Hey, guys, ready or not, twenty twenty four is here and we here at breaking points, are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election.
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Good morning, and welcome to Counterpoints. As you can see that we're building out the studio right now, so here we are working from home.
Emily, how you doing this week?
Good?
I'm in pajama pants, not just kidding, but it's great to have you back.
Ryan.
It was a blast to have Crystal here, but we.
Missed you for sure.
Lady's Day seemed like a great show. The pro shows have been fun. But yes, it's good to get back on track here today. We've got two new people jumping into the presidential election. We've got Chris Christy and Mike Pence. We're going to talk about that explosive news out of Ukraine. Also the PGA basically getting taken over by the Saudis. We can go into the details of this shocking deal that emerged yesterday.
Emily. What else we got.
Today, Well, Tucker Carlson's back, so we're going to talk about that as as part of the Ukraine blocks, some interesting stuff going on there.
We're also talking.
About AI deep fakes, the twenty twenty four election, which does feel like the twenty twenty four election has officially kicked off, and so, of course so are concerns about generative AI and the election, but Europe is handling them in a different way than we probably will, and so we're going to talk about that also, Ryan, you're going to be talking a little bit about Julian Nassan. I'm going to be talking a little bit about FBI and
the whistleblower, trying to break that down. And we have a huge guest, Ryan, because you scored a heck of an interview.
Yeah, we're gonna have an interview later in the show with Imran Khan, who's the populist former Prime Minister of Pakistan who is basically currently surrounded in his home in Lahore. His party has been the target of one of the most incredible kind of crackdowns that you could imagine since he was ousted in April twenty twenty two. He's he's going to talk about what he thinks the US role was in his ouster, what he thinks of the US ought to be doing. Now, stand up for rule of
law and democracy. Stick around for that for sure. But to startles, let's play our boy.
Chris Christie.
This is the former New Jersey governor announcing that he's jumping into the twenty twenty four race for the Republican nomination.
Let me tell you something, everybody.
The grift from this family is breathtaking. It's breathtaking. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Kushner walk out of the White House and months later get two billion dollars from the Saudis. Two billion dollars from the Saudis. You think it's because he's some kind of investing genius or do you think it's because he was sitting next to the president. If it stays for four years too, it favors for the Saudis. That's your money, that's your money. He stole and gave
it to his family. You know what, That makes us a ban out of republic. That's what makes us so he may get thirty percent again I'm not sure. Maybe he'll get more, maybe he'll get less. But let me tell you what he'll know in twenty twenty four that he had no idea of in twenty sixteen. He's in for a fight to get it.
It's like a high school theater teacher.
But on the substance, he's not wrong about any of that. And you and you and I have talked about this, and I know you agree on those points. That the that the level of grift represented by that two billion dollar payment from the Saudis to the Kushners immediately after leaving the White House is absolutely extraordinary. Like in the realm of foreign policy corruption, I can't think of anything
bigger than that. You know, doesn't mean that smaller levels of corruption from Mania or from Ukrainian gas companies or whatever are less, you know, are not themselves evidence of corruption, but good lord, two billion dollars to a family that is trying to get back into the White House just incredible.
Yeah, and it's interesting. I know, we have a lot of clips, so we keep it moving. But just a quick thought is that it's interesting, particularly because no other Republican candidate goes after Trump on that question of corruption. They watched everyone else basically try it in twenty fifteen and twenty sixteen, and so they're hesitant to wade back into those waters. They don't want to offend Trump suppurters whose votes they need, and they also know it's kind
of baked into the Trump cake. But as unseerious I think of a candidacy as Chris Christie's is that's one of the more interesting things. If this is a Kamakazi mission for Chris Christi to exact vengeance on Donald Trump and take him down. I mean, the difference between what happened in twenty fifteen and twenty sixteen is that he wasn't president yet and now this is actually like a grift that happened as president of the United States who can't paign to drain the swamp? Do I think it's
a fatal bloat, Not even close. But I do think it's interesting to see Trump actually to see him actually talk about that.
And for people who don't know the backstory, it's not as if Chris Christy has some unique level of purity on this question.
Here.
It's that he prosecuted Jared Kushner's father and Jared Kushner paid him back by making sure that Chris Christie's life in the Trump orbit was miserable, blocking him from appointments and otherwise undermining him during the Trump presidency. And so Christy has always had a feud with Jared Kushner. And so that's where this is coming from, not any kind of innate kind of disgust that he might have at how MBS spends his bribe money.
Yeah, right, And it's not like Chris Christy really has a leg to stand on when it comes today either. So let's roll the next clip from again. This was Chris Christie's Tuesday night presidential announcement in New Hampshire.
Here he is again, beware of the leader in this country you have had the leadership to who has never made made a mistake, who has never done anything wrong, But when something goes wrong, it's always someone else's fault, and who has never lost I've lost you. People did that to me in twenty sixteen.
That's good, right, he done funny.
He also referred to Trump as a quote lonely, self consumed, self serving mirror hog and said, quote, we can't dismiss the question of character anymore, everybody. If we do we get what we deserve, and an advisor to the campaign told Mike Allen of Axios that Christie's campaign will emphasize authenticity and quote be willing to admit mistakes, be accountable, and share why he keeps showing up even when it
seems hard. Obviously for somebody now running on authenticity against corruption and grift, he might have some Bridgegate explaining to do if anybody really cared about his candidacy.
Yes, yes, indeed, but it probably doesn't get to that point. Trump did not go with the Bridgegate rebuttal, let's play the response from the front runner for the Republican nomination to the entry of Chris Christy into the race's role.
At and it was about our country and its future, and I wondered what our choice was going to be. We're going to be small or are we going to be big?
Okay, that's the president of the former president of the United States, just winning the meme more left and right. A lot of people online did pick up on Christy repeatedly using the words small.
It seemed intentional.
I thought the entire rollout from Christy was just sort of cringe and more than I expected it to because more than I expected it to be because he actually when he first became governor of New Jersey, he clearly had some political talent. And I mean that in the sense of like political the political theater. He wasn't bad at it, you know, he would He really was one of the first people to maximize the power of a
viral clip. Uh at the time it was probably like people pinging in around on list serves, but of him just like laying into teachers unions. It was, you know, the political theater part wasn't that bad. This feels like you know, an eighties hair metal band trying to you know, stay alive and play all the hits for you know, a big boomer concert crowd, because it just it's like
so badly done. The you know, when he's getting in people's faces and walking over to them, it felt like, yeah, middle school theater.
Yeah.
I do think of him during his time as New Jersey governor as sort of like a proto Trump. Like he he didn't he didn't necessarily see Trump coming, but he understood that that's where the energy of the Republican Party was going, and so he and he so he fed them that type of spectacle where he was, you know, attacking, attacking the media, and attacking his political enemies without any type of headge, any efforts to you know, appear like a you know, a reasonable center who's like going to
sit down with the teachers unions and going to work something out. You know, he famously would just yell at the teachers unions, and you know, if he was fortunate enough from his perspective to have a teacher come and confront him, he delighted in that. And then and he would grab the cameras and he would and he would go after them, and the Republican base then would would celebrate that. But I feel like there's something that Christy can't match when Trump came and kind of topped a proto Trump.
Like, if you're proto Trump and you meet Trump.
Himself, it's very difficult for you to kind of up your game to a level that is going to get the same reaction out of the crowd then you can with the headline act.
I think that's a really good point, and there's no reason that it'll be different from twenty sixteen, I don't think, except for one interesting perhaps development, which is that Chris Christie some indications point to him really being on a Kamakazi mission and saying, you know, I know my political future is in the rear view mirror, and what I want to do is take down Donald Trump. As opposed to in twenty fifteen twenty sixteen, the guy clearly wanted to work in the White House. He wanted to be
a cabinet officially, want to be chief of staff. He wanted a major appointment, so he couldn't go full Kamakazi and totally run against Trump. In fact, what he did was basically Kamakazi the rest of the Republican field and go after Marco Rubio. And this is you know, Chris Christy knowing he really had no chance. I think that Rubio debate moment that people remember was in New Hampshire, and Christy is sort of uniquely suited to the New
Hampshire audience, at least in his performance. I don't know if actually policy wise, he's probably not the best fit, but he is somebody who's like kind of an unorthodox coastal establishment Republican that also has this brash populist energy but no populist policy. Is he's just a weird candidate.
In twenty twenty three.
But and I don't think any of his Kamakazi plans seem to be what actually will go after Trump. But to the point about the Kushners, nobody else is talking about that, so I say, bring it on.
Oh for sure.
