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All right, Good morning, Welcome back to Counterpoints. Emily, how was your mushroom does this morning? Did you calibrate it better than last week?
He loves this joke. He's going to do this joke every week.
It was an inside joke because I was a little I had Mac wrote a little bit.
You know, sometimes you gotta There.
Was an audience of one for me for that joke last week. I'm better today, although people enjoyed it either way.
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It's the difference between hearing Ryan making a joke about me micro dosing and scene.
And you really have to see it, Yeah, you do, you do? You got to see it.
So huge news day actually, and this happens a lot, I feel like on Tuesdays as we're prepping the show, but yesterday was something I have never seen quite before. The story is just kept stacking up. Ryan was actually in the Capitol yesterday, and I know you're going to talk to us about shutdown dynamics. Later in the show,
We're going to start with the UAW. We are then going to go to some big news again that broke at night, basically that Donald Trump is in some serious hot water new legal trouble based on a judge's findings about how he was valuing his own assets. We're going to talk about the Big Iron story that was very buzzy in Washington yesterday. The Biden administration may be infiltrated by Ronnian assets. I think Ryan might disagree and have
some fun. It'll be a good debate. We're going to talk about JP Morgan settling once again in the Jeffrey Epstein case. We're going to talk about Google and anti trust. I'm going to talk about a new poll on Republican voters and how they are seeing politics right now. And then we're talking to journalist Toby Green about how the lockdowns affected Africa.
Let's deal with Hunter Biden.
First, Hunter Biden, this is one of those stories that stacked up yesterday. Did you see the Fox story?
I did, right, So Fox is reporting. I think we have an element here that two hundred fifty thousand dollars plus another ten thousand dollars wire originated from a company in Beijing, Beijing that has ties to kind of like the National Chinese Bank that Hunter Biden and is little firm we're working for. They wired Hunter money in twenty nineteen, and the beneficiary address on the wire was Joe Biden's home address, the Big Guy. All one hundred percent for
the Big Guy. Now, the reason I'm a little underwhelmed by this story is that Hunter Biden was lit. We know that he was living. Yes, he was a drug addict living with his parents. Yes, And so if you're gonna get a two hundred fifty thousand dollars wire, which is it's a hilarious concept. You're a drug addict who's living with your parents, and also you have hundreds of thousands of dollars being wired in from foreign countries. Yes, as you know most drug addicts who are living with
their parents too. But any event, he's living with his dad at the time, or it is the most stable address. You know, he's going through a divorce, he's got this other relationship going on, he's got the affair with his late brother's wife former wife going on, and so the address that he can cite is the one in Wilmington is his dad. So as another example of kind of what a rough life Hunter Biden was living, I think
they've got inbusted. I don't think it actually ties to Joe Biden necessarily, Am I being too soft on the big guy here?
It's no, no, no, I don't think you're being too soft on the big guy. But it does if you kind of zoom out to the three thousand foot level. This is a man who was about to announce his run for president on the timeline and is having money from a Chinese pe firm wired to his house, hundreds of thousands of dollars to the man who is about to become the leading candidate for president.
And announced a couple of months later or something.
Right, you're right, right, right, So obviously not a good look. And I think in another era, you know, fifteen ten years ago, this would have been pretty earth chattering for Joe Biden and for any sitting president. Does it tie Biden directly anymore than he already has been tied directly. We're not in the Philip Bump camp, of course, where we say no, none of this points back to Joe
bid Don't It could mean anything? No, I mean, I think there's pretty clear evidence that Joe Biden because his finances and this is I think that one of the points of the story is it's interesting the way that their lives were intermingled, because we have seen evidence their finances were intermingle, right.
And this with this company in particular, I think it was BHR BHR. We know that Biden was on Joe Biden was on at least what one call did coffee in Beijing with Hunter, and the CEO may have called in on during a dinner as well, or was put on speaker during another meeting. So you know, just to
do pleasantries, because that's how this works. Like you, if you're Hunter Biden, you want to just prove that, like, Okay, yes, you know I'm a mess, but like my dad still loves me and I still talk to him, and let me prove it by putting him on speakerphone. Here. It's not like you're going to talk about business on the speakerphone with the vice president form and vice president, but it's just to show that connection. As a parent, you could be like, look, you want to move back home.
You're troubled. You just can't extract money from foreign countries using my last name. You could put that rule in place, my red line. You got to change the kiddy litter every day. Yeah, and no money from China in exchange for selling my name. It seems like you could do that.
It seems like a good deal.
Yeah, and I meant to live in Wellington.
But not only did Joe Biden apparently not do that, but he also then lined to the public about it and said he had no interaction with the son's business at all. We now know that that is not true. We know that he was very very much engaged, whether it was intentional or otherwise, in the lobbying project. I have a hard time giving him the benefit of the doubt. When he's showing up to Cafe Milano, he's on the phone, all of those different things. So is this hard evidence
that Joe Biden profited. Well, we do have some evidence that Hunter Biden was paying bills on these properties. So if you put it all together, it's just another puzzle piece that is becoming an increasingly clear picture of Joe Biden's at the very least complicity in influence peddling with a country that is I think fairly labeled in an adversary, especially on particular levels. And he lied to the public about it too.
Yeah, there was that, and we then move on from this. But there was that great viral speech that was given as sort of like a Chinese Ted Talk thing if you remember this, where the guys like, when Biden comes in, we're gonna be good, yeah, because we're good with Hunter. Yeah. So they like there were certainly people in the Chinese elite who felt like they were getting something.
The last Obama state dinner was a China state dinner, if I'm not mistaken. I mean, when they were leaving office, there was a different there was a warmer feeling towards China. And you know, people can make ideological arguments for why that was and how best to handle this kind of what feels like a new Cold War. But obviously we're seriously at loggerheads with them on things like state secrets, on things like technology and all of these big questions Taiwan.
So it's an incredibly bizarre and obviously unethical arrangement.
Yeah, And that's the funny thing. All of this chatter kind of lives at the realm of just social media chit chat. If you go back to Russia, Russia Gate and Trump, if you believed that Trump was kind of like a Russian asset living in the White House, you'd be shocked that he was so hawkish towards Russia, right, And if you believe that Hunter Biden and Joe Biden are just Chinese assets sitting in the White House, you'd be shocked at how hostile and hawkish they are towards China.
So this entire conversation plays out on a level that's just different from the structural, kind of geopolitical level that's actually at play.
Yeah, I think that's a good point, because Biden's China policy is totally what's the best word for it's kind of by polar and that it's like polled, it's just two poles that are it's a tug of war between people who are more dubbish and people who are more hawkish, because you can see both winning out at various points in time. And that's genuinely interesting. And it's not as clear cut a story as Joe Biden is bought and paid for by China. The story is obviously that Joe
Biden was aware of an incredibly unethical arrangement. His son was profiting to the tune of millions in the way no average American could by trading on his name and influence.
Meanwhile, you've had Republicans accusing Biden of being bought and paid for by the UAW. Are they run Let's hope not. Let's hope not. So let's let's play some extraordinarily exciting scenes from a UAW picket line. The first president in American history to walk a striking picket line. Let's let's roll this. You can't, you know, you gotta you gotta squint a little bit to hear this. But let's here's here's Biden kind of missing the bullhorn a little bit at the picket line.
Ruddy, you ain't w a bigger lines, but not as the Senator since nineteen seventy three. But I'll tell you what first I've ever done as the president? Oh sure, working a real side in the three. Back of the matter is that you, guys.
U A W.
You seved the autobile industry back into out of the eight and four, made a lot of sacrifices, gave up a lot, and the companies were in trouble. But now they're doing incredibly well. And guess what you should be doing incredibly well too. Takes with it because you deserve the significant raise, your need and others, let's get it, never stepped.
Up for us what I was struck by beyond just the imagery of the president out there on the picket
line with the workers. Is that at the end there he says, let's get back what we lost, using the word we talking about the workers, and he's talking about how in two thousand and eight, during the financial crisis, the UAW gave up extraordinary concessions in order to just not go completely bankrupt, like bankruptcy and let not the kind of fake bankruptcy, but like real bankruptcy was like on the table, like that was a real possibility, and they made all of these sacrifices. And so he's saying,
let's we need to win that back. And to have a president say we in relation to the rest of these workers rather than you, was a unique sign of solidarity from a president to actual striking workers. What did you think of of that theater or a real shift in the role to presidency?
I mean it, it was good theater, a rare moment of good theater from the Biden presidency.
I did short, which was good for him.
Kept it short. He so here's more from him. He said, quote, stick with it. You deserve the significant rays you need and other benefits, and he got some reading that. Yeah, he got some additional headlines because a reporter shoutowed a question to him where he asked specifically with the reporter asked specifically about a forty percent pay raise, and Biden just responded to the question of whether workers deserved it. He said, quote, yes, this is yes. You can see
that up on the screen as well. So whether or not, I mean, I think Biden is entirely sincere in this, I think, and that's very typical of Democrats, especially from his era, when union support meant something. I mean, that's that is the core of the Democratic Party when he's coming and especially where he's from, when he's coming into office and is coming into power politically. So I think he's entirely sincere in his sentiments towards unions, and I
think you definitely saw that very very clearly yesterday. It is interesting, on the other hand, that speaking of we were just kind of talking about this in the China segment, the sort of different polls pulling him in different directions, and this happens in every presidency, but it's been interesting the sort of green agenda that Biden's implemented, the electric
vehicle mandate that came from an executive order. Those things are intention and those are explicitly intention according to the union, and Biden didn't address that yesterday. No big surprise there, but it is interesting to see a Democrat like Joe Biden, from his era and his kind of democratic politics then be the administration to implement some of these green priorities that the unions are obviously not stoked about.
