Hey, guys, ready or not, twenty twenty four is here, and we here at breaking points, are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election.
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It's Wednesday, so welcome to Counterpoints. And actually, Ryan, I was just thinking, we are about a week shy.
Of one year of counterpoints.
The one year University of conference does it, and right now is perfect because the campaign seasons in full swinging. Congress is going crazy. There will be chaos in Congress those fall, so we're ready to.
Cover all of them.
Gearing up. Can't wait, Well, we should.
Just start right away with some big news about the law fair against Donald Trump. We're also going to be talking about Elon Musk and the Anti Defamation League, which are in a really intense back and forth the two parties are.
Right now, we're going to be talking.
About China Huawei and semiconductor chip technology advancements that are a little.
I don't know, Ryan, what's the word for this.
It's a nice kind of cold war. Everybody throwing money at technology. That's one way to do it for things that don't like, necessarily have to blow.
Up, they don't necessarily have.
That's kind of nice. That's a good kind of cold war.
Yeah, there was a big special election to fill a house seat in Rhode Island last night. Progressives got rinsed. It was an extremely disappointing result for the left.
There. We'll talk about that a little bit later.
Updates in the McConnell saga, and then we'll be talking about some big news.
Tucker Carlson, it's going to be Viking later this week.
I'll just leave it at that.
Yeah, I'll leave it at that.
If the name Larry Sinclair means anything to you, you back from two thousand and eight, you've got a clue about what this is about.
But we'll get into it later.
I was going to say it's perfect subject for Ryan because he was covering all of this back then.
Here we are again.
Here we are circle and some of them.
Maria is back with us on breaking points to talk about some developments.
This is a huge.
Fall for labor, not just for Congress but also for labor. A lot of stuff happening, and we want to ask so Rob basically, can the right put its money where its mouth is when it comes to weighing in in these disputes, in these battles and actually fully realigning. So that's the question we'll toss to so Rob when he
joins us later today. But let's go to Mark Meadows because Politico had a really interesting story that made waves yesterday where they narrowed in on an exchange between Mark Metal's lawyer and the judge.
I think it was the judge.
We can put a one up on the screen here in a case the case down in Georgia last week.
So this is I'm reading here for media.
I A new report connected the dots among Donald Trump co conspirators for his indictment in Georgia and established a pattern of behavior indicting the former, indicating the former president's allies will turn against him to legally save themselves. Politico reported on Mark Meadow's potential legal strategy. Is the White House Chief of Staff faces chargers connected with Trump's alleged
conspiracy to overturn Georgia's twenty twenty election results. The report referred to a court documents showing a strong likelihood that Metals will join Trump's other former allies who will blame the ex president and portray him as the primary driver of the racketeering enterprise they've been accused of. Okay, so here is the key exchange that Media I pulled out
from Politico. Meadows is the person who arranged the call with Raffensburger, perfect call, the perfect phone call with Raffensburger. But Meto's lawyer who's named Michael Francisco, which always makes me think of the scene in Elf where he's like Francisco.
That's a fun thing to say.
He says, quote, there's a lot of statements by mister Trump, mister Meadows speaking rules were quite limited. He didn't make a request that you changed the vote totals, mister Meadows himself, and then he asked that to Raffinsburger, and Raffensberger says correct, right, So this is an exchange not the judge, that was between Brad Raffinsberger and the attorney for Marketmados. And he's getting him to say that Meadows didn't ask for the vote totals to be changed himself.
Yeah, And there's another piece that adds a breadcrumb to that, which is around the fake elector's scheme. And this is this part's gone viral where he says he did something because he didn't want to get yelled at by the President of the United States. Yes, but the context for that is the fake elector's scheme. And so they said, well, why did you why did you go ahead and put
these fake electors slates together? He said, well, in the event that we won the court case, I wanted to have them ready to go.
You know, why did you want to have them ready to go?
Well, because the President the United States would have yelled at me if I didn't.
And to me, if he can convince.
