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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All right, Welcome to Counterpoints, Happy Wednesday.
Emily Drishinski, joined by my co host Ryan Graham, who is once again giving us a little bit of a French dispatch.
Ryan, it seems like you're enjoying the sun.
I really am. It's pretty lovely over here. I recommend it to people.
Well in DC.
August is known as a very slow news month. That is increasingly not the case as the years go by, but especially not this year. We're going to start with the big news out of Ohio last night, where a referendum gives us some insight, first of all, into how the issue of abortion is playing politically and to where the political fortunes of a major, major, major abortion amendment to the Constitution in the state of Ohio could stand going forward later this year.
We're going to talk about a huge shakeup, very significant.
Ron DeSantis has fired his campaign manager two months into his campaign. There's all kinds of stuff to talk about there. We're going to talk about Davis Bacon. I'm sure Ryan has all kinds of thoughts on that we are going to talk about. We're going to do a little bit of an update on the economy and some really I think troubling numbers when it comes to personal debt and
where that standing, credit card debt and the like. What that says about the future of the economy, the immediate future of the economy.
We're going to dive into.
That Montgomery brawl on the riverfront down to Alabama. There's some stuff to break down there, and we'll have the video for you as well. And I'm going to talk about actually the political fortunes of porn Hub, which aim to be waning. Ryan has a big update for us too that'll be posted later because it's breaking news. But other than that, Ryan, anything to add here.
Yeah, Well, I mean, first of all, looking forward to talking about the Battle of Montgomery.
This is watching those videos.
It brought me back to the drunken mayhem of the kind of rock hall boat docking contest. If you've ever been to that on the Eastern Shore, you know how wild it can get. Spending all day on the boat drinking can can lead to you to make some pretty bad decisions. And these that group of white dudes made some decisions that managed to get the entire country united behind them. So it's really glorious to see, you know, American unity, everybody agreeing that those guys got probably not.
Everything that they deserved.
We're going to talk about the legal repercussions for them as well.
Well.
But as you guys remember from last week, we were talking about the biggest, biggest election that was going to happen over the next couple of months was going to be in Ohio. You know, where Republicans had tried to use the sleepy August vacation time where everybody's out at the French riviera relaxing, not back.
The people, all the people the French rivi era, and.
So they're not back in Ohio to vote for to support abortion rights, that was the thinking of Republicans. Instead, you had turnout like you, like I was going to say, like that you could never expect, but we already saw it in Kansas. You know, Republicans went for the same thing in Kansas, thinking that in the summer they'd get a you know, a sleepy off your election and their core supporters would be energized to come out and the Democrats and an abortion right supporter wouldn't.
Instead.
I don't have the exact numbers in front of me, but the last I saw it was something like you had a few were the two million people vote in the primary in twenty twenty two that had US senators, governors, you know, you know, high level officials on the ballot for.
This seven double that. Yeah, the turnout in twenty twenty two was seven point nine percent straight wide.
They almost doubled that.
It feels like maybe eighty percent increase over that more than two million people pushing three perhaps almost a million absentee votes and a resounding victory. And to be clear, this was not this It was not specifically on abortion rights. The question was in November and going forward, should you
need sixty percent to amend the Ohio Constitution. There will be an abortion rights measure on the ballot in November that is pulling at around fifty eight or fifty nine percent, and so this was understood to be a proxy for that coming referendum, and the latest numbers have it up about fifty seven forty three. You know, pretty landslide victory. You know what, what did you make of the results last night?
So this is sort of tentatively what we predicted last week. We said it was really hard to tell with some of these elections, especially a smaller referendum, because you actually never know where turnout is going to fall when we're talking about elections. Was seven point nine percent turnout as was the case last year, you just don't know. The money was pretty evenly divided in this race, but it was overwhelmingly from out of state each group. So if
you were yes, yes was the conservative side, No? Was the liberal side?
Yes was?
I think it was like fourteen percent versus thirteen percent in Ohio the contributions in total according to some analyzes, early analyzes. And what's interesting about that, it was essentially
the focus of both sides. Both sides were claiming that they were the bulwark against out of state special interests that were trying to dramatically change Ohio, and actually it was dueling out of stage special interests, and as we discussed last week, the conservatives in this case, we're in the unusual position of wanting to change the constitution instead of defending the status quo as conservatives often do. They were actually trying to change the constitution of the state
of Ohio. And you know, I'm not saying the motives were pure. I'm saying I think sixty percent is a reasonable threshold, more reasonable threshold than fifty percent to change a constitution, although we probably disagree on that, but clearly, clearly the intention here was not about preserve or you know, shoring up the Ohio Constitution. Otherwise they could have had
this vote any other time. It was very specifically, you know, tied to the abortion vote, which is also being We have some video of this that we should we should run as we get into this here, but it was
very specifically tied to the question of parents' rights. So it's being broadened, and even the Washington Post has admitted sort of the language of the the that folks are voting on in November could be interpreted in a way that gets into what's taught in classrooms and what teachers are able to do, and what doctors are able to do et cetera. But that was another really interesting aspect of all of this. We can throw a one up on the screen here. Yeah, so that's what Ryan said.
Forty three fifty seven. Those are the latest numbers. Just a resounding, resounding victory for the No's and then if we get to a one B there's some more.
Yeah.
So this was Dave Washerman again called it pretty early. People are always refreshing Dave Washerman's Twitter feed on election nights. It didn't take long for this one to get called. I also want to just highlight some of Dave Weigel's analysis. I'm looking at it here in front of me. Some states that some counties where the referendum here actually was running way ahead of Biden, some Trump counties where the
referendum successful. He's talking about Athens County. So this is the home to owe you, as Dave points out, is a good example of how Issue one went down. Biden won at fifty seven to forty two. Last year, Tim Ryan and Tim Ryan won at sixty forty with most of the vote in No. One by fifty.
Points seventy five to twenty five.
And so echoes of Kansas are certainly playing in people's minds in Ohio. A lot of this was inspired by what happened to Michigan recently, and people saw that they passed with like fifty six percent. So the Ohio folks said, let's get that threshold up to sixty percent.
Yeah.
And before we get to how the debate over this played out, I'm curious what you think about what this means for twenty twenty four and Shared Brown. Shared Brown the kind of Democratic senator who is a holdover from when Democrats had real strength in the Ross belt areas of the United States in particular or Ohio. He held on in twenty eighteen, which is a kind of a Democratic wave year. He's up again in twenty twenty four.
And I've seen people speculating that, you know, if this port if this portends anything, it's it's good for Shared Brown in the sense that it's getting people to kind of, I guess, rethink their relationship with the Republican Party in Ohio, which has been utterly dominant for the last ten plus years.
But I'm curious if you think that it will.
Translate, because well, the good news for Share Brown is that you know there will still be you know, incredible turnout in twenty twenty four because of the abortion rights amendment that will be on the November ballots, So you'll have just as Carl Roave put a ban on Game thousand and four on the Ohio ballot, Democrats will probably now benefit from having abortion rights amendments, so their supporters are more likely.
To come out, and then they'll likely vote for Share Brown.
How are Republicans about Brown at this point on the list of people that they think they might be able to take out.
Yeah, that's a really good point.