I actually think Christy gets a little bit too much credit for that debate performance, because all he did was point out that Marco Rubio had said the same grammatically awkward line, you know, three times within like a ninety second window that I think the entire audience recognized. Also, and all Christy had to do is kind of just point to the guy tripping over his own shoelaces, and
people like, Wow, what a knockout blow from Christy. It's like, no, the guy just the guy just fell over on his face.
I agree.
But if he's going to do a Kamakazi mission, the question is who does that serve, Because, like you said, he kamakazi himself through the primary electorate, serving Trump, hoping that he would, you know, could get some type of position within that administry. Now, maybe it's a CNN contributor, some some type of institution or audience that will celebrate
a kama Kaze mission in the Republican primary. But speaking of Kamakazi missions, I think we might have another fighter in the air who is similarly kind of nose diving toward a Trump battleship. And that's that's Mike Pence, who, you know, after breaking with Trump a number of times, we put up I think a two. Here Pence is filing the paperwork news that I was actually.
Shocked to see.
I think was broken by the Messenger, which is that new kind of Hill knockoff news outlet. A couple days ago they announced that he'd be jumping into the race within two weeks. He has filed the paperwork to run. What's what's your read on what kind of moment this is for Mike Pence.
Yeah, it's it's interesting. So it felt to me like this last week, the Joni Ernst Rost and Ride event out in Iowa was the kind of unofficial kickoff to the twenty twenty four presidential primary season.
And it's hard to always know.
It's like the you know quote about pornography, right, like, you know what, when you see it, that's what it is about. That's what it is with the primary season. And I feel like it's actually like, you know, you hear people I'm going to announce, they launched their pack, they file their paperwork. But with Christy and Pence making their announcements this week, Pence is making his official announcement today. He's already rolled out a video. He's going to be
doing a CNN town hall. It feels like now it's really happening. They're you know, Rona Santisus been in Iowa, South Carolina, New Hampshire, Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, the Hesa Hutchinson. I don't know why I felt compelsive you mentioned him there, but it does really seem like it's in full swing now, and with Pence entering this week, it's interesting.
In his announcement video, he.
Said, quote, I'll always be proud of the progress we made together, referring to try for a stronger, more prosperous America. But different times call for different leadership. I have faith God is not done with America yet. So you see how he his Trump's strategy, his Trump messaging strategy say, I was proud of the administration. Now we're in a different time, need a different guy. And it's definitely not the Christie strategy. It may or may not be similar
to the DeSantis strategy. We still don't really know. That's a little preview of how Mike Pence plans to deal with it. I will say for all of the people just quickly wondering why on earth is Mike Pence getting into the race?
Two things.
Ben Dominich made a really good point, which is that you know, take Mike Pence seriously when he says he prayed about it and that his faith is really is really real. And if he believes that through prayer he came to the decision he should run, then that's probably why he's running. And secondly, I was talking on Megan Kelly show about this, like these candidates are old, Trump
and Biden are old. There is an element of a totally unexpected potential situation that could unfold in a year and then things would be why the race would just be blown essentially wide open if something were to happen health wise, and then you're in the race and you have a real shot at becoming president if everything is suddenly blown open.
And there are criminal cases underway that that'll matter too. And but before we move on to the next segment, I did want to ask you one question. I noticed that at least one high profile Republican on Twitter recently was talking about how excited they were about RFK Junior's Twitter spaces, and I've seen some other kind of populist righte enthusiasm around r f K Junior. So I'm curious, from your perspective, what would happen if he had jumped
in the Republican primary instead. Do you think his numbers would be, you know, lesser, equal, or greater than in the Democratic primary.
I would say lesser. I think the abortion issue would be a real one. I think he would have to talk a whole lot more about like the kind of cultural issues that he sort of steered clear and steered clear of, because right now he's trying to draw contrast with Biden, and that's really interesting. I don't know, but I think there's something also very alluring to a lot of people on the right about the sort of Democratic
candidate who's running. I mean, that was a whole Trump thing, is that he was trying to appeal to these sort of old school russ Belt Democrats and he pulled a lot of them over. So I think there's something very alluring about that too. I think that's probably why there are a lot of people on the right that are like, oh rfa, he's talking about being like a sixties democrat, a Kennedy Democrat.
So that's probably part of it from my perspective.
Gotcha, all right? Sounds sounds right to me.
The Washing Post is out with new reporting based on the Discord leaks, that the Ukrainians had actually been plotting to blow up the North Stream pipeline, and that the United States learned about this conspiracy months before the pipeline was actually blown up, as came from a human source. Tucker Carlson came back to Twitter with his show What's It Called? Emily Tucker on Twitter, Twitter, Tucker Twitter on
Tucker Tucker on Twitter. He's back with it was his first segment that he posted last night, and he dipped into this news roll that here.
No one who's paid to cover these things seem to entertain even the possibility it could have been the Ukrainians who did it. No chance of that. Ukraine, as you may have heard, is led by a man called Zelenski, and we can say for a dead certain fact that he was not involved.
He couldn't have been.
Zelensky is too decent for terrorism now you see him on television. That's true, you might form a different impression, sweaty and rat like a comedian turned oligarch, a persecutor of Christians, a friend of black Rock. But don't believe your own eyes. Actually, miss Zelensky is a very good man, the best really. As George W. Bush once noted, he
is our generation's Winston Churchill. Of all the people in the world, our shifty, dead eyed Ukrainian friend in the tracksuit is uniquely incapable of blowing up a dam well. A former Air Force officer who worked for years in military intelligence came forward as a whistleblower to reveal that the US government has physical evidence of crashed non human made aircraft, as well as the bodies of the pilots
who flew those aircraft. The Pentagon has spent decades studying these otherworldly remains in order to build more technologically advanced weapons systems. Okay, that's what the former intel officer revealed, and it was clear he was telling the truth. In other words, UFOs are actually real, and apparently so is extraterrestrial life. Now we know in a normal country this news would qualify as a bombshell. The story of the millennium in our country, it doesn't.
And I think what's really interesting there is you see him tying this extended argument about the Washington Post discordly reporting on Nordstream, and as Soccer points out, we can put up b three here. Soccer points out, you look at that and you see that we were basically our government knows all of the Sager says, let's this think and the Biden admin had intel that Ukraine had a plot to blow up Nordstream and still lied. Slash tried
to insinuate that Russia was responsible in real time. So we've had months of deception basically from our government at this point. And Tucker then ties that his monologue starts with Ukraine and ends on UFOs. It's about ten minutes long. It's on Twitter if folks want to check the whole thing out, and he has a line where he says, even a Yak herder in Tajikistan knows who blew up the Nordstream pipeline. And he's drawing contrast between American audiences
and everyone else in the world. He's like, the American people might be the least informed in the world at this point, because when you look at how our media react to just like an incredible revelation about alien life forms in our government, when you look at how our media reacts with a kind of a shrug as our presidential administration initially was really deceptive. In fact, they actually said it was a crazy conspiracy theory at first, in
an echo of the lab leak narrative. It was a crazy conspiracy theory that Ukraine may have had anything to.
Do with this.
So I thought it was a pretty interesting piece of argumentation from Tucker.
I thought the show looked good.
What'd you think, Ryan, Yeah, So, I mean, let's let's take the Ukrainian piece first. This is this is fascinating reporting coming out of these these Discord leaks, And it's interesting that the Washington Posts kind of held back the country that initially discovered this intel and then shared it
with the United States. The United States then shared it with its its German partners and others, because if it's in the Discord leagues, presumably you would think that other foreign intelligence operations, including the Russians, already have access to it. So you can kind of withhold the country's name from the public. But I'm not sure what good that's doing, you know from a from a counter intelligence perspective. But what's interesting is that they are there are some real
specific details about that. They list about this Ukrainian operation. They say they're going to be kind of six operatives. They're going to rent They're going to rent a yacht uh and then they're going to go out and use submersibles to blow it up. Now, according to the German investigative reporting, it was there were six people who rented a yacht uh and they they dove, which is I
don't know if that's what they mean by submersibles. There was there was a reference to helium being used by both because it's such a deep dive that you need you know, helium to maintain clarity and to keep keep you safe at the that that level of depth.
And so the idea the end. Oh.
They also said that they were going to do it around is June operation uh, where there were there were you know, a naval operation.
Uh. So that didn't happen.
There was some speculation in the article that they learned that their operation had been compromised and had been had been leaked, and so they postponed but these but it was still done right around a giant naval operation. So basically all the details that the intelligence community had before the operation was carried out actually panned out.
One point.
Don't'm curious for your take on this. This would undercut Seymour Hirsch's reporting in the sense that he reported that it was this, you know, this crew of Americans out of you know, working out of this gutless school and the Gulf uh that carried it out. My guess would be what Hirsch learned about was a plan that was trained for but ultimately not carried out, and instead this Ukrainian operation was carried out. And I'm curious what you think about the way that this conflicts a with everything
the intelligence community has said publicly. You know, they had that leak to the New York Times to try to counter Seymour Hirsch, but it also does conflict with Hirsch's reporting.
