Hey, guys, ready or not, twenty twenty four is here, and we here at breaking points, are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election.
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But enough with that, Let's get to the show. All right, good morning, and welcome to Counterpoints.
We're not going to talk about the elections much in this show today, so let's get through a couple of those real quickly. Friend of the show, Will Stancil.
You just gave him that title on the spot House.
Representative race and Minnesota the way that you know that you're too online whether or not you got that reference. This is a guy who made a career the last decade out of annoying people on Twitter and parlayed that into a run for Minnesota state House. He lost by maybe six hundred votes or so, which is a landslide in a Minnesota House race respectable. Also in Minnesota, ilhan Omar thumped Don Samuels.
Not even close. Nothing like what happened to Corey Bush. A Pack stayed out of that race basically.
As well, there was a lot of money that funneled through a pack representatives to the campaign, which was reported in the last couple of days. It looked actually in violation of FEC rules. There are no such thing as FEC rules anymore, so it won't get prosecuted. But yes, f A Pack itself stayed out. The super Pac stayed out. Ilan Omar won comfortably.
Do you think that's because they like having ilhan Omar They they would rather have ilhan Omar as their sort of foil than totally. No.
I think it's they they don't like to lose, and they thought that they would.
And I think in organ a PAC and the NRA are similar in the sense that they survive. They survived significantly on their reputation of invincibility and of all powerfulness that if they come into a race, if you cross them, they will finish you. So they pick a jews and so therefore they can't come into a raise and lose because then other people are like, wait a minute, maybe I can challenge APAC and survive. So they really don't
want to take any l's makes sense. Although they have they've been they lost that they've men but that was such a weird race. People are like, people didn't even know what to make of that, this California Democratic primary from where they went after a guy who's totally pro Israel.
So yeah, interesting and they should hope they don't go the way of the NRA because times are not good for the NRA. But we're sort of light on twenty twenty four content today because it's the eye of the storm right now, everyone's preparing for the DNC. We are, of course going to cover Tim Walltz right at the top of the show. He gave a pretty interesting speech yesterday, and there was news on the labor front given what Donald Trump said to Elon Musk and Crystal and I
covered some of that yesterday. We're going to cover developments out of Iran. Ryan has an incredible story, and drop site has an incredible story about something that happened in the West Bank. We are getting inflation numbers as we record this right now, bright and early, and then we have an interesting media block because some on the left are now speculating about the pro Republican mainstream media. So we'll have a good conversation about that, I.
Think right, yes, it reminds me of twenty sixteen, where the entire kind of democratic infrastructure was persuaded that the mainstream media was basically in the tank for either in the tank for Trump against or because they just love the ratings.
Yeah, and they just they there's just something about Hillary Clinton at the meeting, and also that yeah, that's their contention, right at least. So let's start with Tim Walls. We will be at the DNC. Of course, the whole Breaking Points team you're probably where we'll be at the DNC next week, broadcasting every single day. Tim Walls will be giving a speech to the DNC. Obviously, Biden is on Monday. We just learned that Pete Bitta Judge is getting a
primetime slot. I think he's going to be speaking on Wednesday. All of the Democratic celebrities will be there and we'll be there.
To cover it all Wednesday's And that's a setup that Barack Obama's position in two thousand.
And four and he's speaking.
She used to launch Buddha.
Judge is a very strong Obama impression, So we'll see.
He'll be Obama will be speaking as well, obviously, Chicago, so it's sort of his home turf, so we will be there covering it with Crystal and Sager and the whole gang. Make sure to stay tuned for that. But while Washington, d C. Really awaits convention season and then Labor Day and after that it is just the last stretch, the home stretch of this race. Tim Waltz gave a
speech yesterday and let's start Ryan. First of all, could you tell us maybe about the significance of Walds talking to this union.
So making one of his first big campaign events, where his first solo campaign event with a union is sending a signal that we love to see. He's speaking at the ask ME conference, which is the federation of what county, state municipal employees, A lot of government workers. These are It's huge though, right national Labor Union makes up a significant part of the backbone of organized labor.
Teachers.
I saw some stat that teachers gave more money than basically any other profession to the Harris Walls ticket after Walls, who was in a teacher's union himself, was named to the ticket. Very reliable democratic voting base. And when it comes to you know, intra union politics, government employees who are in a union are about the most reliable Democratic
votes that you're going to get. But to see him broadly making the case for labor unions generally in such a full throated way is different than we're used to getting from Democrats, even at campaign time, and.
He kind of made a point about that. Let's start with this first clip of Tim Waltz yesterday.
I happened to be the first union member on a presidential tikket it since Ronald Reagan, but rest assured I won't lose my way. Probably should be a few more union members in elected office. President sonders, we might want to work at that. I think I'm looking at some So you heard the story. You knew Vice President Harrips grew up in a middle class family, picked up shifts at that McDonald's as a student. I keep asking this
to make a contrast here. Can you simply picture Donald Trump working at a McDonald's trying to make a mcflurry or something. It's oh, he knows, he knows, as he knows us. He couldn't run that damn mcflurry machine if it touched him anything. So Vice President Harris and I have both had the privilege of joint workers on the picket line.
And it's why as governor I signed one.
Of the biggest packages of pro worker policies in his into law.
In Minnesota.
We made it easier for workers to form unions, We strengthened workers protections, and yes, we banned those damn captive audience meetings for good in Minnesota. Last time I said that at a union meeting, they sued me over. It was the best thing to get sued over I ever sat and.
So Labor Twitter was losing his mind over that, just absolutely loving it.
The captive meetings.
If you've ever been in one's, your boss sits you and your co workers down and they tell you, hey, you may have heard something about this union drive going on in the company.
Let me tell you why. It's such a terrible idea.
And they are incredibly effective. It's a way to dish out a whole bunch of threats to workers. It's a way to spew a whole bunch of lives. Over the years, we've done a ton of reporting where we've just workers often record them and then send them to the press, and it's just absolute, absolute fear mongering and a pack of lies to try to get them to vote down the unions and so for Walls would be so familiar with them to have I don't know the back story
of him getting sued for talking about it. Labor law is wild. You can get sued all over the place for violating it. Oh yeah, which Donald Trump and Elon Musk are finding out.
We can talk about in a second.
But for him to be that kind of familiar with it and also angry about it is.
Super exciting to people.
But what was your what was your reaction to seeing him tell so much about labor story.
Well, yeah, I mean, first of all, I think he's really really good at that. There's no denying it. He's a talented politician. I think he's a good surrogate for her to be able to go to the conference in Los Angeles and speak the language of workers directly to them. He has a lot of energy right now. Also, he feels like, similar to Kamala Harris, he's got that, he's got the vibes right now. You know, he's he's feeling good. They're feeling like they have the momentum, and it shows
in the way that they're speaking. So I think it's a really bad split screen. We're going to get to this in a moment with the Trump elon Musk conversation. I don't know that I agree with the mcfluurry point, because I think it's probably hard for everyone to make it mcflurry.
That's not the one.
Those machines are breaking constantly too. It's not the worker's fault.
Clearly, clearly we all would have problems making mcflurry. Is there's something going on with.
The mix as smart workers like break those machines on purpose so that you don't have to deal with them anymore. But so I also wanted to get your take on this next clip where he tries to thread together his cultural politics, social politics, and imperial material and labor politics. Uh not well, I'm not even gonna like buy us it ahead of time.
Let's just roll.
Why would you think I need your advice to tell me what books I ken and cannot read, or when to have a family or how to have a family, or what religion to worship or how to organize.
You stay in your lane and I'll stay in mind.
That's not that difficult.
So he's taking the freedom and the mind your own business line theme and applying it to labor protections, like don't let don't have the government go in and side with the bosses to squash a union.
I love the effort.
Well, I was gonna say, I have a lot of substantive rebuttals to that, but I guess those are well. I would say, for example, I mean his COVID policies are a huge, huge, they hugely undermind his you know.