I think that is a big blow for a sort of Rovian analysis that you just added, because what we find time and again since Dobbs was decided by the court is that it's not just that voters have a different opinion than people like me. Of course they do, It's not just that is that this is very, very animating, and so that's why the turnout numbers that you pointed to are essential, and that's why Republicans who are hoping to take down Shared Brown were just struck a blow
last night. I think as you're getting it here, because when you have an issue that it's not just that people agree with you, but it actually means they're going to be in a college town, as Wigeo is pointing out around Athens, when you have people that are flocking to the polls to the point where you're out running Biden by like twenty five points in the middle of August, that should tell you that you're going to have a real, real,
real energy turnout problem. And again, especially in those college towns you're looking at states, Republicans in states like Wisconsin, certainly in states like Ohio, are in worried about the concentration of liberal voters that is so so heavy in those college towns that makes it difficult to take an otherwise red state and actually have a clean red state
as they would see it. So that's a huge problem I think for any Republican efforts to tackle shared brown The Susan b Anthony List, which poured their their pack, put a lot of money into supporting the Yes side, so the conservative side here. Their statement last night said it's a sad day for Ohio and a warning for pro life states across the nation. Millions of dollars in liberal dark money flooded Ohio to ensure they have a
path to buy their extreme policies in a pro life state. Tragically, some sat on the sideline while while outsider liberal groups poured millions into Ohio and they go on here and talk about parental rights and going on and on the silence of the establishment and business community, and Ohio left the vacuum too large to overcome. That's a really interesting point they're saying. They're they're blaming conservatives for sitting on
the sideline of the issue. And Ryan, to the point you just made about shared Brown, this is a huge, huge issue for anti abortion conservatives again like myself, who say, who look at this and you sort of know that politically, you know, this is not the most palatable, energizing, appealing position,
and that's why you have business leaders sitting out. But at the same time, groups like Susan B. Anthony say, listen, if we just were able to muster, you know, the the enthusiasm on this issue, it would be a lot closer. And the reason you can't muster the enthusiasm is because I'm I would argue public opinions not there.
Yeah, and so what they've done instead is fascinating.
So let's take let's take a look at you know how the kind of yes side tried to get around the idea that this was about abortion rates, because I think to your point, they're like, they did the polling. They're like, if this, if photeros go into the ballot box and decide that this is a referendumnt abortion rights, we're losing it.
So let's see where we can move it.
And they moved it over to trans rights, and so play first Mike Pence, and then we can play one of the ads from the Yes campaign. So Mike Pence jumped in former Ohio, former Indiana governor, close enough, right, and here's that's right. Here's here's how he framed his message for why you should vote yes.
Hi. This is Mike Pence reminding everyone in the Buckeye State to be sure and get out and vote this Tuesday four. The Ohio Constitution Protection Amendment. You know, for years, left wing interests have abused the constitutional amendment process in Ohio to get their extreme agenda into law. But the Ohio Constitution Protection Amendment will put an end to that.
When it passes.
You'll need sixty percent of the vote in order to amend the state constitution, or you'll have to get signatures from more people in all eighty eight counties. Now Democrats want to keep the threshold as low as possible so they can pass abortion on demand, so they can advance their extreme gender ideology agenda and take away parents' rights education. Don't let that happen, Ohio. Stop the radical left. Get out and vote for the Ohio Constitution Protection Amendment this Tuesday.
Let's save Ohio and after that, we'll save America. In twenty twenty four.
I thought he was going to do like a Howard Dean, like whoo.
There you go, and so yeah, let's roll one of the one of the ads. It's pretty typical of the Yes campaign, which picked up on some of those themes.
Let's play that here.
You promised you keep the bad guys away protect her. Now's your chance. Out of state. Special interests that put trans ideology in classrooms and encourage sex changes for kids are hiding behind slick ads.
Don't be fooled.
You can keep this madness out of Ohio classrooms and protect your rights as a parent by voting yes on August eighth. Keep your promise to her. Vote yes on August eighth.
Yeah, that's a didn't work, right, It didn't work at all.
I mean, we're in again, like just important emphasize we're in early August, and that was forty what was up fifty three to I'm sorry, forty three to fifty seven on the side of the on the side of the left here, I mean, that is just a resounding failure of this argument, especially when the money was fairly evenly matched in some of the analyzes I've seen.
We actually have this. I'll go to A two first. The early voting.
That's another thing that Republicans are really concerned about in states like Ohio.
So if we put a two up on the.
Screen, the early voting was really up, which is again like Republicans are super concerned about bat harvesting, early turnout, et cetera, et cetera. They seem to not have made much of an impact in this particular election. That's sort of changing that and making that more favorable to conservative issues conservative candidates. You can see the actual language here up on your screen. This is I want to read
it. It says the proposed amendment would require that any proposed amendment to the Constitution of the State of Ohio receives the approval of at least sixty percent of eligible voters voting on the proposed amendment, so much clearer, I would say, Ryan than the Kansas referendum. Language that was like actually the subject of some yeah right, and some people on the right blamed it, you know, and said, this was incredibly confusing. The wording here is why we lost, you know,
sort of blaming the referees. And there may have been some truth so that it was genuinely very conservative confusing, but I don't think you have that here.
And then let's throw a three up on the screen.
This is the analysis, that's the early voting one, but a three is the analysis of where the money was coming the out of state money was coming from, which was some some really interesting places. Dicky Line on the side of he's from Illinois.
He was on the side of Yes.
Big conservative supporter, big conservative donor who funds a lot of this stuff, gave four million of one of the biggest packs four point eight million, so four million of that, basically the entire budget came from one conservative Ills Illinois billionaire.
And then on the other hand.
The pack for the No side was funded by a lot of people from Silicon Valley and d C eighty five percent of its money from one person. One vote came from out of state, So just a flavor of how you know, both sides trying to cast this as they're the bulwark against out of state special interest. Once again, there was just a this was a nationalized referendum.
Yeah, and I think if Democrats can convincingly tell the public that they will actually codify Roe v. Wade into law, if given a majority, I think that this could be a huge vote, you know, voter draw for them in twenty twenty four for Shared Brown and for the rest of the party. We'll see if they if they can actually convince that and then turn the election into that reference.
That's what they've wanted to do. That's what they've tried to do in the past.
You'll run on the fear that would be overturned, that that never really worked. But now they can actually promise to recodify it. So we'll see. The Republican primary continues to be kind of boring in some interesting ways. It's like just Trump sitting up there at the top, despite you know, one indictment after the other landing on top of his head. But then underneath him, you've got DeSantis really plummeting.
What do we have going on now in the GOP primary.
Yes, So yesterday it was announced that Ron DeSantis campaign manager genera pak who ran his his last cubernatorial campaign that everyone sort of heralded as a massive success, I think rightfully. So he increased his numbers from a razor thin margin when he defeated Andrew Gillum to just a resounding level of support in a purple state for a very republican governor, a very sort of you know, unashamed, unabashed conservative governor who was seen as someone being innovative
and novel with policy. She is two months into this campaign that had a lot of hype and a ton of money, and she's already.
Out the door.
So that was announced yesterday, and as The New York Times describes, they say, for the third time in less than a month, Santa's campaign, Desanta's campaign announced a major restock structuring.
She was under fire.