That's an interesting point.
I hadn't thought about it, and folks can watch our whole interview with Seymour Hrsch from shortly after that bombshell
was published not too long ago. But I've always thought with his report that it may be through the telephone chain official affiliations are getting confused or are getting intentionally obfuscated and hard to totally pin down, which I think gets us to Obviously, one of the biggest problems with this in power war is that we don't know what our country is involvement in operations like nord Stream, like anything that's being used inside of Russia in Moscow, regardless
of what our government says. It's hard to trust what our government says. They don't seem to know the extent to which our personnel and our equipment is being used. So and things that we've sold Ukraine are being used. So I've always wondered if there was more, if there were just like affiliations that were already loose when you're using maybe mercenaries, and it's unclear where the money, the support, or the go ahead was given.
I don't know. I think maybe that's possibly an explanation.
And as as for Tucker's show, I think he's right that it's wild that there isn't kind of wall to wall coverage of this whistleblower intelligence community allegation that the US has in its pre in its possession basically alien aircraft like and some of the reports, some of the reporting, you know, seems to confirm that like that, that to me is shocking, Like that is something that I would expect we would be covering wall to wall on his on his show itself, just as a person who's involved
in progressive media. It's it's intimidating. You know how dominant the right is getting when it comes to the media ecosystem. How many views does this sucker have by now? Probably fifty million or maybe far more than that. This that comes after the what is a Woman documentary?
Got? Good?
Lord knows how many viewers on Twitter even if you think that they're counting is an order of magnitude off. You're still talking about millions and millions of people, you know, gobbling up this content. And the progressive kind of media ecosystem is just not even if you include c A, MSNBC in that, which I wouldn't, but even if you do, it's not even remotely comparable. Do you can you on the right, do you like kind of feel a burst of energy when it comes to audience that that wasn't
there before? Or is this kind of manufactured through the hostile takeover of an algorithm?
I think independent media has a burst of energy, not so much conservative media. If that makes sense because I just checked. The Tucker video does have, according to Twitter's numbers, sixty one point seven million views, so that's about twelve hours in about twelve hours, And it may be orders of magnitude off. It may just be when people scrow through the video one million, right, which is higher than his audience on Fox News. And I think that ten
minute format is smart. It's really targeted. You can write a really sharp, clever monologue. I thought the writing of the monologue was excellent, just from like the art of writing standpoint, sort of very typical Tucker. He's a great writer and his good writers on his staff. So I think that's where I think the format is very He found a format that's going to work very well for him.
But I also thinks it's.
True that like real leftist media, meaning like actual you know, critical of our foreign policy, critical of the economic consensus, leftist media. It's it's sort of like similar to where conservative media has always been, Like there's just there's not a ton of like money and energy behind that in profession and the professional political class.
But what's interesting is that the.
Establishment media, the legacy media, is so culturally leftists. Now, I shouldn't say left us so culturally progressive now that it's it's the it's created the lane. And when I say culturally, I don't just mean on the sort of woke agenda, because yes, they're they're really far to the left when it comes to a lot of those things, but also just in like censorship issues, like they're completely
pro censorship. They're pro like X, Y and Z, And that creates the lane from Matt Walsh to come in, That creates the lane for Tucker Carlson to come in. And then those are the same people in legacy media who decry populism, and all they do is empower populist
by giving them very real ammunition. So you can't like complain about Tucker having a sixty million video viewership in twelve hours when he is basically right on the substance of the question that you're not doing your job very well if you aren't wallwall coverage about governments lies on UFO craft, and governments lies on you know, this entire nord Stream bombing and the entire war.
Really and Tucker had a really interesting kind of inversion of a Bernie Sanders line at the end of his monologue which people can finance. Around the like nine and a half minute mark or so, where he says something like, don't ask why we're all so rich, go worry about racism, which is essentially out of kind of left wing populism
over the last one hundred and fifty years. That the argument is that, you know, race and racism itself was kind of constructed back in the sixteenth seventeenth century in order to, you know, allow elites to divide the working class in a way that will allow them to rule over them. He's sort of using it a slightly different angle. He's arguing. He's arguing that, I guess there isn't there isn't racism, and so the elites are saying, look, there is racism, so you need to fight about the question
of whether there is racism. But it's fundamentally the same point that he's making, that that that has been made for you know, hundreds of years by people on the left saying that that it's a it's a tool that the ruling class uses to kind of divide everyone underneath the rule the ruling class, and.
That is was that an iteration and an evolution at.
All of his politics that he's edging closer to that, or do you think that there's there's been a kind of an element of that from.
The beginning the speech he gave it the Heritage Foundation right before, and reportedly this may have had some impact on Rupert Murdoch's thinking. He made a speech of the Heritage Fundation's fiftieth anniversary gala the friday before he got canned, on a Monday, and he talked like, very honestly about his ideological evolution going from sort of more libertarian to now more of like populist conservative. And yeah, I think
that absolutely represents an evolution is thinking. And I wish the again speaking of how there's like a lane created it. I actually really wish that the left talked more like that. And I think the right is needs to internalize and learn the lesson too about how the ruling class uses those questions to distract, because they're actually still they're using like very real concerns people have about what their children are being taught in school and using it as fodder
to just create complete distractions. That doesn't mean that people on the right or the anti woke left, center whatever shouldn't talk about that at all.
I mean it doesn't.
Invalidate those concerns, but it is important to recognize that there does, there does need to be a balance, because there is a balance for your average voter, your average person who you know, relies on the media, the political class, the political universe to create a safe and prospering society.
Well, let's let's move on to this incredible basically takeover of golf by Muhammed bin Salma. Now it's being reported as a merger between the PGA and Live Golf, which was the Saudi funded rival that went around and was posching a whole bunch of players in order to create like a rival tour, you know, massively overpaying them and then you know, with the idea that they're going to you know, create this competition. PGA Tour was responded by saying, basically,
these are terrorists. You know, you've never had to apologize for being part of the PGA. You're gonna have to apologize constantly if you're part of the Live tour. If you do that, you are a complete sellout. And and then next thing, you know, PGA Tour is selling out itself. If you look at if you look at and Ben Walsh,
there has some of the details of the contract. The PGA will still technically have the kind of voting majority on the board that governs this, but the Saudis, through their their sovereign wealth fund, will have the exclusive right to invest. In other words, they will own it like they are the owners. And so what does it even mean at that point that the PGA players have a voting membership if it's completely funded and owned by the Saudis.
This seems like just a complete victory for them as far as I can see.
What's your read on it?
Oh?
Absolutely, I mean the memes on this were incredible. First of all, who knew that golf Twitter was so funny?
Not me?
And speaking of which, speaking of Twitter, let's roll the next element.
Let's just put C two up here.
This was a pretty interesting take by Senator Mike Lee where he said, the PGA Golf Tour is buying Saudi backed lip Golf Tour. Looks like a long established dominant incumbent is acquiring a Nason competitor, one that has been challenging its dominant positions.
So there you see.
A counter argument from actually an anti trust angle, which is pretty interesting too.
Matt Fuller.
Then we can put the next element up here as we roll through a lot of the amusing reactions, had this great tweet where he's like doing this transcript of a conversation between Saudi Arabia and the PGA tour. Hey, PGA golfers, we have a bunch of money to offer you for a new league.
PGA.
You're ruining the game in sportswa washing your reputation of human rights abuses. Okay, but what if we offered you a lot of money. PGA today we'd like to announce a merger.
Yeah, basically, and then.
There's just an incredible confluence of events here, so we can put the next element up. This is a Wall Street Journal story about Secretary of State Anthony Blincoln. He goes to Saudi Arabia and we're reportedly he's going to say that human rights are in the are. He's going to take up the issue of human rights with the Saudi's, which of course is what the Biden administration wants to posture.
As we'll see how substantive that ends up being. And then finally, this is maybe my favorite element of the story.
C five, we can put this tweet up. This is a.
Tweet from Timothy means of a Donald Trump truth from What Yeah July eighteenth, twenty twenty two, where he basically predicted this is pretty crazy, where he said all of those golfers that remain quite loyal to the very disloyal PGA and all his different forms will pay a big price when the inevitable merger with Live comes and you get nothing from but a thank you from PGA officials who are making millions of dollars a year. Ryan, My question to you is Trump's There's nobody who knows corrupt
business deals better than Donald Trump? Is this not him just having the perfect experience to predict the moment?
