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All right, Welcome to Counterpoints, everybody. I'm Ryan Grim here with Emily Joshinsky.
Had a big show today.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog is coming to Capitol Hill today. A handful of Democrats are protesting. What else we ought?
Well, we're going to start with, of course, the news if you're not sick of indictments yet, that Donald Trump is facing another indictment and then potentially another indictment after that.
Ronda Santa sat down.
With Jake Tapper yesterday, so we have all the highlights from that interview. Joe Manson, there's some pretty interesting video from Joe mansion in New Hampshire. Maybe a little bit about Gavin Newsom and that. We'll then get to Israel we'll get to some wild video footage of Charles Barkley, and then our guest today is Christopher Rufo. We'll be talking to him about his new book. We have lots of questions and are excited for that interview.
And yeah, and a quick word on that.
You and I both have read the book, and just to tease the interview a little bit, like what I would say is that the most dangerous thing about the book is how.
Good it is.
It's not dangerous from my perspective.
To me, like the worldview that it articulates and advocates for is kind of nihilistic and anti social, but it does it in such an impressively structured way. It's like it's a piece of intellectual hef that has to be grappled with. And I think it's filled with contradictions that hopefully we can some which I think you'll agree with me on probably and some of which you won't.
But I'm curious to see how this goes.
Yeah, I agree, we're really looking forward to that. Let's start though, with the news of Donald Trump receiving a target letter from special counsel Jack Smith. This is in reference actually to those alleged efforts to overturn the twenty twenty election. So we'll put a one the element up on the screen here. This is from Fox News.
They say a.
Government source with direct knowledge of the situation tells Fox News that Smith's office sent Trump a target letter, and the former president confirmed the news in a social media post Tuesday. The development indicates that another indictment of Trump could be looming in the near future. You'll remember that actually from the last indictment. When the world learned about target letters, it's usually a pretty clear red flag that
you are about to be indicted. Now, the Republican primary field, Soccer and Crystal sort of walked through the breaking news yesterday, but the primary field has had about twenty.
Four hours to react.
Now, I should start with one tiny little bit of updated news from ABC say. The target letter mentions three federal statue federal statutes conspiracy to commit offense or to defraud the United States, deprivation of rights under color of law, and tampering with a witness, victim or an informant, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News Now. Vivek Ramaswami has said that these are quote different from any of the other prior indictments against Trump, referring to the charges
in this case. You also had Nicky Haley, You had Governor Chris former Governor Chris Christie come out and talk about this. Chris Christie said, basically, as a former prosecutor, I want to see any potential indictment before I talk about the case against Donald Trump. That said, let maybe clear his conduct on January sixth proves he doesn't care about our country and our constitution. Nikki Haley said, that's
why I'm running. We need a new generational leader. Then you had Asa Hutchinson, who I don't even know what I'm mentioning because he's so completely irrelevant, just torch Trump.
A lot of them never Trump. People really loved that.
And Ron destantas his His first reaction was, I can't speak about that because I haven't seen it. I can tell you one of my jobs as president will be to end the weaponization of these agencies.
I will get that job done.
He also talked about this on Jake Tapper, which we're going to break down the entire interview later in the show, but he did say, this country is going down the road of criminalizing political differences, and I think that is wrong. He references Alvin Bragg and said, my job is to restore a single standard of justice, to end weaponization of these agencies.
We can put a two up on the screen right now.
This is reaction from Julie Kelly, someone who has done a lot of reporting on these types of issues, in particular.
I'm so sorry. I meant a three.
Julie Kelly doing a lot of reporting on this in particular, she says it won't just be Trump, and I should say from the right named in a January sixth indictment, DOJ Smith love conspiracy charges in every conspiracy account obstructions seditions THATCREA needs at.
Least one co conspirator.
Prepare for lawyers, White House, official campaign aids, and maybe GOP House members to be indicted to. In other WORDSDS indictment exhaustion is obviously imminent. And just before I toss to Ryan, let's run the sound bite. Sorry for going out of order at guys, but this is a two from CNN.
But it's a pretty serious moment, and it causes from both illegal and in this case a political standpoint.
I imagine a certain degree of circling the wagons. Look it shows that there is a degree of legal jeopardy coming in the direction of the former president, and that's always serious for anybody who receives a target letter. So I do think, you know, it's something that needs to be taken seriously. Perhaps an indictment is on its way. We saw in the last case that that preceded an indictment. I think we're likely to see the same thing here. He's probably not going to go in and testify.
And then it's you know, then we're back to Okay, this case perhaps going to be be heard in the in the DC district, And who's the judge that gets asign and we're kind of off to all the questions that we had on the first round.
So that's Jim Schultz, somebody who was actually a lawyer in the Trump White House.
So, Ryan, what do you make of that reaction?
Obviously it's not entirely different from what a Chris Christie or maybe an Asa Hutchinson would immediately make of the situation, but also from the broader field as they digestive the news publicly.
I think Ramaswami is wrong on his analysis so far. If the ABC News reporting is correct that those are the three charges that he's going to face. I think that you can say that colloquially that that amounts to insurrection, and therefore you could argue the fourteenth Amendment, or which amendment is, it's the fourteenth Amendment that triggers that bans you from running for a president or in federal office
if you've been involved in insurrection. The insurrection they meant specifically was the Civil War, although law doesn't.
Limit it to that. But I don't see how those three.
Charges would get past a Republican Supreme Court. In other words, they're not going to stop they're not going to stop him from running, they're not going to take him off the ballots, and if he won, I just do not see the Supreme Court coming in and saying you can't take office. So I don't think we're at that place yet.
But like you said, it is. This is another indictment thrown on the pile, and I think it is ammunition for my earlier argument that, in particular, the New York case was a big mistake for Democrats because it looks so trivial the paperwork around a payoff for Stormy Daniels compared to trying to overthrow an election allegedly violently through an insurrection like that is that is broadly.
The charge under which these three allegations fall. So you present a scenario where.
It looks like they're coming after him on just everything that they can find. When something like you know what, lots of politicians pay hush money, lots of politicians don't try to overthrow the elections.
That they lost.
And so I do wish that they had focused their energy on that particular case. But we still have the document's case coming, as Trump calls it documents hoax. That's that's still waiting in the wings. The Georgia elections indictment may still be coming too, from the state attorney general there soon probably and the Michigan Attorney General. I wonder if this is do we have this here? I wonder if this was a coincidence or if this just or
if this is related to these charges. So sixteen Michigan residents, several of them very high profile party apparatricks in Michigan, signed certificates saying that they were the duly elected electors from Michigan. They were going to They tried to give that to Ron Johnson. They mailed it to the Senate.
They were trying to get it to Pence so that they would do basically what happened in eighteen seventy two where there were multiple electors seven nineteen sixty even did oh yeah, they well, well that was the DNC.
It was a similar situation where you had people in the cases of sort of like actively litigating where the state's electors were going to go. So it kind of cast their lot for the one person. And then that's sort of again like the fake elector's thing is actually that it's not an entirely misleading term, but misleading in the respect that it's not like they were trying to commit fraud or anything. They were openly trying a leadgal strategy basically, right.
So where they're getting hit is signing a paper that says, now I feel bad for one woman and if she can prove it, I think she should get off. She says she thought she was signing a sign in sheet. Oh no, Now, if that's nonsense, and that they can prove that she's just coming up with BS, then I see you throw the book at her.
Yeah.
One of the women like, look, I was just a meeting. Everybody was signing it. I signed. I'm here.
If there's a time next to her signature, then I think.
She has to be found, not heal checked. And why I say seven thirty five here, it's when you became a duly elected elector. The others are top party officials, you know, who are saying, like, we are the electors, and yeah, their plan was we're going to send these to Mike Pence, and Mike Pence will then look, oh, Michigan sent us two batches of electors, which is exactly what happened in eighteen seventy two, except it was like South Carolina and Georgia and Florida, and we have two.
I can't rule on anything. This has to go back somewhere else. And then Ted Cruz is saying, send it to a commission. In eighteen seventy two, they did form a commission that comes up with the compromise around Tilden Hayes, And so that was what they were trying to get to. And so then the question is did they have enough rational belief that what they were saying was founded in sincerity or was it just completely fake? Some of that we'll have to do with text messages. I'm sure that
they've obtained emails that they've obtained. But that's what's always bothered me about these questions that if you fundamentally, genuinely, honestly believe that you're the elector even though.
You're not, than what how do we go from there? How do we serort that out?
Now, you guys on the right of the ones that believe in absolute truth, So I have less sympathy.
Facts don't care about feelings.
Yeah, exactly, you felt like you were an elector. The facts say otherwise my.
Truth that I was a Trump elector.
