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.
We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio ad staff, give.
You, guys, the best independent.
Coverage that is possible.
If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support.
But enough with that, let's get to the show.
Good morning, and welcome to Counterpoints. I'm Ryan Graham here with Emily Jhanskamiley.
How you doing.
I'm good. It's good to have you here.
Good to be here. I'm excited.
Let's just get right into the biggest news on the economy and in our politics today, which is I think this deal between UPS and the teamsters yes to avert
an upcoming strike. But more importantly, I think if we can put up a one here, an extraordinary contract which the teamsters are saying puts thirty billion dollars on the table in gains what they're and they're saying with no concessions at all from the workers, the only concession being we're not going to strike and blow up the economy at this moment, so you.
Can see the NA two from David Dayan. He tweeted out the terms of the deal right there. So historic wage increases and as he says, thirty billion dollars on the table, wage concessions are significant.
To your point, Yeah, let's run through some of the details here, because the part time fight was huge here. And what I love about labor unions that have real solidarity and real internal organization is that they fight for every tier. Through the eighties and nineties and two thousands, as labor unions were getting weak and badly, the corporations were able to implement these different tiered systems.
They'd say, Okay, look.
You've been here for ten years, Fine, we're going to take care of you. You're going to keep getting to thirty an hour, and in fact, you're going to keep getting raises.
You're going to get access to the pension, you're going to get the good healthcare.
Everybody else we hire minimum wage, it's going to struggle and maybe not mini wage, minium wage plus two dollars. And recently there's been a huge pushback against that trend and unions have been winning. And so the full timers here went to the mat and fought for the part timers. So now if you're a part timer, you're starting at twenty one dollars an hour at UPS, whereas if you're a full timer, your average wage is going to be forty nine dollars an hour. Plus they can't force you
to work on weekends. A whole other concessions around just the kind of safety of the job. Air conditioning will be in all vans. Incredible that that right now they don't have that situation, given that oftentimes you're cruising around one hundred plus degree heat. It's one hundred nineteen degrees in Phoenix. Those customers still want their tweezers delivered on time,
like there's no grace for anybody in this world. Now, umably they're not saying anybody out in one hundred and nineteen degrees without air conditioning, but anything's possible, that's right, So huge concessions.
Here's what I want your take on.
I think that the kind of i'll call it the Biden economy, but I think Trump deserves credit to because of the huge influx of Cares Act money and his browbeating of the Fed throughout his presidential term making sure that they kept kind of kept interest rates low and kept pushing unemployment lower and lower and lower. But Biden
is now well under four percent unemployment. And the trillions of dollars that he pumped into the economy in twenty twenty one and twenty twenty two, which Larry Summers and Jason Furman and the other economist warned, was going to give us runaway inflation. It's going to ruin the economy and we need tens of millions of people unemployed for years to fight against this inflation. They were wrong, Sorry,
they were wrong about that. And so the UPS workers went into this contray knowing that they're in a situation of full full employment, so that if they go on strike, they have opportunities. There's gigwork, there's other things that they can do. If they get fired, they can go get another job somewhere else. And so I think that that really helped. I mean, what's your read on how the economy played into this.
Yeah, they had all the leverage in the world, an unusual amount of leverage, and obviously we should mention it still needs.
To be ratified.
With a deal like this, it's pretty easy to imagine that it will finally be ratified now. CNBC notes in their article, quote, some recent labor negotiations haven't yielded new contracts despite preliminary deals. On Monday, pilots at UPS rival FedEx rejected their tentative labor deals, so they had fifty seven percent voting against the agreement.
I don't expect that to happen here, but I do think the.
Could anything's possible, Anything's possible, feeling good.
That's right, that's right.
They were like thirty dollars, make it forty.
And that gets back to the point you were making, which is they have all leverage in the world right now if you are sitting in a c suite at UPS and trying to negotiate with your teamsters that represent three hundred and forty thousand members, and to your point at the beginning of the show about what this means to the economy, three hundred and forty thousand UPS employees who are members of the Teamsters union with a potential strike that would have started next week.
I mean, this is huge.
And I think it's absolutely true that you get these sweeping conditions because of the state of unemployment. I think it's true that that has to do with the fed. I do think the Biden administration is struggling to explain why when you have the unemployment rate that you have, you also have economic pessimism and people feeling and we've seen like the likes of Paul Krugman try to explain this. You know, why do people when you have low unemployment
not feel so great. I think it is because there is still inflation that's hitting unevenly.
So for some people you're not feeling it.
But for instance, if you're trying to buy a used car, or if you are trying to buy a house, or if you're trying to if your you know, monthly bills are really heavy on renting or whatever it is, there's still some real problems for you prices when it comes to prices, depending.
On where you are.
But the unemployment rate is the fundamental thing here because UPS knows they cannot find people in the case of a strike, there's no way, like a strike is absolutely an existential.
Problem for them.
Yeah, and so I think that there's two things going on. So I think that one, people are reporting the way they feel about the economy despite the gains it's made, because it feels so precarious, like Okay, yes, I'm doing well now, wages are up, inflation is back to pretty flat, but that could change it any moment. Like I think, we're so nervous after having gone through this pandemic and also seeing the wild swings of gas prices, like that
could happen marrow. We could have a crash like in our lifetime we had a great financial crisis, like we could have another one. We had that epic crash in March of twenty twenty. But at the same time, you've had this massive run up in rents and housing prices. And so even though that's starting to crest and you're seeing rents come down even in some places, that doesn't help you. If your rent jumped thirty percent over the last three years when your wages did not jump thirty percent.
And so even if your wages are now climbing back up, and even you're let's say you're a ups you're now getting four hundred dollars extra a month first with these partners. So with some of these three dollars an hour increases just off the bat and then more throughout the life of the contract. If your rent went up eight hundred dollars a month, a couple of years ago and.
Then stayed flat.
Since then, you're still behind and you're constantly it just feels harder to catch.
Up than it did before.
And so I think that that's more of a structural problem. So you've got the structural rent problem, and then you have the precariousness of it. It feels like it could collapse at any moment. So and no president I think is going to say get is going to hear from voters. Yeah, economy is great, Yeah, very long time.
I think that's true.
I also think, you know, if you're in California, for instance, you haven't really experienced relief and gas prices.
It's just so.
Uneven depending on where you are and what your lifestyle is that when Paul Kargman sort of tries to explain it away or other people try to explain it away, we're just looking at this like fake average, like the hypothetical person who perfectly fits the basket of goods that goes into the real wages calculations. And it just it's not the best metric right now because it's so polarized, it's so different depending on where you are. In some places,
it's really good. In some places, depending on what you're buying, it's really really bad.
So it's I.
Think that's where it comes from. But when you have the unemployment rate that you have, there's nothing that really up is kind of done in this situation, which is great news for these workers who.
To your point, we're asking for.
Air conditioning in trucks, right, air conditioning in trucks, and asking.
For significant wage increases, which they got. And if you compare the dis bargaining to the twenty eighteen bargaining, get a window into how much of the working class had has aggregated power on to its behalf since then, because the wage games that they won in this contract are
roughly double what they want. In twenty eighteen and twenty eighteen, the economy was like, unemployment was low, you know, economy was growing, so it's not as if that was into the teeth of a recession, which interestingly, like we're seeing signs that we maybe headed for a recession very soon. We'll see how that unfolds. But you know, the difference in five years is it tells you everything about the militancy and the strength of workers in this economy.
Yeah, and I.
Actually think pointing to the pandemic. I mean, so the Trump economy was good on a lot of different fronts. But then what happened during the pandemic is it sort
of accelerated this shift in the economy. It was headed in this direction anyway, so you know, more shopping done on Amazon, meaning more deliveries, meaning more you know, online product advertising, and it accelerated this reorganization of the economy that was happening slowly, gradually, you know, pretty quickly in the scope of time, but actually it was happening over time.
And then we're here now and that's happened.
You know, there was no That's why UPS for instance, is so central to the economy right now because if that's bigot turns off, you're in big trouble.
Yeah, and last point on this, it also shows that elections matter, and by elections, I mean union elections. After the twenty eighteen bargaining or during the twenty eighteen bargaining, the UPS workers actually rejected the deal that Jimmy Hoffa's crew came up, Jimie Hoffin Junior's crew came up with or Offa's kid or whatever it was, and out of that sprung this team, this teamsters reform movement really gained
a lot of traction. There has been for years this TDU Teams for a Democratic Union, which has been challenging kind of the old Teamsters guard leadership up. But it was anger at the way that the negotiating unfolded because even after the UPS workers rejected it, they basically forced it on them. The Teamster's bosses forced it on them.
And Sean O'Brien, who had been kicked out kicked off the negotiating team basically for trying to bring rank and file workers and enemies of HOFA onto the negotiating team ran for Teamster's president and won the election and so and with the support of TDU, the kind of left wing reform movement within TDU and at the bargaining table this time they had rank and file workers, not just the bosses from the office from this extremely glitzy office down here and Washington.
D C.
Incredibility for long the most valuable thing that they have that they used to have now their militancy and their organizing capacity is the most valuable thing they had. So they had actual workers part time end full time on the bargaining union unit, pushing making sure that the actual workers' voices were heard at the table, and I think the reform movement, Sean O'Brien in particular, and the workers who kind of pressured the bosses to really fight for them deserve the credit here.