This was entire This was crystal clear to him, and he from his perspective, he probably couldn't see how other people couldn't see where this was going. He's like, what part of this don't you guys understand? Like they have an enormous amount of money that they're willing to spend.
People like money.
They will eventually take the money and they will own you and I like the way that he will like isn't the right.
Word for it.
The way that he addresses love right, The way that he addresses the players who are trying to take a stand against this is just amazing, saying like, look, you guys are the fools, because you're eventually going to be in the pay of MBS anyway, and all you're not even All you're going to get is a pad on the head from the PGA, while the PGA is eventually
going to sell out take the money. All these other players that are selling out are going to take the money, and you're still going to end up working for the Saudis, but just at the same pay or even less than you're getting now. And tragic as it is, that turns out to have been basically one hundred percent correct.
So we have now Anthony Blinkin going to Saudi Arabia and Ryan you know these you know this particular issue area very well. Of course, the Biden administration wants to posture, and they got their ws, they got their Wall Street Journal headline, assuming this is the one that they wanted. As Blincn visits Saudi Arabia, human rights are back in focus sub having Biden officials have pushed the Saudis to
lift travel bands on American citizens. So Blincoln is prepping to visit Saudi Arabia this week and prepping a human rights message to the Saudis. How confident are you that that actually comes to fruition in a substantive way.
Not very because as you saw, MBS basically jacked up gas prices right right ahead of the announcement of the of the PGA takeover. So it's it's almost inaccurate to
say that the Saudis are are buying the PGA. We are buying the PGA, you know, with the money that we're putting into our gas tanks and then sending over to MBS that he's then using to buy PGA, And he's restricting oil production in order to drive up gas prices to help offset the tiny amount that he's going to spend for the PGA, so blink and is going to have that that he's going to have to negotiate.
He's he's also.
Going to be pushing and he said for MBS to release a bunch of American residents, you know, who are being who are not allowed to being kept illegally in the country, a lot of them for social media posts on a social media platform. At Saudi Arabia is a significant owner of Twitter, you you constantly see news stories of people being arrested and sentenced to insanely long sentences
for something that they said on Twitter. A significant number of those are American residents, are American citizens, and so Blankin is going to be taking up their cases. So those are those are a couple of things he's going
to have to push. Meanwhile, they're pushing a cruel and absurd Yemen policy while they're there, and that is probably the real driver of Blncoln's visit, which is to try to undermine these talks that are ongoing directly between Saudi Arabia and the Hoho Thies because the US says that they want a kind of quote unquote U N broker peace, and by U N broker they mean a huge a huge role for the United States in the in those talks.
The US is deeply concerned about the fact that China was able to and we've talked about this before on the show, that China was able to reach this kind of datan between Iran and Saudi Arabia and as a result, you wound up with these with these peace peace talks progressing.
So Blinkin is going to try to make sure that those peace talks jump from there over into basically a U Brokeren situation that would then the US hopes, you know, continue to give them access to the Gulf of Aiden, which is, you know, controls something like forty percent of the maritime economy, you know, oil and shipping all flows through there and into the into the Mediterranean.
So that's that's really what's going on. And so.
You know how much of a role is are human rights going to play into that?
We'll see, And what.
Do you make, lastly of Mike Lee's antitrust argument in this case?
I mean, I guess it's funny.
You know, it'd be funny if Lena Khan FTC chair was able to come in and say, you know what, actually we're not going to allow this. We want more competition in our in our golf leagues.
I don't. I don't see that happening.
And also it doesn't he had to kind of contort what really happened in order to make it fit his hit his kind of joke there, because it doesn't actually seem like the income dominant player acquired an upstart competitor. It seems like the upstart competitor acquired the incumbent, right, but whatever, like close enough for close enough for a.
Joke, It goes enough for a joke.
And it also is true that you have these like two whether or not it's an upstart, like two hugely groups that have a big swath of the market.
Up and people probably know this, but like the NFL, Major League Baseball, those types of entities have carve outs to anti trust policy, like written into law, like they are legally allowed to operate illegally like that. And in order to have that cartel, you know, to have this monopoly on baseball, the where we as a public are then able to regulate baseball and football and basketball in ways that we otherwise.
Wouldn't have wouldn't have been. We have breaking news.
Chris Licked is out at CNN following that devastating Tim albert a profile.
In The Atlantic.
Emily, what is your reaction to this extremely short tenure of the new CNN head.
Chrislick's tenure at CNN was always fascinating because he came from Stephen Colbert and he was producing the heck out of that Stephen Colbert show to where it was both the least funny show in late night and the most highly rated show in late Night for a long period of the Trump administration, a very far cry from the
Johnny Carson days. In the same way that CNN during the reign of Jeff Zucker was a very far cry from the version of CNN in the eighties and nineties and the aughts, when it thrived as a news network that people saw as truly being kind of down the middle. It was the only place that could really pull off hosting a show like Crossfire, and Chris Lickt desperately wanted to restore that, which is funny because when you're tapping
slicked for this job, he was producing Mourning Joe. He is a very successful sort of mastermind of what happened over at Morning Joe in the early days of that show. That's a very niche product. Colbert is a very niche product. And so on one hand, he really knew the market. He knew that because corporate press is dying, that what it needs to do is corner these very particular niches. But in that sort of direction, he never seemed to
know then how to implement that. He in the Tim Alberta profile, is repeatedly shown as straining to get his staff to be on board with his mission of what's derided in the press now both sides is you know, having Republicans on your air and giving them room, you know, giving them tough interviews, but like actually letting them on air and letting them say things you may think are horrible about the election, but at least letting them say that so that you can grill them and you can
have the contrast. That's what Chrislick really wanted. So I actually my contrarian take is I probably would have kept CNN Plus because I think, you know, the future is in that space, definitely not in the sort of airwaves. And I think I never would have sat for that Tim Alberta profile, which was unbelievable, and it seemed like Licked had long been protected by a good relationship with Zaslav and maybe that has come to an end in
the light of the Alberta profile. But just a lot of fascinating I think failures of people to reckon with the new media atmosphere in which audiences desperately want independent news, but that doesn't mean they want people to lie to them and say they have no biases. And that's what CNN wanted to do. It wanted to get people up there with a straight face, like with Caitlyn Collins and Donald Trump, and say I'm just going to be right down the middle here, and then you'd be fully from the left.
And it seems even in the way that you're describing it, that it was just a fundamental contradiction that couldn't be worked out because he wants to do two things that are in conflict. One he wants to bring back CNN, you know, to its glory day is when it was trusted by tens of millions of people across the political spectrum. Yet he also understands that that doesn't exist anymore, and that the spot for that type of media is a
niche market, and I don't. And sometimes the smartest people on the planet will get themselves stuck in these fundamental contradictions that can't be worked out and then just frustrate themselves endlessly because they're intelligence and they're hard work. Just can't seem to unbundle this contradiction because it just simply
can't be unbundled. If I were given Chryslick's job and said, all right, you need to fix CNN, what I would to actually do is I would have gone to Crystal and Saga and be like, I want to hire you guys, and I want to I don't want to produce kind of left right, but not cross fire television all day long.
No centrists.
We're getting like, the centrists can come on as guests, just as we want to hear what these kind of zook creatures.
Have to say about their view of politics.
But but we're not going to try to pretend like we have some magical center that we're going to channel and be trusted by everybody. What I'm going to get is some people you like, some people you don't like, and you can hear from all sides.
Uh and and see and see if that works.
I think I still think there's actually an opening for a mass media that that does that. Whether it can do that and be trusted on a corporate platform, it remains to be seen. Although there are so many different platforms now, like you said, it's it's streaming, it's cable, it's you know, their their clips are on YouTube, We're on We're on YouTube. YouTube's corporation. So you know, the jury's out on that. But that's that's that's the route
I would have gone. Also, would not have sat with Tim Alberta for a fifteen thousand word Atlantic profile and take them in as gym and whatever else he did, right.
He took him to the gym and said, quote, Zucker can't do this when he was lifting, this is like my favorite thing I've ever seen in a profile that somebody you know willingly sat for.
And that just brings us to I think one of the.
The other fundamental parts of the story, which is, no matter how badly you want to kind of restore some of these institutions, they are We're actually talking about this in the next block too, because it relates back to that fantastic story you wrote last year when you raise a generation or two of people with this, I don't know this idea that people need to be protected from bad arguments like they actually need protection from bad arguments.