Yeah, And later he's stuck around to watch Sean Fain, the UAW president, speak to that same gathering at workers. He's got another I don't think we have the clip here, but he's got a worker, got his arm around her, and she's talking about how we're going to beat corporate greed. The thing that beats corporate greed is a united working class. And Biden's like pumping his fist like this is the Democratic Party? What wow? Okay? And I think politicians would
rather do that like it, just as human beings. Like if you can be a politician and you can either kind of be corrupted by big money, or you can be corrupted by thousands of workers cheering for you, you'd rather have thousands of just as a human, you'd rather have thousands of workers cheering for you. Now, it's nice to be rich and you know, be bought off like it'd be an oligarch, like all of those things are great.
But I do think that there is a they wind at the back of that kind of movement if you can get it going, like you have to be able. And you're seeing at the same time, yesterday it was reported you see this that the private equity industry is moving all its money to the Republican the cycle because they're so frustrated by Gensler and other Biden regulators and they think that Democrats are like getting taken over by the berniecrats and it's just not fair. Private equity can't
get a hearing outside of Josh Gottheimer anymore. And it's like good, polarize that, like good, fine, yeah, let's have that fight.
Well, and it's a time when Republicans are at odds with the Chamber of Commerce, and that's a.
Very real where will private equity go?
Well, it's actually fair, I mean because private equity again, I mean we've seen different things like ESG is a huge issue of contention between Republicans and some of these really big business interests. And I don't know, I mean, there's a real question of if they those big business interests that thought they had actually found a new home in the Democratic Party. It wasn't just that they thought, oh, we're souring on Republicans, it was actually they felt really
comfortable with Democrats. If they now feel uncomfortable with Democrats, and that's a wedge that drives them back to Republicans.
There's a lot lot of incentives on the table for Republicans to be friendly with those interests again, and we'll talk about this later in the show in my block, because that's Republicans like actually really can't afford to do that with their voters because sentiments have soured on Wall Street to another degree with Republican voters, but union sentiments even among Republican voters, and in the poll I'm going to talk about later today, it's something like forty percent
of Republicans are favorable towards unions. Let alone the broader public. This is not a time to be going after unions.
Yeah, and this exact fight that you're talking about is playing out within the Republican Party. In tonight's trip by Trump out to what a lot of the media is describing as a talk to the UAW or to like unionized workers, or saying he's visiting the Pike line. None of that is true, and it's interesting. Let's talk about what Trump actually is doing during the debate. He's going to be visiting a non union plant, and let's we
have this Fox News clip. Let's roll this so we can let's hear from directly from the non union owner.
Let's bring in.
Nathan Stemple, a president of automotive manufacturing company Drake Enterprises, where former President Trump will be speaking tomorrow. Nathan, good morning too. It's going to be a big week for you and your business because the former president is coming to speak at Drake Enterprises. Not every day you get a former president current front runner to visit. So give us the backstory here, tell us how this visit came about and why you do want to host the former president.
Well, first off, thanks for having me on. It was complete luck. Some of our colleagues that we do business with reached out to us said that the president was looking for a location to host this event, and you know we are more than willing.
To do so.
Now. Some of is if I'm going to defend Trump, would be the unions are Democratic allies. No, yeah, and so aren't going to give Trump any kind of photo op. On the other hand, the picket lines are all over you know, they're they're throughout Michigan, Indiana. You could, like, you can find picket lines everywhere. And so if he actually wanted to literally visit a picket line, he could do that. He could get the same photo op that
Biden just got. Instead, when his campaign decided to plan it, they reached out to you know, some looks like Republican donors out in the Midwest, and they were like, oh, yeah, I call this guy called Nathan. You know, he's his workers aren't striking, so they don't have a union, and they're like, oh, you can host us. You're like yeah, well yeah. It's like, well, no, this is a big this is a strike against the Big three. What are you doing going to a not striking, non union plans?
Well, yeah, So that's where the media is I think bluring the lines here is so he is speaking to auto workers. Yeah, and when you say Donald Trump is going to Michigan to speak to auto workers a mid UAW strike gives the impression that he is speaking to striking auto workers. That is not the case, and there were some rumblings that this had been organized by the National Right to Work Foundation, which is exactly what it sounds like as a group.
We don't have any evidence of that, as Philip Pump would say.
Right right, Philip Pump would say, by the Bump standards, it's unconfirmed. I did reach out to them and didn't hear back to try to confirm whether or not that's true. But yeah, like I said, I didn't hear back. Now, the right to work issue is a huge blind spot for and I don't know if we've actually ever even hashed this out, because you've covered these issues for years.
I do genuinely think it is a blind a blind spot for pro union democrats and pro union leftists because a lot of the problem with right to work is actually I think it's blamed on companies, like misinformation for companies blah blah blah, which I think is sort of insulting to union workers. But also if unions, if workers don't want to join a union, that's also a problem with the union. And it is because unions like the UAW have had serious corruption problems. There are now cultural
wedges between the workers and the unions. And the candidates that they support with money that partially comes from workers, Like that is a real problem for a lot of people who work at in places like Detroit, in places like Indiana, and so the right to work issue I think is not as clear cut as it's made out to be by a lot of people who cover these
issues really intensely. Not you, but I think sometimes that just gets glossed over, and it is kind of an opening for Trump to come in here and say, you like a lot of you workers, not all of you workers, but a lot of you aren't getting what you want from the unions, and so I don't think it's like
a clear slam dunk. I guess that's what I'm trying to say, Like, it's not like the big dunk on Republicans that I've seen some on the left treated as that that Trump is going to like a right to work non union in place like Actually, union workers in places like Michigan do have a lot of problems with the unions.
I think the timing is a little off for him in the sense that finally, yes, the UAW wildly corrupt for decades until like recently, thank you department weaponized department of Justice came in and weaponized the UAW leadership right out of there after this like then they deserved it, like wildly corrupt. And then for the first time ever, they had direct elections and they chose Sean Fain. Here's the thing that nobody wants to talk about. You know why Shawn Fain won. People are going to not be
happy about this. Graduate students make up at about twenty five percent of the UAW right now. They were the biggest organizers and champions of Shawn Fain, and so it's this interesting Bernie like gentrifier millennial situation. But they very much organized with militant auto workers and other rank and file. But without the graduate students in that union, John Finn doesn't win.
Interesting, yeah, without the we.
Don't We liked our kind of class history to be cleaner than that. So you can just pretend you didn't hear that. If anybody doesn't like that, But if you do like that, congratulations to the graduate students and also congratulations to the autoworkers who are like who did work with them and be like, you know what, these kids
can really help us. There were a lot of fights on the floor where the graduate students were able to help some of these long time auto workers kind of work through the very complicated legal ease of the bylaws and help them maneuver within the within the within the convention. So it's really really cool alliance if if people are okay with like acknowledging that grad students are not just the worst people on the planet, because without them, like
you're not, you're not getting this fight right now. So one point on what I'd say on right to work, Yes, I think it's true that unions need to keep organizing internally and need to you know, positively win the support of their membership.
They need to genuinely be appealing.
At the same time, the way that right to work can sometimes be designed is like imagine you, like, let's say a book, like you're going out to eat and
you've got a huge group. You've got fifty people, and so you call the restaurant ahead and you're like, look, if we give you a thousand dollars, can we book a block off half the restaurant and then everybody can eat for ten dollars total, and then everybody and then people come in and you people figure out, oh, actually I don't have to pay the ten dollars, I don't have to chip in, and I still get the cheaper food.
And then eventually nobody's paying the little cover to get into the side over here, and then the person who organized the dinner can't then pay the restaurant, and so the whole thing just dissolves and you don't and nobody any longer has like this half of the restaurant anymore. The whole thing's over. There's so you got to so ever individual wants to free ride, Yeah, that's for the why not. It takes the incentive away if you can free ride, free ride. But then eventually the union is
so weak that it just collapses. And that's the goal of these like right to work champions.
Absolutely, absolutely, Although I do again think that it's a it's also an opening and even just politically, it's an opening for Trump to pray on. And I say that not like I doesn't mean that pejoratively. I mean that politically to pray on some real weaknesses that the union has. And the union should obviously strengthen the weakness, it should like actually have to deal with some of those things.
And when you don't have right to work, there's less incentive for the union to work on those things because they don't have to appeal as much to workers because workers are forced to support them. So anyway, all that is to say, it shouldn't be a cope for for unions to just say, well, this is you know, business brainwashing and freeloaders. I mean, they're like very legitimate problems that have broken the trust of some of the workers.
And that is at the very least an opening. And Republicans have not been smart enough to really capitalize on that because they didn't frankly give a damn, Like they weren't paying attention and they didn't want to touch the labor issue period. And Donald Trump is the only Republican candidate right now that's going in on this, and that's
like shocking. I mean, it's not shocking at all, but it's shocking from a purely political strategic standpoint that no consultants in the beltwayh have like picked up on this and been like, ooh, maybe we should talk to these workers because they comprise a group of our base. They delivered the election to Donald Trump in twenty sixteen. In some part, it's just absurd that the Beltwegh is still that dumb and bought and paid for by big business, that no candidate wants to touch this.