Basically, she'd never run a presidential campaign, she'd never actually even worked on a presidential campaign. But she was also, as The New York Times goes on to say, quote widely seen as miscast in the campaign manager role, even by those who liked her. She'd come under fire, in particular for building a campaign team so quickly that mister DeSantis was forced to lay off roughly forty percent of
his aids only two months into his candidacy. This is a mistake that a lot of really hyped campaigns make. People probably remember, there have been a lot of comparisons with Ron DeSantis and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. There's a real problem in the Walker campaign is that they grew basically too quickly, had to make big cuts, and ended
up kind of imploding because of that. But in this case, Rond de Santis has now brought in somebody from his governor's office who also doesn't have presidential election campaign experience,
but is seen as a loyalist confidant. That matters a lot to Ronda Santis, obviously, the fact that he brought genera peck in somebody who didn't have presidential experience experience to begin with, and then went with again someone as he's getting rid of someone without a lot of experience and bringing someone in uh with more with not a lot of experience to clean up the mess that the other in experienced person left. You can see there very clearly.
And now maybe this explains what we're seeing with b one. Uh, this is really interesting that already Vivek Ramaswami has overtaken Rond De Santis as Better's second choice to win the Republican nomination. So that is from media, and it's really interesting. Betting odds, they say, which some say provide more accurate predictions and polls, have a new GOP candidate behind former President Donald Trump, according to Election Betting Odds. That's a
site run by John Stossel and Maxim Lott. They aggregate betting odds from oversea bookmakers and other prediction markets media. It says Trump is the runaway favorite, and the site calculates that he has a seventy percent chance to take the GOP nomination in twenty twenty four, but trailing behind him at nine point six percent is not DeSantis, but Vivek Ramsimami, who leads to Santas at nine point five percent,
So again a very very tiny margin. But Ryan, what do you make of all of this as you're watching sort of from the other side, maybe enjoying this schadenfreude a little bit on your end.
Yeah, you know, there's a lot of people out there or like Twitter is in real life. But Vivek seems to be a little bit of a Twitter candidate and yet is having some huge success, you know, to be number two with all of these candidates, uh, you know, against Rond de Santas, who back what in the fall was, at least according to the people who were doing the gambling, ahead of Donald Trump in those numbers, like he was the he was the he was literally the odds on
favorite at one point. So now to be behind Vivak who most people hadn't heard of Ramaswami but at that point.
How serious do you think it is?
Do you think that if it becomes head to head with Trump, like he becomes the kind of viable alternative, that he just gets completely destroyed like a you know, the asteroid coming through the atmosphere. Or do you think that there's some there's some there there that he has successfully been able to hold on to, you know, build support within kind of pro Trump folks while also winning over the other smaller factions that that seems to be his real skill.
Well, I was gonna say, I think that's exactly right, because I think Vveck has handled the Trump question much better than Rond de Santis has and that's been you know, from the right, a lot of people look at the Dessantas campaign and say, what is going on. They feel as though he's sort of in this tug of war. And this is includes myself between the sort of elite GOP consultant class and you know, some people who are
like New Right that he brought into the campaign. And when you're in that tug of war, it seems like the elite GEOP consultant class has one out time and time and again on this, especially the question of Trump, and he just hasn't. It seems to people like he's really botched that the answers about Trump questions, answers on Trump questions time and time and again, and that he
is sort of undermining Trump's appeal. Rather than saying I understand Trump's appeal or conveying that he really understands Trump's appeal, he just is going to you know, he thinks he's
right for this particular moment. There have been way more attacks on Trump, his character, etcetera, etcetera than a lot of people on the right have felt comfortable with because they don't think that's the way to win over that persuadable thirty seven percent, as the New York Times we talked about last week puts it, of people who are
neither hardcore Trump or hardcore anti Trump. The way to win over those thirty seven is not to just sort of be like straight Nikki Hayley or straight Mike Pence, but to be sort of more of a middle ground.
And the thing I was going to turn back around to you is just say, this reminds me so much of twenty twelve potential for a twenty twelve Remember when you would get a surge in polling for Michelle Bachman, Herman Kine and some of these sort of what's the right word for it, not fringe, but like long shot candidates, people who are not traditional eccentric or even people who are not traditional presidential candidates. So Michelle Bachman are representative
at the time. And then Herman Kain a businessman.
At the time. Maybe that was prescient. Yes, what did he say?
It was Becky Becky, Becky Stanstan. That's another Herman Kain classic. But they would have these like sugar highs in polling because they had a really good answer to a question or a really good Fox hit. It gave a really good speech, and it would just it was a carousel.
They would trade off.
And I don't know if that's what's going to happen with Vivek and Tim Scott and who's had some decent polling numbers. But if Trump is staying dominant up at the top, maybe you get a carousel of sugar highs from other candidates like twenty twelve, and just ultimately nobody's over able to overtake him.
Right. The difference between the difference between twenty twelve and the day being that this time they're all competing just for second place, whereas that time you had Herman Kane actually surging to the very top for a little while. I'm curious for your take on what's going to happen with these Republican elites. And one thing I love about the show is I really have no idea what the answer.
Is this question.
But like I remember, back in twenty sixteen, when Bernie Sanders was challenging the Clinton machine, he couldn't hire anybody like basically nobody you know who wanted a job in democratic politics in the future would work against the Clintons, and that actually helped him a lot, because then it ended up bringing in lots of people from outside of kind of Washington politics and gave him a kind of livelier campaign as a result.
But watching the DeSantis.
World people just go to all out war with the Trump world people like I haven't followed it that closely, but it's just such a hot war you just can't,
you know, you can't avoid seeing it. And now that they seem to have been routed so badly, like, are there going to be consequences for them the same way there would have been consequences for the Democratic staffers who worked against the Clinton machine, like or is the Republican kind of miliuse so kind of my kind of money at this point that you can kind of move around different worlds without running into problems. What's what's your sense of how damaged some of these DESSANTUS operatives are.
That's a really good question, because Donald Trump is sort of notoriously fickle, and so are his loyal on these issues, and then sometimes not so like for really high profile people if you can it's he's shown that you can get back on his good side if you sort of
say the right things. But then for the lower profile people, they were, you know, during his administration actually scanning people's Twitter feeds back like three years to see if they had ever liked something that was negative against Donald Trump when they were vetting people for jobs in his administration.
So I think it's going to be a mixed bag, but it's a really interesting question for the Also another reason, which is we talked about DeSantis' economic campaign last week that had some populist rhetoric in it, And one thing I keep thinking about was the twenty twenty Democratic primary, when you had just about every candidate, no matter how much of corporate shills, they were swearing off corporate pack money.
So obviously it was sort of a gesture. But Bernie really benefited because those elite Democratic consultants that were chirping in his ear were not coming from large dollar donors like they didn't They weren't conveying the messages that they were hearing from large dollar donors, and that there are all kinds of dysantist donors that have been talking to the press about how disappointed in his campaign they are, and in some ways, for instance, because he's been very
conservative on the issue of abortion, because of you know, what one billionaire said was concerning to him with quote book bands, which I would argue as a false narrative. But either way, they're criticizing him essentially from the center or closer to the center.
Left than from the right.
And if you were relying more on small dollar donors in the way that Donald Trump has, in the way that Bernie Sanders has, and if you swear off corporate pack money, you're really able, I think, to be free not just from the consultants, but from the bosses of the consultants and the friends of the consultants who are are constantly tripping in your ear and I think giving you bad advice, and whether there will be consequences is a huge like, there are huge implications if there's a
Republican in the White House going forward as to how that plays out. At the same time, Donald Trump had a horribly difficult time staffing his administration because they were so picky in some cases. I don't know if there's a learning curve if there's a second administration on that, it's a good question.