Well, one question for you on that, what is it that changed in your mind as you watched all of as you've watched labor in general have this resurgence and become more robust pretty quickly in a pretty short time span. Obviously, it's the problems that workers are facing that has motivated a lot of organizing, But then what is there something post pandemic that clicks that makes organizing suddenly come together.
I mean, the main significant thing that happened in the middle of the twenty eighteen now is all of these UPS workers being told that they're essential workers fighting through this pandemic, making sure that while everybody was staying at home, that these packages continue to get delivered, some of them for convenience and making people's lives more comfortable, others life
saving moving, moving medicine, moving medical supplies, moving ppe. Combine that with full economy and a continuously falling unemployment rate, UPS doing great, UPS doing great, and you and then and then with frustration at the old leadership, then you finally get the pieces that come together to say that the work work, that enough workers are going to line up with the reform and the democratic wing of the of the Teamsters to take power.
And then and then once.
Ups saw that, that's a sign that these workers are organized, they're militant, they're ready to strike, like they're not bluffing, like we're not going to win this.
So what do you guys need?
Right?
And that's where you get the huge wage hikes in addition to the air conditioning in the cars. You get the full package. All right, well, we'll keep following that story. But we should note that Hunter Biden.
End of August is they have until end of August still prove it. August twenty second, it's looking good.
It's looking good.
Well, we should note that Hunter Biden's plea deal hearing is today.
There was a whirlwind, strange.
Legal drama on the eve of that trial or of that hearing in Delaware. But also Kevin McCarthy in this context has floated the idea of impeachment.
A little bit. We have a first element.
We can roll this SOT so you can see that's the political political headline. He said that the Biden probes quote rising to the level of an impeachment inquiry, something he said this week. He also said just yesterday that well, why don't we just let him say it and then we'll react. Here's the soot of Kevin McCarthy be too, what.
You'll say to the moderates in your party who say you to continue to side and if he's the right wing.
On many issues, including them such as what on talking about an impeachment quire President Biden on appropriations.
On the long list of things, Well, I don't know, because you haven't quoted anybody who just says you say you frame some brand or something.
But let me answer your question.
Okay, So you had that reporter a little flat footage. She just said a long list of things basically.
But impeachment was one of those questions. And another thing Kevin McCarthy said yesterday is that his red line for when impeachment will be on the table is when people stop cooperating with information, when he feels like the probes are hitting a dead end to the point where he needs to rise to an impeachment inquiry in order to keep getting information which is somewhat of an interesting red line to draw. But again this is all as Hunter
Biden's plea deal is set to kick off today. The hearing is set to kick off today, we can put b three up on the screen. New information also came out this week about his art sales, which is.
You know, always amusing.
But this is from the New York Post reporting on what Business Insider scooped here. First, Son Hunter Biden's Novice Our artwork has raked in at least one point three million dollars with buyers including a Democratic donor quote friend whom his dad named to a prestigious commission. And that's from Business Insider. Now, the Washington Free Beacon checked the
White House visitor logs. This is be four and they found that that person Elizabeth herschnef Taly has visited the White House at least thirteen times since December twenty twenty one, and has attended, as they say, several large events at the White House, but has also had several more intimate visits, including with Nearra Tandon on March twenty first.
And they have an important note here.
All of her White House visits occurred after Hunter Biden's first art show open to New York City in November of.
Twenty twenty one.
Finally, I want to put this up from Sarah Bedford over at the Washington Examiner.
This is B five, okay.
So she's also reporting that a very close personal friend and aide to the Biden family appears to have worked for years in the Delaware US Attorney's office under wescluding Weiss,
including when the Hunter Biden probe began. That is important because it gets to the whistleblower saga that was out in Congress last week, where you have irs whistleblowers saying we were impeded, or you have, for instance, the Department of Justice appearing to impede the investigation per That gets to the FD ten twenty three form that has been circulating.
We still don't know who the confidential human.
Sources in that case, but reporting that they were being impeded as they were probing Hunter Biden's alleged wrongdoings. So Ryan, a lot of people on the right now feel like this is hitting critical mass and becoming a real albatross politically.
For Joe Biden.
I don't know about that at all, but it's obvious that Hunter Biden's problems the more. As Kevin McCarthy said just yesterday, he was like, well, we wouldn't know any of this if Republicans hadn't taken back the House and opened up all of these investigations, we may have known some of it.
But basically he's saying.
We used our investigative power to start exposing a lot of this. That's thing that he's trumpeting and feels like is a feather in his cap. But I just don't know that this matters to Biden politically.
I think you would need so much more than this, Like the epistemic closure around both parties is so tight that in order to break through, you need something way more damning than what they've got so far, Like the ten twenty three is not going to do it.
It's that's it's a.
Ukrainian oligarch saying that, saying that Hunter said things. The it's all dirty, it's all messy, it's all scandalous, it's corrupt, like a Hunter Biden friend working for the prosecutor.
Like it's crazy.
Like the levels of kind of privilege that are wrapped up in all of this are are something that should drive everybody across the political spectrum, Matt. At the same time, Democrats A don't care A and B or like what about Jared Koshner?
What about Trump?
Like you, the party that's supporting Donald Trump for presidents, are going to accuse our guy of being corrupt. Like, let's go take a look at how much money the Saudis have run through mar A Lago over the last like two years, like absolutely pales in comparison to the to the amount of money that this donor gave to Hunter Biden for his masterpieces.
His masterpieces.
Well, here's where I think there is a difference in that Joe Biden touted himself and actually campaigned on this idea that he was going to return to trum never.
Claim to be clean.
In fact, he's claimed the opposite.
He's basically said I alone can fix it. I know the system, and iolone can.
He's going to drain the swamp and put it all in his own bank account, right.
Yeah, So it's baked into the Trump cake. And with Hunter Biden, I actually think this is where Republicans might be hitting a brick walls. It is also kind of baked into the Joe Biden cake. I mean, people knew this about Joe Biden. Well, they knew this about Hunter Biden, and that's why republic are trying really hard to tie
this directly to Joe Biden. And I think the Miranda Divine report this week that showed or alleged you had people serious people alleging, including Devin Archer, who's set to testify as postponed three times, still says he's going to test the most.
Business partner of Hunter Biden.
So this is not a kind of Republican ack who's a Chinese spy you can smear in all of these different ways. Well, I'm sure he'll be smeared. Yeah, he was a legit business partner of Hunter Biden and.
Facing serious charges separately.
Which then undermines his claims like that's what that's what Democrats will say.
Well, he's just saying this to get out of right.
Although underminds his claims, but gives him some motivation to speak.
I'm sure. So on that note, he is set to.
Allege, according to Marian Divine at the New York Post, basically that Joe Biden was openly interacting with Hunter Biden's clients, which again we already know and that has still not fully penetrated the news cycle that we have pictures of Joe Biden on the golf course with Ukrainian clients of Hunter Biden. We know that he was at those Cafe Milano meetings with people from everyone Whereinski exactly, and so we actually certainly know.
Hunter went on Air Force two to China and met a business associate over there.
Well, his father was the Vice President of the United States. He was doing business and using Air Force two to do it. We've known that for years now.
We haven't let Harry and Megan on Air Force one yet Lucker Biden just on Air Force two.
And justice in this world.
If Devin Archer testifies and says Joe Biden was telling you know so that the allegation is that Hunter Biden put him on speakerphone with Barisma executives and then Joe Biden, as the media claimed, this was a debunked narrative, right
that there's nothing to see here. When Joe Biden's at the Council on Foreign Relations bragging about using AID money as the sort of stick to get Ukraine to comply with firing a corrupt prosecutor, I'm sure the prosecutor was fully corrupt, but it also happened to help Barisma.
So again, like all of this.
Has been out there and so on the political question, I don't know. I think the more you can tie it to Joe Biden, the better for Republicans and their goal to oust Joe Biden. I think it is really corrupt. I think we're learning more about Joe Biden's involvement in that corruption. I still don't know that it's it's going to make a whole difference in the election.
And that's the other problem with forty five percent of voters being with one party and forty five percent of the other and just being with them in a tribal kind of cultural way, is that in the media and the media and you're immune then to negative things about your side because and you know, herschel Walker and John
Fetterman are good examples on alternative sides. Like Republicans looked at herschel Walker's record and we're like, and you could not have listed kind of a person who was You couldn't have a list of characteristics of somebody less qualified and less supportable for County commissioner, let alone the United
States Senates. You know, weapons, violence, domestic abuse, like the allegations just across the board and coming from his own campaign, but Republican like, well, he's a Republican, he's going to vote with Republicans.
I'm going with him.
Fetterman in Pennsylvania, a lot of Democrats had real questions after his stroke over whether it was going to be able to perform the duties. They're like, you know what better than doctor Oz.
Don't care?
Right, And so that makes kind of that when you have people off into their different camps, it makes journalism and a kind of general accountability just land with much, much less impact.
Fetterman is such.
A good example because that also created this media bubble.