You can't trust the public to deal with those bad arguments. Well, that's baked the CNN's cake now. And even as the CEO Chris Licked could not deal with that, he couldn't like actually control employees who said, I don't want to have Republicans on our airwaves. I don't want to air these arguments. I don't want the contrast was never able to like actually fix that even as the top guy at the company. I think that's a huge takeaway when people say, you know, some of the stuff, the pendulum
will just swing back. Well, no, because there are a whole lot of especially younger people, who for whom these ideas are really central to their worldview and to their like self esteem in so many cases, because it's how they measure, you know, whether or not they have the right ideas about the world. That You're not just going to come in and have Chris locked bulldozed this like deeply bad, this deeply seated ideology that so many people have.
It just doesn't work that way anymore.
And you know, even if you look at something like a top podcast like The Daily, that's not monoculture, Like you can't just be like, you know, walking maybe if you walk into a Whole Foods, you'll find someone else be like, hey, did you hear what was on the Daily this morning? But but like it's not like that. In the rest of the country, there really isn't monoculture anymore.
So it's that that clash between trying to make monoculture with a generation that really isn't capable and also trying to make monoculture when that's not really what you know the It's just really hard to do that because I agree with you that the audience does want it. But if you're not willing to like really go there, you're not gonna be able to do it.
Yea rough ride for Chris licked. He's been put out of his misery. Stick around, We'll be back with more.
Right after this.
A store in The New Yorker by Emma Green profiling the Arc of Fair, a group that was started by Barry Weiss and some other sort of dissident people on the right and the center, maybe a few on the
center left. The Arc of Fair became fodder for this fairly interesting New Yorker story, and the story reminded me pretty immediately actually of Ryan's story from last summer in the Intercept that was also very very viral and especially viral and sort of DC and Beltwegh circles about how UH ideology has paralyzed a lot of nonprofits on the left.
The story in The New Yorker was really about how even anti woke and anti woke group Fair, in the words of some of the people that were really involved, was supposed to be kind of a counterbalance to the a c LU, like an idea of a group that could really stand up for civil liberties where you see them coming under siege. I would argue correctly that, I would argue that they're correct that some civil liberties have come under siege by the I don't want to call it
woke ideology, but that's sort of far left. I don't even know Ryan, how right? How do you describe it? Like, what's a better word than woke?
I mean, woke kind of gets you there, it does. It's until people until people ask you to define it, and then you go viral because because it's hard to hard to pin down. But you know, that's that's kind of it. Weiss herself wrote an essay uh in was it tablet?
Uh?
You know that kind of inspired this organization in some ways, and the New Yorker New York talks about that, and even her description of it lumps together, you know, you know, post modern post structural uh, combined with some you know, identity politics. It's it's like, it's it's very hard to
kind of boil down into a single word. Well, you know, it's probably decent if you can take away some of the stigma and pejorative nature of it, because it's you know, it started out as an UH as a moniker that people were adopting.
On their own.
But I think there's a couple of interesting layers of this, this piece that we can that we can disentangle here. On the one hand, and you and I were talking about this, some of this is just kind of silly naivete among some people that just don't seem to understand how UH non nonprofits work. And we're frustrated at that, and you see that at so many different organizations. That's just that is what it is, and that's but that is also the responsibility of good managers to work through
like it. I think too many managers think that everybody is just kind of born knowing how organizations work, how nonprofits work, what nonprofit structures are like, and they're not. They like people have to learn through the process of doing and through the process of you know, interactions with management of these types of organizations. And so you can't just throw your hands up and say, kids today, they
just don't have any idea what's doing. It's it's also your responsibility to make the case for why the structure that you have and the mission that you have is working.
So that's that's one side of it.
The other is the kind of interesting substantive ideological question at the heart of this piece, which is, as they ask it, can you be moderate and be anti woke? I'd kind of frame it as, you know, what, does this kind of world, which we could broadly call anti anti woke maybe stand for.
Rather than stand against?
And And that's the that's the point that the one of the co founders who went on to run the organization was making himself his names Bien Bartning, and he didn't want it to be just anti this and anti that.
He wanted to stand for something.
The problem is what he decided it stood for was kind of cringe and silly pro human went with pro human, which I think is not a is not his fault for being unable to accurately message. I think there isn't actually a substantive politics there for him to name, because there's so much disagreement within within the space that is
coalescing and organizing around the idea of anti woke. It's like, if you're an anti fascist front in UH in Spain, let say you encompass everybody from the center right to the far left, and so you don't you're a front that is against a thing you don't actually stand for. All of you don't stand for the same thing, so China. So trying to narrow it down is basically impossible because it's going to eliminate some people who don't agree with certain things. And it really seemed to come to a
head around gender ideology. What was your what was your read on that substantive question of what kind of tore this group apart?
That's clearly where it crumbled. And to your point about anti pro I mean antie is baked into the name. It's called the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism. And the relevance of the story again is that Barry Weiss admirably had ambitions of this to be something that really counters the ACLU, and it's clearly not headed for that trajectory. It seems to be at this point a shell of
its former self and a shell of its ambitions. It had money, we learned in this profile from Harlan Crowe, which some folks will remember from recent stories about the conservative.
Legal movement and Clarence Thomas.
It got like a million dollar donation from one high level donor who started to become disillusioned on the group herself, particularly around this issue of.
Sex and gender.
And that's what's so interesting about this story is that, you know, the intolerance part of fair obviously, I think in this climate, I mean, one of the reasons I don't like to use the word woke is because I think it's almost too narrow. That a lot of this is is really broad. These questions about like what is a woman? That's so much broader than woke, if you even want to use the like Matt Walsh framing, there's
so much more going on in that. And I think if you say you're pro human and you're against intolerance, that's almost just getting to like the censorship question, and that gets to the you know, like Twitter for a while not letting you weigh in on the issue of you know, defining or referring to biological women by the biological sex. Twitter says you can't do that. That's an
entirely different question. Question whether Twitter and the government collude to say you can't do that, then whether you should actually morally refer to a biological woman as a woman, or if you should go along with preferred pronouns, or if you should say that you know, people actually really
can change the biological sex, or that biological sex is inconsequential. Like, these are completely different questions, And I think part of the problem that the so called anti woke movement has is that the censorship question is the gateway for a lot of disillusion people on the left and then they have to make you know, Chris Rufo, for instance, was
part of this group. So you have people coming from the dissident left and then they have to make common cause with somebody like Chris Rufo, who, by the way himself, I would argue was pretty much has been center left at different points in his life. And if you can come together on the censorship question, it doesn't mean that you can come together and all of the other questions.
And that is probably one of the biggest problems that the so called anti woke movement has, and in general, the sort of like I actually think those that common cause is essential in the same way that I think our common cause on for instance, like pentagon funding and welfare and all of these other things is essential. But if you if you can't get past that, your advocacy group might not work.
Yeah, and it suggests to me that kind of gender ideology is becoming, on probably both sides, a black hole that has so much centrifugal force that nobody is able to kind of stay out of it and stay out of the question. Because Bartning, he argued internally that some of these questions were not properly addressed by fair advocacy or fair policy. What he would say is, we don't
support any censorship. Like he would say, if we don't, you know, it might be cruel to misgender somebody, but it is not illegal and it should not be banned, you know, So they would they would, they would oppose is that. But when it came to the question of gender affirming care for minors, for instance, he would argue, that's not our business. That's that's up to the that's a political question that ought to be worked out through the political system. And we are here to defend kind
of fundamental principles of free expression. We're here to create the playing field on which those decisions can be made fairly by by a population that can that can you know, come together and argue it out. Whereas that that that major donor for instance, Ruffo and others were saying absolutely not like you need to take a stand against against this care like that you have that this is an
issue that requires your your intervention. And so they they basically went to Barry Weiss and the other co founder and Bartning without their knowing it had made them board members. There were three board members of this New York nonprofit. And when they discovered that they were on the paperwork as board members, two of the three board members, they were like, oh, well, we didn't really want to be on the board here, but now that we are, we
actually have the votes. And they just called him into a meeting and and made a motion and booted him out. He then kind of basically counter sued, saying, if you're going to do board business, you need ten days. And then it gets and then it gets into this ten days notice, and it gets into this extraordinarily boring kind of bureaucratic bickering over it, but but which underlies a real ideological fight over the over the direction of the organization.
But I'm curious if you think that that's right, that that that organization that you know, an organization that wants to be kind of a center right a CLU can't actually do that anymore because it has to become involved as a fighter in the these battles, particularly over gender.
Yeah, I think the acl you benefited from a real social consensus that started to coalesce in the middle of the twentieth century where people in remarkable and beautiful ways had had their minds changed about certain like extremely important issues, and the ACLU you really for you know, more than fifty years, I think benefited from that version of the country where people had like really come on to the same page about racism and the legal system and sexism.
Et cetera, et cetera.
