with now.

agreed to, but that's really all that came out of that. So, you know, you have the the Ukrainians that were able to pull off this dramatic, risky but quite you know, damaging an effective attack within Russia. You have the Russians who've been able to claim quite a bit of territory actually just in the recent paths, and neither side really looking to uh, really looking to bring it to a close or you know, take the losses that would be entailed in bringing this to some sort of a settlement.

That's why you have all of these different rounds. But the one that really matters is if you look all the way to the tenth round, you've got Cuomo coming in at fifty four, so we're still winning, but his edge has significantly declined, and nipping at his heels at this point is Zoron Mamdani at forty six percent. So we definitely have ourselves a race here. You know, mum Donni obviously not enjoying the vast name recognition that Cuomo has in the establishment backing, et cetera, really been an

upstart Marshall. There's some indications that even he and his campaign were not expecting him to have this much traction in this race. And so we've got a couple of clips of Zoron that we can play here in a minute, but just wanted to get your reaction off the top of some of the dynamics that you see unfolding here.

So you have an aging, sort of like unattractive, establishment centrist candidate who doesn't really stand for anything, Like I genuinely do not know if you said to me, Marshall, like what is Andrew Coomo running on beyond just like post me to redemption, I could actually like not articulate that for you, and I don't think most people can. Versus, Zoran clearly believes in things, and I think is being really responsive. He's really great social media. He's also bringing

the suit back. This is where I will speak for Sager. I think he looks so great in his suit, and I think that hopefully he can move us past like the very condescending era of like politicians like dressing down sort of act like they're like fake and that sort of with it. So like maybe there's a fashion trend. We could do a breaking point spin off on those

cultural things. But I think so really, but that's the but here's the problem for Zoran though he's still underperforming with like over forty black voters, Like that's the central So if the central challenge for centrism is it's like central casting problem, the challenge for democratic socialism and Zoran is just the fact that like with like black and like Hispanic working past voters, just a real amount of skepticism about the project.

want to dig in on that piece. He was on MSNBC recently and I thought was asked a good series of questions about his platform and especially about the critique of like, yeah, you know, you're really too far left to appeal to be able to govern effectively. There's a concern within the establishment quarters of the Democratic Party that what's gone wrong with the party is that it's gone

too far left. Obviously I have my disagreements with that, but is an important question ask let's go and take a listen to how Zorun responded.

the nation fast and free. And we're going to deliver universal childcare to each and every New Yorker, whether their child is six weeks or five years of age, because today childcare is the number two reason people are leaving our city, and it makes sense. It costs twenty five thousand dollars a year to raise a kid here, which is more money than it would cost to send that same kid to Quney eighteen years later.

Cuomo is saying. You say to people who say, well, I like the guy, but he's not right for this moment, he's too lefty.

having more money in their pocket four years ago. I asked them what it would take to bring them back to the Democratic Party. They said, a relentless focus on an economic agenda. And when I told them my plan to freeze the rent, make buses fast, and free deliver universal childcare, they said that they would vote for me. And I think ultimately that's what we need, is a recognition that for too long, our party has moved away from working class voters. It's time we actually bring them back.

and they care about things. So Zoran is given just like a perfect like, hey, life's expensive, rent control, life's expensive. We're going to focus on like housing and those other issues. In childcare. I just had a kid, myself, and even in the Texas suburbs, it is incredibly expensive. I cannot imagine how expensive it is in New York right now.

So it's just wild to me that Cuomo and his team I think it's because they were asleep at the wheel allowed themselves for Culoma to take like the general like rhetorical attack of what centrist moderate candidate is and just like bring it that way. Like I think that their worst sort of DSA candidates come off like they and this is the diploma divide that center were of politics. Too many DSA candidates come off like they're sort of like campus organizers or they're sort of in academia and

they're having this big debate about worker power versus. I don't think that means anything to most people. Zora was just like this, this and that. Yeah, Cloma hasn't responded to it, and I, you know, you know, since my politics is more to the center here, like I have like qualms and concerns about like rent controlling those different issues.