A jury of that that the only reason he was setting up the fake elector's slates was in anticipation of a legal victory. Then that falls within his proper duties as a White House chief of staff, because we do accept that you are allowed to challenge election results through the court system, like that's that's fine, that's fair, that's that's that's that's all, that's all in the game.
You're like, you're allowed to do that. And so if if the.
Jury believes, Okay, he was just putting these electors together in case the Wisconsin you know, in case the Georgia case, the Arizona case, whatever came, he's going to have. Yeah, he's gonna have a timeline problem in that they had lost most of these by this point. However, maybe it's enough to like cloud it for a jury, but it does show his strategy that he's saying, I was doing things all within the legal confines, Like nothing wrong with
setting up a phone call with Raffensburger. It's the president who got on there and was like, find me eleven thousand votes. Not wrong with having alternative electors ready to go if the courts go with you. It was the president who tried to use them even after the courts shut them down. So that does imply that he is trying to distance himself here.
Yeah, and willis though, and that's why she, I think, brings in the racketeering charges. And that was very intentional obviously, because then you can charge all of these people with the sort of peripheral activities and behavior because it all goes into the racket, literally into the racket. That was the attempt to as she sees an overturn the election, as opposed to what Mark Meadows is arguing, which is
that we were preparing for potential legal changes. And again, Lawrence Tribe and Alan Dershowitz disagree about what happened in nineteen sixty in Hawaii, and they disagree about what happened in two thousand and Florida. But there have been other legal theories that you need to appoint a separate slate if the vote totals get overturned so that they're ready to go and vote in the direction.
That the vote totals have shifted to. So yeah, it makes sense.
It absolutely is a legal defense makes sense what Mark Monos was doing. People were surprised, I think, not to see, first of all, to see that Mark Menos was indicted, and not to see more breadcrumbs that maybe he was flipping in the I think the original Willison indictment.
Were you surprised by that? I think everyone thought he had larready, he.
Had already flipped.
No, because I have been hearing since day one of the Trump presidency that all of his people are going to flip on him, yeah, and turn state's evidence over to initially whoever it was and it's over to Muller.
Then it's like on and on, Like the media has constantly been waiting for this kind of rollover on Trump and that it was always going to be the thing that was going to get him, because it also has a kind of narrative satisfaction to it because Trump is such a cruel person to people underneath him, and so like obviously disloyal to people underneath him, like so willing to toss him off that I think a lot of people see people in that situation and are like, if
I were them, I would have no loyalty in reverse to this guy. So he must want to flip, And so I think people have been anticipating a lot of flips that haven't come. And so I'm not ready to believe a flip until they've actually stuck the landing on it, because you know, the football has been pulled away so
many times on this particular point. But it still is the point that Trump has raised two hundred fifty million dollars and he's got some he's got some broke like co defendants, and he's not even helping them out with their legal bills. It's like that is that is a recipe to get somebody to flip on you.
Yeah, that's what happened to Nixon. Maybe Roger Stone needs to tell him that.
And what we haven't had up until now is all of these felony charges, these actual criminal charges. So we had kind of rumors of charges, we had investigations, we had legal jeopardy, but now people have been fingerprinted and mugshotted and are facing actual prison time, like staring down their lives being irreparably changed.
Michael Cone got him.
Yes you did Yes, you did it, Michae Cone, right, and he turned into the biggest Trump critic out there, right, yeah, and yeah.
And the significance of Mark Meadows is sort of similar, I would think to Michael Cone, whose testimony has created I mean, actually, I think probably the Alvin Bragg stuff is in some ways rooted in Michael Cone.
Yeah, for sure. He's the star witness.
Yeah yeah, right, yeah, So, and Mark Meadows was by Donald Trump's side throughout that fall of twenty twenty and into the winter of twenty twenty. So you can imagine you know, what might especially like Willis prosecutor like Willis, would delight in getting Meadows to flip certainly there would be a lot of questions that they would be eager to ask him in that context of having flipped.
Yeah.
Sure, let's turn to some twenty twenty four news.