And I'm not saying this doesn't happen in conservative media, but it created this media bubble where nobody it was taboo to talk about what was happening with John Fetterman and potential cognitive impairment because a there was an issue of political correctness, but b this was a binary between doctor Oz and John Fetterman, and the vast majority of people who were covering that race they had an opinion on whether it should be John Vetterman or doctor Oz.
And so you end up with like that tribalism seeping into media in a way that's not helpful.
And I think that happens all the time. With Hunter Biden.
You'll get coverage from the New York Times, You'll get coverage from CNN here and there. It doesn't become a priority in the sort of punditry space, and it doesn't get the treatment in terms of like front pages and breaking news headlines, et cetera, et cetera that Trump Russia got. So it's not a priority because in the binary people have an opinion on what's important and what's not, and it's not great.
And also I think the media, I think some of that bias is very real. But I also think that they feel bitten by a lot of these Republican scandal because if you are at the top echelon of CBS News now you remember like Whitewater, I don't know if you were born, then this is like the this like fake scandal that they ginned up about Bill and Hillary Clinton and some some real estate deals or something like this that then they open it up, they end up
finding nothing. There's some cattle future weirdness going on that's but ended up that corruption may like at best they at best there's some soft corruption. I mean the Clinton's you know, became I think even less softly corrupt throughout there throughout their lives.
But yeah, just.
Which then evolves into Monica le Winsky is the only thing can start and get the which started with Whitewater, and then you've got like, uh, you've got Fast and Furious, You've got Cylinder, You've got ben Ghazi, like all of these scandals that the right just kind of doesn't let go of, and the mainstream media just gets bored of eventually, Like I very sorry that four people were killed in Benghazi. Was a huge tragedy. It happened in what was it,
twenty twelve. We were talking about that in twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen.
Like Hiller, Clinton lied about it.
Okay, it's like what still, it's like four years we're going to talk about Benghazi. It's like, you end up losing people that way.
Well, yeah, I think there's a I think what you're saying is true about media, because there's it's absolutely accurate that a lot of people on the right will get fixated on certain things down to these like minute details, and it reminds me a lot of how the mainstream press covered Trump Russia for a long time.
They end up looking crazy because they're with the with the board Charlie Kelly.
Yeah, yeah, either.
Redoing Benghazi or fast and furious or right right.
No, I think that's true, and I think it's when you see that coming from the right. A lot of what motivates people on the right to go that deep on these scandals is that they feel like nobody else is paying attention and nobody else cares, And I.
Mean it's like eventually they're not wrong.
To legitimate things like Benghazi was a great example where I don't like, I think there were serious wrongs on behalf of our government. I think what Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton did in that situation was despicable. But was it, you know, sort of being used for political purposes?
Yeah? Absolutely? Who admitted that was it? Kevin McCarthy.
It was someone like on TV, Yes it was Kevin McCarthy that it was.
It was seen as he was like, look at their numbers.
It's a big political win.
Yeah.
Absolutely, look look at the Clinton's numbers. Because we keep hammering on Benghazi. Yeah, people like it was it was that in the alleged affairs that blew up his first speakership, and.
Part of what motivated Republicans to go to the mat on that is they felt like nobody was, like the so called mainstream media wasn't paying it due attention, and so do I think that was a political mistake to think they had a real like winner and to treat it so as like a partisan football.
Yeah.
Absolutely, last question on this one for you, does he have the votes to impeach Biden? I don't think he does, and I think Democrats would relish putting that on the House floor. And I think there's eighteen Republicans who serve in districts at Biden one. I think they'd love to say, go ahead, I'd vote to impeach Biden.
We'll see you in November.
Yeah.
I think the Moorishing question right now is what they do with Mayorcus. And I remember when I talked to McCarthy last September, that was what he said. I asked him because Marjorie Taylor Green already had an impeachment bill, and he said, I think you don't start with impeachment.
And there's the question of whether he has the votes to impeach Mayorcus I feel like is a good barometer of what would happen should an impeachment and career of Biden come to the table, because you'll see where some establishment Republicans who would be comfortable in peaching Mayorcus but not Biden.
What do they do.
Do they actually go for Mayorcus if that vote comes, and like they get that sort of ball rolling. I'm curious about that as a sort of gauge to what they would do with the president himself, because I tend to agree with you, I don't think they have the votes too impeach.
Biden right now, Well, let's let's talk about this unfolding scandal in Florida. A couple couple of days in now, a lot of back and forth over this new African American history curriculum put up.
I think c one here in.
Florida that the debate has really centered on on one kind of clarification that is included in this new curriculum, which where they say that some slaves developed skills that they could use later for their quote personal benefit. That has ricocheted around kind of both democratic and Republican pous There's actually a lot more to the curriculum that we're
going to get into soon. But if you can put up C two, I think you've got Chris Christie jumping in on this because Ron de Santras's response to this was.
The quote was really bad.
What was it?
I didn't Yeah, I didn't do it, and I'm not involved in it.
Okay, And the buck stops with some other person. And so Chris Chrissy of course, is gonna eat him up for that, like, look own.
It, christs He's gonna eat him up.
We got putting fingers on the one hand, and we got Chris Christy.
Yes, Christy is you know, loves to say he's he's the guy who's gonna, you know, the buck's gonna stop with him.
He's he's he's a leader.
He's gonna stand up if people close down a bridge on his watch.
He's gonna take responsibility.
That's right, and it's also it also is an easy hit because then he doesn't then he's not debating the merits of the curriculum. Yeah, he's like the Sanders doesn't
force people to debate him on it. Instead they can say, you ran your whole thing on what's wrong with Florida public schools and wocism and how they're teaching about race, and then something comes out that's unpopular and you're like, I don't Maybe we'll find the guy and fire him, like they fired the staffer who like tweeted the like weird.
He's a simple thing.
So yeah, maybe he'll hunt down and cancel like whatever per administrator does. But then we have the thing that really set it off was Kamala Harris's response, Right, so let's play.
Let's play Vice President Harris.
They decided middle school students will be taught that enslaves people benefited from slavery. They insult us in an attempt to gaslight us, and we will not stand for it.
Join us now, the host of MSNBC's Politics Nation, President of the National Action Network, Reverend Al Sharp, and Rev.
Good Morning.
I had to dig in and read this because the headline I thought couldn't be true.
But here it is.
A two hundred and sixteen page document from the Florida State Board of Education. One section that reads, slaves developed skills which in some instances could be applied for their personal benefits.
I never thought i'd.
See both sides ism of slavery taught in public schools.
Well, it is not only insulting, it is humiliating, and it really is dangerous because it will instruct young people if it is allowed to go forward, not only a distorted version of American history, but it robs us from seeing where we are.
Well, I have good news for Willie Geist.
I don't think the headline is quite perfect on that, but I do want to play in fact. Actually, this is our next sot. This is a clip from one of the men who drafted the curriculum who says it's the controversy has taken what he wrote on this line. This is a two hundred and sixteen page curriculum. He says that it has been taken out of context. He's a black man who was involved in the drafting of the curriculum that was created post stop woke.
That's the name of the legislation. It's like all caps. There's some acronym in there. But let's take a listen to what he has to say.
There's been there's been a little bit of backlash to do these standards that you know, we're put out and you know, like you said that, you know these these were done in open, open sessions, so the public could you know, listen or watch along.
You know.
What would you say to critics who say these standards have set education back?
Well, I can't answer critics whom I haven't seen or heard. The only criticism I've encountered so far as a single one that was articulated by the Vice President and which was an error. As I stated my response to the Vice President, it was categorically false. It was never said that slavery was beneficial to Africans. What was said, and
anyone who reads this will see this with clarity. It is the case that Africans proved resourceful, resilient, and adaptive, and were able to develop skills and aptitudes which served to their benefit, both while enslaved and after enslavement.
Ryan, what do you make of all that?
Right, you can't judge it based on just one little kind of snippet taken out of context. But there is some other disturbing stuff in the curriculum that suggests the direction that it was trying to go. And it reminded me of being in a dorm room in college and arguing with people about slavery. And you saw this a lot of those same arguments that you'd hear then kind of gussied up into kind of curriculum language in here, one of them being.
That while serfs and.
Slaves are kind of really similar, so it's actually, you can't blame the US because like, there's always been surf, there were serfs before we had capitalism of feudalism. Then you'd also hear often, well, actually a lot of the slave traders were Africans, and Africans have had you know, elements of slavery through war fighting culture for hundreds of years. So actually it's more it's you can't blame the United
States for that because it's an African thing. And then you'd hear, well, it was a lot worse in the Caribbean. The Caribbean slavery. Boy, with that, let me tell you about how bad that was. And then you'd and then you would hear that, right, some people gain skills and so like, So it all kind of flows into this idea that, yes, slavery was an abomination. However, relatively it's not as bad as you might think, because it's actually they're doing it for thousands of years. It happened, it
happened in Africa. It was worse than the Caribbean. And then The question you have to ask is, Okay, let's stipulate that all of those things are true. They mentioned that the word slave comes from slav which so the Slavs were enslaved in like the ninth century.
It's like, okay, let's say that's true.
What's the point of telling people that, like you, What are you trying to get people to take from that?
That?
Why why make an argument that's that slavery was relatively better than you might have thought it was.
I just and I think the it's it's to get you to a place.