Freedom agenda was not a full display during COVID.
Yes, his respect for civil liberty is freedom, like many people's respect for civil liberties. I had a momentary lapse, and understandably at first, you know, given the level of the emergency and what we didn't know, but then continued on into the future. So I think that's you know, that would be one big subsant of her bottle. Another one would be tim nobody's telling you that you can't
read these weird porn books. They're just saying, like, please keep them out of my child's library, meaning you stay in your lane and stop putting these like weird books in these libraries. Is K through twelve K through twelve libraries, And we've talked about this a lot before, but those are just like two off the top of my head that I would say. What I was going to mention though, is I think my substance of her bottles are sort of less important in the context of the question you asked,
because politically, I think it's really smart. I think in America, anytime you can successfully make the sort of get off my or get out of my lane, stay in your lane, mind your own damn business, anytime you can successfully energetically and sharply make that argument as a politician, it's really powerful because that's kind of the American spirit.
There you go, stay in your lane.
There you go, not you you can swear.
I'll stay in my lane.
I love, but I do love the effort to at least talk about organized labor and workers in the same context as the culture war, because the culture wars has
for so many years been used to distract away from it. Yeah, and to try to connect those two things to say, Look, these same people that are coming after your books and coming after you in the doctor's office are also going to come at you in the workplace and are going to make it impossible for you to freely organize together and demand more dignity and protection and higher wages.
Which are so interesting because again on the right, there's the sense that the wealthy class, the sort of billionaire, multi multimillionaire class that donates to political campaigns, the senses they have no interest in the culture war. It's not true of every billionaire, of course. And what Wats is using is those sort of powerful interests who are very much into the red meat of the culture war and tying them together politically because they also happen to be
the same people that are anti union. I mean, it's it's the it is that that is correct that some of those wealthy, powerful interests really are. You know, I think there aren't many of them that really want to lean hard into the culture war, but some of them do. And if you can tie that together, I do think it's powerful. And another thing I just wanted to mention,
real there's something there. And another thing I want to mention is that him speaking the language of organized labor so fluently and I think personally reminds me a lot of how conservatives feel about JD. Vance, and that he speaks the language of the new right, the kind of the conservative movement, not the old conservative movement, but new people like you can he uses the same words he's reading singing from the same hymn book is probably the
best way to put it. And it's kind of interesting that both VP picks have that connection with such a part of a big part of their bases.
It comes right after this massive own goal I think what I would call a massive own goal from Donald Trump during Elon Musk's interview. Let's let's roll this clip that this is the one I've seen circulating the most. But that might just be my own ecosystem. But Democrats were, I think, over the moon when they heard this from from these two billionaires, and we're among the first to start pushing it around. So here's here's Elon Musk and Donald Trump.
I mean, I look at what you do.
You walk in, you want to do it.
They go on strike.
I won't mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and use it.
That's okay.
You're all gone.
You're all gone.
So every one of you is gone, and you are the greatest.
You would be very good.
Oh you would love it. Speaking of Ronald Reagan, that was a sort of Trump admiring the Reagan and Elon.
Musk uh huh.
And And interesting again because Trump has a significant base of support from members of organized labor like Reagan. Like Reagan, I mentioned on the show earlier that in the nineteen eighty campaign against Jimmy Carter, the Air Traffic Controllers union endorsed Ronald Reagan and then he'd destroyed, like literally destroyed them. And so organized labor has a long memory, and the air traffic Controllers were a reactionary union of mostly like
white guys in their forties and fifties. And if so, if you can imagine that in like the nineteen eighty, like that's that's a pretty right.
Wing like cultural block of voters.
And so that's why they voted against their kind of more obvious material interests in supporting, you know, Jimmy Carter, who would become one vote short of like a labor a union reform bill that it was the most sweeping thing we would have ever had passed in the country. Every thought, oh, we'll get that, we'll get that next cycle, and it never happened, and instead the wave kind of washed the unions back to see. But yeah, so they felt like, you know, Reagan speaking our language culturally, go
with him. And so, but Reagan was smart enough to never say before the election that he was going to fire everybody.
He did it after he won.
Trump and Trump has also now drawn labor complaint from the UAW.
And this, by the way, is a huge not by the way, and Brian, you're like the best person to talk to you about this. This is I feel like this is a pretty huge moment in the campaign. And it felt during that rambling two plus our Twitter conversation or space conversation on X that of a lot of it just was going to fade into the ether and we were never going to remember some of these moments again.
And it didn't break a ton of news, even though they had some interesting tangents that they went down or roads that they went down. But this one actually might really stick because the one thing I said, so I'll get under Democrat skin this election so far, maybe the biggest thing was Sean O'Brien speaking at the RNC. I
mean that was brutal. And Sean O'Brien has now said that doing what Trump lauded in response to his comments, what he lauded Etlon Musk for doing is quote economic terrorism, right, so basically called Trump and economic terrorists.
Yeah, So to fire is first of all, it's illegal
to fire workers who are out on strike. It is also a violation of labor law to threaten to fire workers for going on strike, which is why the UAW, which is trying to unionize some you know, elon musk plants, is filing a labor complaint saying basically, what you have done is you have you have quite rather explicitly, even if you even if Trump said I'm not going to mention the company, like we're all morons here, even if you don't mention the company, it's quite explicit that he's
saying that he's willing to fire workers who try to organize a union at a tesla, And so EUEW files a complaint, and it makes makes Sean O'Brien and the teamsir's president look like a fool for having given Republicans that that olive branch. And it was such an unnecessary thing to say, like right, he's he's riffing, just riffing, like who does who? Who did that line appeal to? That was already not one hundred percent in both of their camps, But.
He was just riffling. They were literally just having a conversation, which is such.
An unusual thing to have a conversation, I know, but it must credit. It was he said, like a conversation is going to be more revealing.
And sure enough they're both clearly people who are more interested in having these like literal conversations than reading off of script. To their credit, that sometimes is not great for their campaigns or their businesses or whatever, but it does give us as the public good insights psychologically into how they are approaching these issues, which Trump it's again it's about strength, right, like, just you're done with them. You're the you're the boss, and you're gonna act like
the boss. But uh, the Sean O'Brien thing. I wonder Bryan if this antagonizes him because he took so much heat for speaking at the RNC and now he gets, uh, this comment from Trump looks like it makes him look like a fool. To your point, so does he I mean, does he come out even harder? Does he start pushing against Republicans and against Trump? Because now he's in this position, he's probably extremely mad about it.
I think what he'll do is he'll read the tea leaves because he was making us several plays here, you know, one is there was a there was a there's an understanding, whether it's actor or not, among a labor unions that if the Trump, if a Trumpet, the second Trump administration comes into office, that there will be an effort to take on organized labor, to dismantle you know, organized labor
power in a significant way. And so O'Brien was trying to get ahead of that and say, okay, you can go after everybody else, but don't go after the team stirs, because look, you love the teams, we had hard hats, we're good for you. And look we didn't even support the Democrats in the election, So you know, please don't put up us up against the wall with everybody else. That was the one path, separate path was his own internal politics within the Teamsters Union.
He's up for reelection. There are a lot of Trump supporters in.
The Teamsters Union and there still will be, of course, definitely still will be. And so he wants to be able to say to them, look, I'm not a partisan, you know, well, SJW.
Democrat.
I'm Teamsters first. If Trump is our guy, I'm with him. If Democrats are the better path for us to go for our workers, That's where I'm going to go, so therefore you should re elect me. In some ways, this is a gift to him because now when he goes back to support supporting Democrats if he does in this election, which he'll do if he thinks they're going to win, is my guess, he can tell the Trump supporters in the union, I tried and then they threatened to fire
striking work. What do you want me to do? Like I he crossed the red line. That's economic terrorism. I can't support that. So I think he actually, while it's humiliating for him politically, it makes his situation less less tenuous then and less difficult than it was because I think a lot of people in labor recognize that he is in that tricky spot because of the because of the significant support for Trump within the Teamsters union.