But it's just like really frustrating that like if and if you're actually kind of this is kind of what we want politics to look like, we actually want politics not to just be like a you're a socialist, Well you were a me too, monster Like that's like very destructive and unhelpful. I love how Zoran has brought policies to the table when I wish we had a politics where Cuoma could say, hey, rent control, I get why you're doing it, here's why it doesn't work. Here is

my actual plan. The lack of that Onquoulos side is a huge problem. And then the other big issue I want to respond to the comment about didn't voters perceive like Kamala Harris is being too left? And you know this is a left to yourself. Of the big issues facing the American left right now is when voters say the left broadly, they conflate like a bunch of different things. So the left doesn't just mean rent control, minimum wage increases,

universal healthcare, things that pull really really popularly. It also means certain positions on crime and immigration, especially with working class voters. There are a lot of working class voters who want the minimum wage to be higher, but also are skeptical of like democratic approaches to crime, especially in

a post twenty twenty one era. There are a bunch of people, the voters who he's going to speak with who are going to say we support economic populism, but actually we're really worried about like migration in the ways that it's like overstrained the city and its resources. So I think the thing that Zaron is really getting out here, and this is why he's not talking about the cultural issues as much, is he's focusing on that part of the left another thing, and this is just like so fascinating.

This is the type of thing which centrist and my sort of can't need to really reckon with. We're assessing, you know, Kamala Harris's campaign obviously in the wake of Original Sin, but it was revealed that her most popular ads had to deal with building more housing mm hm and cracking down on landlords. Those messages actually broke through. So I think the problem was sort of like the left camp that like Zoran is there to engage with, they are a little unfocused on like the building more

housing part. Like this Zuri politics are kind of the mb Rent control is effect for people who have housing right now, but what are the people who don't have housing?

It's it's not a full spectrum approach, and housing policy actually requires that we do a bunch of things at once, but once again Zorn is speaking to an environment where people saying they don't like the left, but Kamala Harrison's most popular policies are a weird mix of like centrist the mbiism, but like left oriented landlord punching.

But the story that resonates with the majority vast majority of Democrats and vast majority of independence and majority overall of the American people. Is the reason life has gotten difficult is because you have a bunch of greedy billionaires who have rigged the system and we're effectively incompatible with democracy.

And I think that's just you know, with the rise of Elon Musk and what we've seen in this administration, they've sort of made the case that the acceleration of oligarchy truly does represent both a democratic threat and an economic threat to people overall. So, you know, that's why this conversation about you know, well, should should we like throw the trans people overboard or should we throw the

immigrants overboard? I think sort of misses the point because the reason those issues were made so salient and so effectively by Trump is because they fit into his narrative of what had gone wrong in the country. The reason why Democrats were unable to stand up to those narratives is because they didn't have their own story and theory of the case of what had gone wrong that made any kind of sense to people. So that's sort of my view of why that conversation really misses the mark.

I mean, if you think about this is what always strives to crazy. Like if you think about polling the comments that Trump has made and the things that he has done, including things like, you know, you want to talk about crime and safety and policing whatever, Like he pardoned all the violent January sixers who beat up a bunch of cops. It pulls it like five percent support. Even one of the January six ers was like, I don't even.

we overreach on LGBTQ rights. It it I think makes sense to look at a bunch of policy issues that when I think the DEVI has to defer over reaching those categories. But if you really understand what's being said there, it's incredibly defensive, right. It's basically this theory of the way we come back into power is by recognizing where we overreach and basically either explaining or not explaining why

our position is different. I think that's needed in a bunch of cases, especially where those positions like lost trust, like I think Biden's immigration policy really damage the party's long term trust with like these same like working class black and Hispanic voters who like Zorin is really speaking to, So that has to be acknowledged. But what Centrist did not do, and I say this is the person who is more of in decently centrist coded is they didn't

actually focus on what does the offense look like? So okay, we need to get a more moderator, or not even moderate in the sense of like we're just moving the chessboard pieces around. But like I love zorro UN's quote, listen to voters. Let's listen to what voters are actually saying on socio cultural issues and have an agenda's response to the step one. But step two is also what else are they also saying that requires us to have something to say. So Cuomo was ready to basically just say, hey,

I'm the research and center left. Everything that's gonna be normal, and twenty nineteen, again that wasn't enough when people were facing an affordability and housing crisis.