And I'll be very curious to see how he frames this. I think A five is Trump's, you know, so I think this suggests he's Trump says he always had autowork back. Union leaders say his first term record shows otherwise, So I think he'll probably get up and say that I've
always had your back. It'll be interesting to see whether he like bashes, if he like stands with workers with bashes, union leaders and Democrats, or which would be a misread of the moment, because I think that UAW members right now are very happy with Sean Fain, very happy with UAW leadership. They love the way that they're rolling out the strikes slowly so that most of the UAW members
are actually getting paid right now. Like they're causing significant pain for the companies, they're bringing these companies to the table, extracting concessions negotiations from when I'm told are going extremely well, and they're getting paid for most of them because only like thirteen thousand are out on strike right now. So I think if Trump goes after the leadership, I don't think it's gonna actually land because they're like, no, what
are you talking about? Like these guys. We elected these guys just recently and they're doing exactly what we asked them to do and they're executing it well.
Yeah, And I mean I guess again, like I expect that he probably will go after leadership because that's one of like in recent years and still memory right, yeah, and your point right now about like leadership. Recently, a lot of Republicans just are not well acquainted with labor issues, Like they don't know what's true on the ground, they don't have the contacts. They really just like don't have their ear to the ground. They definitely don't have their
finger on the pulse. I know this will come as a surprise to everyone of.
Who is Republicans from Indiana that I was talking to Jim Banks, Yeah, Jim Banks. I asked him, like, you know, how our people responding, As the Republican chair of the Anti Wolke Caucus, how are Republicans responding to the coming strike. He's like, nobody in Washington that I know of is remotely even paying attention to it.
Well, and so this gets us to our next element. Let's put a SX up on the screen. This is Josh Holly, Republican senator elected in twenty eighteen and definitely someone considered to be on the quote unquote new right. Visiting the picket line in Wentzville, he said, these workers deserve better pay, better benefits, and a guarantee their jobs will stay in America. Marco Rubio supported the Amazon unionization drive down in Bessemer. We have seen some Republicans flirting
with supporting striking workers, flirting with supporting unions. If we put a seven up on the screen, this gets interesting too. This is Pat White. He says, shame on Josh Holly for acting like a friend to labor just for cheap publicity. His record shows a lack of support for the labor community up until now. These are some headlines he put up on the screen. Holly has been a vocal supporter of implementing quote right to work in Missouri. Missouri election
proposition a right to work vote. So, Ryan, we were just basically going over all of this.
And this one's good, and we're Overtime pay raise blocked in Missouri and nationwide as a result of lawsuit brought by Missouri Attorney General Josh Holly. That's when Obama tried to raise overtime pay for people who were misclassified as managers and HAULI suit and I think misclassified as non manager.
But whatever it was, And I think Josh Holly would say.
Misclass fied as managers. I had it right the first time.
Sorry, we should we should actually try to get Josh Holly on to talk about this, because I think he would say, and you can choose to believe it or not. I think he would say, I understand why people are skeptical.
I think he would say, like, listen, I get it, Like the Republican Party has a very different record on these issues, you know, I still I'm sure he would say, I still support right to work, but I understand people's people's skepticism, Like this has been a real problem for the Republican Party, but the fact of the matter is
that it's changing. The Republican base is changing. He wants to convert and well that's what I'm saying, Like it's one of these like weird things in politics where you know, I again, like I understand if if people are questioning the sincerity, but the practical effect of it is actually powerful.
It's good for the workers. The workers had Corey Bush and aoc in Missouri at a picket line, and they have Josh Holly at a picket line. You can call them all cynical. That's great for the workers.
That's great for the workers at the end of the day, for the workers. All right, Should we move on Ryan to Trump News yesterday?
Yes? So Donald Trump getting hammered by a judge for fraud. The judge says he doesn't even need to, you know, hear evidence anymore, because just he said, just looking at the plain paperwork, he can say that a lot of fraud was going on. You've had the Trump kids. I
think we put up b one here. The Trump kids kind of freaking out about one particular part of the ruling where the judge apparently said that he, you know, he guesses that mar A Lago should be worth about eighteen million dollars and Trump said it was worth a billion plus now, I think and the problem for the valuation of mar A Lago is that it has to be a club, you know, it has to sell as a club. It can't be you know, subdivided up into
a million different McMansions. My favorite part of all This is that the Trump basically suggested, according to the judge, that any valuation that he put on a property and including mar A Lago is legitimate because he could find a buyer from Saudi Arabia who would pay that price, which I think is true, but more damning, like he should be in the cell with Menendez if like if Menenda is getting a bunch of gold bars from Egypt for whatever he's assuming in a cell, then Trump just
having a blank check from the Saudis for whatever he wants to give them. I think we just forget how how corrupt that is and and how how much it undermines our national security and our national interests to have somebody who and whose whose son in law, for instance, takes two billion dollars within days of leaving the White House. If you every day know that you have a a blank check that you can just write from the Bank of Saudi, that's gonna be in your head when you're making foreign policy.
Absolutely absolutely, And it's one of the I think legitimate arguments that was made about Donald Trump and his business interests over the course of his presidency. There were all kinds of funny ones that were made, but that was always a legitimate one. And this is so basically the news yesterday is there's this civil suit that it was Letitia James actually brought against Donald Trump, and the judge ruled in that lawsuit that Trump and the Trump organization
deceived banks and insurers and other types of people. I'm reading from the Associated Press here by quote overvaluing his assets and exaggerating his net worth on paperwork used and making deals and securing loans. So one example of that is mar A Lago, as you mentioned, inflating, according to the judge, its value on one financial statement by two three hundred percent. He also, the judge quote rebuked Trump
for lying about the size of his Manhattan apartment. Trump claimed his three Worry Trump Tower penthouse was nearly three times its actual size, valuing it at three hundred and twenty seven million dollars.
And the judge also pointed out that they would list rent controlled apartments as worth just as much as unrent controlled apartments. Unrestricted land they would list is just as
much as restricted land. Here's why you and you know me well, so you know I have just no soft spot for this crime, this particular crime, because it's what Joe Judice and Teresa Judaice went to actual prison for these are the real housewives of New Jersey, Real Housewives of New Jersey Star They like pencil whipped a little bit of a mortgage just to like just so that they could float like from one like rehab got rehab to another, and the FBI and the rest of the
irs and everybody else came at them and sent both of them to prison and deported Joe. Yeah, not for like a point zero zero one of what the Trump family did here. So no, no sympathy for me.
Theresa is on Celebrity Prentice and I think has sort of hinted that she's supportive of Donald Trump's of.
Course she is, Like the demography is destiny right there, like that Trump supporters, no doubt about it. But some serious penalties coming for Trump, I was just.
Gonna say, right, So, like the consequences of this is that they actually the judge ordered and this is Arthur anger On. He ordered that some of Trump's business licenses are now rescinded, which makes it very hard, at least according to the Associated Press, for them to do business in New York, which is where they have always done.
Business, like they're trying to take the Trump Tower from him, from us the people.
But in all seriousness, I mean, this is again for all of the lawfair involved in these attacks on Trump and all of what I think are legitimate conversations about the weaponization of the Justice Apartment, et cetera, et cetera. Trump always had serious vulnerabilities, always had serious vulnerabilities. And that's why even when he initially ran for president, I don't know to this day that he really wanted to because he didn't think that he would make it more
than like maybe six months. Because anybody with this level of sort of business or this type of business history really wouldn't want the attention of basically what a truck Schumer say about the Intel agencies, like, that's what's going to happen, whether it's Intel or whether it's your business. You're going to become a massive target for all of these things, and you genuinely wouldn't want to expose yourself to that level.
There probably aren't any real estate developers in New York who would want that type of scrutiny. Donald Trump is definitely not one of them, right, He's not among them. Also, he has no lawyers like because for years he has refused to pay his attorneys, and I have never seen this.
In this order, the judge find Trump's attorneys for their bad arguments, like the arguments that they made that, according to the judge, were so bad and so specious that he fined them seven five hundred dollars because he's and he says, in order, I told you to stop making stupid arguments, you came back with stupid arguments. You're fined like I can. It's one thing to lose emotion, it's another thing to lose emotions so badly that the judge
charges you. It's like, that's pretty It's like that line where we are all stupider for having read this motion and as as a result, you owe us seven five hundred dollars.
And that's where I think we should go back to, like again this idea that Donald Trump, so he camt paigned again saying I know the system and I alone can fix it. Basically, he was saying that I have brazenly participated in the upper echelons of America's business and political elite for decades. I have gamed this smart. I'm famous for it. Yeah, it doesn't make me, like, it doesn't make me criminal, it makes me smart something to that extent. It's been out in the open with Donald
Trump for a long time. He hasn't sort of hid that he's at best gamed the system. And so I don't think this affects him with voters. I think again, like people actually know this stuff about Donald Trump, Like it's totally baked into the Trump cake, as we talked about a lot. So the question of whether or not this is like a big blow to Trump politically, I think it's it's not a big blow to Trump politically at all. But at the same.
Time, book wise, ouch, this is like this is a.
Very real hard consequence for him on that level for sure.
Right because he didn't have the types of lawyers and accountants who would say, you know what, that's not the square foot it's on the square food size of this apartment. And you can't say this is worth three hundred and fifty million dollars. Anybody looks, they'll know it's not, and that's illegal. You're gonna get in trouble. And if anybody would say that to him, he would not pay them, be fire them.
And why does this not bother Trump voters. And this is maybe the most important question. It's because on the one hand, Donald Trump was in some sense willing to say things like, it doesn't make me criminal, it makes me smart. And that's I don't know what I'm paraphrasing him, but he did say it makes me smart in relationship to I think it was taxes.
Yeah.