Because so Donald Trump obviously the Republican front runner, Joe Biden, I guess the Democratic.
Front runner because we're not going to do a primary.
I guess we're just not doing it, despite the fact that what seventy percent of Democrats want some semblance of a primary. But Joe Biden is getting ready to blanket the airwaves during NFL games with this ad.
Take a look at it.
They said millions would lose their jobs and the economy would collapse, but this president refused to let that happen. Instead, he got to work fixing supply chains, fighting corporate greed, passing laws to lower the cost of medicine, cut utility bills, and make us more.
Energy and dependent.
Today, inflation is down to three percent, unemployment the lowest in decades. There's more to do, but President Biden is getting results that matter.
I'm Joe Biden, and I approve this message.
It's like AI Joe Biden. No, I actually real Joe Biden.
But you never know these days so that's a twenty five million dollar ad campaign for battleground states during the NFL opener on Thursday. They plan to actually run that through December. Obviously, as everyone just go that was very focused on his economic record, Bidenomics the new hot phrase in Washington, and a Wall Street Journal poll is Axios notes found a majority of American voters disapprove of the President's handling of the economy and inflation. So it's obviously
trying to get ahead of that. Had a little bit of trouble in the White House briefing room yesterday answering an interesting question on the World Bank from friend of the show, Philip Wegman of Real Clear Politics.
Let's play that video.
Last question, given.
That you said ulster in the World Bank is not about countering China. In this country, credit card delinquencies have spiked, mortgage rates are through the roof, Inflation remain the same problem. Meanwhile, the federal deficit this year is almost tripled, and the President wants to increase funding to foreign nations through the World Bank. How is that fair to citizen and say Scranton.
Look, I think citizens in Scranton recognize the problems that happen overseas, don't stay overseas. They come here too a great cost to working people. COVID came here from overseas. When there's massive debt or instability or conflict elsewhere, it has a drag on the global economy, and America is
part of the global economy. So our perspective is that for a modest investment, from the point of view of the overall size of the US budget, to put into ensuring greater stability, greater prosperity, greater capacity in the rest of the world, that is going to end up reducing the costs and burdens on working people in Scranton or Minneapolis or any of all eural's hometowns. And frankly, that's
not some novel idea. That has been a bipartisan commitment of the United States for decades, and even the last administration, the biggest skeptic of all of this made investments in foreign aid because those investments are in the naked self interest of the United States as well as being the right thing to do.
And you can obviously envision as well Ukraine being roped into a similar line of questioning about the Biden administrations basically control of the purse, swings, perse strings. What do you make of the ad? What do you make of Jake Salvin's answer there?
He got more and more honest towards the end of it. And I like the part where he finally said, we're spending this money in the naked self interest of the United States. Yes, And I think people just need to understand that this is not charity, Like what the US gives to the World Bank, and the World Bank then spends abroad or the IMF or even propping up the WTO This is not charity.
This is not in foreign aid is.
A deceptive term, like we're not out there just you know, trying to do the right thing by you know, peasants in Vietnam or whatever. Like what are we trying to actually do. We're trying to exert our imperial influence around the globe, and we're trying to extract labor and resources from the rest of the world, from the periphery into the center here.
Which then, if you have a kind.
Of a social democratic uh empire, benefits the working class inside the empire. If you have a more conservative and las a fair one, then it all flows up to the very top, but then trickles down and then then you tell people, and then you tell people that it
trickles down exactly. So, for example, the World Bank might make a loan for a giant nickel mine, which then strikes contracts with American corporations which get cheap labor working in the mine, uh subsidized nickel that then come that then flows into whatever kind of battery uh kind.
Of supply chain that we're structuring.
Then people then buy evs and that we then also subsidize. So it's all for the United States. Now, then the fight becomes who in the United States is it for? But the idea that it's it's unfair to people in Scranton now like it back in the back in the center, people to fight over the spoils of war. But this is this is just war done by other means. It's not foreign aid. It's just extraction of wealth from around the world.