they want to do. And I think we saw a lot of that coming out of Trump's reelect, where there was an immediate effort to basically do the things that are easy in terms from a sort of like wealthy donor perspective, and not analyze any of the failings on the like you know, economic populist front and in the areas that you know would be more challenging and uncomfortable

for some of those alliances with mainstream democratic politicians. I do want to go back to THO because I'm curious your view of, you know, the demographics that we put up earlier. There was all kinds of conversation during Bernie twenty sixteen and again in Bernie twenty twenty about the nature and demographics of his coalition, and I think, you know, parts of that were always really unfair because it was very much stereotyped as like it's just a bunch of

white bros. Well, now that the white bros have shifted to the right, the Democrats would very much like to get those white bros back, But it was also never truly representative of what his coalition was. Bernie did have a largely working class coalition. His his greatest weakness with older black voters, and I think we can talk about

why that is. It's now increasingly apparent that that's not a Bernie Sanders weakness, that is a left weakness in general, as evidenced by you know, Zorn and as evidenced by any number of other you know, sort of left progressive DSA type candidates. But you know, he had a it was a diverse working class base, including Latinos in particular, and certainly among young people. And that generational divide is important as well, because the stereotype was always like, oh,

black people just don't like Bernie Sanders. If you looked at young black people, that was not the case. You know, he had a very diverse coalition among young people. So why do you think it is that the left consistently struggles with older black voters in particular seemed to be the greatest sort of challenge point for you know, for people who have a DSA style ideology.

They'd say, yeah, I like universal health care, Yeah I want Medicare for all, Yeah, I want them minium wage increases, etcetera, etcetera, et cetera. They would say those things, but like what was really animating them was just a deep distrust and not just distrust, but deep dislike of center establishment politics. These are people who came of age after nine to eleven, after the two thousand and financial crisis, right after twenty sixteen,

after COVID. There is very little to no reason why people should trust if you grew up in that environment the center. If you're looking to order black voters who are rooted in the civil rights there, who are rooted in a different era of the American political system, that appeal of like, don't you just hate these old bums who just like screw everything up that just is not

going to resound as well. So I think it's particularly attractive of the way that Zorin's approaching this is he's making this much less of a establishment versus anti establishment pitch though like it's obviously there and more just I'm going to go down the line and find the positions that you actually agree with and you were actually thinking about.

So this is also another broader and there's a there's a warning here two min all offer at the end of this, but there's also a broder lesson here for the left, which is that, like you know, my takeaways, I'm actually thinking that like city issues and municipalities are probably a better fit for left politics right in this immediate most So, like you know, if you figure out it this way, like what is the central challenge that like centrists like to say to like leftist who say

they want to take other political system they say, like, okay, cool, then like flip a red state or flip a purple state, or when a congressional district the same way that we're doing right now. It's a tall order and it is and I think it's a real serious challenge that left

politics needs to really answer. And the thing is, though, if we're actually looking at like these actual cities, we look at the combination of policies and political dynamics that are better suited to the local rather than like the national wise dynamics. Sara's not having soon. It's not having to debate LGBTQ people. He's not debating immigration policy. He's

talking about specific city issues. The warning though for the progressive left though is Chicago and Brandon Johnson, because the in this is we'll get into this during the abundance a conversation. I think a problem the left has yet to reconcile is that it's one thing to run successful campaigns, to put together narratives that I think are clearly like

winning the long term narrative war, and actually governed. So he could say we're going to make buses fast and free so that during the clip, okay, can you actually do that? And okay, we're going to impose rent control, But if you don't actually make more housing over more people, if that's what we're going to help people who I kind of have theirs, what are you actually going to do when these actual challenges come in?

pay for this program and make it actually work? Brandon Johnson's one of the least the mayor of Chicago is one of the least popular politicians in America because he campaigned on these sets of issues, but he did not have the talent, the coalition, the ability to actually get it done. So that the warning for the left.

followed his career and his pitch very closely. And I still talk to people in Kentucky about what it is about him that's really resonating there. And it's not because he you know, did a hard right turn on any particular issue. He stood up for transparently close churches during COVID, you know, he went all in on, like, you know, protecting people from the disease. But there are two things that people mentioned to me. Number one is just that

he is hyper accessible. During COVID, he was doing like weekly certainly and maybe daylight briefings where he would just go out and talk to people in this way that was felt very approachable.

the policy and in terms of the politics. You know, if you also look at congressional districts across the country. A lot of the candidates that have overperformed they may not be you know, exactly Bernie Sanders, but they have really featured a challenge of corporate power in their messaging and have used that to consistently outperform you know, the top of the ticket. So I do think that there is plenty to suggest electorally that there's a lot there.