And I don't think that the people involved in fair would say they wanted a center right ACLU. They would say they wanted like a center, like they wanted something that was genuinely neutral, and that that ambition of neutrality is not only impossible now, but I don't know that it ever. I mean, it was maybe possible for a very fleeting moment world history in the mid century to millennial America, and I just don't see that being possible.
Here's a quote.
People were afraid, this is from The New Yorker to voice their disagreement because of how they would be portrayed by bartning behind their backs. They feared being fired, disparaged, or other forms of retaliation. So it's like, on the one hand, this may not be you know, the big Maybe the narrative isn't super neatly wrapped up in the story because this is deeply I think, intertwined with personnel issues.
Like clearly, first of all, nonprofit structure in this country is a byzantine, bureaucratic nightmare that lends itself, I think, towards corruption and inefficiency. Secondly, maybe this guy was just really wrong for the job. But I also think the narrative questions are fair. That's my perspective. I don't know
about you. I think it is fair to like pull some stuff away from this because clearly personnel issues aside that they were all accelerated the sex question like gasoline on the fire, there were these like you can see in the story, there were these existing fissures, and then when they were forced to litigate internally whether or not they would take a stance on all of the issues that you raised pertaining a biological sex, it crumbled. They
couldn't do it without being afraid to talk openly. That's just like pretty amazing takeaway.
Yeah, no, yeah, I think that's right.
I think everybody should read the piece because it's as you described it. I think that's right. It's they tried to be the hetero. These are heterodocs thinkers, These are anti tribalism folks. And I think the reason The New Yorker was excited to do this story is because they loved the delicious irony of the heterodox folks raising the question of how orthodox they need to be on a
variety of different issues. And they quote somebody saying, you know, we tried to fight tribalism and in doing that, we formed our own tribes. And I think it is a reflection of where we are today and our kind of social construction that everybody is retreating into their different tribes and if you don't, you kind of just get ripped, ripped apart, and pieces of you go in every direction.
Agree and just really quickly before we wrap. I would say, that's why it's just a breakdown and social trust. You know, even people who can find common political cause can't organize and trust each other in I think a high tech social media opticon pen opticon environment and the way that they used to, you know, say even twenty years ago.
And secondly, just a quick question before we run, did this remind you of your story from last year that saw just like leftist groups being paralyzed by that breakdown and social trust.
Yes, yes, you know, you had different different kind of tools and weapons that were being used internally by the combatants in the office politic just because those are tools that are you know, constructed out of whatever whatever your particular politics are. But the methods and the machinations were
were all basically the same. So yes, you're and I think you're seeing some of this on the right as well, in you know, with you know, a lot of church groups are you know, breaking church organizations kind of in turmoil, with everybody accusing each other of being kind of too woke or or to have have embracing you know, crypto dei type tendencies and using whatever the language is, whatever the ideology is, that kind of your organizations organized around
you then grab the mantle of the purity of that and then and you beat up your internal enemies. And so I think the left kind of pioneered that over the last ten years or so. But I think you're going to see it in organizations like fair and everywhere else.
I mean, you know right wing organizations a lot better than I do.
But have you have you started noticing that you're seeing people accuse each other of kind of cryptowolkness that you know if when in reality they're just kind of expressing power struggles for you know, for dominance of the organization.
It's definitely in the churches. I don't know that.
I feel like wokeness is a litmus test on the right in general. Now, so even like kind of like Spencer Cox, the governor of Utah, when he gave us preferred pronouns on a zoom call with students, I mean that was well, he was just discredited by basically everybody in the right as soon as he did that. So I think it's generally a litmus test like on the political right, but in cultural spaces like churches for instance,
I think you definitely, definitely, definitely see it. So it's not an issue that is going anywhere at all.
We have some news on the case of Juliana Sange. So for a while there's been a lawsuit that's been going on that people may or may not be aware of, where a group of attorneys and journalists are suing the CIA, and also suing a former CIA head, Michael Pompeo, for basically illegal surveillance UH and searches within the Ecuadorian embassy.
There's been some incredible UH new revelations from the Spanish news organization l PAISE that they are now including in a new filing opposing basically the CIA's attempt to get this case thrown out of court.
UH.
And first of all, I wanted to show some of the surveillance footage. You can roll this uh just kind of in the background. This is this is the footage that the that a contractor who was working for the
Ecuadorian embassy, you know, had access to. And we now know that that contractor had uh had connections to the CIA, and that the CIA was able to exploit their relationship with with this contractor to constantly surveil not only Assange, but other people who came into who came into the embassy, UH, one of which was was me At one point. I wonder if there's footage of me when I when I interviewed as songe there just just just wandering around that embassy.
UH.
People could find this on I think it's el Pais's You can find a fuller video on el Paisse's YouTube page, and it does give you a real look at the Ecuadorian embassy that he was living in uh for years.
Uh.
And I was startled when I went there because it's this basically a railway apartment and in London that looked to be only two or three bedrooms, uh and maybe one or two bathrooms. And that that little living room area that you see.
Uh.
And not only was he there for years, but so was the Ecuadorian embassy staff. Just just an incredible situation that and he wasn't able to leave for anything, which is because if the second he would have left, he would have been picked up.
So it's which must be.
You know, psychologically torturous to know that if you need medical attention, that that is it for you, Like you're not going to make it even to the hospital, uh before before you're uh before you're detained. H. But so the new piece of information uh that emerged that the the the c i A or this contractor was supposed to turn over you know, all all all of its data from various kind of electronic equipment.
UH.
There was a technical problem to the judge ordered them to try again, and when they when they did it again, and we can put up this L L paise article. Uh, they accidentally shared what well they were supposed to do it, but I think that they were trying not to share it. A file, uh that is listed as c I A, like the the file, like the direct file. It's just it's just named c I A.
And so.
Richard Roth of the Roth Law firm, who's who's representing the plaintiffs, he said in a in a comment to me, said, these startling new revelations, as reported by l pays demonstrate that you see global unlawfully surveiled, unknowing Americans when they met with Assange. The initial concealment and then revelation of this new information, if true, is proof that the plaintiffs'
claims are legitimate. The CIA's motion to dismiss should either be denied or plaintiffs should be allowed to replead to bring in these new facts.
So literally, they busted this.
Contractor with a file called CIA, while they have, you know, all sorts of other evidence that they were that the CIA was worthing. Meanwhile, Emily, what are you what are you taking a look at what's your point.
I'm also talking about things related to the surveillance state today because it's sort of inescapable. I wanted to do a breakdown on the question of the FBI whistle blower that's being sort of ping ponged around in the media.
It's really hot in conservative media, but I think a lot of people don't know exactly what to do with it because Democrats and Republicans and the House of Representatives have come away with different ideas after they've they've viewed this document that's at the center of the whistleblower controversy. On the Senate side too, they've come away with just
different ideas of what's actually going on here. So with Republicans, led by James Comer actually saying this week that his Comer is the head of the House Oversight Committee, he said that they're going to convene contempt of Congress hearings for FBI Director Christopher rad later this week over his unwillingness to provide the committee with this document. So the basics year just to go, just to go up to this thirty thousand foot level, is that there is a document.
From an FBI whistle blow.
That has information was given by a confidential human source to the FBI, and I'm reading from the Federalist here a story by Margot Cleveland.
Over at the Federalist.
This is a quote from Margo regarding this is that form data June thirtieth, twenty twenty. So this is an FD ten to twenty three form included detailed information from a confidential human source the FBI regarding an agreement by now President Biden to deliver preferred foreign policy positions for a five million dollar payment. It's an absurd possible. I mean, it's not an absurd possibility, but it's an absurd allegation.
Not that it's absurd in the realm of being implausible or being anything like that, but it's ripped straight from the pages of a novel or from a movie. Basically that you would have a president of the United States, a former vice president, longtime senator, just taking money for foreign policy position. But the reason this is so important and the reason that Republicans are right to demand this form is because of what we talked about last week.
The Durham Report.
I really see this as a coda to everything in the Durham Report, where it says Basically, Durham, I think really in great detail showed that James call me Peter Struck. Everyone who was working on the cross for our hurricane investigation into the allegations of Russia collusion applied an incredibly different standard to Donald Trump than they did to Hillary Clinton.
Meaning they subjected claims about Clinton's alleged corruption to much higher scrutiny than they did claims of Trump's collusion with Russia. So if Hillary Clinton was alleged to have the server, and did she know about it, did she not know about it, how was this involved, they were going to subject any claims about that to a really high level of scrutiny because actually, as you see them saying and emails, Durham saw they were like, well, she's probably the next
president of the United States. We don't want it to turn on the DOJ or the FBI, And that really informed the way they went about the investigation into her private server, whereas with Donald Trump, they were a as Kevin Klinsmith did, He's actually he pleaded guilty to this fudging information to surveil campaign volunteers advisors. So it was definitely a double standard, and that's why Republicans. This is
Chuck Grassley. He chruck. Grassley goes on Fox News last week and says, we aren't interested this is a really interesting quote. We aren't interested in whether or not the accusations against then Vice President Biden are accurate. Well, that seems so ridiculous, and the media has run with it and said, what do you mean you're not concerned about whether they're accurate. Bill Hemmer asks how damning is this document to the sitting US president. Grassley replies, I don't know.