So like, on the one hand, again, people know this, they expect it, but they also see that see him as somebody who has kind of turned his fire on the others, the Clintons, the Bidens, who are doing the same thing. And so people are genuinely upset about corruption, petty corruption like this in addition to like really serious major corruption, Saudi corruption. We're going to talk about potential
Iran corruption. These sorts of things like genuinely do really bother Trump voters, but they see it as something that's Ronald Trump has sort of set his sights on. Now. I think your reporting on Jared Kushner should give people serious pause Trump supporter serious pause as to whether that's true, as to whether he's sincere when he says he's set his sights on actually undercutting the power of American elites on every level, that Trump voters are bothered by one
hundred percent, So that's a different conversation. But again, like people have a very real reason for seeing Trump in that sense. They believe that, like he's somebody he profited and benefited from this system and then decided to basically destroy it. The question is whether he actually wants to undermine and destroy it.
Yeah, and then right, but then then once you're behind him, it becomes a team sport, it becomes negative polarization. And if you think, you know, Biden is like a pedophile communist who's trying to sell the country to the Chinese, and then you really don't care, right, what what your opponent? I mean, what what Trump? What's wrong with Trump? Because like that that's your that you're going to ride.
And that's another thing to the point earlier I know, we have to move on that you made about how I don't think any real estate developer in New York would want to invite this kind of scrutiny. That's another thing that's going to really irritate people here, and I think rightfully so, Uh, that's not to say Trump didn't do anything wrong, because I think he was obviously doing something wrong, but it then feels like like witch hunt stuff once again, that Donald Trump is being singled out.
Nobody else is going to be singled out, even real estate developers or similar business people who have given a bunch of money to Democrats. Just going after Trump because he's Trump, because it's the They're not after me, they're after you. Meme that he posted when he was president, and that is there's truth to it, and it resonates
because of that. So that will, I mean, I think that'll loom large in the minds of people who when we're talking about you know, if you ask Hione why, like do you care about the money that goes to Jared Kushner and his relationship with MBS, et cetera, et cetera, people will say, listen, this is it's more serious than
that would be the response. Now, I think both of us would would disagree, but I get why when you look at some of this stuff, at least on paper, it does seem like just a slap in the face of the Trump voters. In addition to Donald Trump, right.
But he didn't have to deport Joe Judice. He didn't have to deport joju and Judice was deported under Trump that's right. Deporter in Chief's actually that was Obama. He could have pardoned confusing your deporters and jee, but he did deport Joe.
That's right.
He had a chance to pardon him, didn't.
Well.
Shout out to Joe Judice, who I believe is in.
The Obamas's That's that's right. So wild story in Samophore about Iran. You want to set this one up because.
Uh yeah, so this story made really big waves when it published in Samaphore yesterday. And actually I saw the Free Press, which was very Wise's publication, republished it just today. We can go ahead and put c one up on the screen. This is a little bit from the Semaphore story, and I'm going to read from it here, except my notes got mixed up and I don't have it in front of me. Ryan, Do you have it in front of you?
I don't. But while you look for it, I'll make the point that it's very nice to see Barry Wise show some interest in a foreign government trying to influence Washington. If she's really wants to get on that beat, I can point to a number of other countries that that are kind of in that broad region that she might want to look at because it's kind of there's kind of a lot going on there.
Well, here's the right, of course, is alluding to Israel. The Semaphore story starts by saying, in the spring of twenty fourteen, because the story talks both about the Obama administration and the current Biden administration, the Special Envoy to Irun, Robert O'Malley or Robert malllee, is brought into this story in some ways that are probably expected. Obviously he came under investigation. I think it's an ongoing investigation into Rob mallie's handling of classified documents.
Which Iran envoy and like the lead Iran nuclear deal guy.
Yes, right, And so the story says. In the spring of twenty fourteen, senior Iranian foreign ministry officials initiated a quiet effort to bolster Tehran's imagion positions on global security issues, particularly its nuclear program, by building ties with a network of influential overseas academics and researchers. They called it the
Iran Experts Initiative. The scope and scale of the IEI project has emerged in a large cache of Iranian government correspondence and emails reported for the first time by Semaphore and Iran International. The officials working under the moderate President Hassan Rahani congratulated themselves on the impact of the initiative.
At least three of the people and this is the big kind of bombshell, as it was perceived yesterday, at least three of the people on the foreign ministries list were or became top aids to Robert Malley, the Biden administration Special envoy on Iran, who was placed on leave this June following the suspension of his security clearance, and so Ryan. I think the IEE this is a statement that's in the story. They talk about how this is.
They're spinning it as kind of a mundane outreach effort to second generation Iranians in different parts of the world. I think one of the big questions here is the funding, because it seems nebulously attributed to a European government. I think is what comes up over and over again in the story, but nobody says who that European government is. We don't quite know what people were getting paid for.
There was a lot of arranging of op eds, seemingly people working for our government checking in with people working in the Iranian government. About decisions on whether to speak in certain panels like Israel came into the picture on one of those questions, So you know, what, do you see this. Let's actually just put the next element up on the screen for a response from We're going to take or Tegas, who was a spokesperson for Mike Pompeo
when he was a Secretary of State. She said, it's not very often that my jaw drops open while reading an article, as it did with the semaphore piece. There's no two ways around this. Top Obama and Biden officials were a part of a foreign influence operation by the Iranian regime, some of who are still in government holding security clearances. This comes on top of the news that Rob Mallee, Biden's Iran envoy, had to leave his position
over his security clearance being revoked. Bombshell, Ryan or not, I did.
Not think so. And there's like a lot of smoke in that in that post by Morgan or Tagus there one is the is the kind of conflation of this comes on the top of the news like that's that's a way that people like to link things together that aren't aren't linked. My understanding is that this security clearance was a this was a fight that he was having
with basically the deep state. Like, so people who were like cheering on Rob Malley getting his security clearance stripped, if they, you know, they should should think a little bit more carefully before they because he was pushing harder. Then a lot of people kind of in the intelligence community wanted on the on the Iran nuclear deal, and this was kind of some payback. But we'll say, like the seven four reports that there might be an FBI
investigation that's ongoing. Like, but again, just because you don't like Rob Malley doesn't necessarily mean the FBI is right on all these these questions. So the broader point here she says they were a part of a quote, they were part of a foreign influence operation by the Iranian regime. It does seem very clear that the Iranian regime, you know, tried to set up an influence.
Operation absolutely and successfully did.
Where they were you know, they created a platform where people would they would hold conferences. People would go to the conferences, would speak on panels, would talk to other experts, and then you would hope to like influence them and from there they would go to se and eight they're talking points either on if they get them on cable, they're very lucky. If they can get them into print, Uh then that then that that's decent too. Uh what what what kind of made jumped out of me about
this story is how also mundane? It seems a old like the current Iranian regime. Uh, it doesn't like Malley, like it's like hostile to them. It's like it's comp like so whatever whatever whatever claims might be made certainly aren't true anymore. There's also like every country does this, Like there's not like Iran is under sanctions and so is limited in what it can do when it lobbies.
I mean, it's barred basically from lobbying. But Washington is just fueled by foreign money and so to watch and so to see this be something that is read as jaw dropping. While the Egyptian government is bribing the chair of Senate Far related committee, like that's an influence operation. Yeah, that's like, but that's a dictator who's on our side,
So you're not going to see outrage. And I was kind of jokingly referring to Israel when it's talking about Barry Wise, but not just Israel, Saudi Arabia, the Nine Arab Emirates, the Cotteries, Turkey, like all of these countries run these massive influence operations Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine with Podesta.
Podesta, Yeah, the European Center for a Modern Ukraine. Google the European Center for a Modern Ukraine. It's very similar to this. Actually, it's basically a front group that's created by a foreign government to do this very innocuous looking influence operation. You can say this was I would like a meeting with Menandez's office on behalf of the European Center for a Modern Ukraine, which sounds different than saying on behalf of Yanikovic. It's much easier to say, I would like And that's.
Just like they was set up this IEI thing what it was called, yeah, exactly, and so they and you get a European government to co fund it, so that that gets you around the sanctions problem.
Right And guess probably for the European Center from Modern Ukraine is a good example of how this works because the way that was set up, it was a shell nonprofit based in Europe, and that way they tried to get around registering as foreign agents, and that's going to be a problem for the people that are implicated in this. And like you said, Ryan, Washington is run by foreign money. If they were actually getting money, if they were doing things, that's yeah, that is that is a really that will
be a huge problem for them. And I'm going to read this. I alluded to this earlier, but arian tibought to buy the current Pentagon official so she works for the Pentagon right now, and at last at least two occasions checked in with Iron's Foreign ministry before attending policy events.
According to the emails, she wrote to the Zarani and Farcia on June twenty seven, twenty fourteen, to say she'd met with Saudi Prince Turkey el alf I saw a former ambassador to the US, who expressed interest in working together and invited her to Saudi Arabia. She also said she'd been invited to attend a workshop on Iron's nuclear
program at benger And University in Israel. I'm not interested in going, but then I thought maybe it would be better that I go and talk rather than in ISRAELI like Emily Landau, who goes and disseminates this information, I would like to ask your opinion too, and see if you think I should accept the invitation and go, so Rani replied the same day. All things considered, it seems Saudi Arabia is a good case, but the second case, Israel is better to be avoided. Thanks, and she responds,
thank you for your advice. I will take action regarding Saudi Arabia and will keep you updated on the progress. There's no evidence to Badibaye went to the conference in Israel. There, her books and research reports suggest she's interviewed a number of senior Israeli officials. So ran I think you're right. This does absolutely resemble just about I don't know, like
many influence operations in size and and scope. The difference, of course between Hungary or Ukraine is that this is an adversarial nuclear power, I think, and that's you know,
that is genuinely different. And I mean, obviously I'm sure you could find similar cases with Israel, Definitely with Cutter, Definitely with other countries like that Egypt, although that seems to be a much more theatrically comedic, almost like Greek comedy type influence operation that's not directly connected to some like formal apparatus, right, Like they just went right to Menendez and saying we're doing this respectable form of influence pedaling, which is to create a shell group.