Well, the White House, meanwhile, is trying to do something actually decent for the working class. So let's give some credit where it's due and talk about that a little bit.
If we can put up.
This great piece from Lee Harris over in the Prospect, people can go read.
That for all of all the details. And that's one, she writes.
President Joe Biden is set to restore a New Deal labor rule in what could be the most significant change the construction worker pay since the rule was gutted in the nineteen eighties. The Department of Labor is preparing to issue a final rule tomorrow on the Davis Bacon Act, which sets a wage floor for construction workers on public works projects. Davis Bacon is often known as a quote prevailing wage as it refers to the going rate for labors in a given area.
Era. And so this is a New Deal era.
This is you know, this is an FDR implemented law that says that, look, if the public is going to be financing this infrastructure project, then the public one.
Workers to be paid a fair wage.
And there and there have then been fights over the definition of fair, over the definition of prevailing ever since then. In the nineteen eighties, at the height of the kind of neoliberal pushback against the New Deal era, they redefined what it meant to be a prevailing wage. We can get you can You can get wonky with the details, but the details aren't what matters. The side of the construction companies wants the prevailing wage to be defined as
something that's lower. The side of the unions and the side of the workers wants prevailing wage to be calculated in a way that makes the wages higher. And so the White House is putting forward a rule that would make those wages higher. Already, the Alliance of Construction Companies is saying that they're going to sue immediately to try
to stop this law. What do you make of the Biden administration's willingness to kind of run up against the construction companies here and try to pick this fight.
Yeah, well, I was going to ask you, because Biden has a really mixed record on labor. On the one hand, his Department of Labor is taking steps like this, and on the other hand, he botches the railway negotiations, and you know, it isn't it doesn't seem serious about you know, some really big questions at places like Amazon, or hasn't taken the steps that I think a lot of people would expect him to.
So is this a sign that in the this.
Type of labor market where there has been this huge surge in organizing that you think going forward, Biden has sort of decided he has to come down more firmly on the side of labor or is it just again part of a mixed bag.
Yeah, I think there's a push and pull going on inside the administration. The Democratic Party is not by any stretch monolithically in support of workers, but there is a strong union coaled you know, union force that gets behind the Democratic Party and pushes them on these issues. And you also have you know a lot of White House economic advisors today who came up kind of through labor funded economic think tanks and have always been associated with
kind of pro worker policies. And so the economists who work for him now are just kind of fundamentally different than the economists like Larry Summers who were hired during the tim geiten Larry Summers who were hired during the Obama era. So in that sense, you do have are more of a pro labor event. At least labor has a voice in the room. RAMA Manual, for instance, when they were debating whether or not to kind of bail
out Detroit. If you remember after the financial crisis, Rama Manuel said, f the uaw like that that was his contribution in that meeting.
Just screw them, you know.
Fortunately for Obama and for Detroit, they didn't take raw manuals advice that time. And I actually think side note that that's why Obama did so well in the Midwest in twenty twelve, because he got a lot of credit for bailing out Detroit, whereas Romney had published that that kind of infamous op ed in the Wall Street Journal that said, let Detroit go bankrupt twenty sixteen, you didn't have that, and so Hillary Clinton gets beaten in the Midwest.
But that's that's sort of a side note, but not really because it is kind of, I think fundamental to how Democrats kind of see themselves.
You know, Biden keeps saying that he wants to be the.
Most pro labor, you know, the most pro union president in American history. That wouldn't be very hard at all, Like we basically haven't had one ever. So if you're even neutral on labor, that kind of makes you the best in American history. And I think a lot of his advisors who are pro labor can use that rhetoric to say, look, you know, we need to do this, and there's so much money, you know, coming down the pipe. Now where today is the one year anniversary of the
CHIPS Act. We've got obviously that big infrastructure Built Inflation Reduction Act has enormous amounts of tax credits and public spending going toward infrastructure development. I think the fact spending on factory development is something like doubled in the last couple of years.
It's huge now, doubled from pretty low rate.
But that means that there's a lot of room to force work, to force companies to pay more to workers, and so I think, you know they're going to go for it, but you know, we'll see if it gets tied up in court the entire time.
Yeah, and it certainly will.
But it has landed with a thud, I think on the right, which is also very interesting. I can imagine just about ten fifteen years ago, in fact, that I'm reading right here from a Kevin Brady, a Joint Economic Committee report on Davis Bacon that is just headlined highway
robbery from twenty eleven. This would have had Republicans up in arms, taking to the media and talking about the Biden administration's extremism and cozy relationship with labor, because labor was not seen in the same light back then that it is now, and especially on the right, this is something that Republicans consistently say, Like if you look at the conservative criticism of Davis Bacon, it's typically that it increases costs for companies, and then Kevin Brady actually in
this report said it looks like a pretty weak argument too, by the way, as I'm looking back on it, that it does decrease employment. So by repealing Davis Bacon and getting rid of prevailing wage, you increase jobs, which obviously if costs are decreased, which I'm sure that they are when that happens, I don't think anyone is going to dispute that the costs are going up when you have to pay people more. That's essentially the obvious math there.
But when you have that, he's saying it actually decreases, and conservatives will say it decreases the level of people that are actually employed. But this is a really tight labor market, So I don't know how seriously that argument is going to be taken by people on the right, especially as their attitudes towards organized labor are shifting. So I also found it pretty interesting that this got very little pick despite it being a fairly consequential decision from
the Biden administration. It didn't really have people running to Twitter, running to people on the right, Republicans running to Twitter. But industry does fund some of those pro business think tanks, and industry is pretty upset about this, as you can imagine, and that's where it will be tied up in court.
So maybe that will be amplified in the future, but as of now, I just sort of found that interesting, and it will be interesting going forward, as this issue, again is very consequential, as you do have the pressure coming from industry, on think tanks, on special interest groups to fight this where Republican politicians will land.
And you made a great point that these building trades members, these union members, those are mostly Trump voters at this point. Yes, and so in some ways it's good for workers when they have both parties who are kind of now looking out for their interests, because, like you said, in the past, Democrats would do this and Republicans would go to war
against it. Now Democrats do it and Republicans are like, H, don't like this because all of our donors say it's not good, but all of our voters say it is good. So maybe we'll just step back and see it, you know, see how this plays out in the courts.
And that's kind of what makes.
Me nervous about this Republican coalition is that they leave a lot of the dirty work to the courts. And whereas the Republican politicians say say, you know, hey, I'm for you.
Know, higher prevailing wages for folks.
I remember I spoke to a bunch of building trades union leaders back in twenty nineteen at a conference, and I was asking them afterwards where how their members were feeling about Trump and the upcoming election, And every single one of them, no matter what, no matter what the building trade was specifically, they're like, oh, heavily Trump, like, you know, sixty seventy, even upwards of.
Eighty percent Trump.
They all, they all had seen wage increases over the last couple of years, and a lot of them were crediting kind of Trump's rhetoric around wayes and around the FED and also around immigration, which I think is incorrect, but I understand like why they're you know, they're seeing him, you know, hammer on about immigration. Then they're seeing their wages go up, and like, oh, maybe this is going
on here. But if Biden can't find the megaphone that Trump had and let people know that the reason that a reason they're getting increases in their wages is because of what Democrats are doing for them, then they're not gonna They're not gonna end up getting credit for that.