Right.
And that's a really interesting point because that's not going anywhere. The significant support among teamsters for Trump, the rank and file is not going anywhere because.
They'll be mad at that comment, but they'll be like, it's Trump, it's Trump.
Because for the reason that so many rank and file teamsters, other union members, blue collar workers, Obama Trump voters in the rest belt decided to vote for Donald Trump a some of them in the Republican primary, but b in
the general election over Hillary Clinton. Really to your point about like the idiate material interests, that's part of it, but it's also this this sense that he understands them and you know, here's the needs of people outside of the Beltway, and you know, we could have a full shift debating that.
But that's a that it's a broader the broader support.
And right when I say that, I mean the Trump diehards, right, like if you're already a Trump diehard, like he said he can shoot somebody in Fifth Avenue, Yeah, you can fire them, yeah, and.
We're like, you know what he had to do.
This is not the persuadable demographic. Right at this point, Ryan Iran, obviously we can put this next tear sheet up on the screen. This is from the Times of Israel. Biden has said that Iran is expected to push off attacking Israel if the Gaza cease fire deal is clinched. This is a big development that was unfolding yesterday. President Biden said that yesterday, wouldn't you make of that as a kind of was unfolding in the last twenty four hours.
So the politics of this and the geopolitics of it are fascinating.
As we're watching this unfold or not unfold.
You've got, again, you've got domestic Iranian domestic politics. You've got the kind of bilateral politics between Iran and Israel. You've got the relationship between the US and Iran. You've got Iran in Russia. All of this coming into play. Iran figuring out how best to balance this while they weigh how and whether to respond to Israel killing Ismael Hania in the suburbs of Tehran, which they have vowed
that they are going to respond to. A couple of days ago, there were some some threats made that they were going to kind of do all out attacks on US forces in bases in Iraq and Syria, which again raised the question of why on Earth are their US forces in bases in Iraq and Syria. Fortunately for them, that did not come to pass, and now we're getting this reporting that the cease fire negotiation track is playing a role into Iran's consideration of how to respond. Iran
recently had a presidential election. An elected a moderate who ran on strengthening ties with the United States. Immediately after that, Israel did his attack in Tehran, and people understood that to be a way of forcing the new president into a kind of armed confrontation with Israel in the United States. And just as Hamas's attack on October seventh was a provocation intended to get Israel to overreact and then undermine the global standing of Israel, and they succeeded in doing
that because Israel took debate. Like if you remember, at the time, we're saying, like Hamas once to do everything you're doing right now.
They didn't.
I don't think they quite guessed that it would be as over the top as it was, but they wanted it an overreaction, like they didn't think that they were going to go into Tel Aviv and conquer it, like it was an attack that was intended to upset the apple cart, bringing a massive attack and then bring global isolation to Israel. Israel did exactly what Hamas wanted them
to do. And so there are factions within the Iranian leadership, including apparently the president who was saying, well, wait a minute, Israel wants us to do some kind of overwhelming direct attack on both inside Israel and you know, hitting US bases in Iraq and Syria, so that then Iran is further isolated and Israel can lay waste to like huge portions of Iran, and then the productive capacity that Iran has in delivering missiles and drones for Russia is degraded.
There's all sorts of things that kind of work out and in the United States benefited for Ron overreacts. So there's a faction within the Ryan leadership to saying, what if we just don't do that, like like we're not actually required to do what our adversaries want us to do. At the same time, there's a hard right in Iran that is saying, no, you are required too, because you're weak.
You can't.
You know, they're picking off IRGC leaders are picking off Hesbola, mid to high level people constantly. They killed Hania right there in Tehran. Your your weak little response back in April clearly didn't do any deterrence. So you need deterrence. That's the hard right argument. Then comes in the Hamas sees fire negotiations. They say, and that I think gives
a way for this debate to be resolved. Inside Iran, they say, Okay, you know what the hardliners say, Look, we don't even think that Nenyahu's serious about these talks, So go ahead. If you can reach a cease fire deal, then go ahead.
And so Biden was in New Orleans and he replied to a comment from reporters about whether he expected a retaliatory strike would be pushed off if there were or entirely prevented if there was a ceasefire deal that was reached. When talks zoom later this week, he said, quote, that's my expectation. Quote, We'll see what Iran does and we'll see what happens if there is any attack. Yes, we will. And then he said quote, but I'm not giving up.
Now we can put the next tairsheet up on the screen, and this is from the.
One other point.
Yeah, before we go go to that one. Hamas is sort of not showing up for these talks that are supposed to start in Doha tomorrow or in Cairo.
But they all of their people are.
In Doha and are right near the negotiators that they would need to be talking to. What Hamas has said is that they're willing to accept the deal that the US and Israel put forward in July.
They'll take the deal, just implement the deal.
They don't want to go back to ground zero, start over, to go back to square one, because they said net Yah, who's not serious? Like if netyah, who's serious, here's his deal, we accept it. And so that's the kind of contours of this of these negotiations.
Yeah, that's helpful because Biden can say that all he wants and who knows what actually plays out. So the next headline, this is from the Associated Press. US approves twenty billion dollars in weapons sales to Israel amid threats of a wider Middle East war. So, according to the Associated Press, this is news from yesterday. The US has approved twenty billions in arms sales to Israel, including scores of fighter jets and advanced air to air missiles, as
the State Department announced on Tuesday. So Congress was notified of the impending sale, which includes more than fifty f fifteen fighter jets, advanced medium range air to air missiles, one hundred and twenty millimeters tank ammunition, and high explosive mortars and tactical vehicles. According to the Associated Press, So again happening in the context of peace negotiations or shease fire negotiations resuming later this week.
Wonderful news for property values in northern Virginia and suburban Maryland. Always is DMV, stays, stays undefeated.
We're doing great.
Another twenty billion for us, which whether that's twenty billion that we're just printing and then sending the Israel and Israel sends it back to us in order to pump up those real estate values northern Virginia, who knows.
But that's the that's the game we're playing here.
Twenty twenty six time frame on these es.
Yes, twenty twenty six is generous, like this is long term stuff, and so.
The Jets comprise the biggest portion of the twenty billion in sales, with the first delivers expected in twenty twenty nine.
Right exactly. These are not these are not for the immediate war effort. These are this is an expression of our long term commitment to Israel's quote unquote security, and these are weapons that will be there to replenish whatever weapons they use between between now and Yeah. It's and one more signal of how tight the relationship, you know, remains.
And Ryan, maybe you can walk us through these next elements. This is a tweet from Ryan B. Three we can put up on the screen some of the some examples of the ongoing human rights situation in the Middle East. Right now, what are we looking at?
I just wanted to share a couple of these, couple of these developments. So a doctor Jumana frid Abu al Comsan, had twins on I guess you know, not not long ago, last last week.
There's she's.
As as is very typical. She received a ton of messages like what a miracle. And you can imagine what an absolute miracle it must be to be to be able to take twins to term in Gaza at this moment and deliver them successfully. We have twins, and it's like the amount of nutrition you need to you know, successfully give birth to twins, even if even if they if if it's.
Thirty weeks, thirty four weeks, thirty.
Six weeks, the photos of them, they look beautiful, they look healthy. The father and goes out to go pick up the birth certificates and while he's out, there's a precision strike on their room and the mother and the and the twins both both killed. Yeah, there's a lot more that people can find if they want to go look about this particular incident, and it's and it's just
it's it's it's one incident. It is it's three lives in among the tens of thousands that have been killed by the IDEF in the in this war.
But it's just it just hit that much harder because it's such.
A at once relatable experience, but then you know, such an absolutely kind of otherworldly experience, just just utter utter devastation.
Uh.