Yes, you're you're relying on all this postmodernism that RUFO loves to dismantle.
That's right.
So you know, that's a really interesting point on.
The Manhattan charges because as we're as we were making that point, I was thinking, there was a really searing imagery to Donald Trump being the first president, first former president.
Indicted in every news station had the.
Cameras following his plane up to Manhattan, and they were doing like twenty four hour Trump Watch basically around that indictment. This one is much more serious from the perspective of the left. This one is much more substantive and credible. And you've already I think lost the public's attention. And that's not to say the whole public has tuned out.
That is to say, no now though, that this is a blob, Like the indictments are a blob for people who don't have the misfortune that we do of paying attention to every little new development in the breaking news cycle. This is all really going to blend together. And you know they're not equal. These indictments are not equal, and that is pretty clear when you make a side by side comparison of them. So the indictment fatigue and exhaustion, it's not just that it's the just sort of the
blending together. It's not just that people are starting to tune out. It's that when you're adding legal layer on
top of legal layer, it's really complicated. And I think it gets harder for Democrats, for the left, or for the anti Trump's center, maybe even the anti Trump right to penetrate the public consciousness every time after you sort of not you personally, but after the credibility was all these mental gymnastics to say that Alvin Brand had a grave and serious case, and you know that's not to say that literally book yes, yeah, and things that people
already understood about Donald Trump. So when you've already exhausted these like huge, big breaking news cycles where you have the sirns out and all of that over bookkeeping, I think a lot of the public's attention has been lost.
Yeah, but nobody listens to me. So what are you gonna do? So you don't think he's going to go to the grand jury? So he has now three days. He was given four days to appear tell his side of the story, which we don't have a legal analyst here. I'm certainly not one. That seems unusual to me. So it feels like usually it's behind closed it's just behind closed doors, and they get they get to hear from just the prosecutor, and you have no chance to make
a defense of yourself. Maybe for whatever reason, in the federal process it's slightly different, or maybe because he's the president, he's different in any of that. They gave him four days, he's now down to three.
Uh.
What Jack Smith is, according to CNN setting signals by going a subway.
We gotta play this, we have this, we gotta play this. All right.
So Ryan just teased this, but this is an actual CNN segment between by the way, not just random cranks they had on air. This is John King and Dana Bash, two of their most prize and treasured talents. There's nothing more I can say to set it up. You actually just have to watch it.
Jack Smith is tight lipped. He was spotted today by CNN going to Subway for lunch, picking up a sandwich, leaving and not saying a word. So no comment from the Special Counsel's Office on whether they plan to indict Donald Trump and when that is potentially going to happen for the second time for a federal case.
Remember when the Classified Documents Target letter, when Trump announced that there's a lot of commentary goes Jack Smith making a mistake? Care is he leaving this all to Donald Trump? And then they released the indictment and we all said, wow, wow, we read it, We saw the documentation, We saw the level of detail. Jack Smith going to Subway today is a message to Donald Trump. Donald Trump tries to intimidate people, tries to bully people, he tries to scare you away.
That was Jack Smith with no words and a simple five dollars sub in his hand, saying I'm here, I'm not going to Yeah. The imagery was was intentional and spoke by you.
So what's crazy to me about that is Dana Bash might actually know there was intentionality behind that imagery. Like if Jack Smith is actually seriously going to subway and leaking the footage or telling CNN to have their cameras there and that's why she said it was, that's even more pathetic than CNN. And by the way, I'm just realizing it. That is a subway around the corner from CNN.
That's like two blocks from CNN. If even so it I've just solve the case on air, just like Sherlott palms the subway video, it's like this, he took.
A car to well the department does depart department just has a new building down there too that I don't know. I think maybe they have well, there's enormous amounts of office space down there.
There's a lot of legal work, right.
So, and he's a special whatever, so they probably have a little space down there. But yes, I think your point is interesting, like did Dana Bash and John King like get a text message from somebody saying, hey, this was intentional, because otherwise how do they come up on their own with the idea that a guy getting a sandwich is a signal to Donald Trump.
It feels like you have to be told that exactly.
And if they're told that, then it's true, Well he really is through CNN setting a signal.
Weird.
They had their cameras at the subway.
That's another part of I don't know why, ridiculous so seriously, but it is really funny and kind of bizarre because it's like Kim Kardashian tipping off the paparazzis, paparazzi saying I'm going.
To be here at this time.
Someone told them to have cameras there, and either they were following Jack Smith because there was the target letter had been you know, announced by Donald Trump on troop Social, so they had just been following him anyway.
But to your point, even.
If that's not the case, even if you know they weren't tipped off to be by to be at the subway, it does sound like they were tipped off that this was intentional. And that's again I think that's even more pathetic than CNN just coming to that conclusion on their own.
I think we need more analysis of this. It looked like one foot long sub.
Is that right.
I thought it looked at a SI.
We'll have to go back and look at this footage closer. So it looks like one foot long sub which is like, wait a minute, okay. Jack's like, hey, I need lunch. I'm going to subway. Yeah, anybody need anything? Nobody needed anything nobody else, nobody needed like an oatmeal raisin cookie.
I find that suspicious. They have excellent cookies.
And if somebody's going the subway and they ask you if you want anything, yeah, which you're going to tell.
Me you want a cookie?
Most people would.
So did he not tell his co workers that he was going to subway.
Or he knew the cameras were going to be on him and he didn't want to send a bad message to the kids about.
Eating cookies for lunch.
That could be.
I don't know.
It's hard to say, but well, we'll pay attention to this story as it develops. Well, be sure to bring you any updates on Jacksmith's lunch preferences. Ron DeSantis sat down with Jake Tapper of CNN yesterday, which is actually interesting in and of itself. Ron DeSantis is obviously pretty known for avoiding or not avoiding, so much as stewing corporate press, legacy media and being really aggressive about that,
making it an intentional strategy. His team actually, as he's been in the governor's office, has intentionally cut corporate press legacy media out and for good reason. By the way, he had an absolute hit job done on him by CBS sixty minutes once, and after that it really snowballed into a broader strategy that we are blocking access. If you don't change your ways, if you don't give us a fair shake, just like you would give any Democrat, then we are going to cut off access to So it's interesting.
That he sat down sign of how well his campaign is going, that he's rethinking.
It's that strategy.
My colleague Eddy Scary wrote in The Federalist actually a couple of weeks ago, a piece that I wonder if this implanted that in the desantisis team team's brain basically like he is DeSantis's best when he's in adversarial conversations with reporters and to sort of rejuvenate.
His campaign, he should be doing that all the time. And so here he is on CNA. Let's roll a few clips here, a few highlights.
He obviously reacted to the Donald Trump news, and so he also reacted to news about our questions about his campaign, the state of his campaign, his poll numbers. So let's end Wokeness and then Ukraine. But let's start and we'll just we'll run through some of these highlights. Here's the first clip.
Some of your supporters are disappointed that your campaign has yet to catch fire the way they would want in terms of polling. One Republican polster, one who is sympathetic to you, I was asking her about your campaign and she said she thought the issue was you bumped up at the beginning because voters, Republican voters saw you as a more electable conservative like Trump, like Trump without the baggage.
But then they say, as you go further and further to the right on some of these divisive social issues that could alienate moderate suburban moms, et cetera, Republican voters see you as less and less electable. What do you say to that analysis.
We I donal think that's true. I mean, the proof is in the pudding. I mean I took a state that had been a one point state, and we want it by twenty percentage points, one point five million votes. Our bread and butter were people like suburban moms.
So that's him being questioned on the state of his campaign.
Let's row the next club.
The biggest issues were the number two issue, women in racial or ethnic minorities are discriminated against in the army.
Wokeness is listed here.
But it's only number nine, so that would suggest that wokeness is not as big.
Well, but I think there's an issue about like not everyone really knows what wokeness is. I mean, I've defined it, but a lot of people who rail against wokeness can't even define it. And so I think it's a sense of, you know, this is not something that's that's holding true to the core martial values that make the military unique. And I can tell you the veterans, you don't have to look far and wide, go to a VFW hall,
go to an American legion. There's huge amount of concern about the direction that the military is going.
With one more before we start breaking these down. This is Desantas responding to the Jack Smith target letter to Donald Trump. Actually just probably hours after that news broke.
If Jack Smith has evidence of criminality, should Donald Trump be held accountable.
So here's the problem this country is going down the road of criminalizing political differences, and I think that's wrong. Alvin Bragg stretched the statute in Manhattan to be able to try to target Donald Trump. Most people, even people on the left, acknowledge if that wasn't Trump, that case would not have likely been brought against the normal civilian.