But you know, to your point, obviously, it has to be competently executed, and at the city level, especially when you're talking about you know, any sort of executive position, it has to be competently executed because at the end of the day, it's like did the trash get picked up or did it not get picked Did the snow

get removed or did it not get removed. One thing I want in this will helps transition more into the abundance conversation is that one thing that's interesting to me about Zoron and this actually isn't unusual on the left. Oftentimes the left does focus on issues like zoning reform and some of the things that are you know, considered to be abundance policy. He has not only gone leaned into those more like DSA policies like the rent freeze

and the free busts and those sorts of things. He also has made an explicit focus of zoning regulations of you know, streamlining bureaucracy for small businesses. He's talked about, you know, some of these things that are like single staircase reform and some of the things that are like core the abundance movement and the zoning reform movement. More broadly, let's go ahead and take a listen to this ad that he cut about small business in particular.

Regulations are important, but small businesses have to navigate more than six thousand of them with far fewer resources than the big chains. That's why is Mayor, I'll appoint a mom and popzar with the clear goal of making it easier to run a small business. One thousand dollars isn't a lot to our city government, but it can be make or break for a small business trying to get

off the ground. Next, we're going to the mom and pops are will coordinate with agencies to speed up turnaround times, cut rent tape, and letting Yorker start businesses soon because you shouldn't have to fill out twenty four forms and go through seven agencies to start a barbershop. But most of all, we're putting our money where our mouth is by increasing funding for small business support programs with five

hundred percent. We're going to invest twenty million dollars in our business express service teams.

discourse and they're all like the negative reviews. But when I talk to people in the know who I would take seriously, they're like, look, Abundance at its best has pointed out some real problems, and we'd like to get to a yes and from a progressive perspective that doesn't just treat us as these people to be left punched, but like a broader conversation, because like this is like

I'm really interested in, like UK politics. I always like to think of American politics in a sense of like coalitions, Like this is a coalition, And if a coalition is going to be like fifty plus one and actually have a governing majority, it has to take everyone's different perspectives of mine too. So I really think that like the best version of the abundance agenda is going to be a set of policies that a politician like so around kid likes take and leave. This is good, this is good.

That isn't good, That isn't good. Okay, I'm governing. How do I actually make this happen? That's my best version of the project, rather than just a version that equals okay. Now, we ought to support Richie Torus for governor.

of anything other than preserving the status quo. He thinks that he would be superior to Zoron, and there's just it seemed to expose that abundance is not really about getting to yes, and it is actually an attempt to compete with what is an ascendant narrative within the Democratic Party, a very popular narrative within the Democratic Party about fighting corporate power and fighting oligarchy.

The other part is there's a right wing people call it dark abundance that anyways is sort of more of the vcs like Mark Andrecent people in the Trump administration sort of a lot of the tech right falls into that sort of like right wing abundance kind of because they're like, look like Trump's going to build nuclear Trump's going to deregulate everything and help us build again. Technology

is the way to the American future, etcetera. Etcetera. That's part of the abundance movement as well too, though I

would not overstate the use of the word abundance. And then there are sort of like this I think unhelpful sort of version of abundance that in many ways is this center that was finding itself in a defensive position after November December, where they said, Okay, we have to moderate on LGBTQ issues, we have to moderate an immigration etcetera, etcetera, but we actually do need to have something like forward facing to say, and they've adopted abundance as part of

that project because though the project is like moderating and making the Democratic Party more centrist, abundance has been mixed into that. What I'm trying to do with my work from my small podcast perch is build out abundance as a broader sort of approach or set of policies and questions that any sort of like from the center to the left over we thinking about it, and I think the way about to tell a story. And I'm not saying this as a dunk on you. This has become

a sort of close table. I'm actually asking did you read the book Abundance? Yes? Okay, so you noticed the first the first chapter is this like twenty to fifty vision of the future where like technology and growth provided us all these different great things. I actually really did not like that first chapter, especially from the perspective of

articular into the left. Why that should actually care about these ideas because I think a to your point, we live in an error where people are backlashing against oligarchy, where people like aren't excited about technology or resubating smartphones like that is a version of the book. Because this book was supposed to come out in twenty twenty four, I've suspect if they were to start this project today,

the book first chapter be a little different. So my pitch for what the first chapter should have looked like is rooted in me not being a New Yorker or a San Franciscan, which is where a lot of the mb House people come from, with me being like a Texan. I live in Austin, I lived next to the hill Country, and I haven't looked at the books in a while, but the Path to Power that Robert Carrow's biography LBJ is no longer back there. But that was a really