It says that doesn't undermine the kind of American exceptionalism that we're trying to kind of push through through a purely patriotic education. And I think that very quickly then becomes false in a sense that even if it's true on all of the various points, it becomes false overall, and it doesn't really.
Doesn't really serve the students.
And there is also to its credit, the curriculum talks about slave resistance and slave slave rebellions and talks about the slaves who escaped underground railroad and then served in the Union Army, fighting, you know, for not just their own freedom, but for the freedom, for the emancipation of the four million slaves throughout the South, which is which has to be understood, we're trying for like four million
enslaved people. Puts it in a category that just is substantially removed from these other things that they try to say, Well, it's not as bad as it was over here, right so, uh so that's where that's where I come down this that it's just it is clearly trying to move in any direction that is unnecessary. Now Harris, uh seems have just gone off that one little clip, And it's interesting. We were able to find the place where she's able
to make a direct, firm and passionate case. Yes, and it's against slavery, right Like, so we found the line.
That was yeah, that was like animated Kamala Harris that ever more thought was going to do so well in twenty twenty and you see that so rarely. Now, I thought I had the same reaction.
To that clip. What you just made is a really interesting substance of critique. I have seen so little of that. What I have.
Seen is this despicable smear by Kamala Harris elevated by the corporate press saying her like one black voice is more important than other black voices, or one black voice is more inherently legitimate than the black voice is defending the crecum that they drafted actual academics, and that would be a much more interesting conversation about why are you trying to sort of put slavery American slavery in this like historical perspective to the point where it seems as
though you're trying to absolve I haven't read the full curriculum. I think that's an interesting critique. From what I've heard of the curriculum, it's pretty balanced. To the point you
made about even including rebellions in it. I think there's absolutely nothing wrong with the two sentences that were taken dramatically out of context, and we're saying, actually that people who found themselves in these incredibly trying circumstances of their own agency made the best of it in ways that speak to remarkable resilience.
And I don't think there's.
One factual point, factual problem with that claim. I think your point is interesting, why is this being you know, this is this being tied into a problematic narrative. That's always a worthwhile question, But This has been such a useless conversation because there's just been a debate against the straw man, the straw man of Ronda Santis. It's like, it's basically that don't say gay controversy again. Were there
substance of problems in that bill? I actually think there were are there, But are they what anybody is saying they are? No, And it created a completely false caricature of Ronda Santis of Florida Republicans in the press that is still like indelible in the public's imagine imagination today, and that's not helpful to fighting what could be very real problems in the curriculum, to correcting what could be
very real problems in the curriculum. When you have the vice president taking this highly publicized trip to Florida to push back on an abject smear, it's not just that she's disagreeing with the substance of the curriculum. It's that she's actually accusing people of despicable racism. And I think that's despicable in and of itself. It's not like we're
disagreeing over marginal tax rates. She's accusing black academics and Ronda Santis of facilitating white supremacy essentially, and on what I think.
Is a lie.
And I just I find that completely despicable. I think Chris Christy has an interesting point in his response. I think Rondo Santis His response was weird. I didn't do it and I wasn't involved in it. For Rondo Santis, you would think he would be leaning into it, saying it's a meet the guys. Yeah, he's clearly lost his mojo, I think a little bit. And this gets to C six. We can put that up on the screen. Losing a third of his campaign staff. He's sending out talking points
to his key supporters. Yeah, and yeah, we have a You can go to the next element here talking points being sent around where Ryan mentions they actually spelled break wrong breaks. Oh yeah, you can see that in the first bullet point of the second section.
They spelled it break. We can go to our laid off the copy editor.
Yeah, they actually very well may have.
But you can see in the next one the point about layoffs about a third of his staff. And the next element, if we go to that, just announced another round of layoffs last night, So more than a third of twenty twenty four campaign staff now Ryan.
Another thing I think is interesting that.
Chris Christy says is he goes on to say, we're arguing about these issues, these smaller issues, when we've got big issues in our country, like runaway inflation that continues to hurt families, like an education system blah blah blah.
And I actually he's making a point that's half right and half wrong, half right, and that do I think DeSantis has over emphasized the culture war in his campaign, Yes, half wrong in that actually some of these culture war issues, like kids are being taught in school, does matter to parents?
Ask Glenn Youngkin.
These are kitchen table issues in the same way that inflation is a kitchen table issue. Parents really care about what they're paying for in public schools and their kids are hearing on a daily basis.
You have to talk about it.
In the right way, though, and the dasantas like meme campaign has not necessarily.
Been the right way right, and DeSantis has pushed his meme campaign way off. If we could put go back to was at C six B here, which is the it's the Ben Jacobs tweet of the Yeah, so if you look right in the middle there says the central themes of the.
Great America comeback.
These are the talking points of the campaign set out to reporters number one, economy, number two, border, number three, China, all the way down at number four culture walk ideology has infiltrated our schools and our military. We need a leader who is unafraid to restore our nation's society. It looks a little afraid because it's all the way down at number four, Like this was kind of number one up until he was doing his reset, which I think
doesn't bode well for that point. That like the like, if you can't even win a Republican primary all this stuff, what's what good is it?
Yeah?
It's not the best.
I mean, it would be a really interesting test case if Trump wasn't in the race, because Trump sort of makes it hard to engauge what the other Republicans are trying out. But the economy bulltpoint has a little culture war in it, which I think is well placed on Ron DeSantis where he talks about corporate elites, the economy of benefiting corporate elites. That's a cultural war messaging on the economy that Republicans never used to sort of connect the dots to in the same way that Democrats do.
So I think they're trying to do both at the same time, to walk into gum at the same time. It's not as easy as it looks. And so I mean, that's tough stuff. But this should be Ron de Santis in his element, like he shouldn't give Chris Christine opening to come after him on.
This, like this is his this is a gift to him.
It's a political gift to him, in the same way that Don Lemon saying women are past their prime or Nicki Haley's pastor prime was a gift to Nicki Haley. Like Ron de Santis should just be like rubbing his hands together, like eagerly trying to figure out how to make the most of this instead of that first response was punting. His campaign has like I think, hit the ground running with us since But that was.
Bizarre to me.
But I think, right, I think he has a messenger problem and a confidence problem. And his confidence problem is coming from, you know, just getting rinsed by Trump in this primary so far, and so I think he's not feeling as confident and willing to stand on some of this culture war stuff. And the messenger problem is that all right, is it true that some enslaved people were blacksmiths and were able to use their skills. We've talked about Robert Small's on this show a bunch before. One
of the greatest American heroes ever. He was an enslaved ship pilot in Charleston, South Carolina, who stole his slave ship and delivered it to the Union Army and then ended up fighting on behalf of the Union Army, ended up serving in Congress, worked with Harriet Tubman, he was doing guerrilla stuff back in there, like just absolute incredible hero.
Is it true that learning.
How to pilot the ship as a slave like enabled him to steal that ship?
Oh?
Yeah, that is true, But it gets too close to sounding like you're patting the person who taught him how to pilot the ship on the head and compare it gradually and good, good, good job, you know, good for you for teaching these skills to Robert Small's. And it's like, no, you owned him as property and we're and we're like utterly exploiting and degrading him and his family, and he
then had the resourcefulness enough to scapes. I think it's a messenger problem that DeSantis needed to be more careful about like, if you're gonna be making this you're central to your campaign and saying that the education is too well, people are gonna be looking very closely at what you
come up with instead. And so I think it you know, somebody ought to have seen that and been like, yeah, that's not going to come off well, especially when you're doing the whole Oh Africans did slavery too thing.
It's weird because when I looked at that sense, I know, we have to move on. But when I looked at the context that it was in, I got completely with it. Like they were saying in I thought in the context it was look at how resilient and look at how like look at how the lot of that in there. Yeah, to me, it just it was like all about putting the agency on people who were under like incredibly difficult circumstances.
Phrase personal benefit.
That may be extremely grading to people. How that that's a how dare you kind of line whenever you're using personal benefit in relation to anything right to do with slavery.
Although I also think the media was disingenuous and acting as so this was something that like Rondasantus and not Black academics.
Right, if they cared, they could have to do an actual segment on what's in there? Yeah, and talk about talk about it the way we did.
Let's move on to X.
You just see the letter X at the bottom of your screen if you're watching it.
We're going to fill in the blanket.
Yeah, what are we going to talk about? We're going to do some algebra today excess of course, as Sager Cristal talked about yesterday. Now Twitter, it's sort of like when Facebook changed to meta. You don't quite know when you've hit the point of critical mass that people know what you're talking about, so you can actually just start.
Referring to Facebook asn't matter or Twitter as X.
But this is actually a pretty interesting story because Elon Musk has basically come out and said X was all along the goal of buying Twitter. The goal of buying Twitter was sort of the free speech question was secondary to what you can do make make Twitter sort of like webo make it this one stop shop, this huge financial hub where people are doing social life, they're doing news, they're doing.
Finance, all on X.
This goes back years for Elon Musk. People have been digging up press quotes and clips of him.
This is from CNN. We have a stot we want to start off.
And I can say that real musk heads who are in my dms have been telling me that like this was his goal from the very like people have like if you I'm not a muskhead, but the real musk heads that have been talking about X for a very long time been like, whenever I'd criticized, must be like, wait till you see X.