So Ryan, Actually, we do have Chris Ruffo on later in the show, and I think we'll probably have some questions for him about how he's had conversations with Ron DeSantis about wokeness, defining wokeness and then once you define it sort of targeting with targeting it with policies. But what did you make of DeSantis's back and forth with Tapper on those questions.
First of all, a guy who had a viral and extremely damaging story about eating pudding with his fingers should never say the proof is in the pudding.
You were very fixated on food today.
Don't go yeah, don't go anywhere near pudding.
And then he talks about bread and butter, like the knock on him has been some of these viral videos.
Does he eat that with his fingers too? The butter?
See, now you've got me thinking about that.
Maybe like he's if he's hungry and he's stuck in a two hour meeting and all all that's in front of him is butter or he's on a private plane.
I don't know what he's gonna do.
Never go full Klobe, but I do think it is an important question because as effective as Rufo has been at making, you know, his kind of culture war critique to be the thing that we're all wrapped up in and obsessed with, the guy, the candidate who adopted it has flamed out, and the Republicans who have adopted it generally have have not seen dividends in the way that you would hope if you're a partisan Republican.
You know, the Democrats increased.
Their numbers in the Senate, they they lost their their their.
Numbers in the House by much less than they thought they were going to be.
So why And I thought Jake Tapper, channeling that that female GOP polster put it well well, that DeSantis was Trump without the baggage and electable Trump. He then went far right in his both his style and his policy, which is leading people to think, oh, well, maybe he's not electable, so let's go with the more fun guy.
If it's a if.
It's a long shot anyway, And the problem with electability arguments is that some of it is vibes, some of it is numbers and polls, and he's just not polling as well against Biden as Trump is, and people can see those numbers, right. So do you think that there was a different path for him that wouldn't have led him to this place where he's Trump without the baggage, but also without the electability.
I don't know, because i think we're still seeing that emerge, and I'm curious as to whether Ron DeSantis can kind of as we get to debate. I mean, the first debate is less than a month away now, and after debates you really start to see for better or worse than some cases. You know, at certain points, for Marc Rivio, these were really good and at other points they were momentum killing.
And you know, you get you lose money.
People see you in a debate, and they see the media coverage of you in a debate, whether or not that's actually reflective of what the public thought, and they pull their funds or they put more funds into you, and then the media coverage can change. So I'm curious if he's like right now, if they're going back to the drawing board. He had a great answer to somebody in Iowa yesterday who I think described herself as a super Trump.
Fan, and yeah, it was a good clip.
And DeSantis comes in and basically says, listen, the way Donald Trump was treated was horrible. I am going to change it. I'm the one that can actually make the change. And that is to the polster that Tappers challenge channeling what was it wasn't just that he was Trump without the baggage, it was he he's Trump, but in this he has this like spirit of trump Ism, as people on the right would describe it.
But he's also able to pass legislation.
He's not mired in the palace intrigue of the Trump White House, and he's doing things.
He's proactive with policy, he's.
Coming up with new ideas, and I don't think that he has been able to define himself that way in the campaign.
He was as governor, but in the campaign when you are.
Again he's talking to Jake Tapper in this planned interview for the last few days, it's at least been publicly announced, and what happens, Jack Smith said.
The target letter to Donald Truck.
I'm it for that.
So it just I mean, I think there's a really possible and people understand this obviously, but it looks really like Donald Trump dominating the media cycles is also going to have him dominating the polls, and so far we have seen no evidence to the contrary. In fact, we've seen Trump's numbers or the gap between Trump and DeSantis grow the more Donald Trump is being hit with indictments and legal challenges, the more he is dominating the media cycle, the more he's dominated the.
Polls so far.
And the phrase to your point that he keeps using is get it done right, And he used with that Trump supporting woman and he's like, basically, Trump's good, He's great, he makes you laugh, all those things. But I'm going to actually get the things done that he said he was going to get done. But I think that momentum and winning is the thing that you need to persuade
people that you're actually going to get it done. Like winning begets more winning, and if you are losing, you get the stench of an l on you.
And then when you say I'm going.
To get it done, people are like, Okay, that's great, that you're going to get done, but you can't even win this election. Your poll numbers of cutting whatever, they have a third or whatever since you've come out, And you saw that on the Democratic primary a lot that people had a lot of questions about actually Barack Obama's electability in two thousand and eight. But winning Iowa and then polling evenly with Hillary Clinton was it. That was
the answer, can't you can't win? Oh, well, I just won, Now I can win. And Bernie Sanders answered some of those electability questions as well by winning a bunch of races, and then when he lost some critical battleground races, it all came rushing back that, oh yeah, he can't win. And so you had a bunch And so the idea of whether you can get something done or whether you're electable is so ephemeral and so related to just how you're doing. It's an unfair kind of circular reasoning that
people have. But that's the world that we live in. And right now he's kind of undermining his own case by flailing around the campaign trail.
Now they got into actually foreign policy a bit, not something that Ron DeSantis would deal quite as much with as governors who would as president, although Florida is a big state with international waters on it, so he has a little bit of that. But Taber asked him obviously he's also a veteran, But Taber asked him here about Ukraine, and this is how Rond DeSantis responded.
We are going to approach the world instead of Europe being the focus like it has been since World War Two. And it was understandable why it would be after World War Two, NATO stopping the Soviets. I get it, but now the Asia Pacific really needs to be to our generation what Europe was to the post World War two generation. So I would have the Europeans do more in Europe, that's more in their backyard, that's more of an interest for them.
You know.
I would be willing to be helpful to try to bring it to a conclusion there, but I am not going to diminish our stocks and not send to Taiwan. I'm not going to make us less capable to respond to exigencies. And you've got to care at least as much about your own border as you do about foreign borders.
Great, some people on the right have been a little hesitant on DeSantis when it comes to Ukraine. When it comes to whether or not he's willing to sort of go full Trump or full like New Right, as it's called in conservative movement circles, he said, you know, I don't think anybody wants to see US troops in Ukraine.
In his interview with Jake Tapper as well, in addition to sort of flushing out that point and making the juxtaposition with China, Ryan, I want to play one more clip because this one was sort of funny too, of CNN, a CNN panel reaction to the interview, Let's roll this final club.
I think what we show today was that I was happy to see him sit down with I forget what they call you now, corporate media.
Yeah, yeah, I'll take that. Yeah, that's a nice verst, trust me.
I know.
But I was glad to see him sit down outside of his bubble because then it helps him look more electable. I mean, it's one thing to do a Joe Rogan interview or kind of the fringes. It's another thing to sit down with a consummate journalist. And I think today he was able to handle those questions and deal with them. And although I don't I don't believe in his policies per se. But he actually looked decently presidential today. I'm not sure it was a reset because everything is I'm
anti woke, anti woke. Today he just inserted in the military. But at least today he started to give the ViBe's still a Scott Jennings things. He started to give the vibe that he could be president of the United States.
Novel observation there from CNN. It's a vibe primary.
There you go, what did you make of that? Kind of stealing my bit there? But I do like the idea that they think that appearing on CNN makes you seem like a presidential candidate. Appearing on breaking points and counterpoints, that's what makes a president.
Yeah, I mean it does it make you look electable to talk to the twenty thousand remaining people watching.
In the middle of the day.
I mean I get their point, Like if he is if the problem that he's having is he's seen as too fringe because he's like half the things he says regular people don't understand.
He launched with elon that.
He's too online, he's too on Twitter in particular, then getting off of that and seeming like a more normal person eating pudding with a spoon rather than your fingers. Like these these are things that you can do as a politician to make yourself appear more palatable to a general electorate.
I guess you've he's lost the rank group. But I can tell just because it's a pudding. That was when you were like, I've done, don't say gay that bill, stop woke that bill. You were still thinking about supporting DeSantis. But when he ate the pudding with his fingers, that's when you said.
Absolutely no, check plays out. Can't do this to maintain some dignity.
No. Your point about CNN is an interesting one also because they don't. But Cary Seller's there just referred to Jake Tapper as a consummate journalist. And it's not so much that Ron DeSantis is unwilling to have conversations with these so called consummate journalists. It's the problem with the Jake Tappers of the world is that they sort of
fundamentally misunderstand DeSantis, but more importantly, Desanta's supporters. And that's one of the things DeSantis said in his back and forth with the woman we referenced earlier, the Trump supporting woman. I think this was in Iowa. He said it's not he did the Trump thing. He said, it's not about me, it's about you. And that is really, really really powerful. That could be one of the things that helps some
sort of claw back at Trump again. I think this gap is really huge, and the more Trump is in the news perhaps insurmountable. I don't think it matters very much as if CNNC's run dasantis as presidential, but he can generate news cycles when he goes back and forth with somebody like Tapper, and they're positive news cycles for him in a Republican primary. So I think it was a decent showing for DeSantis on CNN yesterday.