And so do you think that the ad that we played a clip of airing during NFL games, you know, Battleground States, trying to get ahead of the fact that you have a lot of Americans saying, huh, I don't feel great about this economy, and I don't feel great about Biden's oversight of the economy. And you see a lot of people, especially sort of Democrat leaning or Democratic leaning economists, who are saying, what.
Is wrong with people?
The economy is doing better, there have been gains, and people aren't reflecting that in their sense of how the economy is going. So Biden comes in and says, basically, like everything is rosy.
Is that gonna work?
Well? I mean it's better than saying everything's terrible.
Probably if you're the one that's in charge, Like, because you're in charge, you're going to get the credit of the blame for it, you know, no matter what happens. I think every president going forward is going to be in a tricky situation because because of the combination of just the general economic procarity, where at the flick of MBS's.
Risked we can be paying four dollars.
We're paying four dollars a gallon all of a sudden because NBS decided to restrict production. Why because a year ago I was telling me like twenty twenty four gas prices are going to go up because MBS doesn't like
Joe Biden. And sure enough we're heading into twenty twenty four, gas prices are going to go up, and so people I think it gives you a sense of anxiety that you that at any moment you could start to see these wild swings, because we went through in twenty twenty twenty one, these big upswing And now it's nice that it's back to three percent, but I don't think people
feel comfortable that it's going to stay there. Combined with housing like that, the inability of people to afford either to buy a home, or if they bought a home, they can't move because they're kind of locked into a low interest rate and prices have sword everywhere else, so they can't kind of go anywhere else.
Or if they don't have a home, they're even worse off.
And it's eating up more and more and more of people's income. And so while everything else is true, we
have had a long run of adding jobs. You're seeing people, you're seeing you had the unemployment rate go up this last month because hundreds of thousands of people who had been out of the labor force came in because they're like, Wow, wages are up, jobs are available, I'm actually going to try to get a job now, Like we haven't had that practically since World War Two, and real wage growth is happening, but in the context of the amount that people are paying for housing and the kind of per
carreity that people feel about the future, nobody's going to sit there and say, yeah, things are great, even if they're so much better than they were before.
And gas prices are a huge part of that, and you disagree with us for environmental reasons. But Biden is going to have to answer to voters in Scranton about Keystone, the permit for revoking the permit for Keystone, which has given MBS even more power over our economy. And that's really I mean, it's another interesting part and we've talked about this a lot of the economy right now, which.
Is gas prices in some parts of the country have actually.
Been okay, not great, but okay, and then in other parts of the country they are horrific. It just depending on where you are, you're experiencing the economy differently.
It's the same thing.
You know, if you're in the market for a car, if you're in the market for a house, you're experiencing a different economy than if you're good on.
Some of those things. And so it is.
It doesn't surprise me because that also those sentiments kind of bleed into other things, and people all pick up on that feeling of malaise. Speaking of which we can put a four up on the screen here. This is from the New York Times. This is an upshot quote. President Biden is underperforming among non white voters in New York Times Stanate College national polls over the last year, helping to keep the race close. In a hypothetical rematch
against Donald Trump. On average, mister Biden leads mister Trump by just fifty three percent to twenty eight percent among registered non white vot voters, and a compilation of polls from twenty twenty two to twenty three, which includes over fifteen hundred non white respondents, So that might seem like a big margin, but as the Times continues to say, the results represent a marked deterioration and mister Biden's support compared with twenty twenty when he won more than seventy
percent of non white voters. So that's a seventeen percent dip, fifty three percent after he won about seventy percent of non white voters. Ryan those are really bad numbers for Biden.
Those are and let me say at one point on the fossil fuel before we get to the voters. And I'm not celebrating this, but fossil fuel production is up from the Trump era. It's true that Nick's Keystone excel. It's true that he just passed a regulation saying you can't put liquid natural gas on trains. I think communities where trains go through are probably breathing a sigh relief
over that those headlines are true. But overall, fossil fuel production in the United States is up significantly from twenty nineteen to twenty twenty. It's this weird kind of people think that Sunrise movement is kind of running the White House or something, and so therefore, you know, he's just kept everything in the ground. But if people can just google like the production numbers.