At the at the U n yes Un yesterday, the the the there was an emergency session called to basically to debate and condemn Israel for the massive attack on a school recently, which included a a speech by the Israel's representative to the United Nations which people can find
as well. That is one of the most bizarre things you've ever seen, where he he starts screaming at the other representatives of the United Nations saying that Israel is the most moral country in the world, which is the most moral He just keeps repeating it, most moral country in the world, most moral country in the world, which if they were not carrying out this genocide, would even be an odd thing to say to other countries.
What what what? What are you even talking about? The most moral country
What?
in the world.
And then he just and he says, you hear that Palestinian representative and this guy represents terrorists. Meanwhile, all of this is unfolding, plus a nationwide debate about whether you can rape detainees. It's it's like utterly divorced from reality. There and there was, there was, there was one other and I didn't want to let pass. But I have to put my glasses on for this and we can put the last one. But this absolutely harrowing piece that uh that units to Rawei, who's actually written for us
over at a drop site as a Palestinian reporter. He he just takes this, uh, this post and translated it and he reads, I came to search for the remains of my son, who had gone ahead to the dawn prayer. Some one gave me a bag of twenty three kilograms and said, this is your son.
Bury him.
As I carried him, I remembered a day when I was coming back with him from the market carrying a heavy bag. He in complete filial piety, asked to carry it for me. He went to his mother happily boasting of his manhood, singing in front of his siblings and teasing them that he carried all his weight alone for his father. His siblings embraced him, and his mother prayed
for his long life and goodness. Now once again you precede me with the bag to the house, my son, But how do I convince them that you are the one inside it? That your laughter which used to fill the house, your thin arms that used to use to spar with your siblings, your head that used to rest on your grandmother's lap, and your feet that tirelessly searched for water, all.
Have become one in this bag.
When your mother asks me in a bitter gosen tone, do you know if there is any electricity?
Abu salah?
Where will I store all this, all the goodness we give to the neighbors? How will I tell her, my son, that what's in this bag is not suitable for charity, and that twenty three kilograms of.
Remains is our share of death this week?
A lot of the casualties of that strike on the school were children, and one of the more harrowing images that came out of it was so many parents, because the children had been so dismembered and destroyed by the strike, just picking up their children in bags and this so this is this father's remembrance of it?
Brin. Actually, you're going to keep sharing right now in our next block here some awful and tragic details.
What's unfolding while everybody is well, Actually, while the focus is actually waning, I think on Gaza and the entire region, even as it gets closer to a regional war. Meanwhile, in the West Bank, the crucible of the conflict, the property property annexation, continues.
We'll talk about that next.
A few weeks ago, I asked Breaking Points and Counterpoints viewers to help support the launch of the new independent, nonprofit news outlet I was launching with my old colleague Jeremy Scahill, and a humbling number of you did.
So.
The launch has gone so well that I can now announce the hiring of another former colleague, Martaza Hussein, who you've seen here on the show. We've also hired The Intercept's former deputy editor, Osca Renter, and it plans to continue growing as long as as the support keeps growing. So if you still want to subscribe with the Counterpoints discount, go to drop sitenews dot com slash Counterpoints, where you
can find the link down below. Now yesterday we published a new report by Martaza looking at a single conflict over a West Bank home just outside of Bethlehem. With all of the focus on Gaza Iran and the software in the North with Hesbola, it's easy to lose sight of what's happening in the West Bank. A creeping de facto annexation property property. The fight over the family home of Alice Caisia has been heating up the past week. So the family property once hosted not just their home,
but a restaurant they had built. That was before settlers vandalized and demolished it. Now it is home to a makeshift campground the family guards fiercely while Israeli settlers, with the active help of the IDF, have managed to squat on a portion of it. The family isn't leaving without a fight, and their stand has drawn the support of some Israelis and Western activists who are hoping their presence
will slow down the process. So the family has gone to court numerous times to try and assert legal protection over the property, only to see those claims ignored on the ground by settler activists.
Guarded by Israeli soldiers.
So the poster on the right here in this photo was a blown up version of the property record showing that they are the proper owners.
So a number of representatives.
From the group of Combatants for Peace, which is a mixed group of former Israelian Palestadian combatants turned solidarity activists, have attempted to physically blocked settlers from displacing the Kaisia family from their property. In recent days, armed soldiers have arrested demonstrators or physically driven them off the site. Meanwhile, more settlers have arrived to have vandalized the Caissia's remaining property, including a statue of the Virgin Mary owned by the
family that was found smashed at the site. Not that it should matter, by the way, that these are Christian Palestinians. In video from the property shared with drop site, groups of settlers guarded by IDF soldiers can be seen mocking the family and activists who have come to defend them, while trying to break into a gate surrounding their land.
So last Friday, Amato Sisson, an activist from New Jersey with the solidarity group Fazzia, joined fellow demonstrators near the West Bank village of Beta, not far from the Kaisia home. In an interview with Martaza after being discharged from the hospital, Sissone said he was taking part in a quote protective presence exercise aimed at defending Palestinian citizens living in the West Bank from settler and military violence. The IDF began firing live rounds at them and they ran into a
nearby olive grove. It was then that he felt what he said was a quote, blunt impact in the back of his leg. He initially thought hit him hit by a tear gas canister. It turned out to have been a live bullet which entered his thigh and exited from the front of his leg. And video of the incident provided to drop site you can see his friends and fellow activists carrying him here away from the olive grove and toured a pickup truck which would then take him
to a hospital in Nablis. We asked the State Department for comment on Sassan's shooting and got the following statement quote, We are aware of these reports involving a US citizen in the West Bank and are in contact with local authorities to gather more information. We are greatly concerned when any US citizen is harmed overseas. And work to provide consular assistance. We re it I can't even say this one. We reiterate our advice to US citizens to reconsider to
the West Bank. Over the past few months, there has been an increase in extremist violence and military activity. Due to privacy considerations, we have no further comment unquote. So after being shot, Saesone was treated and discharged from the hospital in Nablis. He was lucky the bullet that struck his thigh did not hit any major arteries or bone,
and he's expected to recover now. While the shooting has gotten zero attention in the US, it did get some coverage in the local Israeli Pressed, where a spokesperson for the IDF said troops had quote used riot dispersal means and fired live rounds in the air to disperse a quote gathering in the area near the settlement outpost. The statement added that quote a report was received regarding a foreign national who was accidentally injured by the riot dispersal
means and was evacuated to the hospital unquote. A number of Americans have been killed or wounded by the IDF in recent years, including both Palestinian citizens living in or
visiting the West Bank and US activists like Sason. Earlier this month, the US government announced that it would not pursue Leahy Act sanctions against an Israeli military unit, the Netsa Yehuda Battalion, implicated in the death of an elderly Palestinian American man Omar Asad, who died after being bound and left exposed to the elements by soldiers from the unit. Two Palestinian American teenagers have also been killed in separate shooting incidents by the IDF in the West Bank since
the start of this year. The US government has taken halting steps in recent months the sanction particularly violent settler leaders. The sanctions stop some individuals and groups associated with the most extreme fringe of the settler movement from access in the US financial system, while also targeting selected outposts in
the West Bank for blacklisting by banks. The Biden administration, which is being sued over the sanctions by pro settler groups in the US, has hinted that these limited sanctions measures could theoretically expand in the future to target more
of the settlement enterprise. Now, while President Biden has promised US retaliation for violent attacks targeting Americans elsewhere in the region, there has been near radio silence over a steady drumbeat of violent incidents that have affected US citizens in the West Bank at the hands of the Israeli military or settler groups that selective interest and concerned by the US government over violence targeting its own citizens has frustrated his own.
He told Martaza, Biden has said that if any US citizen is attacked, we will respond. Yet there have been
multiple times now this hasn't been the case, unquote. So I guess his own thought that Biden was going to respond to violence against him, he was guilty of a little bit of wishful thinking, but I think he probably knew better, Like I think that he understood going in that if our partners, as the State Department calls him every day at the briefing, if our partners are the ones that do the shooting, you're not really going to hear much about it.