Sure, good enough.
Moving on to our next conversation. Here we're talking about Joe Manchin, one another one of Ryan's favorite politicians.
I love Joe Manchin.
All right, Right, what happened with Joe manchon this week?
So he was in New Hampshire, you know, which is may or may not have a primary, but it's still kind of symbolic in our minds of the launching of the presidential campaign season. So anytime you go to New Hampshire,
you're setting a signal. Hey talk about me as a presidential candidate, especially if you're going with a dark Bundy organization that has raised seventy million dollars and says that it's going to have ballot access in all fifty states, not the Green Party talking about no Labels, which is basically private dec We hadge Fun and other mobile putting together money behind this organization to say that you can we just get people like Joe Manchin and John Huntsman,
Lisa Mkowskiff, she'll join us to just common sense solutions that involve a lot of cutting taxes and cutting regulations.
Get some adults in that room.
Yeah, basically like you know, nineties era republicanism.
Or democratism Clinton, they just.
Want to go back to the nineties, just nineties nostalgia.
They want low taxes, right.
And so we put up a one here.
So Joe Manchin up at at this unw at this no Labels event where they are very kind of not subtly recruiting him to be their independent candidate, and he continues to tease at. Dick Durbin, uh the other day called Joe Mansion history's greatest political teas accurate. No lives detected in that description and so he sat down with with these moguls to talk about how common sense solutions are needed and maybe he'll be the one to provide it.
I think people have to understand that the context for this is that you don't want to make any one hundred percent predictions.
But he's close to a.
Dead man walking in West Virginia. In his re election race in twenty twenty four, Jim Justice has announced he's going to run against him, a former Democrat, former friend who's now a Republican and not a friend. And the partisan structures that he's running up against in West Virginia are to me so insurmountable that even somebody who is an adept politician like he is in West Virginia and well liked.
You go around West Virginia.
Everybody likes Joe Manchin, and the left has to acknowledge that he's good at the kind of the retail politics of it, and in a small state where you get to meet most of these people over a long career, he was governor's Secretary of state, state senator. His family
has been involved in Virginia politics for three generations. But it's just such a Republican state at this point that you've got too many voters who are just willing to say, I like Joe Manchin, but I'm a Republican, and I also liked Jim Justice too, and so.
Well, hence Jim Justice becoming a.
Republican, right, Yeah, exactly, And Manchin, in fact, Mansion helped trigger this. I think nineteen ninety four, Mansion was behind the Republican the Democrats for the Republican Governor Movement, which really kind of busted the dam in West Virginia and helped create the Republican party that is now going to eat him alive.
If Manchin ran as a Republican and say Jim Justice hadn't gotten into the primary, so it was Mansion and Alex Mooney. If he had switched parties, he would win easily, just with.
The r Ish. Maybe the problem is, and I say this as somebody who's glad that he came back to the IRA and helped pass the biggest climate spending package in world his but I think that his support for the American Rescue Plan, he was a pretty reliable, if annoying Democratic vote throughout twenty twenty one and twenty twenty two, and I think that that really did actually cost him
back home. I'm not going to write a profile and courage book about Mansion, but you know, compared to what West Virginia would be expected to produce, which is like a Shelley Moore Capito who's going to vote for zero democratic priorities, Mansion was a godsend for Democrats in twenty twenty one and twenty two. And I think he's going to and I think he'll pay the price for that now.
Like I said, he was extraordinarily annoying all the way through and cut what could have been a seriously ambitious agenda down to a much smaller one, but still big enough that it's causing him a lot of problems.
And so that leaves him with.
Maybe this escape hatch of a vanity presidential run and then a deal where, because he's a deal maker at heart, a deal where at some point he drops out for some type of concessions for who knows what.
Yeah, there's something, really, there's something really powerful about being able to say I was at the table when we were debating the American Rescue Actor that or whatever it is and saying, listen, they pushed me to do X, Y and Z, and I just could see him.
I don't think he actually ever will become a Republican.
So I feel like he has this sort of emotional attachment to the Democratic Party, and he did vote, I mean he voted in that direction, not in initially more capital way, because I think he is, you know, sort of an old school Democrat. Maybe not in the way that modern democrats like or would define that now, but he really I don't know. I feel like if he did decide to become a Republican O La Jim Justice, he would be a kind of an unstoppable force in
West Virginia. But that's pure speculation. Your point is very well taken. Let's actually just roll his clips so people can see him seated next to a well quaffed John Huntsman border up in New Hampshire.
Take a look at this video.
I think people are getting ahead of the putting the card ahead of the horse. We're here to make sure that the American people have an option, and the option is, can you move the political parties off their respective size. They've gone too far right and too far left. If that movement can move, but they can't be done. That can't be done. Nless they're threatened only can threatenings have
people out there that says, listen, they can't win. Either side can't win without the independent, without that independent, that center left, center right, an independent Republican, an independent Democrat. If they have another option, then they're in trouble. Those parties are in trouble. So they're going to have to say, Okay, we're going to look at this again. I don't think unless we stay over here that they're going to vote for us. Maybe we can move. Let's see what happens.
It's too early, but even things.
We need to do something.
I'm I I see one.
That's because if you.
Do get in the race and you spoil the election, would you would that factor into true.
I've never been any.
Race I've ever spoiled. I've any races to win, and if I get a race, I want to win.
So oh, he was ready for that one. He also told Kaitlyn Collins that he says, I haven't made any decision, nor will I make a decision until the end of the year.
And this goes along with C three.
If you were wondering, you know, when are they going to talk about Gavin Newsom, the most formidable man in the Democratic primary. Potentially, here you have Democratic strategist Doug Shown saying in an Orange County register at ed that Gavin Newsom wants to run for president. This wasn't sort of a spilling of any tea. It was more just reading the tea leaves, looking at what's out there and saying,
this is a guy. And I'm sure Duck Shown knows a little bit of inside stuff too, And I think it's probably pretty clear writing is on the wall for a lot of people that Gavin Newsom wants to run.
So I think the question when you look at both those stories side by side, two very powerful Democrats in their own states, seems to me almost that they're running out the clock, and that there's an idea of whether Joe Biden, something happens to Joe Biden, that they are positioned in case something goes wrong medically for Joe Biden, in case there's a surprise decision one day that he doesn't run because of his age, because of his health, And now they're in a position where they can jump in.
And I think Mansion maybe using the third party excuse to do that, or should we be taking the Mansion third party spoiler threat very seriously, I.
Don't think so, because I think, like I said saying earlier, he's such a deal maker that you could buy him out of that for whatever kind of concession he wants if it looks like he's going to get seven or eight percent or something like that and throw the election to Trump.
But I think you're right.
About the analysis of the status quo because right right now, the kind of no labels argument in the Mansion argument pretends that Joe Biden doesn't exist, like it pretends that Bernie Sanderson won the presidential campaign.
It's like the parties are in control by the far left and the far right.
It's like, I'm pretty sure that Joe Biden is president right now. And Joe Biden is not the far left. He's just the definition of a boring centrist. Like that's who Joe Biden is. He I'm glad that he has kind of been dragged a little bit to the left, but he's still Joe Biden, and he's still he's still always codes as a centrist, yes either way to voters, to voters, and so the idea that somebody's going to look at Joe Biden and Joe Mansion and see much
daylight between the two of them is a fantasy. They also do this this thing that he did in that clip where they say, you know, sixty percent of the country is independence, Like, okay, yeah, that's true. Half those are registered as independents, but are always partisan voters with either Democrats or Republicans. Like another forty percent of those are to the left of the Democrats or to the right of the Republicans, so they're not like centrists sitting
around for Huntsmen and Mansion to team up. You're left with like maybe ten percent of those independences who are remotely gettable, and those people don't want to vote for a spoiler in general, or they probably just rather sit it out than vote for a spoiler, right, And so you'd have to have like some health scare and then maybe Kamala is like the Democratic nominee or something, and then maybe there's some type of an opening or something.
But yeah, it's I don't even think with Gavin Newsom that you have a space for somebody on the kind of center right or center center, like a Mansion.
No, yeah, I agree with that completely, and I think you know, Newsom has sold himself in California. Interestingly, I don't think he flies outside of California. I do think he's charismatic, but I think outside of California he just gets absolutely torched, even in a Democratic primary. But he certainly would be able to have a lot of money and he would be able to get a lot of media. So it's not an insane idea that Gavin Newsom could
position himself in a primary. I think the entire no label shtick, I'm sure we agree on this is just so cynical. It's weaponizing this American fatigue with the political system in a way that just advantages the political system. It's all about exploiting Americans exhaustion with corruption for the sake of strengthening the ability to stay corrupt, to fortify the corrupt system. And you can see that by the people who flock to no labels. In fact, like that's
the most obvious thing in the world. It's just low taxes and open borders. Like it's on the center left and the center right. You bring both of them to both of them together, and it's the worst of both worlds. And I think the one thing that populace have in common with centrists is like Why can't we just compromise, Why can't we just sit down at the table and do something for people. The problem is that centrists aren't actually serious. What they want is to sit down at
the table and do something that benefits them. Their version of compromise is let's help the industry or you know, let's help the political class. And they do it under the veil, which is really powerful of compromise. But typically when people start talking about compromise with Washington, d C.