Let's roll the tape. Like literally, let's roll the tape. But this is an ATM.
What we're going to do is transform the traditional banking industry.
I do not fit the picture of a banker.
X dot com.
This is too much.
I'm raising fifty million dollars as a matter of making a series of phone calls.
And the money is there. I've sunk the great majority.
Of my networth into X dot com, which is the new banking and mutual funds company on the Internet that I've started.
Big exactly X dot Com.
I think X dot com could absolutely be a multi billion dollar bonanza.
Okay, so he's twenty eight years old there. That's from a scene in Perspective's documentary in nineteen ninety nine and he's already talking about X.
Yeah. Now, I think in Musks telling there it's a little bit backwards.
He really he's always yes, he's always wanted to do this X thing.
He tried to and turn PayPal into X.
And this is basically what got him pushed out of there, right because they're like, do we're PayPal? We're doing We're good okay, Like we're sitting here, people are using our platform to exchange money and we're taking.
A piece of it.
We're all going to be multi billionaires, right, Like, well, we're going to have multi generational will. Like what we're not doing anything right, just putting buckets out and taking people's money.
He's like, let's call it X and do why?
I mean, you can see it.
Just get out of here.
It's actually kind of interesting because I never thought of PayPal as what it became. And you can see that PayPal became I think, you know, bigger then, and it has potential still to keep getting bigger as crypto grows and et cetera. Actually, speaking of crypto, Jack Dorsey Wade in this is our next element.
We can put it up on the screen.
Jack Dorsey obviously long time head of Twitter just he tweeted, keep calm and just X through it another amusing uh sort of subplot in this whole story. We can put the next element up on the screen. What you're going to be seeing, uh, is the Twitter sign, the famous Twitter sign in San Francisco getting taken down by a
guy in a bucket truck. What actually happened, though, is security and police also stop them from taking down the famous, the iconic Twitter sign because there was a miscommunication as to whether or not they were supposed to be doing that. So while they're taking the Twitter sign down, the bird down, which Elon Musk reportedly hates has always been fixated on
getting rid of the birds. That was that was actually interrupted And some more interesting stuff in axios from Walter Isaacson, who's apparently has this like huge biography of Musk coming out on September twelfth. He says that the X rebranding has been in the works for more than nine months, right since Musk decided to buy Twitter. Quote he said, it can be a trillion dollar company easily. This is an idea he thought about for twenty five years. A
financial platform that helps anyone profit from creating content. He feels it can transform journalism by offering an alternative to subscription models, where people can make easy payments for whatever strikes their fancy. When he first walked in, it was like a hard scrabble cowboy walking into a Starbucks.
He said, there are too many birds here.
He pulled all the woke t shirts out of the cabinets and scoffed at the notion of psychologically safe workplaces. It was like watching a movie on fast forward. I could see him getting more and more frustrated with the culture, and Musk himself said, we have to replace this with a maniacal sense of urgency. We can put the last element up on the screen here, which is from Elon
Musk himself. I think the most interesting point here is he says Twitter was acquired by ex Coort both to insure freedom of speech and as an accelerant for X, the everything app. The Twitter name made sense when it was just one hundred and forty character messages going back and forth.
Like birds tweeting.
But now you can post almost anything, including several hours of video.
And then he adds a timeframe.
He says, in the months to come, we will add comprehensive communications and the ability to conduct your entire financial world. So we must bid ado to the bird, your entire financial world. I always figured this was.
Goal because he kept name checking Webo.
Early on in the Twitter days, which is a Chinese equivalent of Twitter that's more of a hub than Twitter is right now. And then he's added subscription on Twitter. He's added long, long long form video to Twitter, and has been working with big content creators like Tucker Carlson. Says he wants to transform journalism. Ryan, what do you make of that. I'm sure you have some thoughts on that.
I mean, the number one thing you want in a financial institution is safety and security.
Right.
You want to believe that the money that you have sitting there is going to be sitting there the next time you come. You want to believe that when you press the transfer button and you send it to the person that you're trying to send it to, it gets to them. Yeah, and that you can confirm that all of that happens. That takes an enormous amount of infrastructure, Yeah, and then it takes social confidence in the out in
the institution to manage that. It shocks me that Elon Musk would have handled Twitter the last nine months the way he has and then expect us to turn over us, to turn over money to it.
And to do something much vaster in scope when you've narrowed the company.
Yeah, it's like, okay, you said you're gonna take care of the bots. The bots are worse. The scam. There's scams everywhere. You know, Dave Dane is constantly.
Getting hacked and selling laptops to people fake laptops. Don't buy laptops from Dave Dane, like, don't, don't do it. And then he's gonna instead of fixing that stuff, he's gonna come and be like, no, no, it's totally fine.
Now.
I think the idea is if he pumps billions more of his own money into it. The idea is an interesting one, like if you can like I mean, and it's not that original.
It's like PayPal.
It's like try to be a place where people move money around and take some of it while they do that. Like that's basically what he wants to do. But he's gonna have to, you know, put up money to make it safe to do that. The reason that it's become less safe is because he pulled so much money out of it because he levered so much debt on top of it shape and when you hear him complain about it, he's like, yeah, we lost fifty percent of our advertisers
and it's just so deeply in debt. It's like, well, the advertisers fled from you, bro, and you put the debt on it, like literally, like that's that's your debt so that you could buy it. So the things that you're complaining about you caused and then that and then that made it much more rickety. And is something rickety the kind of thing that you want to give access to your bank account?
I don't know.
I mean there's potentially, Yeah, there's potentially an argument that we're in the middle of.
You know, he can go five years from now.
Let's say hypothetically Elon Musk's vision is realized for X and we're looking back on now. It looks like his critics were, you know, nitpicking at something that was in the process of becoming much bigger and it was in the middle of a transformation. But the question right now, I think is whether that transformation looks plausible. And yeah, I think it's been a really rough go for Twitter.
It's not that he inherited inherited a perfectly great situation that was like all rosy, that is true, but yeah, the confidence in creating and building something much bigger in Twitter when the version of Twitter right now.
So yesterday I got.
A notification saying the violation you reported has been reviewed, and I clicked on it was something like very obvious that someone's personal information had been posted to Twitter and I reported it a few weeks ago with somebody's address, and it was like a very obvious thing to take down. When before musk Hat taken over Twitter, Twitter, to its credit, had a much bigger workforce, and it was I still think, a terrible app, but they would take that down like
much faster. And that's the basic question of security that you're raising. And so if he's if he's trying to get new cash influxes by having a bigger vision, that allows him to have a better staff, a smarter staff, smarter AI whatever that gets stuff.
Stuff flagged, I guess.
But you know, he's had Twitter for a while now, and I feel like problems like that have only gotten worse, which is.
A pretty big deal. Man.
You're like, hey, so I had money in my account now it's gone.
Yeah yeah, we'll get back to you in forty five days.
Yeah yeah, but I got bills to pay like now.
Yeah.
And I think all of this is also the bigger pictures that, like Twitter is engineered to addict you and disrupt your brain in ways that are very harmful, not just to discourse but to people's personal and professional lives. And I can't cheer anything, no matter how much I like for speech, I can't really cheer anything that ignores that much deeper problem in Twitter and tries to add our banking to a platform that is made like a slot machine.
Doesn't feel good.
If this results, though, in hater's money flowing into my account because they're engaging with me and trashing me, all right, that'd be funny.
Have you tried the subscription yet?
I see what he's saying about how it could transform journalism, and I get why he was upset about Substack rolling out the notes feature, because it does look a lot like Twitter, and Subsack is sort of doing the journalism thing that I think he wants to do on Twitter.
So did you do the subscription?
No? Yeah, I just really don't like Twitter. It doesn't matter who's in chargement.
My tweets are still free for y'all, whether he wants you to call them sheets.
Did you see this?
No?
Yeah? Literally?
Okay, well wow, moving on. Stephen A.
Smith has weighed in on the Jason al Dean controversy.
Let's start.
This is from Steven Asmith's podcast on Monday Steven Asmith Show. He weighed in on the try That in a Small Town controversy, which by the way, has risen to I think number two on the Billboard Hot one hundred in the wake of that song was released in May. The video came out, and then the controversy bubbles to the surface and the song started taking effect.
Yes, total strikes in effect.
Al Dean is on tour right now too, so I think that probably hasn't hurt. But there's a very clear yes, that's why he's coming to merry other post I think this week. Even so, it's the thing happened really quick. The ball started rolling down the hill when the controversy bubble to the surface.
So Stephen A. Smith weighed in and here's what he had to say.
Are you ready for this show?
I find nothing racist about those lyrics. Surprised you did not nothing racist about those lyrics. Only when the video gets attached to it, do you see what he's trying to say. See, I ain't no damn hypocrite. I see the lyrics that are spewed in other genres, whether it's.
Rock and roll, hip hop, or whatever the case may be, if.
We don't say anything about them, we shouldn't be saying anything about Jason Oldeede's lyrics. The problem is a the whole Trump supported thing, him showing up allegedly to some party in blackface, trying to look like Lil Wayne. There's racial undertones showing Black Lives Matter protests as opposed to protests at other places.
I didn't see the insurrection on.
January six, twenty twenty one.
In that video.