Yeah, and the understanding in Washington since CC took power is that Yusuf allow Taba, who is the UAE's ambassador, has been operating also as the kind of ambassador from Egypt. Like this very bizarre situation because the UA funded what was it called, I forget the Arab Arabic word, but for that mess protest against Morsey and the Muslim Brotherhood
government that led to the military coup. UE funded that, and afterwards the UAE basically became kind of the lobbying vehicle for the Egyptians in in Washington and would lobby for its ability to get weapons and aid and said it did all this diplomacy, And so I think this is probably some weird like freelancing because they don't have any diplomatic muscles because the UA flexes them all. And so you've got these freelancers Coen brother types on the side giving gold bars to Menendez.
Well you added another element to this, Oh, yes, different, it's a different layer. Ryan tell us about the reporter who broke this story, j Solomon, who has a little bit of a history with around himself.
Yeah, so put up this next element. This is New York Times a couple of years ago reporting Wall Street Journal fire's reporter with ties to Iranian born magnate. That is about Jay Solomon, who had always been known as if a bit hawkish, but a well sourced reporter for the Wall Street Journal. All of a sudden he was fired, and that came just ahead of an Associated Press investigation into him, uncovering the fact that he was in talks with this Iranian born magnate to launch a bunch of
different business deals. So this is the reporter who was then hired by Semaphore in order to cover the Middle East and is now writing about this influence operation. You know, he himself was fired for getting into a financial arrangement with his like leading source who was and this was UAE related like. So to go back to what we were saying about the Amoradis, he was an Iranian born magnate, but he was someone who worked very closely with the m or So the Amidis had something of an influence
operation going on. This Wall Street Journal reporter who then got fired and then later got hired later by Samophorre to write about an Iranian influence operation. So that's why you have to kind of forgive me for being like really like this, this is a bombshell.
It is to the extent I mean, I think it's a very serious story, to the extent that there are people in the Biden administration right now that seem to have cozy or well maybe warmer ties with the Iranians than they should given the state of the country, the state of Iran. So I think, you know, the current ties are genuinely problematic. Twenty fourteen was a somewhat different time period, and obviously we could have a different conversation about the nuclear deal. I think to the extent that
it reflects on current Biden administration officials, that's problematic. But I totally take your point. It's a little.
Bit a little rich, little rich.
Yeah.
Yeah. He recently he sued over getting hacked and having his emails exposed, which then exposed this corruption scandal, and the case was just I think last week or so, it was just it was dismissed. That can't go forward.
And as to the veracity of this trove of documents, some of the reported that they scraped metadata, They did an analysis and there's no evidence of it having been changed. People can take that for what they will, but certainly a story that the kind of over on.
Yeah, it's kind of if this is all they got so far, it probably wasn't changed. Like, it's pretty mundane stuff.
Obviously, with Ukraine, the Forefront, Iran, China, all of those kind of powers now increasingly seeming to communicate with each other and agree with each other on different questions is a huge issue for the Biden administration. So this definitely isn't going anywhere, and we will continue to follow it for sure.
Now the actual global espionage scandal is the one we're going to talk about next, and this is the latest wrinkle. A JP Morgan decides that it is going to settle with the Virgin Islands over its relationship with with Jeffrey Epstein. Just scandalous beginning to end. Do we have, Yeah, we have JP Morgan getting asked about this most unfortunate connection that they had to Jeffrey Epstein. Let's play diamond here.
How are you feeling about the Epstein deposition this month?
I am so sad that we had any relations with that man whatsoever. You know, we had top lawyers of valueing this from this SEC enforcement, the DOJ, you know, and obviously have we known then we know today, we would have done things differently. But it's very unfortunate. And I have deep respect for these women. That doesn't mean reliable for the action of an individual, but I do have deep respect for them. My heart goes out to them. And he's so tan Brian.
That's from about four months ago. So they were asking about the deposition that month of Jamie Diamond and other executives.
At jeff Reson original.
One thing he said, yeah, so one thing he said right there that was interesting. He said, obviously, if we had known then what we know today, we wouldn't have had this business arrangement with Jeffrey Epstein. But of course that's part of the problem here is that JP Morgan
did have indications they did know. And this is one of the biggest remaining questions, and it's not even a question in many cases why people Bill Gates included continued to have relationships with business personal Jeffrey Epstein after he got that sweetheart plea deal down in Florida that at the very least exposed him as a predator that's the problem, and that's not nobody. Nobody has a good answer to that question, not Bill Gates, not JP Morgan, Which is
where you get this seventy five millillion dollar settlement. And actually it's worth noting that's the same amount that Deutsche Bank agreed to pay Epstein victims. I'm actually reading from CNBC here to settle a third Manhattan federal court lawsuit that alleged the bank facilitated his sex trafficking when he was a customer from twenty thirteen through twenty eighteen. So
look at those years. Pretty important. Now. The CNBC report also notes the deals come months after a separate two hundred and ninety dollars million dollar settlement by JP Morgan with victims of the now dead predators the Virgin Islands. Previous predator the Virgin Islands previously obtained a one hundred and five million dollar settlement for Epstein's estate and another sixty two million dollars from billionaire investor Leon Black to
resolve potential claims related to Epstein. Now, this money from JP Morgan is going to attorney's fees for the Virgin Island and Virgin Islands, and what they described infrastructure to help them with sex trafficking and victims and all of that. Man For JP Morgan, seventy five million dollars not a huge amount. For Deutsche Bank seventy five million dollars, not a huge amount, especially when they're doing okay right now.
But when you add that to the two hundred and ninety million dollars that they had to give to the victims, that's that's stacked up. That's a costly error. Obviously, they probably still the money, of course that was alluding to it.
Right, but they probably still made money off of it in the end. Absolutely, And there are some the incentives here are for these you know, banks who work with these massively rich people to just look the other way. And it's so arcane and opaque that it's this constant cat and mouse game between the regulators and the banks. And the cats are tiny, the mice are huge. It's
just they're just hunting the dark. It says, you know, JP Morriy did not admit any wrongdoing in the settlement, which will give fifty five million dollars to Virginia Island's charities and the American Territories anti tree efforts. So as the Virginia Islands said the deal quote includes several substantial commitments by JP Morgan Chase to identify, report, and cut off support for potential human trafficking, including establishing and implementing
comprehensive policies and procedures unquote. That's the good that's the hard part. And also they don't want to do it right like it, so, yeah, they just have to constantly be exposed and pressured. Otherwise their incentive is to just allow their clients to just move money, you know, in whatever way they feel like they can get away with.
Yes, and yeah, it becomes the tax of doing business. It's like a fee, right, Like you're going to have to pay some settlement down the road if it turns out that this guy you have really good indications might be a sex trafficker, is sex trafficking and you're facilitating it. I think it's actually the case itself is actually a pretty interesting test of liability and the law regarding liability
and bank liability. But it's very very clear that the relationship top executives that JP Morgan had with Jeffrey Epstein was wildly inappropriate. The legality of it is obviously a different question. But they are one of many organizations and people who continue to do business with him and continue to have personal business with him beyond when it was appropriate, including, by the way, the Virgin Islands, which is another interesting layer in the story. Lee Fong has done excellent reporting
on this. This is a headline from Lee in August fired ag leading Epstein inquiry reveals the Virgin Islands governor pressured her on pedophile's behalf. A subheading. His newly followed court documents show that the Virgin Islands Attorney General investigating Epstein faced political pressure to give the pedophile a special waiver.
He needed a special waiver in the Virgin Islands, and he got it, and it looks as though he was I mean, he was lavishing people in the Virgin Islands with donations and political donations, all kinds of stuff in order to get the treatment that he needed to be doing business down there. And so it's not just JP
Morgan that was complicit. And so the settlement with the Virgin Islands is interesting because there's more and more reporting coming out that a lot of people in the Virgin Islands seem to be compromised beyond ethical relation, beyond sort of normal ethics with Jeffrey Epstein.
Yeah, good point, Like, it's definitely not only JP Morgan. And if you're even going to sympathize with JP Morgan for a second, you're going to say, from JP Morgan's perspective, going to say, wait a minute, this guy's hanging out with foreign presidents, foreign prime ministers, members of the royal family. Everybody's talking about how he's like an intelligence asset for
maybe multiple countries. Of course we're doing business with him, and now all of a sudden, we're not supposed to do business with friends of presidents who are intelligence assets. Were JP Morgan Chase, It's it's your fault for letting all of this unravel, right.
And I mean, I think that's another thing is these settlements are preventing some exposure probably of why people felt pressured or beyond money, Because places like JP Morgan have plenty of money, their reason for doing business with Jeffrey
Epstein might be different than Virgin Islands. People in the Virgin Islands government officials sort of petty bureaucrats reasons to do business with Jeffrey Epstein and the intelligence ties are probably the biggest missing puzzle piece, and you know, it's not entirely missing. We have some good reporting that Jeffrey Epstein was Massad, was affiliated with Massad, so there's plenty.