Yeah, I'm sure that's true for me personally. One of the incidents, fairly recent one relative to the scope of this tragedy that started to well, I don't know. I think the US response to it was so pathetic that it started I don't even know what the right way to put it is. But the Shri n Abu Akla killing, the way our government responded to it, Austinian, American, Christian journalists,
all of these different categories. The Americans obviously purport and Israeli is obviously purport on the world stage to care about the responses were just disappointing would be putting it mildly. They were absurd. The responses to what happened, they were absurd. So that these incidents are when you look at how the various governments respond to them, I think tells you a lot about what we put up with in our foreign policy. Right, And that's just a really basic way.
I mean, like that's a thirty thousand foot view, but I mean it's.
Just that that's the view. That's the view that will give you the correct vantage point.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's crazy. And it's the same thing when you talk about how the Biden administration sites the ICC and relation to Putin and it doesn't have any use to the ICC in relationship is real in talking about the rules based international order when it suits you and not when it doesn't. It's just turning a blind eye willfully intentionally. Yeah, it's insane.
Yeah.
And in interviews with my colleague Jeremy, who helped me launch drop site, Hamas officials have said that what's going on in the West Bank was a significant driver of their decision to launch the attacks on October seventh, because the deck is being rearranged, and every time that another large piece of property is taken, there's not a lot of
property left to be taken. Then it becomes that much more difficult than to get to a political resolution, especially when Israel continues to say that the key stumbling block for any agreement is this Palestinian demand of right of return that they get some of the land back.
And so as they continue.
To lose land and continue to be told that there will be no land that comes back in an eventual political process, it makes the political process seem untenable. And there's that old famous saying that like those who make peaceful resolutions tenable make violent resolutions inevitable. Yeah, that's a paraphrase, but it's something like that, But that is what you see going on here.
Yeah, No, that's a really well applied phrase here. And I think what I was trying to say earlier, iss just like Israel is not Israel Palestin has never been one of my top issues. I'm not far from an expert in it. But the propaganda surrounding because we were doing the show actually together and we were covering what happened to shrin Abu Bakla, and normally, because it's not one of my top issues, I just you sort of like, don't dig into you know what's happening.
If I don't have to, people I trust are saying things I'm gonna or just like, you know, don't.
It's not one of my top issues, so I'm not thinking about it all of the time. And because we had to think about it when we were covering it, you're peeling back the layers of the propaganda and it's you know, to me and I know a lot of viewers it's going to sound naive who've been this has been one of their top issues for years and years. But when I was sort of forced to reckon with the propaganda. It's not to say that there's there isn't
crazy propaganda on the other side, because there is. But when I was reckoning with the propaganda from the US and Israel in that case study, it was shocking. It's shockingly bad, which again says naive to people who have been following this for a really long time. But it's never been one of my top issues. And when you're forced to peel back the layers of the Israeli propaganda is insane.
I don't think anybody should ever feel guilty about not knowing something, because nobody is born knowing everything.
Like everybody, everybody our issue area, and everybody comes to things.
You know, it's either either they come to you sometimes or or or you come to them. But for you, it was it was Sharene that really kind of broke through.
Or yeah it was and I think you would probably say this too. The propaganda in that case when you have so many, I mean it was insane. You had the bullet patterns on the trees, you had all of the audio and video analysis, you had all of these categories that both countries claimed to be protective of and revere in one case study. I mean, it was all
everything was wrapped up in that case study. So I think, you know, there have been various incidents over the years and like, oh, yeah, this propaganda's crazy, but that one was just unreal, is all? It was all tied together in such a tragically perfect kind of situation.
Yeah, that's well said, you know, and it takes flexibility and courage to like think things through in a in a plastic way.
So well, your reporting is always so helpful, and I'm loving everything on drop site, incredibly good reporting.
Well, thank you, very very very much, appreciate it, and thank you to everybody else who's supported. It's been really gratifying and encouraging. So it'll be there'll be more of this to come, for sure.
You'll love to see it. Well, not really, but you'll love to see the good reporting.
There you go.
So we actually have the inflation numbers out right now. Just as we were talking, these numbers were released. Ran, should we start with the Republicans been because I know we have an element of that. It's Rick Santali of course, that was already clipped and posted by the official Republican Party x account. Let's row this clip.
Right now for the July consumer price and that headline number coming in as expected, up two tenths of a percent, up two tenths percent on headline number follows yet unrevised down one tent So we went from basically the weakest the biggest negative month over month change, a positive in CPI since COVID for twenty for twenty twenty, and now we're at the level that we haven't seen really since April. We're up at three tens if you look at ex food energy exactly is expected as well, up two tents.
The issue is, of course, it's following one ten, which, just like the last number was comping towards the first several months of COVID.
Okay, so that's the Republican's been immediately upon the numbers being released. But Ryan, let's get into some of these numbers and actually what they are, because it's the first year over year being less than three percent of an inflation increase? Is the CPI here first year over year since March of twenty twenty one, So year over year the first time that it hasn't been over three percent two percent or higher since March of twenty twenty one,
right in the heat of the pandemic. How do you think Wall Street's going to react to this because they were, as The New York Times put it, quote on edge ahead of the CPI being at least which is always the case.
Yeah, and they were this is it beats expectations by a little bit. Last month also beat expectations by a little bit, so that's two months in a row. The big question that Wall Street is going to have, and that all of us are also going to have because it matters to us as well, is whether whether there will be a rate cut next month from the Federal Reserve. But this number seems to move that question to what kind of rate cut.
We're going to have.
Is it going to be a quarter point which is the kind of normal state of affairs for the Fed to cut, or is it going to be a half point cut? And this pushes the possibility of a half
point rate cut closer to closer to happening. I think rates are the Fed sets its current rate, I think five three percent, but a half a half point cut would dramatically would send a dramatic signal that there's going to be more money flowing into the economy, that loans are going to be easier to get, and then you and then you will start to see you know, long you're already seeing interest rates coming down interestingly over the last several months, like thirty year mortgage rates coming down.
This would send mortgage rates significantly down, which means, you know, five hundred to one thousand bucks or more off of a mortgage payment for people who either refinance or purchase at the exact same price.
Do you think that potential do you think the potential rate cuts going to depend on the jobs report September early September, six September.
So that'll play a role, and that'll probably be soft, which means that it probably will not They will probably not have added as many jobs, you knows, as they had in previous months, and that then will further induce the Fed to cut rates. Now, the politics of this are such that Trump is probably going to spend the next several weeks browbeating the Fed not to cut rates. You know, he has said that he wants he wanted a market crash, and he wants no Fed FED rate cuts like in order to help.
His his re election campaign.
And it's delightful for us as political reporters that he just says the stuff out but really that's what that's what all candidates who are opposing the incumbent want.
But he just says it out loud.
You don't need any truth serum, like we never needed mk Ultra, We just needed Trump.
He just says it.
It's all he ever needed.
Tweets it out.
He got his market crash, but then immediately kind of rebounded over the next several days, and so that and that market crash also probably also woke up the FED a little bit. The reporting around Pale's thinking on this the FED share.
Is that he doesn't want the FED.
To appear political by coming in, and it would be Trump will accuse him of being political and accuse him of kind of biasing the.
Electoral results towards Democrats.
If Powell thinks that Democrats are going to win anyway, you know, that kind of gives him more reason because obviously everybody is political. So if he thought when it was Trump versus Biden, and it looked like Trump was going to win like New Mexico and Minnesota and your pal, then you're like, you know what, I'm not going to tick this guy off. But if it looks like Trump's going to lose anyway and you are at you are risking this soft landing that you've been going for, which
is which would be your legacy. Like if he if he can, if he can oversee this spike in inflation around the around the pandemic and then bring the and then bring inflation back down to the two percent range while keeping unemployment at the three to four percent range and not going into recession. That would that would be a legacy for a fed share that you that he would go around and give speeches about and people would write books about.
Him and get some money for those speeches too.