He's stressed that. Well, this is from Marco.
Quote.
There's accusations in the FBI report. The Congressional Overset Committee concern is whether quote the FBI does its job. That's what we wanted to know. That's what we want to know, Grassley said. An entirely fair question. This is the bottom line. That is an entirely fair question. Given the mountains of evidence in the Durham Report, the IG report that even James Comy himself recently has been saying, you know, it
did uncover some real problems in the FBI. This is critical after all of that, after years of the Russia collision investigation, after John Durham pulls out. I think pretty clear evidence of a double standard. Chuck Grassley is right that this document is relevant, that Christopher Ray should turn it over, whether or not the allegations that a vice president sitting vice president took five million dollars to change
his foreign policy position. Congress needs to perform its job and provide oversight, and the way to do that is to see the document on their own and to gauge the potential accuracy of it and to gauge whether or not the FBI, which had this document and is day to June of twenty twenty, and they have a confidential human source we know now was seen as quote highly credible. That's actually from what we know that the FBI had
a confidential human source they considered highly credible. Total contrast with Igor Danchenko, who they Igor Danchenko, who they used as their confidential human source and crossfire or hurricane again. I said this last week, My eyes glaze over when you talk about all this stuff. It is intentionally confusing and complicated on the part of the FBI, the surveillance state because they want your eyes to glaze over. It helps them get away with these things. But this whistleblower
document is not nothing. It is not something the media should shrug at, because Congress has a very real duty to ensure that the FBI is performing its role equally, that it's upholding the rule of law, and that it is using its vast, are too vast powers in a way that is at the very least responsible. Durham gave us plenty of reason to doubt that the FBI is doing that, and this, this document is well within the
purview of Congress to take a look at. So with that, Ryan, I want to pivot to you on the question of the accuracy of the document. What Chuck Grassley is saying, I think is important, But then also whether or not the document is accurate is ultimately the key question. It sounds sensational and absurd that Joe Biden as a vice president would be like, yes, the price for my foreign policy position is five million dollars, So take that for
what you will, highly credible, confidential, human source. I don't know exactly what that means in the standards of today's FBI. What do you make of the sort of central claim of the document. We mentioned this at the top of the show, but you landed a really big interview that we're super excited to bring to the counterpoints and breaking points audience here today. Tell us a little bit about what we can expect to hear from m Ron Khan.
Yes, so extraordinarily important.
You know, because the nation of Pakistan is a nuclear power with a population of two hundred and fifty million people. Today, you know it's facing an existential crisis as the country's military establishment is rapidly consolidating power and cracking down on the most popular political party, which is known as the PTI, headed by for former Prime Minister Imran Khan. Now, Khan is an unusual politician. He's going to be our guest
in just a moment through a pre taped interview. And for decades, Cohn was the nation's most famous cricketer before transitioning into the there's Cohn wrapping a cricket ball or whatever the word is for what he's doing there. Before he transitioned into the world of philanthropy. He's well known
in Pakistan for building hospitals, for supporting universities. From there, he moved into politics, founding the PTI and sweeping into power as a populist in twenty eighteen, but he had a slim majority, and he was ousted in a no confidence vote by April of twenty twenty two. Since then, he and his party have been the target of a relentless crackdown by the nation's military, which has ruled the country directly or indirectly for decades.
Now.
My earlier attempt, if you remember this, to schedule an interview with him was foiled when he was arrested on May ninth by the military and held for four days while the country erupted in protests, after which the Supreme Court ruled his detention illegal. Some of the protests turned violent and directly targeted officials. High officials in the military, and the military establishment responded by arresting most of Khan's senior leadership and forcing them to resign from the party
under pressure. Now thousands of rank and file party workers have also been jailed. Kahn, meanwhile, is hold up in his home in Lahore, sifting through some one hundred and fifty charges of corruption and other offenses that have been leveled at him, charges he and his supporters dismissed as politically motivated.
Yesterday, there were.
Suggestions that they're even going to charge him, perhaps with murder. Yet Cohn remains a popular political figure heading into elections that are scheduled at least for October. We'll see if they actually happen.
So in the.
Interview, and actually I can we could place some of this interview now and then we can come out and talk about it. So here's here's Imran Khan. Were you interrogated? Were there any any threats direct or veiled made about your future role in Pakistani politics?
I think they know me. You know, this country knows me for fifty years. I mean for twenty years, I was the leading sportsman in this country and cricket is the biggest sport and I was kept for ten years. So I was in the media for a long time, and then I went into Forendthropy and built up the biggest charitable institution, which are council hospitals and that university. So people know me for a long time. They know
that I'm not going to do a back down. But what they're doing is, you know, I mean they have clearly stated to me, the establishment that whatever happens, you're not going to be allowed to get back into power. So what they're doing now is that they are dismantling the party, but dismantling the biggest political party, the only federal party in Pakistan, is dismantling our democracy. And actually
that's what's going on all the democratic institutions. The judiciary it is, I mean, the judiciary today is totally inputed in stopping this violation of fundamental rights. The Supreme Court. We went to the Supreme Court according to the constitution, the elections in Punjab, the biggest province which is sixty percent of Pakistan, was supposed to be held on the
portrenth of by the government refused. So I mean, when the Supreme Court orders are are not listened to, the judges giver give people bailed there the police picks them up on some other cases. So this total violation of fundamental rights which is going on, I think this is it's all an attempt to weaken me and my party to the point that we will not know, not be able to contest the elections because all the opinion polls show that we will win a massive majority in elections.
Out of the thirty seven by elections, my party has swept thirty of them despite the establishment helping the government parties. So therefore they know that in a free and fair election, we will just sweep. Hence, all these efforts are being made to completely dismantle my party and weaken it to the point that it will not be able to contest elections.
This is a dark moment for your country, for your party, as you said, for you yourself personally. But I'm curious, what are you looking forward to in a best case scenario. What's the path out of this crisis.
It's like a crossroads. One road is leading back to the barrel days of military dictatorship, because that means, you know, we will regress the whole movement for democracy, which gradually evolved over a period of time. Media really, i mean struggle valiantly for their freedom, and we had one of the freest medias uh. And then a judiciary in two thousand.
Judiciary was always subservient to the executive, but in two thousand and seven started a movement called the lawyers movement, and for the first time we the judiciary asserted its independence. So the whole pillars of democracy now are being rolled back. The whole evolution, the steady move towards a democratic country is now all at stake. So either we allow this to go where it is going towards a military dictatorship.
The other is, you know, we all try and all the democratic forces get together and strive for getting back to rule of law, democracy and free and fair elections.
As you confront this potential long term military dictatorship, how does it make you think back on your own support of the military in the you know, the purpose situation, the coup of Purpose Mishar or or having the military's you know, indirect support in your own election. But do you feel like there was a way to accomplish that without the military, or is Pakistan in a situation that that reform is only possible through that institution?
Well, you know, just to make a correction. Minus the only party that was never manufactured by the military People's Party Zulfikarli Berto. He served a dictator for eight years before he formed his party. The other the second party is PM Mellen. The head of PM Mellen was actually nurtured by General Za's dictatorship. I mean he was a non entity, so he was actually a product of his
military dictatorship. Minus the only party for twenty two years from scratch, I started and actually broke through a two party system in the twenty eighteen election. The army didn't oppose me, but they didn't help us in winning the elections. The elections weren't rigged, because it should be now obvious now despite the army the establishment standing behind the government, we've swept thirty out of thirty seven by elections and all opinion polls show that we are way ahead of everyone,
allust sixty to seventy percent rating. And the other thing I want to say is how is it different When a Yukhn't the first military dictator took over the majority of the population backed him because at that time we were very insecure and the army was the bestion of security. When Ziaulaka deposed Zulfakari Botto, the second military dictator, half the population supported him. Half the vote was for Boto,
about half the vote went against him. When General Musherav wound up our democracy in ninety nine, he had eighty percent rating in Pakistan because he came on an anti corruption platform. But this is a unique time in Pakistan. The almost the entire country is standing now for democracy.
They are no takers for military dictatorship anymore. So it's a unique situation because we are thought processes evolved to the point now where there's a consensus in Pakistan that a bad democracy is better than a military dictatorship.