informative book for like Sager and my politics. And here's my favorite chapter of the book. It talks about how in nineteen thirty seven LBJ is a Congressman and during the New Deal there's something called the Rural Electrification Administration and what it literally did was bring power to rural America. We had electricity in the country of more than fifty years, but the private sector was not delivering electricity to the

hill country to pour like hard scrabble farmers. And what the New Deal did used a combination of private actors and public actors to create these co ops that brought and Robert Carroll's telling I really reckon people read this book brought people into the twentieth century from the Stone Age. Effectively, people are like didn't have powered, Now they have power. That is a vision of broad left liberalism that deliver for people and really mattered and got over the actual

objections and things that wouldn't make that happen. So rooting abundance in the story of Like Wow, Like it used to be that we had like a majoritarian left liberal politics that could fundamentally change people's lives by delivering them things that are powered by technology, that are powered by different forms of organizing and when the private sector or the public center can't get it done. That's really what

I want abundance to be rooted. And I think the first chapter of the book that we pitched to the left would be rooted not in the future in a way that people aren't really bought into, just in the like why was it that nineteen thirties liberalism could deliver? But if we asked basically anyone, they would say that like New York, California, etc. All these like bastions of like left liberalism can't really deliver. That's why I want abundance to be rooted in.

of abundance. Who could disagree with, right, building more stuff, building more housing, making housing more forward to actually being able to do the high spreed rail like really building out. And this is where there's another i think tension within abundance, like really building out the capability to move into a green energy future. But to your point about there's this other part of abundance that also is very fossil fuel aligned and is you know, exist in the Trump administration,

which does not actually want that green energy future. It certainly starts to feel like, okay, this is being used whatever the intentions of you know, various people in the movement are it's being used as a way to stop a shift in the Democratic Party that would otherwise organically happen, and that you see happening towards, you know, a framing around corporate power and checking oligarchy. And so that's where the concern comes in, is that you've got this moment.

You have this reckoning with the you know, the wreckage of neoliberalism that has been repudiated sort of across the board.

to preserve the status quo. And that's where you know, I think evidence for this in terms of the way it's being used is by how eagerly it's being accepted by the richie tours is of the world, by the entire Senate Democratic Caucus and the establishment democratic figures who are most comfortable with trying to preserve the status quo.

right wing like tech billionaire crowd here. That is like the version of abundance which is basically just like a substitute for like neoliberalism, just substitute for me, we regulate and something that that is a key thing that I really should out for here. But let's go back to this Zorron conversation. What I love about abundance, and this is like the key thing. We're going to talk about

this pole in a second. But there's you know, there's a poll out there it by Demand Progress that revealed that abundance messaging is far less popular when you're not door knocking for voters than a more populis centric pitch. So I think that that's fine, Like that is not a shocker, Like if you are running for office right now, you should not be talking about bottlenecks, and like the fact that like our NEA laws have made it so

permitting doesn't Like that is not the pitch. The pitches that like Elon Musk is like literally killing kids in Africa. He's cutting your grandmother off of Social Security. So a bunch of like eighteen year old you know dudes can like play around and pretend they're like new dealers or

something like that. Like that is what you are talking about, right and to your point about Zora, And you're also talking about like housing and afford a bit like actual not not just like housing in the Astra, but like actually, like I am meeting you as a voter, and I'm recognizing the number one thing you're worried about right now is how truly precarious American life is right now, So

like that is what the actual electoral pitch is. But what abundance should be in response to voters not being jazzed about bottleneck reforms is a tool kit to help politicians actually think through how freaking complicated and difficult it is to navigate this country. So back when I was first getting into policy, if you were reluctive, you're talking about people talking people about housing, we just say, like, yeah, like rend control or you know, like let's just like

kind of do that. Abundance expands the set of policies in a bigger direction, So it says, okay, soron. So like, I'm not going to convince Ron in any way whatsoever that rent control isn't what like New Yorkers are demanding or what wouldn't be informer delivery for his base. What I could offer with the abundance toolkit is, but hey, we really should also build more housing because there's a

real gap and shortage of housing. And yes, there are two million New Yorkers who want rent control, but there's also like other New Yorkers who don't have apartments right now in the first place, and need apartments to actually exist in the first place. So my real like and the good news here too is.

do in this country. So we're gonna have to come up with a broad mix of doing these different things. I think part of the issue too, of abundance what kind of Ezra and Derek or pundits like that is their job, Like if you're a pundit, you noticed like you have to make your argument, dial it up to one hundred and twenty percent and advance the argument. So they in their argument really focus this on the deregulatory story.