Maybe I missed it, but I didn't see it.
What does that have to do with Ron DeSantis. It's simple, it's a race war taking place in our country.
So he had previously said some nice things about Ron de Santis, and I think that's where this was especially interesting to people, because, yeah, he had previously said basically he was interested in DeSantis, he didn't want Donald Trump.
To get the nomination, and that's where.
DeSantis comes into play, and his interest in Dessantis comes into play. Coleman hughes in Barry Weiss's publication The Free Press. He wrote an essay using lyrics from and Coleman is a rapper himself, lyrics from twenty one Savage and comparing it to like lyrics from Little Baby. I am not going to do the Benchapia thing where I read rap lyrics.
You got to learn from other people's.
Mistakes, but right, we had other mistakes in that clip.
Yes, so a few people more entertaining than stephen A.
Smith.
What did you make of his take here?
I love stephen A. So he's so good at what he does, one of the best out there. I think that he makes a really fair point that you have to understand in the context that it's presented. And it is a choice that if you're trying to talk about just general unrest and problems that you've got in the community, but you're not going to have them in a small town, you have a lot of choices that you can make
when it comes to footage. And if you choose Black Lives Matter protests rather than January sixth protests, then okay, that's a choice you made, and that's the context are setting.
He did show white people protesting, and like a lot of.
The Black Lives Matter protesters were white people.
Well, I mean, when I was covering those protests, watched like a white liberal woman scream in the face of a working class black cop for hours on end, basically in the middle of a day on like a Tuesday in the summer of twenty twenty, calling her despicable names.
And so I mean, like it saying, I get what he's saying.
So what he's saying is interesting because the conversation we had last week about how actually a lot of small towns, a lot of people usaw on January six, have been hit with economic circumstances. People in their situations used to look at, you know, urban areas and minorities Black Americans and have this like smug sense of superiority to people who were rioting protesting like riots, and then things hit their small towns and their small towns aren't so great anymore.
You know that these places have actually been.
Ravaged and there are serious problems with crime and drugs in those small towns.
So al Dean's.
Narrative, they try that in a small town isn't so clean. There are is, like again, like where I grew up, that's a small town that's still thriving.
But that's not everywhere, and it's certainly.
Not a lot of the places where al Dean is maybe talking about, where they're Trump supporters like him who have faced like people on January sixth, for instance, that we have like actually dealt with. It's not to excuse anything whatsoever.
It was horrible on every.
Level, but people were motivated by economic disenfranchisement, there's no question about it. And that has created crime, and that has created less cohesive small town communities, and so I think that's the real problem with this narrative. I still don't think that it's racism.
I get what Stephen A.
Smith is saying, but a lot of people died in those riots, a lot of people, a lot of Black Americans, have been victimized by the crime surge in the last couple of years. So I still don't see the racist question being answered me.
The title try that in a small town is extraordinarily clear allusion to vigilante justice, and in this country, vigilante justice almost exclusively has meant mob lynch mobs like that. The two things are very much linked, and he his unfortunate choice to, uh, you know, film it outside of a courthouse where black men have been lynched, only furthered that now I think they're probably just dumb and just didn't know that.
Yeah, Coleman, he was pointing out there was like a Hannah Montana music video filmed at that same courthouse.
Sure, but it was that's the Sun about vigilant Hannah Montana wasn't singing about vigilante justice.
The sad really is that there are a lot of places in this country where there's a history of lynch in the South, Yes, and so I think it's extraordinary likely that was Quincton's.
It is a sad reality.
But at the same time he is talking about it with some nostalgia or talking about the idea of or you could see why people would think, why Stephen Aide would think combined with Black Lives Matter footage that you're making a nod to that.
I think you had an interesting point last week where you're talking about how that used to be in cities too, Like people used to take pride and taking care of their own in their cities, and like it doesn't still a lot of cities, now, yeah, totally in certain neighborhoods.
And again, I think that's another thing people miss.
Is that you can have Mayberry inside a big city.
Right. There are pockets. Although Muriel Bowser actually just this.
Week said this isn't Mayberry and like basically blamed valets for losing people's keys that were stolen in DC.
Did you not see that?
No, don't, don't valet your car downtown there were a bunch of keys stolen a Valet Kiosks, and Mariel Bowser came out and was like, this is any Mary, This is not.
On us, basically, but yeah, fanned your keys to random people.
There are pockets of big cities or pockets of the country that really still are great, and people do take pride in taking care of their own. And I think that's the vigilante justice thing. Is interesting because I still see this as taking pride in your small town, taking care of other people and taking care of your neighbors, even though I don't think that's the reality.
And a whole lot of small.
Towns, especially where it used to be, because people had jobs and families and in tact marriages and mental health, et cetera that has been like plundered. I get that, but I still, I mean, I just don't see that as being necessarily racist, because there's truth in that in different like that still exists whether you're in a city or a town. And I guess it's true that Jason Elden was probably talking about like rural America. He probably
didn't have like big he's in mind. But when Stephen Nasmith says the lyrics are not racially motivated, I mean he's saying because there's not January sixth protest video, even though there are videos of white protesters acting out in the video.
I mean, I guess I still struggle to see.
How that's racist to put him in his full contact. At the end, he says it's a race war, but it's not started by black people.
Like he's making the point.
That that the aggressors in it, the ones that are instigating it are people like Alt Dean who are making a big deal of the like they're the ones, like they're the ones that are kicking it off. Because I just realized we cut that video off right before he said that.
And that's actually an interesting point, Like why does it matter to jasonal Dean who doesn't live in a big city, like why is the focus of a song? I mean,
I think people have good reasons for that. But I guess the other thing I should say is that this does I do think it's true that people, especially white Americans, sometimes stumble into things they should know better that are like racially insensitive, that for good reasons, are interpreted as having racial under or overtones to people, especially to their black neighbors, in a way that they don't intend, or
maybe they subconsciously intend and they don't realize that. But I think that that's actually a fairly good point that Stephen Asmith is making when it's like where is the January six footage?
Et cetera, et cetera.
I don't think there's any like racial animus behind what Jason Elden did. I don't think his label would be dumb enough to deal with that. I don't think he would be dumb enough to intentionally do that. But I do think there's absolutely still the case that people stumble into things that are interpreted, for a good reason because of the country's history, as racism when it's not intended to be.
You also wouldn't carry off in an insurrection in a small town because the Congress isn't there.
That's true. You would do it in Harper's fairy there.
That's a good point, all right, Ryan, And what is your point today?
So by the time we get to the presidential election of twenty thirty six, that's just four quick cycles from now three if you don't count this one, gen z will make up a full thirty five percent of the electorate in every election between now and then. Their numbers are going to grow, and the number of boomers making it out to the polls will get smaller and smaller. And one of the most common misconceptions in American politics
is that young people are always liberal. And part of that misconception is the boomer's fault, because the kids in the sixties who were actually leftists were so loud about it, with their tight eyes and their huge marches and their campus citizens that you couldn't miss it. Yet, in nineteen seventy two, the first year eighteen year olds were allowed to vote, Nixon actually.
Won voters under thirty two.
If that pattern had held in twenty twenty, Trump would have been re elected in a landslide instead. Historic youth turnout gave Democrats the House in twenty eighteen, put Biden over the top in twenty two twenty, and in twenty twenty two, the kids saved Democrats from a red wave.
In Michigan, youth voter turnout was the highest in the country, which is bad news for Republicans because that election was fought heavily along culture lines, with abortion on the ballot and fights over schools and trans writes dominating headlines.
The Republican response.
To this generational shift has been truly confounding, which is why I'm glad we have Emily here to help explain one on earth they're thinking. But first, let's take a look at a few numbers from the Harvard youth.
Poll that are just out.
They were plucked out by Greg's sargeant over at the Washington Post. He zeros in on what one polster calls the Big four, and those are gun laws, action on climate, same sex relationships, and the question of whether quote food and shelter are a right unquote. Now, back when I was a youngster, all four of these issues were underwater
for the left. Now, looking at the chart, you can see a few obvious things happened, the most obvious of which we Trump as emily, as you can see in this chart here, like once Trump is elected, support for all of these things just skyrockets, and people can pause that and study that if they want. But you also see in twenty eighteen after the Parkland shooting, the number almost just straight up when it comes to strong gun.
What's your point today?
Well, yesterday, as CNN reports, and you can see this up on your screen here, a federal judge blocked President Joe Biden's controversial asylum policy, delivering a major blow to the administration, which has leaned on the measure to drive down border crossings. The judge put the ruling on hold for fourteen days for a possible appeal. So we see this happening time and again with the border it getting
litigated in the courts. Fourteen day appeal, there was a judge in Florida recently blocked another important aspect of what the administration sees an important aspect of its policy. And of course there are real human life in the balance. Many of those human lives currently making their way up through Central South and Central America and Mexico. Many of those human lives waiting on the other side of the border right now for any word of what might work
for them, how you get in. Here's more from Fox News on that particular decision, which, again keeping in mind the context that there are people who are literally waiting
on word for how this is all working out. In the courts, Judge John Tiger of the U. S. District Court for the Northern District of California blocked the Circumvention of Lawful Pathways so that's capital clp circumvention of Lawful Pathway's rule in response to a lawsuit from a coalition of left wing immigration groups that's including the ACLU, by the way, which claimed the rule was actually similar to
the Trump era transit ban that was similarly blocked. He found the rule is both this is quote, substantively and procedurally invalid and has delayed his ruling from taking effect
from fourteen days. That gives administration time to appeal, which they certainly will, because, as Fox continues to say, the rule formed the centerpiece of the administration strategy to deal with the expiration of Title forty two that expired, as you may remember a few weeks back, more than a few weeks now, that expired actually in May, but it was one of those things that presumed migrants you've probably heard this, to be ineligible for asylum if they entered
the US illegally and have failed to claim an acclaim asylum in a country through which they have already traveled, Mexico being sort of the.