And if but if he holds rates too high for too long, he risks sending the economy spiraling into a recession, which then undermined which then undermindes his whole legacy. But what's interesting about the gopie spin that we played at the top is that that's also true in some ways. Yeah, Yeah, it's a it's a case where what both sides are saying is true.
So you want to run through some of.
This, Yeah, I was gonna say, let's get into that because in this CPI, shelter costs are still going up. So it's a half percent, but that's still significant because that's one place that is absolutely crushing. People will get into that in a moment. New and used cars are going down. That has been a hugely significant expense for a lot of families. Food prices still going up, in
the CPI. Now, if we put this almond up on the screen, it is a long wall stre journal report on basically picking apart where people are still getting hit really hard from inflation and these some of these numbers are truly insane. Car insurance is still up like forty percent, childcare, water, sewer, trash costs, some of these like very essential services still up. Rent and electricity up ten percent. So consumer prices overall since June of twenty twenty two are up six percent.
Car insurance, I think I already went that. Said that one. Shelter costs are rent, I already mentioned that. But shelter overall, it's another metric that they measure separately, still really high. There are things that have gone down, cable shampoo, there are some kind of random places where people have seen cooling. And that's all true. But if you can imagine across the board, I mean, some of these depending on how people live and where they live, it's a little bit uneven.
Some of that matters. And if you're in a city, like childcare super super high in cities right now not going down doesn't show any signs of going down, So it's being experienced differently. In different pockets of the country. But some of these things, like forty percent increase in car insurance prices, almost everybody is feeling I mean just almost everybody's feeling that increases in essential services. Those are things that everybody is feeling, and they're not showing any
signs of going down at all. It's not a good sign that the shelter costs are still increasing, even if it's a slow rate of increase.
So you look at these numbers and you have the answer to the question of why do we have a quote unquote good economy which is low unemployment and low inflation, good market, and then a booming stock market, yet my life is miserable? Like how on earth are all of
those things true? And the reason that they're true is what you what everybody kind of intutally gets rent housing is through the roof, since the pandemic, energy costs, your power bill are through the roof, and car insurance those basically those and you know, food prices have gone up and haven't come down, so like even though they're no longer going up, you know they're up, and wages have
kept up with food prices. But if you throw in rent and you throw in the car insurance, you throw in the electric bill.
You're way behind what you used to be.
And so just looking at some of the BLS numbers from this month, so transportation services, which includes car insurance, ubers and lifts and cabs and all that stuff way up. Still still rolling it eight point eight percent, which is which is rough. And that that is, you know, partly because used cars and trucks and new vehicles were so significantly up, like you said, they're now coming down. So used cars and trucks are down ten point nine percent
year over year, but that's because they went up. They were massive number. The more expensive new and used cars are, the more expensive it is to replace, the more expensive your insurance is now. A bunch of people who watch this show were mad at me for saying that climate change is one of the drivers of why auto insurance has gone up so much in the last couple of years. And this Wall Street Journal article just confirms that once again insurance and maybe the insurance companies are lying and
their data is completely faked and it's fake news. But they say that storms and crazy weather have been a significant drivers in recent years of damage to vehicles and as a result of higher insurance rates. And you can go ahead and say that maybe the storms and all the crazy weather has nothing to do with climate change, but that's not what climate scientists believe, and the numbers are showing what they're showing. I think the rise of
electric vehicles playing a role here too. Like you get in a car accident with an electric vehicle, that's that suckers totaled a lot faster. Plus you cannot underrate the role of what Kia and Hyundi of selling millions of cars that are easy to steal, like this is an undertold story.
Okay, yes, but then also the cities that are wildly over permissive of the stealing of those cars.
That's that's fine, But if you create cars, if you produce cars, should that you could just walk into and drive away?
Yes, they should not have done that and refuse.
To stop doing that after it's called to your attention, Like the number of car thefts that are directly connected to Kia and Hyundai making cars that are easy to steal.
But mostly to the people thieving first and foremost connected to the people stealing the cars that are easy to steal.
Right, But if if you make it harder to steal, So.
To Turment, no question about it.
Like, you tighten that up and they are going to be fewer cars stolen. But it's it's a complete because. And so the other spiraling effect here is as car insurance gets more expensive, fewer people acquire it, even if the loss as you're supposed to have it.
What does that do?
That drives up the cost of insurance for people who do have the insurance because now if you get into a car accident, the chances that you hit somebody that doesn't have insurance have gone up. Yeah, And so like at some point it feels like we're going to need a public option here, like the car insurance public like
because this is going the wrong direction. Because every percentage increase that you have in car insurance costs is going to me in a higher percentage of people without car insurance.
We should do a whole segment, which.
Which then drives car insurance prices higher.
It's interesting, we should we should do a whole segment on that.
So yeah, you're paying Yeah, and if you're not going to solve climate change, then the public option for car insurance. This before we get to property insurance, flood insurance, like which I don't think anybody is going to quibble with me about that being related to climate.
Change, not even Trump, who, in this conversation with Elon Musk said, listen, I'll maybe it'll create more ocean front property.
For me, it's not happening, but it'll create more open flood property.
Yeah, But I mean these So it's to your point about the kind of duality here that the Republican spin I probably shouldn't have even been laughing and mocking the Republican spin because it is tackling something really real. There's
the duality of that and the good news. So it's like there's good news, there's bad news, but overall still just bad news for everybody because there's no sign like, well, it's it's I guess good that we're below three percent since for the first time year of a year since March of twenty twenty one. Yeah, I guess that's that's good news. On the other hand, it's hard to see this kind of was the best way to put it, the Titanic being turned around here, because even these good things,
we don't have an answer to the housing costs. And there's an interesting quote in the Journal article where a guy says, yeah, gas prices are cheaper, but I'm not feeling it in my budget because the other things have gone up. Basically, you know, yeah, gas prices can go down, Cable prices can go down, which I honestly don't even believe. I don't know how they're getting that cable number.
Maybe it's for cable prices went so through the roof because of the pandemic.
That's true. That's true, like cars and yeah.
Because everybody was at home. But the Wall Street Journal article is good and people should read it. And you can, by the way, you can just take the journal article and go to like Not that I would tell anybody to do this because maybe see legal tell them, but it is possible to go to like archive dot i s and put the Wall Street Journal link in there.
And you would never I would never suggest such a thing.
But if you do that, you can find an archived version that goes around the paywall.
But you don't recommend them.
Absolutely, that'd be terrible. Who would ever do such a thing?
Not our viewers, And don't do it to drop site either.
Well drop site. Everything's free there.
That's right, so charitable, man, that's right.
The only thing you get if you subscribe you can comment cool And the goal of that is actually just so we don't have to moderate the comment section, because we figure if somebody is paying to subscribe that they're not going to be a terrible troll in the comments.
Well, as we learn that'd be a weird way to spend your money, but it's.
A good way to do it because, as we learned at the Federalist a few years ago, they will come after you if people say crazy things in your comments and demonetize you, threaten to demonetize you on Google Ads, which basically means you can't run a news business. Do not do that to internet business. Yes, so good. That is a way to do comments.
But the good news, if we're going to finish it on that is if the Fed does lower interest rates and that brings down the price of mortgages, then that can help with rent and housing costs like that.
That is a path out of this.
And if you can make it easier to borrow money, you can build more housing and you have to deal with the NIMBI problem.
But then obviously there's prices elsewhere that get affected by that too, which is why the job support is probably pretty.
Imp right there, right right.
The concern is that if you lower interest rates, the economy is going to grow, Wages will grow, and wages will produce inflation. As Powell has said, the connection between wage growth and inflation is much more tenuous than it used to be in the nineteen sixties, partly because there aren't union like back in the sixties had unions who had contracts and made up like forty percent of the workforce.
That if that they would get raises based on the cost living increased that the federal government produced through It's through these numbers, and so then the federal government would say, well, cost living with seven percent, unions would get an eight percent raise, and then that would drive eight percent the
next year, and then unions would get nine percent. So it had this like feedback effect, which thanks thanks to neoliberalism breaking labor unions, we don't have that feedback effect anymore. So now it actually seems like interest rates play a more significant role. High interest rates play a more significant role in driving prices up and costing people more than they do in slowing or slowing or growing the economy.