You should get really nervous.
Right, Yeah, everybody loves the idea of compromise.
It's good.
Yeah, we're learning kindergarten. They should be doing stuff exactly. They're exploiting that.
So Daniel bogus Law for The Intercept, went up to cover this event in New Hampshire. We could put this last element this So a No Labels board board member told bogus Law that if Martin Luther King were around today, he'd be supporting a mansion centrist run and note he would be basically a member of No Labels.
He wrote.
The board member said doctor King was a Centrist. If he were alive today, he would be a member of the Note Labels party. Bogus Law then pointed out to him, Hey, don't you remember that whole thing where he said the biggest obstacle to progress is white moderates and he was the board members kind of shunted it away before he could answer that question.
But so wasn't this board member in particular was like an associate of Martin Luther King's? Was he not like someone who was in the circle of Martin Luther King?
Right?
And we also had that AI image going around of Donald Trump and Martin Luther King on Twitter.
J you to see that yesterday. No, you can't see it.
You can go find that on social media if you want. It's MLK and Trump at a diner, you know, at a diner. Yeah, sitting in a sitting in a like a like an Ohio diner kind of thing, just enjoying each other's company.
And ironically no labels.
Gave Donald Trump an award in twenty sixteen as a problem solver, a guy who so now they're running against him as too far right. In twenty sixteen, they were like elevated him as somebody they would support.
So I guess Martin Luther King too, board member.
That's why is at the diner with Trump, also a No Labels member.
They were just getting some stuff done.
So I wonder what Martin Luther King thinks about No Labels going after their former guy.
That would be interesting. Ryan.
I'm really curious to get to this next block because it's a issue you've been covering very closely. The interscept has been covering very closely. Let's talk about everything unfolding as you have her song from Israel coming to Washington, d C. This week, and the squad reacting and then establishment Democrats reacting to the squad reaction.
Break it down for us well.
I mentioned that Daniel Bogos always at that New Hampshire event and then No Labels event on Monday. We also had them out at net Roots on Saturday for this moment where so we'll play this clip. This is You've got Representative Jan Schakowski of Illinois and Permila Jaya Paul of Washington, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, are on stage at the net Roots Nation in Chicago, which
is a gathering kind of progressive operatives. They start getting protested over Israel and specifically over Schaikowski not being on a bill that would bar the use of US money to detain Palestinian children, and it evolved slash devolved into this.
Maybe I should just walk on y Can I say something?
Can I say something? As somebody that's been in the streets and has participated in a lot of demonstrations, I think I want you to know that we have been fighting to make it clear that Israel is a racist state, that the Palestinian people deserve self determination and autonomy.
That the dream, that the dream.
Of a two state solution is flipping away from us, That it is not that it does not even feel possible, It does not even feel possible. And I want you to know that while you may while you may have arguments with whether or not some of us on stage or fighting hard enough, I do want you to know that there is an organized opposition on the other side, and it isn't the people that are on the state.
What is her staff doing wedding or go to Nutroots, because this is exactly from like the perspective of your communications.
People. You don't want to have happened.
Is her get up on the stage, start getting booed at Netroots, which is way more lit than seapack in terms of like booze and audience engagement and then start riffing and get yourself into this situation. Now you have a take on how other people reacted to this, and not just a take but.
Reporting on it too.
But yeah, you've you've seen a lot of politicians get tripped up by net roots. I think famously you had Martin O'Malley, I think, when he was running for president, said you know, got protested and said all lives matter, and it's like, oh, problem, not the right place to say that.
Don't say that there.
Bernie Sanders got protested at a net roots everyone does, and he just did his very grumpy thing.
If you don't want me up here, I'll just get out of here. Do you leave me alone? Invited me here? Now you're yelling at me, come on.
And so you've got to be prepared for, you know, these these moments. And so Giapaul told The New York Times that as soon as she stepped off stage, that phrase racist state, which is blunt, was rallying around her head, and she's like, oh, that's not going to go well. She's in a difficult spot because it is a state that has ministers in it who are proudly racist. One of them was convicted previously of inciting racism and supporting terrorism against Palestinians.
Like literally, yeah, literally, a minister in the government.
They say racist things all the time. They have a explicitly ethno nationalist orientation that gives rights to citizens based on their ethnicity and their religion. You have half the population living under the control of the country that doesn't have rights, and you have another half that does have rights, And so what is that She described it in that moment as a racist state. If we can put this up and you can pause it and read the whole thing,
I'll read the entire thing. But here's her clarification of what she meant, where she's What she's basically saying here is that she doesn't believe that Zion is an equals racism, and that she doesn't believe that the state is fundamentally intrinsically from the day it was born racist, but that its practices currently are so that of course is not satisfactory to the people who are calling for her head and calling for her to, I guess apologize more and more.
And so they pushed a resolution onto the which we can talk about later. They push a resolution onto the House floor yesterday which has come, which came a day before Isaac Herzog, the President of Israel, which is different than the Prime Minister, is coming to address the Congress. You have most of the squad members saying that they're going to boycott this speech by by Herzog. Here we have I think Alexa Andrew Kazu Cortez being asked if she plans on attending you address.
I will not be atending.
But there's currently a crisis of democracy and apartheid, and I think that this is something that has been a consensus.
Now.
The resolution is one of the wildest things I've seen put into the oppera in my time covering Congress. If we can, we can put up the text of it that's a little small. We'll have a bigger one for you later, but basically you don't need to read it. I'll tell you all three things that it says it can. Interestingly, it condemns anti Semitism and xenophobia. It's wondering if any Republicans would be like, wait a minute, we're against xenophobia.
Now are we condemning Trump? Here? What's going on here?
It says, then the third one says, we will always support Israel always. Israel's like, hm, we could even invade Ukraine and you'll still support us, Like it's unconditional. We will always in the future support Israel. And then it says Israel is not a racist or apartheid state. Now you know why they put racist in there, because that's
the word that Jayapaul used. They slip in apartheid there because they know that everybody's now going to vote for this thing, and it led to a whole bunch of jokes. Saying I'm not a racist or apartheid state. T shirt is raising a lot of questions that I thought were answered by my T shirt and me anytime that you are pushing the House to just straight up declare that you are not something that you are not a racist state,
you're not an apartheid state. You might have some problems that are not going to be sorted out by the House just declaring it. I was I was talking to a reporter up on the hill like this, it's all this afternoon, They're going to vote on Israel not being an apartheid state.
And of course, but it is like Nobo, the House is saying it's not so.
Well, okay.
So also then the Biden administration comes in because again this is all happening as you mentioned, in the context of the speech that.
AOC Parazog meeting with Biden, right and Aos.
It wasn't just AOC, it was other squad.
Members Owlman to leave Omar and Omar and to leave Defense. Let's be clear, Israel does not allow Omar or to leave into the country. Yes, they're members of Congress elected by seven hundred thousand Americans each and they're not allowed to go into the country. So Israel has no right to complain if they don't feel like showing up for that speech.
So we obviously disagree on this issue, and we've had this conversation many times. I think where Jaya Paul actually walks back the racist statement, as you pointed out, that's where her kind of reservations and where she pulls back is really interesting because to the point about Omar, for instance, when you use the word racist, when you invoke apartheid, as you mentioned, it's sort of the rights that are given, taken, etc.
In Israel are not.
Based on race, they're based on religion, and that it has implications obviously for ethnicity and race in Israel and in Palestine obviously, but whether it's baked into the state itself racial policies, I think objectively no, And that's where I have a really hard time invoking apartheid. They're Palestinian Arabs that serve in the Israeli Parliament.
There are plenty of.
People in Israel with different backgrounds, racial backgrounds, and I think specifically invoking race, and then Giapaul realizing specifically invoking race and walking it back. I feel like I'm in a weird position of agreeing with Giapaul at net Reads Nation as she's getting booed, but I actually think it's not so much I agree with her is that I think actually where she walks back is where the meat
of that debate is. And it's so rare we start to talk about actually the center of the debate or the real thing at question, and actually that's what's happened in this conversation.
Yeah, there's probably some elements of it that get lost in translation between American culture and Israeli culture, in the sense that you know, race and racism is such an has such a specific, constructed meaning in the United States.