Obvious example that.
Now, what's important to know that sounds on its face like maybe it seems overly draconian. Maybe if you're conservative, it sounds reasonable. But one thing it does sound is effective. Right, How could anybody get into the United States in large numbers?
Where would you possibly see an influx of immigrants coming into the United States if they are being forced to go through legal channels and then come to claim asylum in Mexico or in another country that they've passed through, especially people who are taking flight.
It sort of confounding.
There's no way if you have this rule in place, that you could possibly have an influx. Well, there's a dueling Republican lawsuit over this particular plank of the Biden administration's policy as well, and here's where things get interesting. As Fox News writes, the lawsuit is also facing a separate challenge from Republican led States, which argued that rule is quote a smoke screen to quote define the problem away by recharacterizing what would be illegal crossings as lawful pathways.
And that's where the rubber meets the road. That when you're looking at this rule and saying, how do we still see big numbers of people coming across the border? The Biden administration claims those numbers are down. Either way, even if they claim those numbers are down, you can see with your own eyes from reporters that are on the border that there's overwhelming crossing attempts at different places.
We know that you can see it with your own eyes.
And the reason for that is, as Fox News adds in their rite up here, the quote controversial CBP one app which allows migrants to apply for one of the more than fourteen hundred appointments at a point of entry each day to be paroled into the US. So when you're saying, how could people still be coming in big numbers when you have this rule that has now been blocked by this judge gives the administration fourteen days to appeal, which they certainly will. How are people still coming? Why
are their shelters still overwhelmed. Why are we still seeing coyotes bring people into the water, weigh them into the currents and get them to the other side.
Well, it's because a the.
Administration has expanded those legal pathways via CVP one, which was supposed to have about a thousand appointments a day and has now been expanded to fourteen hundred one thousand a day. As this is, in the words of the
Obama administration, is quote a crisis. Now we're talking about just one thousand legal appointments, ninety nine percent of which, according to reports, are being These are your granting your entry into the United States while you await that sort of US pending asylum trial, and so that means you can go to a sanctuary city. We saw reporting recently in the San Francisco Chronicle about why so many migrants from Central America that are building literal mansions in Central
America go to San Francisco. Well, it's because of the way law enforcement is able to deal with people who have crossed illegally, the way law enforcement is able to deal with people who've been have been imprisoned, given jail time for drug offenses, et cetera, et cetera, so all of these policies really do matter. Lenient immigration policies are inhumane. There's a way to have humane immigration policies, especially important when people are coming to the United States for good reason.
I've talked to some of the people who are coming to the United States for good reason. Some of it doesn't meet in any sense of the word asylum claims.
Some of them do. Some of them clearly.
If you hear these stories and talk to people up close, you would think we should expand the way that we define asylum in the United States to economic asylum. But for a whole lot of people, it is purely economic.
Is why they're willing to wait in the streets of a dangerous border city like Reynosa for an indefinite time period, waiting to get their CVP one appointment, waiting to pay get the right amount of money to pay a coyote to cross, you know, doing odd jobs so that you have enough money to pay a coyote to cross.
This is inhumane.
Uh and the Republican lawsuit referring to this Biden policy as a smoke screen is much closer to the truth than the acl used claim that this is that they also claim By the way, a lot of immigration groups claim that CVP one is in and of itself inhumane, even though again it's really fast tracking the asylum process or the entry process for a whole lot of people that are claiming asylum. The administration is not being transparent at all about their numbers when it comes to CBP one.
So all of this is to say, the court process, because Congress has kicked the ball to the courts and
to the executive branch, is janely tragic. There are people who are waiting in border cities, desperate, people in grave danger because cartels have seized on this business and they are forced to stay in these border cities, or they're coming up because they hear and this is the important thing they hear from so many people via who have gotten in via CBP one that you can do it that if you pay the coyote to smuggle you up through Central America into Mexico and you wait in that
border city long enough, you will get your appointment through CBP one. And even in cases people are being detained, well, if you're detained and then released into the United States, or if you are detained and then released back into Mexico and you still have a chance of getting through again.
People see that as genuinely being better than where they are in Central America, because in so many places, life is miserable there, And that doesn't absolve the United States of helping to facilitate that level of misery, but it does mean that people are so desperate to get out of those situations they are traveling up and spending time in these inhumane conditions that are being caused by policies like this that are ligning the pockets of cartels, and
it's an incredibly tragic and unfortunate state of affairs.
Also, people have realized that the.
Administration is not enforcing what it says entirely that it is enforcing, so if people do cross the border illegally, they are still being granted entry. In cases we see this only anecdotally, because again we don't have numbers on this,
the administration isn't being especially transparent about it. But border reporters who are down there have video talking to migrants and are watching this happen, and so as soon as that call gets down or that WhatsApp gets down back to people in Honduras or Nicaragua, then they will take the gamble on coming up. And so again, this is not the way to run a border. This is not
acceptable in any way whatsoever. It's not safe for the American people, and it's sure he is not safe for the people of Central America and Mexico who lives are being even if they don't travel, their lives are being turned upside down by the power of cartels, which is especially as the government is cracking down on fentanyl, are turning more and more to human smuggling as big business.
It's disgusting and these policies aren't helping it. So what we need is a Congress that wants to take action, and in the absence of that, what we get is people hanging in the balance of our court system and being punted around like footballs as these cases make their way through the court.
Ran We've talked about this a lot, and this is a pretty big.
We talk a lot on this show about the nature of the family as it relates to economics and to culture, and we wanted to talk about We wanted to talk today to a philosopher who has been thinking a lot about the role of the nuclear family, its relationship to the extended family and the way that the left ought to be thinking about it.
You've probably guessed already who that is.
Welcome to the show, Arami, Ose Frimpong Arami, thanks so much for joining us.
Yeah, thanks for thanks for having me.
It's not it's not obvious why liberals hate families and why they get their clocks cleaned on family issues pretty consistently, both electrically set down just in popular media.
Set that set that up for us. First, do you really think that liberals hate families?
Yeah?
Yeah, why do you think that? Why do you say liberals hate fat families?
And I don't I think I know you're being a little hyperbolic, but I don't think you're totally wrong on the on the history, the intellectual history there.
So tell tell us what you mean by that.
Okay, Yeah, I don't even think Emily would say I'm hyperbolic, like I think. I think it's just conventional wisdom. I think there are good reasons and bad reasons to that liberals hate families because it used to be the case that what you did in function of society was a product of your lineage, Like farmers, people with the last name Farmer came from farmers. And they were expected to be farmers, like Smith's came from Smith's and Coopers came
from Coopers. And it's not obvious that you should your productive activity and society should be determined by your lineage and who you came from, and that's that was kind of an affront of freedom. So the idea is that we level out that that lineage privilege and distribute assets and then people can work for their passion and build up skills and areas that they're passionate about, and then let the market decide what's produced and who produces it
for society. And that seems to be better until we think about who protects like little kids from the market, because the market just wants us to be on social media and jewel So it's not obvious that I mean. So that's a good reason why liberals go at the family, and historically have went at the family, because the pre modern family used to decide what you did for your life, right, and then the same market could be made for the church. It's another reason why liberals kind of hate the church.
The bad thing is that nothing then defends children from the predations of the market, And it's not obvious that parents shouldn't have aspirations and realize there are aspirations for their children. And even like the variety of transphobia that's that's in America today. That's like I should be able to send my kid to a school, my son to a school, and not have them come back and like fight with me about wanting to become my daughter. So family has so little power that we don't understand like
the right sort of mediation for family, right. And for example, like my nine year old just finished studying a list of SAT words, right, So it's not as if when she takes that test against in ten years or in eight years, once he takes against that test against other kids, her family is going to have a lot to say about her quality of success. So this idea that you can completely evacuate the family responsibility and family right from the lives of people is I think a little bit ludicrous.
But the open determination of family in people's lives up until you know the modern era is real and how to be mitigated.
Also, Yeah, and.
It's that question of freedom.
You wrote a really interesting medium post on this is called Families under Siege, a left defense of the nuclear family, And I wanted to ask you about what I found
one of the most interesting paragraphs you write. Since justice is going to be a matter in making sure that each person has the opportunity to realize the different varieties of freedom if people are restricted from participating in family relations and injustice has been done yet the left is bad at conceiving the family as an institution of freedom that needs to state protection from predatory markets and special cultural interests. And then the next line you invoke what
you were just talking about. You say, the nation's most recent bount of transphobia medical procedures is rooted in the anxiety that only the GOP cares that families can set an agenda for their genetic line.