Interesting, Yeah, we'll.
See, Yeah, we'll see. The Journal article is worth your time if you're able to read it. Moving on hilarious moment unintentionally on Colbert. The only funny moments that happen on Stephen Colbert Show are unintentional these days. But Caitlin Collins at CNN stopped by Colbert's Late night show, and this exchange was really beautiful. It's really clip.
Trump has kind of been thrown on his heels by this, and he's not really sure how to go after Vice President Harris.
He knew his attack lines on President Biden.
He really has struggled with how to go after someone who's twenty years younger than him, who is.
A different gender, a different race.
It's kind of been this moment where he has not been able to coalesce around a single attack line.
I know you guys are objective over there, that you just report the.
News as it is. Oh, I know a CNN makes.
It, and I know that's supposed to be a lab like I wasn't supposed.
To be, but I guess it is.
It's just brutal. It's so brutal. His audience thinks that he's making a joke, but he was being serious, which reflects so poorly on him in so many different ways, not just on CNN. Obviously it reflects on CNN, but also just on Stephen Colbert's ability to a liver a joke at these days.
Well, maybe he's just such a funny guy that everything he says is funny.
It's always funny.
But yeah, it shows kind of how partisan Colbert has gotten. I know, he didn't understand how that that would land. Zero self aware with his own audience, right, Like.
He's in such a bubble that he that's such a good point. He's in such a thick bubble that his awareness of what's funny and what's not is like shot.
Yeah, and his connection to the way that people are viewing places like CNN. Caitlyn Collins seems to be more in touch, actually, because she seemed to genuinely think that.
He was making fun of her.
Yeah, she was like wait a minute, Yeah, but it's almost more embarrassing the other direction. But she is interesting herself, right, I mean she's she came from conservative media, yeah, in a journey to CNN, which is not It's more common to come from like the New Republic or something, But to become a star, yeah.
That's not too common. Is it to come from conservative.
She's the only person that's done it.
Basically, she Daily Caller she was Yeah.
I don't know if Sagers mentioned this before, but yeah, they were colleagues at The Caller. I knew Caitlin like Caitlin, so she's had a very interesting.
Path talking about her like she's dead. Yeah, well.
The Daily Caller Caitlyn is definitely not no longer with us. But it's almost unheard of. I can't think of anybody who's gone from such a like she was a kind of rank and file caller blogger to such a high level of superstartum at CNN where she's like anchoring primetime shows and going on Colbert. Very much unheard of.
But Robert Costa started the National Review, but he was but he was always a reporter first at National Review, and actually when I was at Tubing Post, we always had like one or two conservatives that would cover conservatives. We tried to hire with John Ward, we tried to hire Costa at one point. He ended up going to the Post instead and since become like a star reporter and he's on TV a lot. Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, definitely, but not like Kaylen Collins.
Oh, he got a Biden interview the other day, Costa did, but he's yeah, similar, A lot of people in conservative media would would grumble heavily about both of them, saying the only way, really, it's actually an advantage to come into liberal media as someone who was at conservative media and was a conservative, because it kind of allows you to bring in all of those sources. And also that's why we would hire them, right, yeah, exactly, and then
also sort of with added credibility, trash the right. So that's the kind of pattern that a lot of people on the right would grumble about. And speaking of the Republican Party and the conservative movements relationship with the so called mainstream media, let's rule this next because I think it'll drive this conversation in an even more interesting direction.
What's your overall advice about like how democrats can sort of what's your take on how democrats can sort of balance the field?
I think the most important thing is not to confer of our all the legitimacy onto the mainstream media as if they're advocating for us. I mean, they are so not on our team that they bend over backwards to show deference to Republicans. I mean, there were I think something like sixty nine Hillary's email stories and the lead up to the twenty sixteen election, and so like, these are people who are not only not on our team,
but they're broadcasting that they're not on our team. And yet we have independent progressive media like Crooked Media, like what I do, and like so many others in this space, who are showing that we are willing and able to pick up the mantle for where the media is dropping the ball. And we have to be able to be
able to combat what the right has done. I mean from the days of Rush Limbaugh all the way to today with Fox News and Oan and Newsmax and Daily Wire and just the the vast ecosystem of the right.
We have to be able to push back.
And by relying solely or only legitimizing mainstream media sources, we're not going to get there.
Yeah.
I don't even think that they should be on our team because.
They're like that.
Look, it's their their job is to report the news. Their job is not to help Democrats want elections.
No kidding, right, no kidding?
He yeah, and John Favreau there is is right.
I think they shouldn't be, but it is interesting that that is a that counts as an insight right in that world.
Because.
It shows that there is this real dynamic.
And you were listening to Brian Tyler Cohen, by the way, if you weren't with guy without the shirt, yeah, hit button. You're damn sure he was down like three buttons deep like it was we were seeing.
Might have been four buttons even. Yeah, yeah, maybe that's a new.
Thing, Sager. This is probably what made Soger sick. This is what sent him to sick bad.
But yeah, there's this there's this unspoken view among a lot of liberals that because the media is a liberal institution in the kind of mill sense like that it is without a without a democratic, democratic, small d government, not an open In an open society, and a liberal society, you need a free press. The free press cannot operate
under an authoritarian regime, you know. Therefore, in this contest that they see between authoritarians and liberals, non authoritarians liberals in the old school sense, the media ought to be partisans on their behalf because it is it should be in their self interest, yes, to maintain an open, democratic society that allows for the free press to continue to exist like that.
That.
Plus then there's this cultural allegiance where you can it doesn't seem weird that one brother is a an anchor and the other brothers the governor of New York. That that's like that, that the politics of that kind of overlap.
And it didn't seem weird to anyone, by the way, like that was happening at CNN for a long time. He was covering his brother and it just didn't really upset anyone until COVID.
But Democrats should also understand that, yes, while while there are all these like cultural overlaps and political overlaps, and while they're like going gaga over Kamala the last couple of weeks in ways that must be infuriating to you and or actually probably not because you're used to it.
It's on another level.
Though it is kind of on another level. But you also can't rely on.
Them like you know, they're they're they're in their own interest. I mean, this is their own estate.
I think this is.
Interesting that jexpose these two clips, by the way, where you have Colbert's audience laughing at the idea that CNN is just the facts, totally objective, because they assumed that was a joke and the pod I guess Favreau is right, so I shouldn't I shouldn't, you know, But he probably makes the same argument about the Clinton email stories, whining about media being anti left. It's so laughable. It's so laughable.
There are moments of sanity in the media or clarity in the media where the sort of old if it bleeds, it leads profit motive or certain journalists like Ken Vogel is just a fantastic journalist and he is going to report out any scoop that comes his way.
He's at the New York Time. Guys broke the Hunter Biden story last night.
He's so good. He's so good. And that still happens in corporate press, like there are still flashes of excellent journalism and corporate press. But every time there are people like Brian Tyler Cohen have this, they want it. They demand the authoritarianism of the press. Not reporting on Hillary Clinton's email scandal would have been an authoritarian collusion between the media and powerful interests. That's what he's demanding for The New York Times. And they don't see it as authoritarian.
They see it as fair because their idea of what's newsworthy and what's not. And that's why this collusion, whether it's between Republicans on issues like Israel or Ukraine and the press and the Pentagon, that's why these relationships should absolutely terrify people. Or it's Democrats on partisan questions like Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris being drawn, as Trump said, like Milania on the cover of Time, that is terrifying.
And to be to see it through the lens that Brian Tyler Cohene is very common among Like the other funny thing he said was that he's saying they're broadcasting that they're not on our team. Yeah, first of all, I mean they aren't really doing that. If you saw the Time magazine cover, they're not really doing that at all.