The reason why I went back to the New Deal story in terms of my telling of abundance is more just that we should be focused at this point in the conversation, or we put it this way because people what I wear are conversations they want. We should root our abundance conversations when we're trying to engage between like the center and the left in objectives and then work our way backwards rather than just sort of saying, hey, guys,

guess what deregulations they answered all of your problems. You're not going to agree with that. What I want you to agree with me here, and I suspect you will, is we need to approach housing through a bunch of different vectors. Rent control is not going to solve everything. That's your concession. I'm going to concede that if we magically also a we're not going to magically just relax zoning across the country because the incredibly unpopular, ironically enough,

even with moderate centrist voters. I live in the Texas suburbs. I promise you these mind. And this is also why the centrist like Abundance Project is going to run into like a weird place. I promise you like my centrist Texas voters definitely would like they're down for the moderate on social cultural issues part, they are not down for like a mass GMBD regulatory program that fundamentally transforms the suburbs.

So we're both going to have to make some of some sort of like concession here and build an approach together. And that starts with recognizing, wow, we need to get more housing for people and make housing more affordable. That's a bunch of different approaches.

not the entirety of the movement. But you know, when we were talking about narratives before, the narrative of the book is that there were these liberal do gutters who put a bunch of regulations in place, well intentioned that have been that have you know, outserved their usefulness and

need to go. And a lot of this becomes very squishy because there are difficult moral choices involved in, you know, pushing to the side any of these you know, regulations or any of the interest groups involved in what Ezra Client calls everything bagel liberalism, so he never wants to actually say, like, and that's why we shouldn't use prevailing wage standards, right, Or that's why we shouldn't require childcare as part of building these projects, or that's why we

shouldn't do environmental review, or that's why we shouldn't have these air protections to make sure that when we do build public housing that poor people aren't like suffering from asthma and other conditions that.

think it is the central story to politics whatsoever. And just to give one example, you know why when they did this massive study to look at, okay, when zoning reform has been implemented, what has been the impact on the housing supply, and it's it's not that it had no impact, but it increased housing supply.

the stakes are really existential. Like you know, if you zoom out for a minute, here we are, and I don't know if we agree on all of the contours of this, but I think we're witnessing the rise of a sort of like would be fascism and techno authoritarianism. You have these you know, powerful billionaires who are have vast control over our government, who are doing things like, you know, just cutting the funding of USAID so that millions of people around the world may die as a result of those cuts.

pursued at a rapid and terrifying pace. And so to fight back against that with zoning reform and you know, getting the regulations out of the way, it's just to me, it feels so wildly inadequate to the moment and what we actually need to deliver as a you know, counter political project to what is rapidly coalescing in this country right now.

actually a much better book. It's one hundred pages longer. People, if you want to really learn about these books, should read these books. They Why Nothing Works and when. What Mark does an amazing job is he tells this abundant story through the lens of like debates about America and the left and liberalism for the twentieth centuries. Here's here's

the way he tells the story. In the nineteen thirties, you saw he explains us that liberalism and by the way, I know people, you know this, people get so nitpicky with the terms basically describing like left of like center left thought in America extends all the way out during the nineteen thirties. The way he explains this is liberalism has like two instincts. Like one is like the Hamiltonian instinct after like Alexandra Hamilton. It's it's big, it's making moves,

it's trying to force change, it's aggressive. So the New Deal was a Hamiltonian project. We were going to once again electrify the whole country. We're going to build the TVA, we are going to build the Hoover Dan. We're gonna do all these big, big, big things and bring America into the twentieth century. We'll also like regulating capitalism, all these like different aspects. So that created a lot of

really great stuff. And also, though, and this is why I think this needs to be more rooted in the story of abundance, it created a lot of bad things, Like what is Rachel Carson's Silent Spring about? Like what were all those nineties? What is Ralph Nader is like

unsafe at any speak? All these sort of like left movements that came out of the nineteen sixties looked at a lot of like the benefits of what we got from that Hamiltonian New Deal era, where we also had business and government working very very and labor working very very comfortably low two entangled together. There was a real industrial complex there. We got a lot of benefit, but we also got crazy costs. We have Robert Moses like destroying whole neighborhoods of people in New York City, We