Can you flush that point.
Out more, especially as you juxtapose it with the conservative focus on there's actually a literal conservative group called focus
on the Family. But what you know when you see the left walking away since Betty ord Ferdan calling the home a comfortable concentration camp or whatever she said to now, that is a stark contrast, and especially in that sort of conception of freedom that you're advancing, if the left doesn't see a family as a bastion of freedom, of something that can protect individuals from markets, from government overreaches. That does seem to be a problem for it.
So that's a structural advantage the right has when it talks about families, So because it could say it could look at all the good things families have done for people and argue from a matter of tradition and say that, like, as a matter of tradition, like we should keep the family, because without the family, you know, people go, things go horribly awry. And you can say, as this is what we've done, this is how we've succeed succeeded, and it's
the same. And there's a similar kind of religious argument we could the right could use to support the family. The left doesn't have those kinds of resources because tradition has licensed all sorts of like awful things, and religion has licensed all sorts of awful things. So the left has to look into family as a variety of freedom, and if it's not a variety of freedom, we get rid of it.
But if it is a variety of freedom, and.
Our constitution is supposed to protect freedom in all of its all of it's you know, manifold colors, then the federal government's job to support the peculiar kind of freedom that can only come in the family. And so in that article I talk about what is the peculiar kind of freedom that can only come in the family, and that peculiar kind of freedom is the freedom of acting with someone who is committed to you without you know
their immediate choices, having anything in the matter. There's a certain kind of freedom that you can only have with someone who can't choose their way out. There's a certain kind of freedom that you can only have some kind of relationships, and certain kind of plans you can make, and certain kind of plans you can realize with someone only when their exits are tied.
This is why you know Cortez burn the ships.
There's a certain kind of self determination you can have, and we kind of know this with rules and other aspects of our lives. For example, if I were to play soccer, Let's say I had to play soccer, except my opponent when I play soccer, says like, you know what you can't have. You can't keep me from using my hands. I really want to use my hands. Who are you to tell me that I can't use my hands?
And there's a way in which the only way any of us can be soccer players is if we forswear the ability to like.
Use our hands.
And that's one of the one of the kinds of freedoms get with with family, the immediate.
Unity where the other person can't just leave.
You have to figure it out together, and you are you get to figure it out together, so you get to do It's also something you have to do. And like, my kid can't just decide that my neighbor makes better cookies and then come to me and say, Dad, I want to quit you and live with them because they're better.
Right.
Yeah, in so far as that's a particular kind of freedom, it's a particular kind of freedom that needs to be supported, and I think it's an important kind of freedom.
But there are other kind of freedoms that also need to be supported.
So we need to support them, just kind of mediate them through each other and moderate them so that they can all allow each other to flourish well.
Arami, you talk about in your piece kind of nannies for all A maybe I.
Came up with that term for it. But you're you know you you.
Write about how you you elevate the nuclear family, but you're you're kind of dismissive of the extent family, which kind of the capitalism and the way that people have moved around so much has has really gutted the extended family anyway. So it's not as if it needs any extra push. But that leaves us with the situation where you have all of the work of child rearing and
running a house on justice nuclear family. And so one of your solutions is kind of basically subsidized you know, Nanni's, which gives a new meeting to the nanny state.
But I one and two.
Like Arnold Schwarzenegger can get behind, Yeah, And so I wanted to get your take on what you make of the rising kind of politics of the care economy within the Democratic Party, like it within Build Back Better, you know, the most trans well, the most transformative element of the American Rescue Plan was the childcare tax credit, which you know, the you know two fifty and three fifty per kid, which was which flows out of this kind of movement
within the Democratic Party of taking families seriously and really helping them, you know, make ends meet, to stitch the the you know, to economically stitch the family together that ran up against climate in the in Build Back better and got pushed aside for the climate money, there wasn't enough kind of support within.
The party for it.
But it is the new thing, like you've seen, you're seeing a lot of foundations i think, getting behind it, and you're seeing kind of the kind of democratic apparatus moving into place to say that the next time that we get a majority, we are going to implement as big of a care economy agenda as we can, which is similar to what you're talking about here.
So where do you think that How did.
That come out of the ashes of what the Betty free Dan kind of movement that you're talking about.
And I'll tag something quickly onto that, and that Republicans would say all of this has to be done with a marriage requirement. That's a huge debate on the right and so Arami, is that also important? Is there something still telling about the fact that Democrats would basically never pass cash payments for families without with a marriage requirement.
Right, So Democrats like children, but they hate families. So it's very complicated. So if we can give the money directly to the kids, we could, but supporting like you know, jobs for the adults and like jobs with unionized benefits and free time and all of that and just calling. And I'll say this because I don't really get paid to do what you guys do. I think the casual divorce in America's former child abuse. I think children should have access to the two people who like naturally.
Love them, and.
Then when you split that access, it gets weird because I don't think there's a fifty to fifty divide happening, because if you have kids, you might not have three kind of a heap. Panting isn't fifty to fifty. It's always one hundred one hundred. And if you're not doing one hundred one hundred, you're not doing it right. So, like I think the casual divorce is.
No yeah, but the Left is never going backwards on legal no cause divorce. Are you talking about social stigma around it? I mean it's already way down from what it was in the eighties.
Are you yeah?
I think are you talking about actual legal restrictions on it.
I don't want to make no fault divorce or a casual divorce illegal, but I do want to put marriage training into the culture and as a public curriculum, and like we need to decide what marriage is for, and I think marriage is for the realization of this peculiar kind of freedom you can only have when you're committed to working it out with someone.
Now this isn't sex specific.
It could be two people committed to working out to men, two women committed to working out to non binary committed work people working out together like, but it is a commitment to work out your household issues that have been condealed together. Because once you put things together like that, they can't just you can't just split the baby like that,
like we've casually just assumed we can. So we need a cultural revolution and not so much an external legal one to like jail or find people for getting divorced. I think the wrong people are getting married for the wrong reasons. So let's try to address that first and get people married for the right reasons to realize this peculiar kind of freedom. And they'll look for different things
in apartment. They'll look for like the you know, the creative spark that allow me to solve weird problems when they emerge, because that's all like that holds a real kind of marriage together, like a little bit of love, a little bit of like lust, but also like an appreciation of the way that person solves problems with you when external shocks come, because kids are nothing but an external shock.
That like causes people to want to solve problems.
So so that's why I think, that's how I think we can hold marriages together. But why I want to get rid of the extended family is because, well, I mean experientially, I've run.
Into so many like sixty.
Year old people who are still taking order from like their ninety year old a parent that we need to figure out how everyone can realize the freedom of family, and that might mean limiting the family to a nuclear version because the invention of the intervention of the nuclear family as a realization of freedom got you away from clan power, that's clan with the c power, where like the richest uncle just didn't dictate what everybody else did.
So we need these nuclear units to be able to kind of with their partner within the within the family, within that nuclear family, decide how to live their life without having to worry about, you know, ticking off the inheritance from you know, the richest aunt or alienating themselves from the childcare provided by the richest uncle, which means the state has to step in and be like the childcare of last resort when when the grandparents can't do it or don't.
Uncle Sam, no ants and uncles, but uncle Sam arommie. We can fight about the extended family. Last time, this has been this has been fun. We have to leave it there though, thank thanks as always for joining us.
Gonna make one more quick point, but a quick one because we got a roll.
Okay, So a lot of people will say like, well, you know, you have to.
Keep marriages and you have to keep families together because it's good for the children. And then they list this laundry list of empirical data that says that families like
intact families are good for the children. But that's not the right kind of argument, because you could also imagine studies that come out and say that it's really good for children of poor kids for the bottom twenty percent if the top twenty percent of way journers in wealth hoarders can just pluck them from their family and raise them as their own, so we could have like those. The same empirical arguments that tell you to keep the family together can license family pillaging. So you need a
non empirical account of why families are good. It can't just be looked. It can't just be looking at the outcomes for children. It has to be looking for about the rights and access of parents and children to each other, and in a more robust way than just looking at you know, presupposed outcomes.
The same can be said for marriage.
You can have a study that comes out and says that like, well, you know, if an eligible marriage partner comes to you and they make thirty percent more than your current marriage partner, these studies say that you'll be happier if you just divorce this partner and go with the richer. Richer would be spouse. Right, So these studies can't do it. It needs to be a non empirical rights based argument about the peculiar kind of freedom that families.
Realize.
That's not that's different from market freedom, and that's different from political freedom.
Yeah, Rommie, thanks thanks again for joining us. So always always fun to talk through this stuff with you.
Oh, no problem, And if anybody likes hearing what I have to say, just go to either www dot funk academic dot com or you can go to the YouTube show I do. I do a show on relationships on Monday, but when I do relationships about like oh this is get you laid, it's like how to you know, date in a way that will not end up in a divorce. So I had to think about relationships in a holistic
manner that means like staving off divorce. And on Thursday, I do a political show that's just more straight politics.
That does it for us on this Wednesday edition of Counterpoints.
Hope you enjoyed the show.
Make sure to subscribe to watch the fools Thing from the beginning to the end. We appreciate all those subscriptions. We appreciate all the support for Counterpoints. It means so much to us.
Thanks for tuning in too soon.