So we'll, you know, we'll see how that shakes out.
But whoever gets credit, it's a good thing when workers are getting paid more for the.
Work they're doing well.
And to your point about special interests versus politicians, a lot of those same people who are supporting Trump also probably ended up being Ron Johnson voters ended up being JD Vance voters. So it does put a different for different reasons, but it does put a different kind of pressure on the Republican Party versus the special interest apparatus. And one huge thing for the conservative movement to reckon
with is how pro industry, how pro business. A lot of those judges are who have been on benches and celebrated by the conservative movement for being installed on benches because they had, you know, at the time, were what seemed like the favorable sort of approach towards free markets, towards for instance, abortion whatever it is, and are now going to be inclined to rule in certain antitrust cases, tech cases, or different cases in ways that may not
be favorable to those voters. Let's move on to another economic topic, which is the sort of troubling levels of personal debt that we're seeing. We can go ahead and throw d one up on the screen. This is from CNN Business. More Americans are tapping their four oh one K accounts because of financial distress, according to Bank of America data released Tuesday. So Americans, as the CNN headline says, are pulling money out of their K plans at an
alarming rate. Here are the specifics. The number of people who made a hardship withdrawal during the second quarter surge from the first three months of the year to fifteen nine hundred and fifty, which is an increase of thirty six percent from the second quarter of twenty twenty two, according to Bank of America's analysis of clients employee benefit programs, which are comprised of more than four million planned participants and expert that CNN quotes cause that quote pretty troubling.
You understand why people do that in the heat of the moment, but the opportunity costs on that are really really high over time. I would also point out numbers that show people's auto mortgages are going from debt to delinquency at a really surprising rate that has spiked over the last quarter and just seems to keep going up. It's actually different than what we're seeing debt to delinquency on mortgages.
But I think when you.
Put this all together, you're looking at the picture of a lot of people having borrowed a good chunk of money in the last couple of years. And it's one thing if people are borrowing that money and like with the mortgage numbers, are are not, you know, then tipping into delinquency. But if they are, especially in something like auto loans, which is a lower level, that is that is pretty concerning. I do agree, Ryan, that is a little troubling.
It's very troubling.
And to put to put it in perspective, if in twenty twenty, interest rates, you know, collapse down to for home for mortgages under four percent and for a lot of people under three percent, and you saw record numbers of refinances and so Refinancing often does two things.
You know.
It on the one hand, it lowers your It lowers your payment that you have every every month and so that you have, you know, as long as your pay stays the same, you're taking a little bit more home
every every month after you've paid your mortgage. But a lot of people then take a little bit out also say like the bank will tell you, hey, look, if you can add you know, twenty five thousand dollars to your principle over the next thirty years, it will just give you the check for twenty five thousand, and you're still paying less a month because your interest rate was at you know, five percent now it's at two point seventy five percent, and millions of people around the country
you know, refinanced and took that money out. Then you had the Cares Act in March twenty twenty, which was kicked what six hundred dollars checks to everybody. Then you had the note, well, you had twelve hundred dollars checks, six hundred dollars check, fourteen hundred dollars checks.
You know.
Ultimately, you know, you had in January twenty twenty one, people getting a family for got a fifty four hundred dollars check if they had, you know, two dependents. That's fine, that's a that's an enormous amount of money to just
land in your bank account. And the combination of I think all of those refinancings plus all of those direct checks, plus you know, the unemployment benefits that you're getting extra six hundred dollars a month, the amount of savings that people had had never been higher.
Some of this article notes that the number of.
People who I don't know, if we have this one, I think it might be our second element. Number of people who can afford a four hundred dollars hit is back down to about sixty two percent at this point.
In twenty twenty one, Yeah, d three, it was it was sixty eight percent.
Could swing a you know, you want it to be one hundred percent, Like you want everyone to be able to swing a four hundred dollars hit that they get. But in twenty twenty, twenty twenty one, that number was going up, so at least it's going in the right direction. That number is coming down now, and so we've exhausted the refinancing, We've done all the checks, and so now people are dipping into their four oh one k's. They're
borrowing from their workers. I mean they're borrowing from their workplaces. Now you still you still did see according to this reporting, just as many people adding money adding more money to their four to one case than we're reducing the contributions to their four o one case.
So it's not like everybody is in this situation.
But I do think that there's a strain on the system that if it hits a shock, there just isn't the cushioning, and you're going to have enormous number of people who need this music to keep playing before they're going to lose this game.
So this is a really interesting point.
Even if we just go back to that simple question of mortgages, mortgage delinquency versus autodelinquency. Who's more likely to have a mortgage versus who's more likely to have an auto loan. If you have a mortgage, you're probably in a different socioeconomic strata on average than the average person with car loans. That would be my guess, And I think that speaks to what you're talking about, which is our economy just going into completely different directions.
We see this with the stock market.
We saw it with the stock market during COVID and right now, if we put a D two up on the screen, this is credit card debt. So this is CNN's credit card Sannan's report on credit card debt. They're saying since twenty nineteen, household debt balances have increased by nearly three trillion, according to the New York Fed from the first quarter of twenty twenty three, and a lot of that is coming from credit card debt of the
first time. On Tuesday, the New York Fed reported that US households credit card debt quote surpassed the one trillion mark for the first time ever. That's a forty five billion dollar increase in credit card debt. It's driving overall household debt to levels levels to seventeen point six trillion at the end of the second quarter. And then you add on top of that that federal student loan payments are resuming in October.
So if this is bad now.
Imagine how much how much worse it's going to get in October. And again, an expert CNND quote says, there's only so much hard debt that people can handle before delinquencies really strike. Ultimately, just have a lot of people who are doing okay now, but it wouldn't take a whole lot for them to find themselves in a pretty sticky situation financially, whether that is a medical emergency, job loss,
or even just student loan payments. Restarting and the student loan payment pause is another example of how it may feel like the pandemic for us is in the rearview mirror, but economically, that pandemic era policy is very much still with us in the economy, and the pandemic era economy you've seen tightening, for instance, in media in Hollywood in those space is from the pandemic.
Again, we talked about a sugar high.
There was a lot of that, There was a lot of growth, and right now some of that. You know, the FED is really eager that they to say that looks like we're going to have the soft landing.
But indications like this.
That are sort of below the surface, the beneath that you see the tip of the iceberg and then it's the giant thing underneath the water, I think that is a lot more concerning than they will admit. Ryan that then Janet Yellen or Jamie Diamond will admit.
Because car loan delinquencies are considered by economists and people with common sense to be a huge uh you know, red siren blaring because if you think about it, you're in the number of as as it becomes harder for you to pay your bills. Uh, the car is the main thing that you know that you continue to make sure that you're paying because you need your car for everything. You need your car to get to work most importantly, and so if you don't have that, uh, you're you're
you're set back. And so studies show, and like I said, common sense shows that when people have to decide, you know, what to pay and what not to pay, uh, they're there. They always want to pay that car, that car loan off because they do not want that car repossessed. And so that if they're not paying those loans, and if delinquencies are rising, that means they've already exhausted all the other things that they can move around and couldn't and
couldn't pay for the time being. And so they're you know, once you're not paying, Once you're not paying your car loan, unless you've got two or three cars, Uh, then you know you're you're you're really facing a significant trouble.