It's like the absolute worst thing you can say to anybody.
You've got Tommy Tuberville being like, well, they're white nationalists, but don't.
You dare call them racist.
They're Americans, like and you you unless.
You're in the United States, And in that conversation you hear somebody like Tuberville say something like that, and they sound like a completely insane person. You mean, white nationalis isn't racism? And huh, where where are you coming up
with this? But understanding that mindset, that that Cordin's off, that that one term from everything else, it helps to explain why it's like whoa whoa, whoa whoa whoa uh, Because if you're a Palestinian living under this occupation, going through four checkpoints on your way to school, being taunted, you know, having having dogs nipping at you, the kind of academic debate between whether that you're a victim of racism or you're a victim of some kind of ethno nationalist,
bigoted stew that is just producing this toxicity.
It's upstream of it's upstream.
It's like whatever it is, it just feels just awful to.
Live to live under.
And then you throw in the apartheid question and I asked a bunch of members of Congress yesterday on the hill whether they thought it was an apartheid state, and some of them would say, well, look, Amnesty International says it is, and they would just try to defer to Amnesty International and other human rights groups including Betts Salam and Israeli organization that.
Says yes, this is an apartheid state.
Others would say no, because an apartheid state requires permanent control over people within its borders. Now, control over some of these areas is going on seventy five years. But as long as they can kind of pretend that there's going to be some two state solution in the future, then this is a temporary occupation rather than an apartheid government. But if you have lived and died your entire life under this quote unquote temporary system, it's very hard for you to see the difference.
So let's also we have clip from the White House. This is D five. This is current Jean Pierre reacting.
Here the administration's new plan to counter anti Semitism. As you all know, this past May, we announce a very comprehensive, once of a kind anti Semitism plan, which we think is incredibly important at this moment.
I think they just solve the problem.
Yes, they got an anti plan.
Okay, it's good to know.
She was pressed.
She was pressed a lot in that in that briefing about these questions, and she didn't really want to because it's Democrats are in a difficult position. When when Jiapaul clarified her comments there walk them back, then she gets hit from the left saying why don't you stand by that? Yeah, like you have people saying why say it doesn't help us for you to say it in the first place
if you're not going to stand by it. And so in the same vein the White House doesn't want to associate itself with that specific comment, But they also don't want to condemn her too hard because then then they get hit for, you know, being weak on it, right, and so uh, And the idea that the House of Representatives is taking time out of its day for this three part resolution.
Is just so perfect in the White House as well.
And the White House is getting peppered about it.
Yeah, So we also have this tear sheet from the Intercept. You've had an article here about Pervez, one really really interesting article about a little bit of a case study here.
This is fascinating. Yeah.
So if you've been following our coverage, you know that in the twenty twenty two cycle a PAC and its allied super pack or allied organization Democratic Majority for Israel, they spent collectively close to fifty million dollars in democratic primaries telling voters that these candidates were bad and not mentioning Israel Palestine, just focus grouping whatever they could about
Donna Edwards. They spent seven million dollars against Donna Edwards in Prince George's County of Maryland, basically saying that she was bad at constituent service, like never once talking about the actual issue at hand, which is their difference is
on the question of Israel Palestine. And so as a result, you had a lot of consultants advising their candidates keep your head down on this issue and also other progressive issues, because supporting the Green New Deal and Medicare for all was becoming a proxy for APAC DMFI for also being supportive of Palestinian rights.
So not only would they back away.
From supporting Palestinian rights, they would also back away from issues that they thought might get them in the crosshairs of APAC and DMFI, because that amount of money in a primary is almost insurmountable when you're fit, like Donna Edwards was up by thirty points or so before they came in with six years, six or seven million dollars and knocked her out of that race. Summerlee. They came
in the last three weeks and dropped millions. She got a million from outside from Justice Democrats and Working Families Party, and she respon she was able to respond, and she didn't.
She wasn't on record in any way that.
Could be kind of used against her in these attack ads, and so she survived, but only by like four thousand points. They had another two weeks, maybe they end up beating even Summerly, who voted against this resolution. By the way, So now you have an interesting development where this candidate in Houston running against a pretty standard kind of center right New dem APAC endorsed Lizzie Fletcher in Houston elected
in twenty eighteen. It almost seems to be baiting APEC and DMFI to get into the race because the district was redrawn by Republicans in Texas.
It's now about seventy five.
Percent non white, with a significant Muslim population, a lot of pack that Houston has a big Pakistani population in particular, but also other Muslim American populations. And so he's just straight up saying, you know, Jaya Paul was getting attacked unfairly, and that you know he supports restricting aid to Israel, and that he basically ticks off every box that would
get the attention of APAC and DMFI. In my sense is that he feels like this is a chance to test the question of if you actually run toward this issue, rather than not mentioning it like most of the Cans would just try to not mention it. Yeah, you know what make this an issue. My opponent is being funded by outside money organized by APAC. That's bad for democray,
that's bad for this district. I'm the anti APAC candidate, and in a low turnout primary, if you can get people who that matters to to turn out, maybe he can win. He's raised three hundred thousand dollars, so he's a credible candidate. So it'll be a real test case of whether or not you can actually run this way. Now, it's only the question is what kind of population do.
You need for that to work?
This is seventy five percent, like I said, not in white, so that narrows the places where you can kind of run this strategy. But Houston and its suburbs is definitely potentially one of.
Them, absolutely absolutely, and it's testing a political strategy that has a lot bigger implications. It's funny because we talk about this a lot on the right, especially when it comes to abortion, another one of those issues where every sort of establishment politician, like the equivalent of a Jaya Paul, feels like they're always between a rock and a hard place.
You say one thing, you upset the base, you say another thing.
It's just it's a nightmare for them, especially when you throw in their donors and their fundraisers, et cetera. But there's this example of Ronald Reagan at an early Sea Pack. I want to say, this is a seapack phrase from maybe even the first Sea Pack. He talks about bold colors, not pale pastels.
And especially on.
The left, a lot of people remember Ronald Reagan as being the sort of arch conservative, but he was a revolutionary. He completely remade the Republican Party. He was the tip of the spear of the remaking of the Conservative of creating the conservative move and ushering it into the Republican
Party at least. And he really firmly believed that your best political strategy is actually, in a lot of cases, the moral political strategy of just saying here's what I believe, here's why I think it's a problem in confronting things head on. The parallel to me really stood out when you were talking about I think this hit my inbox last night from your son with your sub stack.
That just stood out to.
Me because I actually think it's something a lot of especially centrist politicians, forget because they constantly have donors tripping in their ear. A lot of times, voters just want to believe and trust that you're being honest with them and that they kind of know what you're going to do, and then they can make up their own judgment. And that's not even like Hackney that really like people want to know that they can generally understand where you're coming from.
And if you can pull that off.
It's not easy if you're a politician, because you want to lie about who's funding you and what you actually believe because you want to win.
But sometimes even your most cynical.
Attempt is not even your politically advantageous attempt.
All the the strategy is in some ways cynical, But to go to Reagan, it's an interesting case case and that you want as a politician, you want to elevate your least popular enemies so that you look kind of
good in comparison to them. And Reagan did that all through forn you with the counterculture and the hip hooies, and you know, in the seventies the Republicans were calling it acid, amnesty and abortion and just trying to really tie the Democrats to this counterculture that people were, you know that the silent majority I would have been part of that counterculture. So I'm not you know, I'm not endorsing this this opinion, but beat up you would opinion. Yeah, you're hard hat on.
Hitting me with a monkey wrench, no doubt.
So he's trying he's kind of baiting attacks from the hippies so that he can be like, look, the hippies don't like me, I must be good, totally and so perfect. Aguan is saying, look, Apak wants to destroy me, therefore I must be good.
And the resolution we have this from D six did obviously you'll be shocked to learn pass.
What's that four hundred and twelve to nine one abstention.
Yeah you Betty McCollum from Minnesota abstained and you had nine, which is basically the squad minus. I think sometimes beca balance. Max Frost, Greg Get talked about is kind of squad ad Jason they voted, they voted yes, but otherwise it's here the people that you understand is like squad and squad ad Jason voting voting no.
Well, speaking of the squad, let's talk about Charles Barkley.
How's that for a transition.
Charles Barkley clearly the member, a member of the sports punditry.
Squad, forgot about it.
I don't know that's quite a stretch.
Well, Charles Barkley was out in Lake Tahoe over the weekend and actually talked about bud light twice both Friday and Saturday nights. Charles Barkley was out in public weighing in the bud light controversy, which is really hilarious meaning and of itself, just that Charles Barkley is so fixated on what's.
Happening in a bud light.
Let's start by rolling the clip here.
And I have a problem with that, okay, right.