It feels like the military may see this crisis and this conflict as existential for them, that given what you've said that the country, the population has now turned against them, if they lose power, they may be pushed off the stage entirely and so cornered that you may that may explain some of the reactions that you're seeing. So how do you how do you navigate that situation where they currently have you literally and politically surrounded, but if you escape, they face an existential crisis.
When I was in three and a half years in power, I mean, I recognize that, you know, you can't wish away the military. You know, you have to work with them, because they've been entrenched for seventy years directly or entry directly, they ruled this country. So I work with the army chief. And apart from the fact that he would not he did not understand what rule of law meant or didn't want to understand. Apart from that, we sort of, you know, we had a working relationship. When and why he decided
to pull the rug under my feet. I still don't know. I mean, at what point he decided that this is, you know, I was dangerous to the country. Why he decided to change horses Because he backed the current prime minister who was facing massive corruption cases. And so why he decided to do that. I think my hunch is that he wanted an extension and the and the current prime minister had promised him that. I guess that's the reason. But really he's the best he would know why. I
don't know why. So my point is, you know, the way Pakistan has been run a hybrid system. It just cannot be run like this anymore. We are now facing the worst economic crisis in our history. And my point is that, you know, when I've said, I've offered talks to the to the military, I've said, look to the army chief, but so far there's no response. My point is that the hybrid system cannot work any longer because if a prime minister has the public mandate and the
responsibility to deliver, he must have the authority. He can't have a situation where he has the responsibility but the authority. Most of the authority lies with the military establishment. So a new equilibrium has to be made. You have to have some sort of an arrangement where you know, certain issues just have to be delivered in Pakistan. Pakistan cannot do without rule of law now, because we cannot get out of this economic mess unless we attracted an investment.
But investment from abroad does not come to a country where people do not have confidence in their justice system and the legal system and their contract enforcement. And therefore they go Pakistani go and invest in the Way and other countries. But the plan invest in this country. We have ten million Pakistanis. If we could only get five percent of them invest in this country, we wouldn't have any problems. But they do not have faith in our
justice system. We are out of the one hundred and forty countries and the rule of law index Pakistan is one twenty nine. So with that sort of you know, a lack of rule of law, I'm afraid the country's survival did that stake. So hence a new equilibrium has to be made with the military establishment.
Final question.
I know you said that you believe that the driver of your ulster was clearly internal and not driven from outside, But I'm also curious given that the US expressed its private approval for you to for you to be pushed out of office through a no confidence vote. I'm wondering what it was that you think drove the United States
that position. Do you think it had something to do with your willingness to work with the Taliban after the Taliban took over, to think it had something to do with the war in Ukraine, or what is your read of the geopolitics that would have led the United States to go from supportive to willing to see you thrown out.
Well, for a start, you know the war. Trump administration acknowledged that. I was the one who consistently kept saying there was not going to be a military solution in Afghanistan. It's because I know Afghanistan. I know the history and the province, the Pushtun province. Remember Afhanistan as fifty percent Pushtoons, but the Pushtun population is twice as much in Pakistan. And my province where I first got into Paris is the Pushtun province bordering Afghanistan. So I kept saying there
would not be any military solution. Trump administration acknowledged it, and they finally went when he decided to the withdrawal, he understood there was not going to be a military solution. But I think this was taken wrong by the Biden administration. There someone thought I was critical of the Americans and I was sort of pro Taliban. It's total nonsense. It's just simply that anyone who knows the history of Afghanistan just knows that you will they have a problem with outsiders.
So the same happened with the British and the nineteenth century, the Soviets in the twentieth century, exactly the same was happening with the US. But it's just that no one knew that, and so I think that was one reason. Secondly, I was anti the War on Terror in Pakistan because remember Pakistan. Pakistan first of all, in the eighties created the Mujahideen mujai Deen who were conducting a gorilla warfare
against the Soviets. So it was from Pakistani soil. And we we told them that doing jihad, Jihad means fighting foreign occupation. Is is your heroes, It is a you know, we encouraged it. Now come ten years later, once the Soviets had left the US lands in Ughanistan, you're told that this was heroism to fight foreign occupation. How are you going to tell them that now that the Americans
are there, it's terrorism. So that's what happened. The moment we joined the US War on Terror, they turned against US. Eighty thousand Pakis died. I mean Pakistan. No ally of US has taken such heavy casualties as Pakistan did. And in the end we couldn't help the US either, because we were trying to save ourselves. There were forty different militant groups. At what point working against the government. Islam Wa was like under siege, their suicide attacks everywhere. We
had no investment coming in the country. Well, economy tanked. So I think my opposition to the war on terror also was perceived as being anti American, which is not is just being nationalistic about your own country. With Taliban, I mean, when the Taliban took over. Frankly, whichever government is in Afghanistan, Pakistan has to have good relationship with them. We have two and a half thousand kilometer border with them.
We have three million Ofvan refugees here. And when the RUnni government before that, I went to Afhanistan Kabul to meet him, I invited him to Pakistan. We tried our best to have good relationship with them. So whoever is in power in Afghanistan Pakistan has to have good relationship because at one point during the previous government, there were three different terrorist groups using Aflhan Terror to attack Pakistan, the isl Pakistani Taliban, and the Baloch Liberation Organization. Three
different groups were attacking us. So therefore you need a government in Afghanistan which which would be helpful. So it was not pro Taliban, It's basically pro Pakistan, as any anyone who cares about his country would make those decisions.
For a full transcript of my interview, you can find that over at the Intercept dot com. You can listen to the entire interview over at my Intercept podcast, which is called Deconstructed. In that interview, he made claims against former Pakistan Ambassador to the United States Hassan Hakani. Hussein Hakani my apologies and I reached out to him for comment. He denied Khan's allegation that he had lobbied the United States against Khan. I also reached out to the State
Department for comment, and I will read that here. The State Department says, quote, our message has been clear and consistent on this. We support the peaceful upholding of constitutional democratic principles, including respect for human rights. We do not support, whether it's in Pakistan or anywhere else around the world, one political party over another. We support broader principles, including the rule of law and equal justice under the law.
On the War on Terror and the Taliban, United States and Pakistan have a shared interest in ensuring the Taliban live up to the commitments that they have made.
Terrorist groups that may be active.
In Afghanistan are no longer able to threaten regional stability. Emily Imran Khan fascinating political figures in some ways kind of I would think, maybe an ideal populist right candidate that you guys might wish you had somebody like that over here in the United States.
Fascinating and just I think your interview really brought that side in Immran Khan to the forefront, because it's also a personality thing and the sort of politics that he espouses. Then to see that translated through I think the political personality is just it is a very interesting combination. He's such an important international figure that gets I think probably too little attention on the world stage. Is probably one
of the more if you follow foreign policy stuff. I mean, people know his name, but his central importance to world politics right now I think is disproportionate to the media's interest in his story. So I thought that was fantastic interview, and I'm so glad that you were able to bring it to the audience here and just a small process.
Note, folks can imagine.
How interesting it was for you to negotiate getting an interview with somebody who is in a position like him, Ron Khan. I mean you can see it like in the internet a little bit. You can see it in just some of your questions.
Not an easy.
Interview to land, but also just not an easy interview to make happen when you have so many obstacles, political obstacles to just like using the internet and talking to journalists.
Yeah, I think part of it is that he's so constricted in Pakistan that one of the few avenues for him left is to start doing these kind of international interviews. So I think our ability to kind of get him had to do with how cornered he is politically back home. So next week we'll be back in our brand new studio. I was in Boyertown, Pennsylvania for my cousin Lady Grimm's high school graduation this weekn and met a guy named Justin who was maybe he's watching now.
He's a big Counterpoints fan.
I was able to show him pictures of the studio and he's like, wow, I didn't even have to pay for this, And so everybody's going to get to see the new studio next week. What's what's your take on what you've seen so far?
I think it's amazing and thank you so much to the viewers who make it possible. It's you know, I think it's soccer always makes a really important point about, uh, the why we need to take on not just be someone, you know, sort of broadcasting from their basement with an
xbox headset. I don't mean to be offensive at all, but like we're here in d C, and uh, there are people, because of the rise of independent media, who are going to have conversations with the Breaking Points team and you're going to see some of those big names next week. And the new set design is just a real l vation that I think is going to allow Breaking Points to keep growing and to draw big names more viewers. So we're just beyond grateful to all of you, and so excited for you to see it.
Yeah, and we could keep the bricks around and still do kind of moonlight with an open mic comedy night or something, and Washington DC.
It'll be like.
How you know, various museums have different pieces of the Berlin Wall. We'll give different places epting.
Wait, these are fake bricks. This is outrageous.
We could have just poked holes in it the whole time.
Yes, all right, Well, we'll see you there in studio next week