If you have two or three cars, you know, you're just gonna you're.
Gonna sell them and you're not gonna You're not gonna let them get repossessed. So that's why people economists really worry when they see car delinquencies starting to starting to tick up.
Last question, Ryan is if you were Janet Yellen.
Put put yourself in Danny Yellen's shoes, Ryan, and you're looking at these numbers, how does that influence your decisions on interest rates?
Well, well, I mean I think you well, you mean you mean the FED chair that she used to be the FED chair.
Yeah, yeah, she did a good job of I.
Think of keeping rates really low for very a very long time.
You know.
I think Trump even could have kept her on and she would have would have kept doing it. He can steady replaced her with Pale, who then kept rates really low. But I think if your pal you do have to be and I think if you're yelling, because I think you do have a good question. Because she is still responsible for the economy, she should be browbeating Palell to say okay, enough, like good job. You know, you squeezed
Silicon Valley. You know, a bunch of those clowns lost their shirts, which they should have because they were just wasting money.
Uh.
You know, now we need to focus on making sure that people uh don't get hit with the kind of shock, especially given the fact that student loan payments are are are are coming back in October that it sends us into a tailspin, like do not over do not overcorrect here, you know, so you know, slowed down, and you know, and maybe if you need to ease, do something a little more targeted rather than just opening up the spigot and sending the money straight to Silicon Valley next time.
Right, Yeah, And Yellen, to your point, Ryan had a sort of different I guess approach than Jerome Powell. And if Yellen had been in a position rather than Jerome Powell might have been a different question. But in terms of how Powell as is seen in the administration, is treated by the administration, as directed by the administration, it's just I'm very curious to see because these indications have been lingering, but as they are sort of heightened.
I mean, these are to your point, like red signs.
These are those are like glaring, glaring problems that are demanding I think probably a little bit more honesty.
Yeah, And he wanted to see the number of job openings reduced. He wanted to see wages going down. He was very clear in public about that. And you know, you you are seeing the number of jobs added to the economy rising at a lower rate.
So you should just declare victory and.
You know, stop trying to strangle the economy, is what I would tell him.
So before we started filming today, Ryan revealed some personal knowledge of boating brawls. And we're going to talk now about the one out of Montgomery, Alabama. I think probably the best thing to do is just start by playing some of these clips.
Let's throw you one up on the screen.
Here they long crossing.
That's what swimming his hands?
O yah, some boy could have left that one. You look that your boy?
Get up down, y'all buck, Get off down, y'all buck.
No girl.
S they what's up?
I was all miserable.
YOA whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa?
They did? Look out they did, whoa they did? Whoa? Oh ha, whoa.
That was the game.
It's a real spectator sport, and we can I think it's pretty easy for everyone to understand why those videos have gone massively viral. As the Montgomery Advertiser put it, they have captivated the attention of the nation. The latest news on this is that three men are facing charges.
So that we have a forty eight year old white male, Richard Roberts, who's facing two warrants for assault in the third degree, twenty three year old white male Alan Todd one warrant for assaults in the third degree, and Zachary Shipman, a twenty five year old white male, facing one warrant for assaults in the third degree.
More context here.
This is from Saturday evening, so last Saturday, when, as the Montgomery Advertiser puts it, Damian Pickett, the co captain of the Harriet two, asked the operators of a private boat that was docked in its space to move, getting only a quote obscene gestures and quote taunting in response.
Dozens of cell phone videos posted to social media were recorded by the passengers aboard the Harriet two riverboat, which was waiting to dock with two hundred and twenty seven people on board for more than forty minutes, as well as people.
On the shore.
So after a long Saturday spent you know, on the river, drinking, having fun. It sounds like Ryan this escalated very quickly.
Yeah, And I think the ship is named after Harriet Tubman, which is right, which is which is pretty great. These guys, yes, they clearly were wasted, sunburnt, rednecks who just felt like because they had the numbers on one guy, that they were just gonna kind of, you know.
Show them how tough they were.
And I don't know if we saw it in that footage, but the kid and he turned to a sixteen year old kid who was swimming over to the dock.
Yes, just brings a tear to your eye.
It's just it's just the most glorious symbol of solidarity that you can ever see.
Like he sees that somebody needs help, he dives into the water. That's those are the heroes that we need today now. And there you go.
In in Phil in Phil Lewis's tweet there he mentioned that Reggie Gray, who is the man willing to share, uh you know, is being asked to contact police. I'm not defending you know, wielding shares at people, but I would advise Regie Gray he does not have to contact the police. You know, you're not You're not required to turn your turn yourself in if his name is even
Reggie Gray. So it has been you know, TikTok has really, you know, kind of gloriously covered this because you're getting, you know, just absolutely everybody's got their take that they're putting out there, and everybody seems to agree, and how could they not? Like these these these dudes bullied this one guy who was just doing his job and then they got.
Whooped and what you know, what what more can you ask for?
And the irony, of course, is that we we've gone through this whole kind of contra versy over that Jason al Dean song, and these dudes did try that in a small town, all that small, and you know they found out what what did you think?
Yeah?
Well, the debate over what constitutes a small town has been actually really interesting too, because Montgomery is certain probably probably seen by a lot of people who look at, you know, Atlanta as the antithesis, as it's sort of opposite rather than you know, maybe the three hundred person town an hour outside of it or whatever.
It's.
It's certainly seen as like different than Atlanta. And I'm sure it is to some extent, but I think it's a really interesting point. The other thing I would say is just that there's a lot to think about in terms of how social media can condition us to I think, make jump conclusions. So like, for instance, Nicole Hannah Jones,
who's at the New York Times, pretty powerful person. She tweeted, if you understand her ext she said, if you understand the history of Montgomery, one of the most prolific slave trading cities in the US and brutally repressive apartheid regime after a majority black but just got its first black mayor, it gives so much perspective.
To this video. I don't know about that.
I feel like when we when when stuff like this goes viral, the incentives to sort of shoehorn it immediately into a broader sort of political narrative can be really dangerous and unnecessarily divisive. And actually I say that as someone who doesn't rule out the fact that we may learn as this investigation goes on, uh that there were racial implications or motivations. I don't rule that out at all.
I think it's perfectly plausible. I think to tweet that within a couple of days or even hours of it going viral, and to turn something that was local and that we would typically all sort of deal with, litigate literally on a local level before and then sort of rocket it into the political stratosphere.
I never find that to be helpful.
I think it's really unfortunate when people do that before we know, you know, whether this is actually tied to racial animus.
And again I don't rule out that that's possible.
I just I have seen some of that in this case, not just from Nicole Hanna Jones, but from other spots, and it may be possible. I just I don't like doing it before we know whether or not there's real evidence of that.
Well.
I mean, you do have the evidence of the clear racial lines, and you know, so people who people who were watching, you know, from away from the fight could see that that was a bunch of you call them white, they were red. You could see this a bunch of white people and the person getting beaten was a black person. You could very clearly see that, and I think, certainly
in Alabama that you understand it through that prism. I think a mistake that Hannah Jones might be making in that analysis there is to suggest that you know that black people in the South either in an organized fashion or spontaneously operating in self defense is.