Charles Beckley also said just he actually talked about how he's not afraid of cancel culture, and I think what set a lot of people off is that he said, all you rednecks or a holes who don't want to drink bud Light, if y'all, hey, y'all can't cancel me, I ain't worried about getting canceled because let me tell you something. If y'all fire me and give me all that money, I'm gonna be playing golf every day. As I last said, If you're gay, as I said last night, if you're gay, God blessed.
If your trance, God blessed you. If your problem with.
Them, if you obviously the Dylan mulvaney controversy, which has then turned into a boycott of bud Light that has at least in the short term, absolutely affected their bottom line and their business. It has ignited a conversation over ESG because there's this conversation, why would bud Light send the Influencer can their influencer kit to Dylan mlvaney, even though it was only like one or two beers. Whatever was sent to Dylan mlvaney obviously a major trans influencer.
Why would they do that, Why would they want to upset their customers.
Then you have the bud Light executives.
Saying that their brand is too freddy and they're trying to get away from that.
Why would they do that. A lot of people were.
Saying, well, it's for the ESG score. It's because they don't mind having a dip in business in the short run, so long as they can seduce investors to put their money in bud Light based on getting a better score on the ESG like list, which is those scores actually do really matter.
So the conspiracy theory would be that they would deliberately tank their stock by half so that they can get more investment in the company. It's like like that, that doesn't make any sense.
Probably that they didn't anticipate.
That would be that much of a hit. I'm sure they did not yet.
And that you have people who are operating without the knowledge of you know, the people really really high up. You have marketing executives who are so thoroughly steeped in, you know, their sort of ideology that they see all of this as being a benefit for business and not to mention sort of a moral imperative. And so that's why bud Light as soon as this happened got rid of the woman. I believe she was first suspended and then canceled. Yeah, canceled, Yeah, canceled the woman.
Out who who went viral?
It was out canceling everybody.
But Barkley's point about you know, I think it's actually really interesting that he started by saying if you're gay, bless you, and then if you're trans, bless you.
Because this is.
A country that even among the like bud Light drinking demographic, there is high support for gay marriage and for like homosexuality in general. That happened over a really quick period of time. Support really built. It's specifically the Dylan mulvaney thing. Like bud Light has been doing pride stuff for years, it was specifically Mulvany in twenty twenty three that set this off.
What surprised me about the whole thing is like, why don't why is the right now upset about corporations appealing to different subcs communities Like corporations have always done, Like you got people who were into hiking, you know, there's a hiking themed product that they make for them. You get like the ide, and it would be like, well, I don't like to hike, and so I'm so mad that they marketed their their beard of hikers that I'm
gonna boycott the thing. It seemed kind of snowflaky to me, rather than like what I would expect from a previous incarnation of the right, which is more of a live and let live, Like you don't like Dylan mulvaney, fine, but to then never drink bud Light again is a strange reaction to me.
Especially as a conservative.
I've always found boycotts to be kind of snowflaky because as a conservative that you know, I didn't grow up in the fifties and sixties, so as somebody who grew up in the nineties and oughts, you don't have a lot of options if you start boycotting things, and it's always incredibly selective. And also I really like bud Light lime, so that was problematic from the get go. But on that note, although I am I'll take Miller, Let'm from Milwaukee over but Light any day, the Saint Louis swill.
But on that note, unless you put line in it, That's what's so interesting about the Barkley clip to me is that it does channel they'll live and let live populist American sentiment in general. That's not just the American kind of like if you had to say, what is the American attitude on politics, it's not just when it comes to social policies. Also, like when it comes to the size of government. It's really powerful when you talk to people about like gas stoves, when you talk to
people about the New York pizza ovens. I'm not saying that this applies to you know, Americans approval of every policy down the line, but it is just that resonates with a huge swath of the American public. But that's where it comes into tension with the trans stuff, is that it's like live and let live.
But I say, away from my kids is how people on the right see it.
And but Dylan's an adult.
But Dylan is an adult influencer. That is first of all, that's big TikTok influencer was brought into the White House.
And I think people see dil Malvani as.
Someone who is kind of contextualized by the cultural not bud Light obviously because it's not for children, but by the cultural establishment.
And like trans.
Influencers in general as role models for children, and.
They pitched themselves.
Rachel Levigne has made that pitch too, that like this is an example for children to look.
Up to and follow.
But if that's how people feel, parents should just keep the kids off, TikTok, right.
I mean I agree with that obviously, and people are doing it with Disney too, and so like Disney has gotten a taste of this. But I just think that's interesting of the context or the tension is that there is a really strong live and let live strain in America, which is where I think you saw support for gay marriage skyrocket in the span of like ten years, and you know, Obama goes from campaigning against it's a championing it in the matter of like four years, like two
thousand to twenty twelve. But then this particular issue was like transgenderism, as you have the left push for policies that.
People feel encroach on their freedoms.
It's different than what people saw with gay marriage, which was opening up freedom from their perspective, the perspective of your sort of.
Like average American. And that's where I think things are fundamentally different for people.
I do feel like there's a retrenching going on though, even in the LGB side. Curious if you're seeing that too. We don't have it handy. But Mark pocan congressman from Wisconsin, openly gay member of the Appropriations Committee, delivered a really stearing five minutes speech that people can find it on my Twitter feed because Republicans in the committee blocked ear
marks that were associated with any LGBT groups. And his point was, nobody here would remotely consider blocking an ear mark because it was so stated with a civil rights group like that, would that nobody would even today think to even suggest doing that and to block and he and he talks about the way that the attack on the trans movements has now has now as he said,
kind of affecting more broadly. Oh yeah, the broader move So I don't I don't think the gains are as locked in as as people would like.
No, not at all.
Andrew Selibyn talks about this a lot and has written about this a lot. That you know, if you are LGB and you have enjoyed a lot of wins over the last couple of decades, and then you see the t sort of being inextricably intertwined with the LGB cause, and the t is asking for things that even a lot of people in the LGB camp are uncomfortable with and don't think our smart policy, let alone politically advantageous.
This is not going away anytime soon, and I think specifically because of that, because it's going to start to cause friction with a cause that a lot of the country supports, and that's going to be again, like, I just don't think this is going anywhere anytime soon, despite what maybe Charles Barkley wants.
I guess well, Charles Barkley, I think understands that there is a huge portion of the population who supports those rights and will support him for standing up for it, particularly his show's going to be on CNN, right.
I think he does have a show with Gale king Right debuting on CNN, right, So I think, yeah, he sees that, you know, he's speaking to you know, millions of people who are going to see that and agree with him and.
Be like, thank you for standing up for us, King Charles.
I think the American public is very much on board with the King Charles point when it comes to live and let live, Like if your trans blessed you. I think that's a really easy pitch to make. I think, especially for adults. I think when there are policies involved that start that people feel are on offense, you know, where they're aggressive, the policy is the aggressor as opposed to you know, opening things up or whatever it is,
and children are involved. I think that's really where the King Charles line will not be as politically palatable.
King Charles was my hero growing up.
Really, I didn't know that.
Read his memoir like three times.
It should be on your shelf.
I lost it because, I mean it's so tattered. Yeah, yeah, I got his I saw him at a Phillies game once. I didn't know that any of this, got his autograph.
Was he nice?
He was very nice? It was great.
I'm sure he was. I can see that.
Ryan, you're gonna be talking about us, so I'm gonna be talking about the Jason el Dean video controversy.
I know you're huge Jason Aldean. Kidding on, have you heard of Jason el Ding?
Okay for to learn about this person?
Right before that, you're talking to us about marjor Taylor Green.
What do you got for us today?
Incredible development in the presidential campaign, an endorsement by Marjorie Taylor Green of the Biden agenda the greatest political ad definitely of this cycle, maybe of the last ten cycles.
Let's roll this one.
Joe Biden had the largest public investment in social, infrastructure and environmental programs that is actually finishing what FDR started, that LBJ expanded on, and Joe Biden is attempting to complete programs to address education, medical care, urban problems, rural poverty, transportation, Medicare, Medicaid, labor unions, and he still is working on it.
Okay.
When I first saw her speech at which was at the point, yeah, the turning point in USA thing, I wondered, I was like, are they going to turn this into a thirty second campaign had because I would if I were them, And sure enough they did. And this is not a deep fake, This is not AI produced. This was the speech that Marjorie Taylor Green gave. If there was any deception at all, it would be in where they ended it, because of course she doesn't end it
right there. She kind of is upset about what she says is the fallout of some of some of that FDR LBJ Biden agenda. So just for this sake of honesty and transparency. Like here is kind of the rest of what MTG said.