had the police, We had all these different issues. So that activated a Jeffersonian instinct once again named after Thomas Jefferson, what's going to listen to me? Just citing Mark here, But the Jeffersonian instinct is like, nah, what about the people? What about the local community. Did anyone ask, like a small community of black people in New York City whether they agree with Robert Moses's grand Hamiltonian vision of what

the twentieth century city looked like. So, coming into the sixties and seventies, as weocused more on the costs of everything liberalism accomplished, we got movements and said, hey, let's focus on the on the on the downsides of that, and that's really important. And I would really push back on your idea that the best version of abundant says we're just going to jettison We're going to jettison those regulations because they are just slowing us down and they're

a whole problem. No, like democracy, like all our politics needs to be rooted in a belief in democracy and once again a balancing of the Hamiltonian vision and the Jeffersonian vision. So the way that he kind of explains this is what's going to work out during this era is how do we balance the recognition And I think this is what The Green New Deal is the definition

of a Hamiltonian project, right. The Green New Deal recognizes that in a climate crisis, America has to move, It has to move fast as to be big, and it has to be bigginning. It's it's an ambitions. We're not going to get this done via a bunch of tax credits to a bunch of corporations. You get this done,

that's Hamiltonian. Jeffersonian side, though, is hey a Hamiltonian project that has premised on us bulldozing in the entire country, not listening to communities who may have pollution, not listening to local communities who have their own Actually, it's also not going to work. So what I'm trying to do with my work, and this is why I'm really grateful to have a platform to talk about this here, is how do we actually balance the Hamiltonian instinct with the

Jeffersonian instinct. And I think if Ezra and Derek spoke from the perspective more of like balancing those dynamics, And that's what we're trying to really get to. How do we recognize a climate crisis? How do you recognize the fact that you really need to get how do we recognize the fact that we need to reshore our semiconductors in this country with the fact that we have local communities and democracy. So that's what I'm trying to basically

get to. And the last thing in the second part of your response is, look, I think an abundance And this is why I said that Ezra and Derek are doing the pundant thing where they dial everything up to one hundred and twenty percent to sell their argument. This is everyone does this right. This is a left fright of center thing. I think there's been a serious overstatement of effect of abundance and gender policies, and I don't want to I would, and that's why my pitch for

what we do moving forward. I'm doing this on my own and other people are thinking about this too too. When when I talk about this on the podcast, I get input from actual politicians and actual staffers of what they're looking for. Is what we're talking about this here too. That's actually the funny thing, Like most people are not actually looking to do a big like centrist versus like progressive fight. Most people recognize what time it is and

how we need to build something together. So my point is let's focus on I would love to sit down with Stora and right here and say, look, let's just start the fact that housing is a crisis and we need more of it and it needs to be more affordable, and then we work our way backwards to how we actually get there. If abundance people are not willing to do that, then A they're not going to gain political power in the first place, given your point, but B it's not going to work.

with Palenteer. Trump administration, according to The New York Times, is launching this elaborate project to hoover up all of our data to consolidate it in one database, and they are working with Palenteer in order to accomplish these goals.

merge data on Americans throughout eahencies. So help us understand stand the contours of the story and what Palenteer even is and what it means for ordinary people.

human manpower to do. Now they're no longer limited by that. And I think the concern on the part of ordinary people, even if you're not someone that lives in Gaza or in Ukraine where it's being used, or wherever else, is that something that has preserved our civil liberties for a long time has been just the pragmatic fact that as much information as agencies collect, it was never feasible for them to be able to go through it.

heavily invested in President Trump and Vice President Vance. He was a major campaign donor to both. Then, the stated goal of DOGE is to streamline and combine government data, which is exactly what Palenteer does.

federal agencies. So help us understand the extent of this in the ways in which this could be deployed. You know, I think we already have some inklings of this from the War on Terror and the way that you know, dissent in various administrations has been has been curbed and people profiled who may be at odds with administration priorities.

of the FBI. It's called Homeland Security Investigations. And if you go and look through some of the stuff that's been released under FOYA about them, they're involved in monitoring protesters related to the Gaza war, stuff that you wouldn't think of as what you think of as ICE's remit, you know, being going after people that they're going to deport. That's what it's other function, called Enforcement and Removal Operations does, But that's not all they do. So these guys have

a very broad mission set. It's not just immigration, it's also quote national security threats, which can encompass a lot.