A is a new phenomenon.
And in fact, there has been resistance to oppression, uh, you know, dating back to the very beginning of the oppression, not just not just when it comes to slave revolts, but then you know, organized organized, organized slavery volts. Then then then escapes that kind of so panicked the South that it uh you know, it caused them to overreact, which ended up trigging in the Civil War, the futuive slave backed et cetera.
We get that.
Then you have uh, many of those freedmen then join the Union fight back there, and you have people you know, organizing militias fighting against the fighting against the Klan, and that you know, up through the civil civil rights movement like you have always had uh you know black Americans, uh, you know, pushing back violently and non violently but also you know, violently then and that has that has been
kind of suppressed in the history. But a lot of it, you know, was you know, thoroughly justified and in self defense, like like you saw in this situation. So for her to kind of, you know, suggest that it's something new, I think almost as a disservice and a discredit to the prouder history of resistance.
That's a great point, and maybe maybe she.
Wasn't suggesting that it was there was brand new, just saying look at it through that prison. But I just want to be clear that that that that that proud history is there, and that's a more.
I think, precise way to put it, because obviously, I know, you know, Nicole Hanna Jones and other people reasonably would say the evidence is right in front of you, like you see the racial breakdown, you have a city as historically charged as Montgomery involved.
Uh.
I guess the point I was trying to make is that it's the question of whether there was this very specific if there was like an actual someone's used a
racial slur. Someone was like that question to me something that is when you sort of apply that to a really specific local situation and elevate it on the national level, I think that's always unhelpful to getting justice served and to understanding the truth of what happened, and the kind of rush to to sort of put this into the national racial I understand it, I understand why it happened. I guess I just think putting that into that context
without litigating it. And like, I don't mean litigating in that sense like going through the courts. I just mean before we have information, this stuff goes viral on social media and you end up with the Covington Catholic situation. That was also people were looking at a racial breakdown and it led them to a conclusion that ended up was seen and settling for millions and millions of dollars.
Because the snap picture it doesn't always tell the full story, even though it goes viral on social media and it's a video and people feel.
Like they know what happened.
So that's I guess that's all I meant to say, right, And that's when we did get a bigger story, fuller story lots, you know, everybody's got a phone at this point. But also I think some of the I think some of the racial undertones come through in just in an unspoken way, in the sense that like, who do these guys think they are? You know, like, and it's it's where you start to have to give credit to terms like white privileges, like dude, Okay, you were out drinking
on your boat all day. You've been sitting there for forty forty five minutes on the dock with one hundred plus people waiting to get off their ferry, waiting to get off this Harriet two and you just won't move, and then the co captain comes and asks you to move, and you beat him up.
That is a very like privileged, who.
On earth do you think you are that you can do that, and very difficult to imagine the racial dynamics being different that. You know, a boat of a handful of black guys who are holding up hundreds of people on a ferry then beating up a white co cap and on the dock.
It's very hard to see that because the kind.
Of power structure and the power dynamics just just don't allow you kind of to imagine that unfolding. Although it's very difficult to imagine what on earth these dudes were thinking, you know, that they would do this in front of a very large black rap like there was a I think a it was a college or a high school
reunion party going on. You know, several hundred people who were obviously not gonna, uh, you know, stand for that, or maybe they thought they would stand for that, but they they found out that they would not.
Yeah, I think you know, they probably want to blame the alcohol in this case, and I'm sure that that amplified tensions, especially at the end of the Saturday.
But the the.
Scenario is just laid out or you're the one causing problems and then you're the one that's beating people up. Uh, that's that's that's not just alcohol, that's you having some serious character problems, and that absolutely being inclined to act like a jerk no matter what.
Yeah, I've done a lot of drinking and boating, and I have never beaten anybody.
Up for no reason or even for no reason, for no reason, but you have, or even or even for.
Any reason really in the boating situation. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Well, I think you know we were talking about the rock called boat talking contest. I just realized that on my Twitter profile people want to see it that the like the top image is from like a late nineteen nineties boat docking. You probably find me in that crowd somewhere. I haven't gone in years. I'm too old for that now. But nothing more fun than that. But no fighting, Come on, no fighting.
It takes all the fun away.
So Emily, what's your point today?
Well, now seven states have required pornography websites to have age verification, allowing users to access them within their states. So there's been heavy focused on Mississippi Virginia. Those are two earlier this summer. You can see that on the screen. This is a Gizmoto headline. You can't access pornhub in Mississippior Virginia anymore.
Why is that?
Because their age verification laws Pornhub felt they could not comply with, and so people who go there in those states see an explanation basically for why they're not operating in those states anymore. Louisiana was the first state to do this, so there's been a huge amount of focus
on that. But as Political Magazine, which had a great story examining some of these bills, how they came to pass, and then what's been happening to Pornhub explains now identical bills to that Louisiana one have passed in six other states, Arkansas, Montana, Mississippi, Utah, Virginia, and Texas. So not just super deep red states. Montana's a Democratic senator, obviously. Virginia I would argue it was blue, even though it has a Republican governor right now. And
you know others are pretty conservative there. But these are bills that are passing with pretty big margins despite being fought bitterly by the pornography industry, which is a huge industry right now. The online pornography industry absolutely massive, big, big business at this point. And they're being signed by as political notes, democratic Republican governors. And this is a
quote from the story. In just over a year, age verification laws have become perhaps the most bipartisan policy in the country, and they are creating havoc in a porn industry that many had considered all but impossible to actually regulate.
I think that's really important. And Political Magazine.
Goes on to explain why they say quote, they're having real effects on how the massive online porn industry does business. Pornhub, the YouTube of pornography, gets more global users than Amazon or Netflix. In twenty nineteen, the last year Pornhub released at data, the site was visited forty two billion times,
or one hundred and fifteen million times each day. But according to Ethical Capital Partners, the private equity company that owns Pornhub, let's just look at Louisiana they say their traffic has dropped eighty Their traffic has obviously dropped one hundred percent in the states that it's simply not operating in anymore, including I believe Virginia and Mississippi. So that's incredibly big news across the board for millions of people's daily lives in those states and for a massive industry
as well. It's also reverberated. This political magazine story was shared everywhere on the right yesterday. It's reverberated in Washington because of this idea that online online pornography was too big to fail. Maybe it's the best way to put it, that it was too hard to do anything. It would be like sort of trying to clean the beach, right, trying to sweep up the beach with a broom and get that stand off the beach, as sort of how
people viewed online pornography. And the lesson is not just about online pornography for people in Washington, but it is that reasonable laws can have massive consequences, that some problems aren't too big for legislation. And maybe you disagree with these particular state laws, but it should be a lesson for all politicians that when you have a problem you consider serious, there are ways, even if it's even if it seems overwhelming and impossible, reasonable legislation that is not
overly intrusive. So the porn industry in this case is their trade association. A lot of people probably know this is called the Free Speech Coalition, and I don't think it's unreasonable, of course to say that there's free speech implications and regulation of pornography. But we have plenty of registration, we have plenty of regulation around the Second Amendment, and I argue, of course for minimal regulation around the First Amendment. But age verification laws are hardly an undue burden on
the online pornography industry. This is very specifically tailored to online pornography and very specifically about age verification. And so if you want to peddle something that we are learning
is as powerful as online pornography, there's mounting evidence. Of course, the Free Speech Coalition would dispute this evidence and say it's not conclusive, it's not serious, but there's evidence that this affects people's dopamine reactions and their brain, especially as they're younger, so they have minds that are still being formed in those stages of brain development, that online pornography can be very addictive. It can create issues like or
can lead to issues. It can influence issues like a rectile dysfunction. There's some evidence suggesting that there's some evidence suggesting it actually has harmful effects in your dopamine pathways. Your ability to experience sexual pleasure in a healthy way
can be harmed by online pornography. And again, whether or not you agree with any of that, the big takeaway to a lot of people here in Washington is that on this sort of state level, you can take small measures that have huge consequences for hugely consequential issues, to the point where those issues are feeling overwhelming legislators in
this new era, and that has big implications. I would also say, for AI, how much is that argument trotted out that we really can't do anything when it comes to AI because it's.