There's plenty to that, and I think there's probably some explanation, partially an explanation for why we saw so many powerful people continue to have relationships with him when they did. But this is, you know, again, the cost of doing business if you're JP Morgan, might just be a fat legal settlement down the road. And to your point, Ryan, I'd love to know if they still came out on top, because I think there's a good chance, when Epstein was moving as much money as he was, that they did.
All Right, Well, there's big news yesterday from the FTC and Amazon. Things are getting heated. Ryan, tell us what happened.
Yeah, so dark Brandon rises again. So not only was he on the picket line, his his neon eyes were blasting Amazon from the FTC and put up this one right here. So Lena Khan joined with seventeen attorneys general from around the country to file a landmark suit against Amazon. Matt Stoller will be here later this week to kind of unpack precisely what's going on. Here where what we can expect.
Whether you want it or not, He's going to explain it to you.
He's going to explain it to you. You're going to love it.
He's going to man explain it to you.
But basically, what they're accusing him of is abusing their marketplace power. There are there's a number of details that they get into around the way that they say, you you know, so you're on Amazon, You've got that like little you know, buy now add to kard thing underneath the product. What Amazon would do is they would kind of crawl the rest of the Internet and find if you're a third party seller and you're selling on Amazon for eighteen ninety nine, but you're selling on some other
site for seventeen ninety nine. Let's say your own site is you want to bring people there, you want to keep the data, you want to build a business. They would see that and boom, they take that buy button away and that just annihilates your sales. And so what that did is it sent a signal to all of these third party sellers that Amazon gets to set the price, like whatever your Amazon price is, if you go a penny below that anywhere else, they're going to nuke your business.
And that's just one example of the way that they do that, but there are a ton of others where you know, they will see which products of theirs are selling us are selling well, which third party products, and then they'll quickly kind of make a crappy generic version of it, or even if it is there already is a generic version, and then and then they'll undersell the
third party seller. There are rules around, you know, in grocery stores, for instance, that a grocery store, let's say it's Acme and they've got Acme cereal, they cannot kind of privilege their own their own product on the shelves against competitors' products. Like the ideas like the store is a platform. You're welcome to sell your own products in that store, but you can't take your competitor's stuff and
put it at the back of the shelf. Because that's just as a society rules that we have put into place because we want fair competition. What this is trying to do is apply that to Amazon's marketplace.
Yeah yeah, well, and Amazon's argument is one that a lot of like anti antitrust people will It's like the very familiar one that basically Amazon is being published punished for being too successful and for being too efficient, right, that this is something consumers want and it benefits consumers.
And again like this is such a it's they make that it's intentionally helpful for them, because it's one of those things that makes it almost impossible to disprove because we don't have the experiment of what would happen if
Amazon wasn't engaging in these types of practices. That's the entire point is that they are blocking competition and if we could see competition, like it's actually not a fair playing field because we can't see how they're interaction with interacting with competition, which is, by the way, what's at stake in the Google anti trust suit as well, in that Google has been intentionally blocking fair access to competitive playing competitive right.
Yeah, right, it's three weeks into the Google Search trial right now, and I think that's a place where people can just understand, go to Google Search, it's like it's worse than it was before, and that you know that it's not the trajectory that we want. We want things
to be better over time, not worse. It's kind of amazing to think that con was a Yale law student six years ago when she published her kind of landmark Yelle Law Review piece about Amazon called the Amazon Paradox or something like that, about how the current interpretation of anti trust laws was making it so that what Amazon was doing was considered to be by anti trust regulators to be okay, yet they were monopolizing everything, which is a clear paradox, like you don't have anti trust laws
if what Amazon does is considered to be within those laws. Right and now here she is as the head of the FTC suing Amazon six years later, and this is kind of an amazing run.
It is amazing. And by the way, she has support from people like Josh Holly, who we talked about earlier in the show, where people are skeptical of whether Josh Holly is just doing it for show when he's going and supporting union members, and we talked earlier about how even if he is doing it for show, the substance actually is there and it might not trans into more substance down the line, but whether he wants it to
or not, it's helpful to the workers. It is helpful to have people like Josh Hally supporting and in some cases other Republican senators supporting these anti trust investigations and suits.
Because he's been a huge supporter of hers. Yeah.
Absolutely, And again this is somebody who comes out of Warren World. Lena Kahan Elizabeth Warren is partially why she ran for president of twenty twenty. She became enemy number one of basically the conservative movement and the business community, which were way more hand in glove than they used
to be. If you went to Seapac, you know, just ten years ago, it was all these events were sponsored by Google and Facebook, and they were, you know, the best parties there, to the extent that that's an honor. They were like lavishing some of these pro business groups, and you know, that was just a that was it wasn't so much that they bought support as at the time.
That's sort of sincere pro business, anti government or limited government concerntive ideology was hand in glove with them on these business issues, not necessarily the cultural issues, as Republicans
came to find out down the road. But it is kind of remarkable to see Lena Khan in the position that she's in coming from Warren World, coming from and you see this crop up like Ted Cruz has attacked Lena Khan for being you know, basically even Republicans that support are on certain things don't agree with everything she does,
which by the way, is fine. But she gets attacked as like a radical, like a Bernie radical, and which is interesting because there are some Republicans who would say, yeah, we need radical Bernieism in the anti trust space because these tech companies are it's very similar to what we saw with like rail hundreds of years ago, which is that it's a new technology and we don't have the sort of infrastructure, muscle memory, and legal precedent about these technologies.
So when Amazon can put these buy buttons add to cart buttons next to other people's products, like, that's just an interesting new dilemma that we don't have precedence or we don't have exact apples to apples.
For And it's not a coincidence that she flows out of Warren world rather than Bernie world, because Warren, you know, is a former Republican who talks about how she loves markets, and it's it's the way, it's a way to blend her kind of progressivism with with that kind of love of well regulated markets, whereas kind of traditional socialist types are fine with big big as good for them because that's a bigger company to be organized, nationalized, nationalized and regulated.
And there's a you know, there's a as as John Kenneth Galbraith would talk about, there's like a kind of fine line between, you know, something that is firmly, solidly regulated and controlled by the state and something that's outright nationalized. Like some ways it's you're just talking at the margins at that point.
Yeah, and that's where I think, you know, we would we would we starved apart because you know, it's it's it's very difficult and there's there's very little precedent, I think for not having a symbiotic, sort of croneous relationship at that point. But to the point of people from Warren World and like in your camp, it's the end goal isn't cronyism, that symbiotic relationship. It is nationalizing things like Twitter.
Companies or yeah for the Bernie left, but yeah, for the Warren right left there like just it's fundamentally kind of conservative impulse. So it makes sense that there's this alliance there.
Yeah, absolutely right. You were on Capitol Hill yesterday, you were following literally a drama and all the dynamics. What have you got for us on this shutdown? That is definitely coming up?
So we're headed for a government shutdown on Saturday. Even though a majority of Republicans in the Senate on Tuesday voted to move forward on a bipartisan spending bill to keep it open. That's because a group of House Republicans is refusing to let anything come to the floor that can pass into law, basically guaranteeing a shutdown. In doing so, they're following the orders of former President Donald Trump, even though it's clear Republicans will get blamed for it and
take a political hit. The only person who could benefit, actually, besides Joe Biden from this is Donald Trump, who is facing multiple federal indictments that he's been working hard to delay past the election. The federal courts can stay open for about two weeks thanks to the fees they collect, but after that they'd have to shut down, gumming everything up and throwing the court calendar into chaos. Now, Republicans
spent Tuesday evening jawing at each other. Florida Representative Matt Gates, one of the Republican firebrands leading the shutdown charge, to his credit, had the knight's best joke. Let me hand the mic to him.
We are devaluing American money so rapidly that in America today you can't even bribe Democrat senators with cash alone. You need to bring gold bars to get the job done, just so that the bribes hold value.
All right, that was pretty good. He also lashed out at Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Twitter, calling him quote pathetic for a paid advocacy campaign Gates said had attempted to pay Republican influencers to trash talk Gates and his shutdown effort. McCarthy issued a cease and desist order to a consulting firm which appears to be or is accused of being at least democratic. Emily knows more about this than me, and we'll sort this that one out in a minute maybe.
But the Gates McCarthy drama continued. Here's McCarthy getting asked about him.
Matt Gates made another thread chair speakership on the House floor today. Are you worried at.
All that to bring up us here?
When you make of the threats He's made them for quite a while.
Have you seen Matt and what he said about me when we first started this. Look, people have got to get over personal differences. I'm focused on America. I think that's where America's looking right now as well. He never voted for me to start out with. I don't assume he's changing his position. He said a lot of things and we waded through. The one thing I will always tell you is I'm never going to give up on America. And that's where my focus is going to be. If
somebody has a personal difference with me, that's fine. They have the right to say it, they have the right to do it. Do whatever there is that.
Distracted this process, though, when he keeps hammering you on this, is that a problem? I mean, he comes out every day with a little more pushing the involop does well, That's why I'm.
Asking you no if it doesn't.
But that is that distracted from this whole issue to fund the government address?
No, but it seems to do something for you.
Now, I don't think people quite have a grasp of how thoroughly absurd the Freedom Caucus position is on a government shutdown, and it's not even the entire Freedom Caucus. Now, I know it sounds like I'm speaking from a partisan perspective here or saying that I disagree with their approach. But what I'm trying to say is that what they're doing isn't wrong, it's just completely insane. So to put it simply, Republicans previously agreed to a very specific deal
to fund the government. They have not made any serious demands or proposed any way forward that would keep the government open. Yet they are still pushing for a shutdown. They can't even pass a bill through their own chamber that would fund the government. They're not even proposing big changes to federal spending because they already took that off the table during Biden's State of the Union.