That is actually finishing what FDR started that LBJ expanded on, and Joe Biden is attempting to complete socialism. Meanwhile, we are now thirty two trillion dollars in debt, with record high homelessness, forty year record inflation. We're losing the US dollar as the number one world currency. We're losing our freedoms.
Our government is.
One big, fat, bloated machine, and it's killing the American dream.
So a bunch of technocratic stuff about the budget and it's killing the American dream, and it's socialism. Bernie Sanders gave kind of the same speech during the twenty twenty campaign where he said, you guys say that I'm a socialist, I call myself a democratic socialist. Let me tell you what I mean by democratic socialism, and he couched in the spirit of FDR and the legacy of FDRs.
I'm an FDR democrat.
Biden, when he was really feeling his oats in early twenty twenty one, said the same thing that he wanted to be, you know, wanted to be another FDR, and that's when he really pushed forward with this like really aggressive kind of agenda that was then whittled away by Joe.
Manchin Kirsten Cinema.
But if you want to wrap that all in socialism, Okay, fine, it's government spending.
Fine call it socialism.
I did, like, what is Marjorie Taylor Green doing here? Like just reading off what could what literally was turned into a campaign ad for Joe Biden.
I think it's.
Still a blind spot for the right, how favored well, speaking of the developing populist Republican mind. Actually speaking of Georgia, another Georgian we're going to talk about Jason al Dean, who Ryan said he is excited.
To learn about who this person is.
Country fans know Jason eld and he's a very very popular and has been over this guy. Yeah, he's like one of the kings of pop country and has been a mainstay for a very long time. He had a video called Try That in a Small Town, very politically charged. It's for his new single, which I think was actually released in May. The video itself was released pretty recently within I think within the last week, but it was
pulled as of today. It was pulled by CMT, and CMT hasn't quite waded into again, this is just as of we're taping. They haven't answered media comment request about why they did that, but the video has gotten a lot of criticism from the left. We can put the first element up on the screen.
This is just.
CMT yanked the video. Again.
They haven't said exactly why they did that, but Billboard was the first to report it. Then all of this conversation, I think started bubbling more and more to the surface. The right started to really pay at time to the blowback that al Dean had been getting. I think the reight had just been kind of enjoying the video and not paying attention to the people who were criticizing it. Just so you can get a little taste of what that video is like.
Here's a very short clip o.
God on the owner of a liquor store.
Think it's a food so carjacking, pull a gun on an owner of a liquor store. These are things that, as red meat as they sound, are ripped from headlines here.
In Washington, d C.
Not too long ago, a man who was a translator in Afghanistan was gunned down during his shift driving.
I think he was a lyft driver at night.
He his wife told him, you know, didn't want him to go out, but he said he had to make money. And he's clearly was a hard working man was gunned down during his shift for absolutely no.
Reason, totally senseless violence.
And so again I get that that sounds red meat, like a lot of it, but it's also pretty ripped from the headlines. And I guarantee you resonates with a whole lot of people, even if it's not people in my immediate era area here in Washington, d C. And actually, a couple of weeks back, Crystal and I got into a conversation about country music and especially pop country music. I said something that I got some tweets about. It was kind of interesting that I really am annoyed by
how country music sometimes devolves into redneck mad libs. Like if you grew up in a smaller city and a file over state, you know, a lot of the stuff is just coastal liberals who are getting rich off of dumb stereotypes because it.
Doesn't feel remotely authentic.
And it's like when Hollywood does their like real America depictions, they're just sort of like crudely attempting to paint a picture of what they think, quote real America looks like, and it's generally laughable. And you get that into in country music a lot, even though it's supposed to be like the one place where it speaks to real people, and I think to some extent it still does that,
but sometimes you do just get redneck mad libs. And what's really unfortunate about that happening in country music is that you're undercutting one of America's coolest artistic exports. And people don't think of country music that way, but it really is. It developed with musical traditions from West Africa, from Ireland, from Italy, blended all of these things together and even more than that in a very very very American way. And by the way, the story of country
music not all positive. Some very American but very bad parts of that story and some very American and very.
Good parts of that story.
But you know, at the end of the day, pop music is always going to be pop music, whether it's country music, whether it's rap, any of that. Some of it is good, but when you get into that redneck mad lib territory where you have these people in like air conditioned boardrooms, or are just throwing words like tractor and beer and truck together.
It's just sucking the soul out of one of this.
Actually, I would say like one of the most valuable American artistic traditions. So the Aldine video is getting absolutely torched by the left on social media.
I'm trying to find some of the quotes here.
This is a police reform activist who said, just look at the lyrics and you see that beyond this being so insentitive to the small folk town, small town folks dying from gun violence, it's a reference to mass shootings in places like Uvaldi. It is also just a racist dog whistle invoking quote urban crimes that we better not do and quote his sundown quote town.
This is for the quote what about Chicago crowd.
And then you have a podcast host Jim Stewartson who said, this is one of the most dangerous, irresponsible videos from
a mainstream artist I have ever seen. Jason Alden is openly radicalizing his fans into white nationalists, vigilante violence, and yeah, there's the Interestingly, this is a quote from Mississippi Free Press news editor Ashton Pittman, who said, Jason Aldean shot this at the site where a white lynch mob strung Henry Chote up at the Moray County Courthouse in Columbia, Tennessee, after dragging his body through the streets with a car in nineteen twenty seven. That's why al Dean chose to
sing about murdering people who don't respect the police. Okay, so al Dean responded to all of this. He goes on Instagram and says, quote, I've been accused of releasing a pro lynching song, a song that has been out since May and was subject to the comparison that I direct quote was not too pleased with the nationwide BLM protests. These references are not only meritless, but dangerous, he said. No one, including me, wants to continue to see sense those headlines or families ripped apart.
Try that in a small town.
For me, refers to the feeling of a community that I had growing up, where we took care of our neighbors, regardless of differences or background or belief. That to me is fascinating, because he said, you'll notice something in the past tense again. Just to get this up to speed, or just to get this in there again, he said, it refers to the feeling of a community that I had growing up, that I had growing up, where we took care of our neighbors regardless of regardless of differences
of background or belief. Again, that is past tense, and it's probably true that you'll have a harder time car jacking someone in small town Virginia than you would here in Washington.
D C.
But small towns are suffering as much and if not more in some cases than the bluest cities in other ways. So like the seven thousand persons saying that I grew up in Wisconsin, some of these places are thriving because social capital remains really high. Others, though, where NAFTA and WTO absolutely decimated.
Their workforces are not at all what they used to be.
People are falling through the safety net drug and crime. Drugs and crime are everywhere. Social scientists have looked at the correlation between the social capital in some of these really rural areas and drugs and duds of despair.
This is not a secret at all.
These patterns are crystal clear, and that's why people like al Dean and others from a lot of places that have been hit this way, like Donald Trump them express that political sort of angst by liking Bernie Sanders, but Donald Trump. Why does someone like Jason Aldean, who's a
Trump supporter, flock to him? Because nobody else is comfortable saying things that al Din is saying in that song, which, by the way, are closer to the truth than a lot of what his critics are saying right now, and he was immediately called racist.
Again.
This is one of those things that just pushes people to Donald Trump. There's a really good song by Mark Aurelli, and I think it actually might be getting covered on the new Grace Potter record, Lovely Vermont Native.
I love this song.
It's called Rose Colored Rearview because in it, the singer remembers better times than a small town, but then wonders whether that's just kind of the sheen of nostalgia. And I think that's a thought process a lot of people are going through right now. So the lyrics are there was a time this town felt like family. I could ride my bike down any street and somebody always knew
my name. There was a time before the meal pulled out and the pills moved in, when we didn't need no medicine just to take away the pain.
Was there a time or was it only in my mind.
When everything seemed simpler and we all sat down for dinner every night? Or am I just looking through this rose colored rear view. The answer is yes, in a whole lot of places, there was a time. And that's where that Al Densweng is fascinating. It's not just the cities versus Mayberry anymore. The cities are burning and while Mayberry might not physically be on fire, it's burning up too.
And Ryan, that to me is really obviously sad, but also there is this I think ten Well, the show is kind of over, but also not quite over, because we have an interview with Christopher Ruffo offered the new book America's Cultural Revolution coming up, and I've both read the book and we're.
Really excited about it.
It is going to be posted after the full show. We've got, you know, twenty to thirty minutes with Rufo coming up. And so what we want to do is get the show out to subscribers so that we are all.
Up to date on the breaking deal with our subscribers.
We're not going to break that deal, that's right, that's show.
Yeah, So we want to get the full show out and then we're going to get that RUFO interview up a little bit later, so basically, stay tuned for that.
But thank you for watching the show. We appreciate it. We'll of course be.
Back next Wednesday with more counterpoints, and back really soon.
With the RUFO interview.
There you go, see you soon.
Stay tuned.
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