Already out of our hands.
And that's probably a big argument people are making right now in states like Louisiana. It's like, Okay, well people aren't going to pornhub, They're still finding their pornography somewhere. I'm sure there's truth to that, and I look forward to reading the evidence about whether or not that's happening, the degree to how it's happening, and what's going on with that. But I still think it's incredibly important to look at how these laws can shape behavior, even if
they're small and they're not massively intrusive. This isn't a it would be hard to argue even conservatives, and especially conservatives in this case, but even sort of pro business conservatives look at this and say, well, yeah, that's not like the most intrusive step into the free market or the economy that you could possibly conceive of. And I would argue, again, this is important as political points out. We're looking at some democratic governor signing this.
Well.
One of the activists started a push for this by watching Billie Eilish on Howard Stern, when Billy Eilish said, quote, I used to watch a lot of porn. To be honest, I started watching porn when I was like eleven. I think it really destroyed my brain. And I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much porn. Quote, I think it really destroyed my brain. Washington takes a long time to catch up, often with younger people, because Washington is disproportionately older.
But as the rate of technological.
Change increases, makes it more and more important for Washington to understand technological change, the effect of technological change on younger and younger people who are using that technology much differently than your average senator, a representative, or governor or state legislature. And that is another hugely important issue of all of this. Do people understand in Washington? I mean, remember those famous clips of senators trying to understand Facebook.
We feel like they've caught up on Facebook now, which makes sense because it's all boomers anyway. But have they caught up on things like online pornography? No, because it's different. We look at the levels. We see the average age that people are exposed to online pornography, the average age of regular use starting of online pornography, when that's happening over the course of ten years as your brain is developing, so from the ages of like thirteen to let's say,
happy likely twenty three, whatever that is. This has never happened before in human history that people have access to this volume of pornography so easily and for such a long period of their developing lives. So I think it's
absurd to dismiss these things out of hand. I'm sure some of the evidence on the anti pornography side, like it was in the nineties when people were fighting about this and you had Android's work in and all those folks saying, you know, we need to regulate this, we need the feminist position on this has to be anti porn I know some of those arguments we're spurious, although we were talking about a very different kind of pornography
back then. Then again, the volume, the difficulty of regulating something like porn Hub's content, for whether or not it involves things like trafficking, for whether or not it involves things that are violent and beyond the pale of what people should be able to make money off of them, what people should be able to serve up to young children. This is a very very different time. Again, I'm sure
some of these arguments are spurious. I'm not saying they're all made in good faith, and they're all from people who really do believe in free speech. But there's an incredibly reasonable position here, which is that we don't know we have some really really negative signs of how this has affected developing brains, how this has affected people around the world, and we don't know simply the extent of
how bad that is. There's plenty of evidence to suggest how bad it is, and there are reasonable measures that can be taken on a small level that don't dramatically curb the First Amendment just because they're age laws and can have a hugely consequential effect, and can be bipartisan, and can be from both the left and the right, something that people will agree on.
So, Ryan, this has been.
Really interesting to see these seven states, some from different backgrounds, past these laws.
Have you noticed how this is? I know this is.
It's always been a raging debate on the sort of the feminist left between your Andro Dorkins, your Chemopaulias, your people who are sort of the sex positive feminism that seem to win out over the last twenty years, and then even people like Michelle Goldberg taking some steps back and saying.
Well, maybe we do need to rethink some of this. How is this landing on the left?
Other than folks like Michelle Goldberg, who are I think admirably willing to kind of run up against the grain, you pretty much have hegemony for the kind of sex positive side, even if maybe there's some stirrings in the younger generation of saying that maybe the pendulum it needs to swing back a little bit in the other direction.
So you don't see much on the left, although you know clearly there's not it's it's not a high enough.
Priority issue that some that is that a blue state like Virginia couldn't pass this law that that that has porn hub shutting down there. So, you know, I think what you see kind of in the culture and and on on social media doesn't necessarily translate into into the into the halls of power. I'm usually really skeptical of companies when they're claiming that regulation is going to destroy them and so therefore they have to leave the state.
It's usually you know that it's very often that these companies are are just using their market power as as political power and trying to bludgeon them into basically repealing the laws or or or to stay to other states. Look, if you if you do the same, then then this is what's gonna then this is what's going to happen next. You know, a lot of this to me should be up to parents rather than rather than up to Virginia.
Uh uh.
And that you know, kids, you know, kids shouldn't have devices that are capable of doing this, and then you know, so that's the one part where I'm where I'm sympathetic to the pornhow argument. Their argument is that the controls should be on the device, that the device, uh, you know, should have settings that only allowed to reach certain sites, and porn sites should be you know, by far the first that they don't get to. And then there's lots
of other stuff like most YouTube videos. Maybe they're not even ready.
For this show, this YouTube video yet, this hugetube video.
That's right, but there's so much on there that that kids just don't need until they're you know, until they're much older.
So you know, my answer that is definitely like why not, both because I agree with that completely and a lot of the content I think is designed in a way that is intentionally addictive and is having real effects. I mean, there are plenty of scientific studies on the neurology and the neurological effects of social media, and I think we
will see a push towards regulation. That is, you know, we have age laws for buying cigarettes, you have age laws for marijuana in some states, and even as a generally a limited government person, I'm fine with age laws for the consumption of cigarettes. Maybe seatbalts are a different question,
but age laws in some cases are entirely reasonable. So the other thing I'm waiting for, Ryan is the porn hub argument then to be used by the sort of the small porn business and saying like, it's very easy for porn hub to do age verification in Louisiana, but us little guys, you know, maybe maybe pornhub flips at one point and is like, yes, age verification, because then we can shut down all of our little competitors who don't have the technological resources to do comprehensive age verification.
Yeah, but these smaller competitors are so fly by night that I would imagine that they'll just, you know, they'll just pop up and continue because if you shut them down, they just pop up with a different ur l. Like it's it's different than you know, a social media company like competing with Facebook or Twitter, because they need massive scale and network effects to be successful. These little, tiny
porn companies don't need that. They just need some way to get to these users who are you no longer have access to the porn hub in Louisiana or Virginia. Yeah, absolutely wasn't surprised to see that Utah.
No Uta is the least surprising of the states included on that list. This actually does it for us for the show at the moment, because again, as we mentioned at the top of the show, Ryan is going to be out with a breaking news report that we've teased a little bit and I'll let Ryan, you know, take it from here because it's a pretty big breaking story. But we will be back later with a follow up to today's show because Ryan has a breaking story to share with everyone.