Some Republicans want medicare and solid security sunset.
I'm not saying it's a majority.
Of Let me give you.
Anybody who dots it, contact my office. I'll give you a copy. I'll give you a copy of the proposal that means Congress doesn't vote. Well, I'm glad to see you now. I tell you I enjoyed conversion.
So with Medicare and solid security off the table, that's left Republicans nibbling at the edges. Now, perhaps It seems like too long ago, but this whole thing was already worked out. In May, Biden and McCarthy, as you'll recall, sat down to craft a deal to avert a default and a global financial crisis. The deal was straightforward, and it was announced publicly. The debt ceiling would be lifted until January twenty twenty five, so a lame du Congress
coincidentally can lift it again. Discretionary and military spending for the next fiscal year would be capped at one point five nine trillion dollars, eight hundred and eighty six billion for the war making folks and seven hundred and four billion for the rest. So all of this has already been hashed out. As Hank Williams Junior would put it,
it's all over. But the crying now. The holdouts are calling for budget numbers several hundred billion dollars below what was already agreed on, which is fine, that's their right, but it doesn't mean anybody should listen to them. So today McCarthy suggested he needs another meeting with Biden, which the White House quickly rejected, noting they already cut a deal, and his problem is with Matt Gates and that crew
not with the White House now. AOC suggested McCarthy be told to quote pound sand, which is actually one of my favorite cliches out there. Meanwhile, these votes are a trap for Republicans because they'll never be good enough for the most ardent conservatives, and they'll include draconian cuts and extreme social policy that will then be used against modern Republicans running and Biden districts. Here's how the Washington Post
framed the latest proposed cuts. Quote, cutting housing subsidies for the poor by thirty three percent as soaring rents drive a national affordability crisis, forcing more than one million women and children onto the waitlist of a nutritional assistance program for poor mothers with young children, reducing federal spending on home heating assistance for low income families by more than seventy percent with energy prices high heading into the winter months. Unquote.
That's not just terrible for people, it's terrible politics. Now, once that theater is over, the only option will be a normal, clean, bipartisan CR. The Senate voted seventy seven to nineteen to move forward on a CR yesterday evening to keep the government open another forty seven days. But they also added some six billion dollars for Ukraine and another six billion dollars for disaster relief, and House Republican holdouts want nothing to do with that Ukraine money. Now
here's where McCarthy faces a choice. He can prevent the Senate bill, which has a support of mitchma Connell and a host of Republicans, from coming to the floor. His right wing rebels have said that if he passes it with Democratic votes, they'll depose him, and they might, but A they don't have an alternative who could get two hundred and eighteen votes, and b Democrats could vote to save him, which would be c absolutely hilarious. So what result are we.
Going to get here the Ukraine spending?
Emily, what's your point today, Well, a.
New poll was just released today by American Compass that is a conservative organization working on sort of new right realignment issues. You may be familiar with it because we've had the head of American Compass, or In Cass, on the show on Breaking Points and on Counterpoints several times,
because Orn has really interesting perspective. He was actually recently profiled by New York Magazine as quote the Nerd trying to turn the GOP populist, and he has drawn some attention because a lot of the policy prescriptions that come out of an American compass are wildly against opposed to Republican orthodoxy on things like unions, on things like private equity, financialization,
Wall Street, et cetera, et cetera. And these poll results I think are worth the Republicans here in Washington taking a look at and then weighing against what some of their benefactors over on Wall Street. Although you know that relationship is strained in many cases. If you're talking to people both on Wall Street and in Republican politics because of cultural issues, this is worth paying attention to. There's a Republican primary happening right now, There's a debate happening tonight.
We'll see how well these priorities are captured, both by the candidates and by the moderators. So on tariffs and on Wall Street, you have Republican voters. This is a pull just of Republican voters. It was taken between August eleventh and seventeenth. The sample is one thousand people or a thousand Republican voters. It was done by you Gov. This is Republicans who voted in the twenty twenty two election. They were over in favor of tariffs and had a
very very negative opinion of Wall Street. Now, the way the questions were written, and you can go take a look at the poll yourself, the way the questions are written. I'm not going to read through all of them here. I think it was maybe nudging people in that direction. But you can look at other polls. I mean, Republican voters right now have I think it found it finds like forty percent support for unions. You can see that
in polls throughout the country. There is increasing support for unions nationwide, not just among Republican voters, but favorability among Republican voters is increasing. And part of that is because you have union voters who may have only pulled the lever for Democrats in the past, now interested in Republicans. Maybe because as we talked about earlier in the show, they were unhappy with the UAW, they have been unhappy with leadership, or maybe because of cultural issues. I think
in many cases that's exactly what it is. But nevertheless, those are the facts. And you have Donald Trump going tonight to talk to Auto workers, non union auto workers, and a non union plant. As we talked earlier in the show, trying to actually drive this wedge because the unions themselves have have looked at the Biden administration's Green Agenda policies and said, wait a minute, this isn't actually in line with our agenda. We're giving you lots of money,
We're giving you lots of support. Let's talk about this sore all. There's this explosion of priorities in the labor space right now, and things are you know, it's sort of the house of cards has been knocked over, and we're seeing where everything is going to land, and Republicans would be wise to pay attention to where their own voters seem to want them to land. Now, let's look at other things. We can put figure one up on the screen. This is really really interesting. They asked about
top issues for Republican voters. So the question was, which do you think are the most important challenges facing America? Please select at least two and up to five. So if you're looking at this screen not listening, I'm going to break this down for listeners right here. What's going to jump out at you is that sixty nine percent
of respondents picked transgender active. Now again they're picking at least two and potentially up to five, so this means they picked it in a basket of at least two to five so among other things, but that was the top one that was selected by the most people, so
sixty nine percent. Then it goes down to woke corporations sixty two percent, critical race theory fifty two percent, illegal immigration sixty percent, So that's likely within the margin of error, so sixty percent with woke corporations and illegal immigration, Family fertility done at thirteen percent, higher education all the way done at eight percent, globalization fifty percent, worker power eleven percent,
financialization nine percent. And then what American compass prioritize or categorized as old right priorities, regulation, tax rates, and free trade. Regulation is at twenty eight percent, tax rates are at eighteen percent, and free trade is at ten percent. So those are very generic and broad categories, right, But even using the kind of friendly term to free trade by actually just calling it free trade is only down at ten ten percent of people saying that's among their priorities.
That is a different question than whether people support free trade. Of course, whether it's a priority and whether you support it are totally different questions. And I think that's one of the biggest questions that Republicans are facing right now. It's not only you know what are are you out there talking about right to work? Or are you out there talking about the fact that people in these labor unions are underpaid? Those are right? Which one are you emphasizing?
You may believe in right to work, but you may also believe that the workers are underpaid, and you should probably emphasize right now, like Josh Holly did when you went to the picket line, that people deserve higher pay. So that's the question of priorities. Is what's on the table? Here is what's on the table for national Republicans, And I think this poll is actually genuinely a very interesting
glimpse into that. And as American Compass puts it, unsurprisingly, the cultural issues most often selected are therefore all also those on which voters want to see if politicians focus most time and attention. They asked respondents to rank where they want people. They gave them a hypothetical one hundred points for politicians, and ask them where they would want politicians to spend most of their time and sort of
allocate those one hundred points to these different issues. Overall, voters allocated, according to Compass, forty four percent of their points to the cultural challenges, twenty three to consensus challenges, nineteen percent to new right challenges, and fourteen percent to
old right challenges. What's interesting there is also that these cultural challenges are kind of new right challenges as well, because the RNC back in twenty twelve basically said let's put cultural priorities, immigration, all of that stuff on the back burner in order to win new voters. So I think actually you could even fairly classify those cultural challenges as new right challenges. And I'd also just like to emphasize that a huge problem in the Republican Party is
not classifying cultural challenges as financial challenges. So when people are saying, for instance, that transgender activism is one of their top priorities, the way Republicans don't think of that, and you could argue that's because of the donor class. You could argue that's because it's the disproportionate influence of what some people see is the old moral majority wing
of the conservative movement. But what I think Republicans are wrong not to not to emphasize is that when people are worried about that, a lot of times that's because it is a financial worry for them. It's a financial issue because they disagree with what their public schools are teaching, which in some cases are actually very very extreme, and that means they have to go spend time looking for
a private school that is expensive. It means that their tax money that they're paying to the public school is not going to their kids' tuition. It's being spent in ways they don't think is benefiting the community. And so that lens is not just like we see these things as sort of mutually exclusive, right, like it's either economic or cultural, when in fact, so often the cultural issues are economic issues and when people We'll look at that chart and maybe we can pop it up on the
screaming screen again. This is figure one, and you see that eye popping number of sixty nine percent of people specifically pointing to transgender activism as the most important challenge facing America, one of the most important challenges facing America. And then you also see the same thing with woke corporations critical race theory. I would posit that a lot of that is because it creates financial hurdles for people just to live by their own values and values they
see as basically consensus values. You know, people shouldn't be you know, the men and women the locker rooms. The locker room issue is difficult. They want to be able to shop at Target without you know, having issues with it. They want to be able to buy their bud light without feeling insulted by the company. And again, those issues may seem small ball to people here in Washington, they may seem like cultural red meat, but I think it
also has something serious to do with people's pocketbooks too. Ryan, what did you make of the poll and what do you make of that question of how a lot of people in Washington, d c c. The economy, and the culture as sort of mutually exclusive realms that are not, you know, in any ways, have that middle vend diagram.