We're not going to hear about any of that. And my sense from talking to people is that there is a massive deployment going on at that level, as well as the you know, lower law enforcement agencies that are not a member of that system of the of the intelligence community like I. So so what we're talking about now is just the tip of the iceberg and what you're actually able to see.

who are focused on AI technology. So it's sort of misleading to say he wants to cut these deep state agencies. It's more like he wants to move the money from these legacy platforms, which I think there's a good argument for, but towards these AI fueled ones that raise all these civil liberties concerns that we're talking about.

American citizens are getting swept up by ice. You see this in the way that American citizens who may be married to an immigrant are having their liberties infringed upon. But more broadly, in order to figure out who is citizen and who is non citizen, you got to take a look at and surveil everyone. It necessitates a vast, massive police state. Again, the priorities of which are quite evident in the Republican Trump budget, which massively expands ICE.

It also expands the Pentagon budget, massively expands detention facilities. Like those things don't just stay aimed at a the non citizen population. It necessarily has to take a look at everyone in order to figure out who are the goodies in their view and who are the baddies.

net far beyond the only individuals you're talking about. So when you send ICE out to conduct things like what's called pattern of life analysis, see or someone walks to and goes back from before they deport someone, they try to get a sense of their pattern of life, where do they go about their day, Where can we try to intercept them? And as you're mapping that out, you're going to sweep up all sorts of other things. So in the case of Mackmood Khalil. They're going to be

surveilling the demonstrations of which he's participating in. It's impossible to separate those two things, and that's what we've seen again and again there are you know, Foyer records to show this that ICE is looking at the demonstrations more generally and not just people they suspect of immigration violations. So yeah, that has to be front and centered everything we think about, because again, now they can process this stuff at scale in a way they never could before.

conversation about Elon and Doses. There's actually a little clip of him in the more Perfect Union piece, and in some ways DOJ's this total and complete failure didn't save any money, made the government less efficient, but in other ways, you know, I have a lot of questions about what was going on there and what sort of data was being collected what sort of data was being consolidated. And you know Elon obviously very close to Teal and to

Alex krp over at at Pallenteer. You know, what do you make of how the DOGE project sort of is connected to this move towards massive data collection.

to use to train AI on. And so there is just this Blitzer out Just to give you just one random example, since the budget came out, I was looking through it, the Department of Homeland Security has an AI core, just like the Peace Corps or any other you know, subgroup that an agency might have that has an entire team of people going on to these different agencies figuring out just like we saw with DOGE, but happening at the agency level, which we might not hear about how

do we take these breakthroughs that these these advancements that are happening and apply that to case management, to information processing, and like you said before, sharing across agencies. Even though ICE is not in the intelligence community, they have a they have a formal mechanism by which they can share information with them. So something that ICE might sweep up, maybe they'll get passed along to FBI, maybe it'll get passed along to military police.

Israel is committing war crimes. You know, that's that's completely apparent. I just couldn't say it at the time because I was representing the government.

an open question. I think What is heart is almost certainly not an open question, is that there have been individual incidents that have been that have been war crimes, where members of the Israel and military have committed war crimes. So ultimately, in almost every major conflict, including conflicts prosecuted by democracies, you will see individual members of the military of militaries commit war crimes. And the way you judge

a democracy is whether they hold those people accountable. But Israel has and that's my point is we have not yet seen them hold sufficient numbers of the military accountable, and I think it's an open question whether they're going to. I'm really struck that you think now that Israel did commit war crimes and yet at the time and I get why, but at the time you were at the podium and you couldn't say that.

government policy. It's like, really, did you not see them announce a policy of mass starvation and blockade of the entire gaza strip?

take it. If you want to give a speech, But I think spa places in Washington where you can give a speech.

I mean, that is just a fact under international humanitarian law that every country has the right to defend itself.

something that is not truly your own personal view. It seems very different when you're talking about something like war crimes and crimes against humanity. And I do think the willingness of someone like a Matt Miller to stand up there and say things he knows is not true to remain in that job, even as it's not just Israel committing war crime, it's US funding, providing diplomatic cover for lying on their behalf shipping weapons in order for them

to perpetrate those war crimes. Like that is to me a morally unconscionable decision to make. So talk a little bit about that moral landscape and the rationale that does go through the minds of people like Matthew Miller who end up adopting this pathetic line of Defenso I, you know, I was just following orders.

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