The different coverage of like the tax on tips. I don't know if you've seen any of the split screen coverage of how the media covered Trump's no tax versus how they cover Kamala Harris is like it's just so obvious. But he's also saying now that independent quote progressive media like Crooked is picking up the mantle of the New York Times. That's the That is what he just said, that independent media like independent progressive media like Crooked is
picking up the mantle of the New York Times. That is insane. They're not doing anything like what the Daily Wire or conservative media is doing. They're just talking on a podcast.
They're not reporting right that that is true.
And Ken Vogel's beat over at the Times has always been big money influence, and he he did a lot of great reporting on the Coke Coke Network back in the day and other kind of right wing billionaires well also Soros and others on the left. Back when he was doing a lot of that Coke reporting. If you noticed, he was on cable news all the time. Since he started doing the Hunter Biden reporting, I don't think I've seen him on cable like.
A single time.
And so his story last night, I think is going is going to infuriate Republicans again in this but not his fault. So basically what he reported is that the Times he through the time has been suing the State Department for public records related to Hunter Biden's potential influence peddling with the State Department. And the way that the Freedom of Information Act works now is you need to sue like if you don't have a lawyer and that's
why it's costly to do investigative reporting. Nowadays, you can't basically no longer file a foya and get it returned to you like that.
Those days are just gone.
So you file a foyer, they basically reject or don't really fulfill your foya.
Then you take them to court.
After you take them the court, they start dribbling out bits of information to satisfy the angry judge who's like, you're not following the law. And so that's what the State Department was doing with this foyer request that The Times through Vogel had put in, dribbling out bits of information, and then they moved. They said, we've given you everything we have. This case is closed. Times suit again said no,
you have not. We know that you haven't given us everything you have because we have the laptop and here are these things that are in the laptop that would be responsive to our foya that you haven't given us yet. So we know that, So what else have you not given us? So judge is like, all right, keep giving him stuff. Then Biden analys he's stepping down. And one week later they give the handover a new trunch of
documents and in that tranch. Vogel had been looking for something that this State Department official and who had worked in Romania had done. But before he was in Romania, he'd worked in Italy and happened to find a letter from basically from Hunter Biden to the Attack ambassador saying, can you set up a meeting? Help me set up a meeting with the Bearisman executives and this Tuscany dude
because they want to do geothermal. Apparently Tuscany is like the place to do geothermal, and the Commerce Department guy inside the embassy is like a little bit nervous, like we want to be polite here, but like you got to love these bureaucrats. They get that and they're like, no, this is not how this is. They know it's not
supposed to work like this. The letter was completely redacted, so we don't know precisely how Hunter phrased and what he asked for, but we do know from other emails inside the laptop that that they were that Bearisman was leaning on Biden Hunter Biden to get them a meeting to get this deal going in dusk Tuscany.
The deal never happened.
Yeah, but like that, like that's what you that's what you pay somebody like Hunter Biden for like make this meeting happen.
Yeah, and Crooked Media is not going to report on that, like give me a break. They're not going to do the Ken Vogel legwork. And I obviously I kind of we are very supportive of independent media. I think podcasting is an important part of journalism now, no question about it. But to say that Crioket Media is the progressive, independent outlet that is helping pick up the mantle, that's the word that he used there, that The New York Times is not that The New York Times is like somehow
abandoning the mantle of quote being on the team. It's just such a bizarre They're not even progressive. They're just corporate hacks. And it's again, it's not like I don't think conservative media is perfect. I think conservative media has all kinds of problems. But the Cricket guys are just they're just partisan. They won't even say it's.
An interesting point. They're independent in the sense that they have their own independent source of revenue from their basically ads that they run in there, from the users who
pay for their product. And so that gives them an independence from the party structure, and they used that during the Kamala Harris Joe Biden they should should Biden's point to really go hard and calling on Biden to step down now and then, and they came under like fierce attacks from the party establishment wing, the wing of the
party established that wanted Biden to stay in. They toned it down for a day or two, but then they came roaring back, and I think that way they came roaring back probably because they got word that like other elements of the establishment like Nancy Pelosi and Obama were actually which you know, they come from Obama world, were
supportive of where they're going. So they and they took a lot of flag from their own listenership because their listeners were these like Rider die Biden people now who are who never would admit it for a second that they were rid or die Biden.
But they only flipped.
To be fair, they only flipped on Biden as soon as presumably their boss ideologically Obama flipped on Biden. It wasn't before, it was after the debate. And it's true that they were bucking what Biden himself said, but they only flipped after it became okay, and they made it even more okay. But presumably they were they flipped after they were hearing from other people. The highest echelance of the Democrats don't.
Yeah, I don't know how in touch they are with Obama on a regular basis that world, but yeah, Obama's going to still call those shots. Yeah yeah.
And they're also not entirely independent.
Uh.
The George Soros Management Fund has a minority stake in Kirktmedia, which is kind of interesting, Like they got a big investment.
From his Oh that's right, that's right, the for profit wing.
Yeah yeah, yeah yeah.
But last point on the on the Times thing, the so anybody who has common sense is going to look at this and like, oh, the State Department held this until Biden dropped out, and then once Biden dropped out,
they agreed to release it. Vogel reports that his understanding is that they had actually already signed off on releasing this a couple of weeks before Biden dropped out, and that the State Department moves so ridiculously slowly that they would not be capable of pulling off a conspiracy of that level of like, oh, Biden's gone Okay, now you.
Get Vogel with documents.
But and so I say that, and so everybody can know that have that information. But I also don't think they deserve any benefit of doubt because it was their own slow walking that got them in the position to get accused of this malevolent behavior. So I don't actually think it was specifically malicious around this precise conspiracy, but I think it was definitely driven by them slow walking public information that would be damaging to the administration in general.
And so so you don't get a get out of scandal free card because your malevolence was only on a gneral basis and not in a specific basis. You're still acting in a malevolent fashion against the public interest and against the clear statute that says that you need to turn this information over and stop making us take you to court all the time.
Yeah, the vocals reporting is fantastic on all of this stuff. Highly recommend and it was.
Nice to see them The Times actually down this. I think you can criticize the Times for The Times sent out an alert on your iPhone, sent out an email breaking news like really spiking the football and celebrating Vogel scoop which I do not think they would have done if Biden were still running, and I think anybody and I think that's a reasonable suspicion. Yeah, that's an interesting like all of a sudden, now you're celebrating vocals reporting again, Yeah, and burying the guy for years.
Seriously, seriously, Well that does it for us. On today's edition of Counterpoints, Brian's going to be back here tomorrow. That's the plan.
That's the plan. Yes, you because you've got on hard stuff to do.
We're not we're not trying to do a left wing take over the show, but when we can, we're going to see see the moment like the Bolsheviks that we are.
Well, you know, it's actually just such a good time for that too. I said, the last time you and Crystal did show together, what wasn't the last time, but you did it one together a couple of weeks ago after buying stepped off the ticket, And it was also because I couldn't do it, and it was perfect timing that. But this is too, because it's going to be the last show before the DNC and.
We'll all be at the DNC, so we planned it that way.
I was, that's what I was going to say just a republics no conservatives.
Today, but I will be with O our lib team at the d n C, so hopefully we'll have all kinds of fun conversations there. You guys are staying in like a frat house basically, so you know Sager, Ryan and producers Mac and Griffin will be well rested.
Well, that's why the show is going to start later, several hours later than normal, So don't expect in your inbox at eleven. All the more reason to go to Breakingpoints dot com and get a premium subscription because you're going to want to get it an hour earlier because it's going to be pretty late when we're out at the DNC.
Yeah, and the reason for that is basically, at those conventions, the heart of this stuff starts happening in the afternoon and especially in the evening.
So that's the actual reason.
That's the actual reason. But we'll go with your reason, all right, So make sure to stay tuned for Ryan and Crystal previewing the DNC a little bit tomorrow, and then we will be on the ground in Chicago all of next week and are excited to share some really fun and important coverage with you guys then all right, see you later.