Part Yeah, the transgender number.
That's all right. So, as we were prepping the show last night, news broke that House Republican is alleging Anthony Fauci secretly went to CIA headquarters to quote influence the COVID nineteen origins investigation. We are going to talk now with Toby Green he's a professor of African history at King's College, London. His latest book, co authored with Thomas Fozzi, is the COVID Consensus. He has been covering this as
it relates to Africa, the African continent. Let's put up on the screen a persuasion article that Toby authored recently, which is so fascinating, just a really, really really good read. I highly recommend giving it a look. Toby, thank you so much for joining us today.
Thanks very much, Amy, thanks and Ryan, thanks good to be here.
Yeah, so you've we've written about the African content on this. You've written about Niger in recent news about the coup there. I want to start with the Persuasion article because I feel like you encapsulate a broad sort of critique of the West as it has affected seriously had had serious consequences for the African continent throughout the Western response to
COVID nineteen. Could you tell us just a little bit about what you're reporting in the Persuasion article and how these things have affected Africa.
Yeah, thanks very much for the question. Emily.
Well, I mean, in the Persuasion article, I'm documenting what has happened effectively in terms of the pandemic response on the African continent.
That and we need to go.
Back a little bit, back to Thebola epidemic, which many of your listeners and viewers will know about twenty fourteen twenty fifteen. At that time, short lockdowns were trialed in Freetown, in Sierra Leone and in Monrovian Liberia. And at the time medsasal fontie A Doctors Without Borders said really warned against this, that it would be a bad idea. Subsequent
academic research confirmed that it had been counterproductive. So already prior to COVID nineteen, Meta Medical, the world medical establishment, you know, was aware of the fact that in a situation on the African continent, where as the international labor organizations had eighty five percent of workers depend on on
the informal market, lockdown's simply don't work. In fact, and in fact, I had a friend in Nigeria, Clican in Nigeria who later told me, you know, this is a policy which could work in our context for three days. And so what the article does is document the history of how it was already known that this was a project policy which didn't work in the context of the informal labor market.
Already by March.
Twenty twenty, scientists were saying, well, actually, you know, Africa has a much lower median age. It was in fact under twenty recognized by the UN in twenty nineteen, and already suggesting it would have that COVID might have a different outcome, questioning whether or not this were there for appropriate policies and how social distancing could possibly work in a context where, you know, informal settlements people live in
very overcrowded conditions. And yet the WHO recommended in its February twenty fifth, twenty twenty report that every country when U cases were found should follow non pharmaceutical interventions, should follow policies of restriction, isolation, quarantine, and never really pushed back on the fact that when this was pushed out across the African continent, this was going to have catastrophic consequences.
So the article summarizes all of that and looks at the long term consequences, which is, you know, what people talk about is almost a decade of austerity to come on the continent, which is going to be catastrophic for future health outcomes.
And before we unpack some of those consequences. I just want to linger on the who here. So how does it work in practice? So who says, all right, you've got cases, here's the protocol you are to follow. Who says a lot of things? Why did it end up getting implemented and what what was the kind of discipline mechanism that led to it or were their interest within those particular countries that wanted to see lockdowns implemented?
By the way, and this is who leadership? The first African leadership Doctor tedros is Ethiopian at the time of both the Bowler and into the COVID pandemic.
He wasn't a leader at the time of a bout it, but yes, certainly was in the COVID nineteen pandemic. Yeah, I mean this is a very complicated question. It's a really good question, Ryan, So thank you for that. There are lots of complicated factors at play here.
You know.
On the one hand, I interviewed people already colleagues in Ghana, for example, and at the.
Time I was talking to a lot of people daily on the continent.
You know, I've spent a lot of my last twenty years in and out of many different countries on the continent and people was people did, you know to start with, you know, worry about what the consequences might be. So I think there was an initial buying that you know, this was a serious a serious virus, and that's one of the factors that has to be played.
But on the point of view of you know, why then when.
It became clear pretty pretty soon that consequences were catastrophic. I mean, the UNDP on March the thirty first, twenty twenty SEU to report saying that half of the jobs on the African continent could be lost, I mean half of the jobs. I mean, it's quite incredible that at that point senior figures in global health and also in global you know, in global leadership didn't step back and they go, hang on, is this really a sensible policy
to consume? But so when when that happened, that when it became clear that the consequences were what they might be. At the same time that well, you know what, having interviewed a number of people around the content, you know, there was a lot of pressure from doubt, but not only from WH. Who's subsidiary. So example, there's a WHO subsidary in West Africa, you know, and and a lot of core health funding is tied to global health programs
from the WHO and other partners. So it's actually quite hard for ministers of health turn around and say, well, you know, you're recommending that we should do that, but.
We're going to turn around and not do that.
So, in fact, in an article Chuck alfored quite recently with a senior public administrator from the GAMBIAT, he described how, in fact, you know, there were weekly demands from embassies, Western embassies and partners like the like the World Bank IMF for situation reports. They were getting phone calls saying, well, we hear people aren't social distancing. We hear there's not enough mass compliance.
Uh.
And he described that, and this colleague of mine has some cca later described that in a subsequent interview. So we know that there was lots of informal we could
you could describe that as informal pressure. But you know, when you think about all of the pressures that were there and the way in which global governance works and finance works, is pretty hard for ministries to turn around say we're not doing that, particularly since also, of course, the other major partner, economic trade partner in Africa is China, and of course this was also a policy which which took shape first of all in China.
That actually reminds me of some of the reporting that Ryan and others have done on a Bola and a Bola outbreak. And you think you a Tetris was definitely not the head of the who doing the bowla outbreak, but he had some oversight of their response to the Bole outbreak. And it's all of these strings, these Western strings attached to what happens in Africa that create an incentive system that seems just like it's it's very difficult for governments and for people to break through, and it
becomes a laboratory basically for the West. And I wanted to ask Tobe how this sort of what the economic outlook and like what sort of concretely can we look at in different African countries right now and say this is downstream of a sort of foolish Western COVID response. You wrote in the New State Statesman. We can put this is the third element up. This is about the
coup and niche air. You've you've covered this, You've written about the Can you walk us through a little bit of what it looks like on the ground in some of these countries right now.
Yeah, I mean, I mean I did you know, I've recently been in the gambur in Senegal, and you know, I mean, just to give her sense of it, you know, And this might sound strange to an American you know, American audience, but you know, I didn't meet a single person, I literally not a single person, you know, including senior government you know, MP's senior administrators who did not think that the entire COVID response not only had been a catastrophe, you know also I mean, I don't want to use
the word fraud, but you know they literally did not know hardly anybody who you know, fallen ill from COVID. They and you know, they would talk that people were claiming that they had gone to hospital with malaria symptoms they were diagnosed with COVID. I mean, this is so, whether or not this is true, what's interesting, I think is how if this is now being perceived, it's now being perceived definitely as you know, a real neo colonial
imposition which had a catastrophic impacts. And I'll give you an example. You know, I've got a very old friend rather than for thirty years in Senegal to COVID. He had a business on a motor He had his own motorbike. He would go down to the coast, he would buy fish and he would bring it, you know, a couple of hours in land and he would sell it at market. And that business was destroyed and collapsed in twenty twenty
because they were people weren't have to travel. And then what happened was people had to spend any money that they had in order to be able to get food to eat. And still now when I met him a month or so ago, he you know, he said he can't start up that business again because people literally have not got any money to buy anything other than the basic sack of rice, oil.
And of course the other factor there is inflation.
You know, obviously the whole world has been experiencing inflation, but it has been very severe in Africa, and in fact, some of the interviews I've done, which we discussed it in the COVID Consensus, with people say, you know this started in twenty twenty one. Because what happened I mean, and I wrote about this with Hassum CS in the article a couple of months ago. What happened was that, for example, in the Gambia, effectively almost our whole harvest
was lost. The transport shutdown came at a time when people would go and take seeds from the capital city to villages. They couldn't do that, and those who did manage to plant, because of social distancing protocols, didn't have enough people in the fields to harvest. I was told of colleague in Angola that, you know, people simply weren't allowed to go to the fields and so they lost
to harvest. Similar stories from Ghana, and that caused effectively a huge increase in prices already by twenty twenty one. So you have all those factors coming together and people are angry, and you know, and that's what I wrote about in the article in the year you know that what has happened is you know, not only I think, as I mentioned in the Persuasion article. You know, prior
to twenty twenty, people were talking about Africa rising. You know, this was in many ways a really hopeful, autimistic time with the continent. The economy had boomed throughout the twenty tens. Now the same journals are talking about, you know, a decade of austerity, and the evidence is quite clear that they started in twenty twenty one.
You know it's and it's linked to what happened in twenty twenty and it's so fat.
Toby, thanks so much for joining us and for your sharing your reporting here. Really appreciate it.
Thank you, Ryan, Thank you Emily.
Of course Toby's book is called the COVID Consensus. He just mentioned it, so you can check that out. That does it for us today on Counterpoints. We so appreciate everybody tuning into the show. Make sure to like subscribe. If you're a premium member, you get the whole show early to your inbox, full video, no commercial breaks. We appreciate it.
And we will be here tomorrow morning with Cryslin Sagar with a kind of debate coverage special and maybe a little Trump speech to non union workers special as well.
Yeah, well we'll have it all for you tomorrow morning. We'll be back so you don't have to wait another week to get your macro dose. Ryan Grim, see you guys tomorrow