We're pumping an enormous amount of files.
Feel I think we have to solve it on the demand side, like we just have to get away from it. So that Muhammed bin Salman says, oh, yeah, well, you know, I'm taking a million barrels a month or a million barrels a day offline. We're like, okay, do whatever you want. We got we got windmills and solar panels. Over here, we got hydro, we got nuclear or whatever we like. We're fine, and we will still have needs for gas
and for filesil fuels. But if it's if the demand is way down, then he can't really whip us around the way he is.
Although yeah, and we don't.
I guess I just say like things like KEISTO XL help us sort of ease into the transition. But anyway, the seventeen point dip among non white voters for Biden is significant.
Again, he's still up by a big margin. I don't know if this is through anything.
I mean, it seems like the New York Times reading of this is that it's not something that Donald Trump has done, because they're doing these hypothetical matchups. It's not just the favorability of Joe Biden. It's a hypothetical matchup. It seems like everyone's saying, well, this is a Biden problem, not a Trump solution.
I don't know. I actually have no idea what's going on there.
I wonder how much of it is like reverse magnetic where As Democrats increasingly become the party of kind of suburban, college educated voters and particularly white suburban college educated voters. If there's just something about that coalition that pushes then non white, non college educated and white non college educated voters out of the coalition because there's just the kind of cultural differences are so.
Are the class strong.
Yeah, class differences that manifest as cultural differences are so distinct that it makes it up. But on the other hand, you had a New Deal coalition that had, you know, the NAACP and outright white supremacists, because everybody was in it for higher wages, for union power, and for the kind of material gains that think that the New Deal coalition was pushing for. So it actually is not impossible
to pull that coalition together. But there's something different about our kind of tribalized, social media driven era that might make it more difficult. But then the question will be what's the what are the policy implications of that? Because back in the mid nineties you had right wing Democrats who were pushing really hard to say, we need to move away from our working class base and we had to move to the suburban voter because the suburban voter is going to be more conservative.
On economic issues and that's where.
We need to be, and that that lined them up with their kind of corporate pack strategy, the Clintonian stuff that they where they wanted.
To take the party today.
Though if you survey suburban, white college educated voters economically, they're often to the left of non college working class people. Yeah, so you get into this really awkward place where as a party, to maintain a kind of left wing economic, material driven agenda, you have to override what a lot of working class voters are telling people non.
Cultural issues too, social issues, Like it's the same problem that arises like when everyone tried to make LATINX happen and you're working classes panic voters are like, yeah, let's let's cool it with that.
I think I think they're backing off that somewhat, and I think these numbers are a reason that they're backing off. Is like, oh, okay, we tried the Oberlin approach. Yes we tried, and the arrows just pointing down, So let's try not.
You know, Actually, this isn't entirely dissimilar from what we're going to talk about in the next block, which is Elon Musk and the Anti Defamation League. It's a pretty interesting back and forth and not also dissimilar from the one we talked about recently with the Center for Countering Digital Hate.
Which Musk.
There's a lawsuit where Musk accused the Center for Countering Digital Hate of hurting X's basically relationship with the advertisers.
And that's from the Guardian.
But the Guardian also is now digging into what's going on with the ADL and Elon Musk, and it's very similar. It's about advertisers, so reading from them again, it says Elon Musk has threatened to sue the Anti Defamation League after accusing the US based civil rights group that campaigns against anti Semitism and bigotry of trying to quote kill
his ex social media platform. The owner of X formerly known as Twitter, said the ADL was trying to shut down his company by quote falsely accusing it and me of being anti Semitic. In a series of posts, Musk said, advertising sales for the business we're down sixty percent and quote based on what we've heard from advertisers, ADL seems to be responsible for most of our revenue lost. He also said, quote, it looks like we have no choice but to file a defamation lawsuit against the Anti Defamation
League dot dot dot oh the irony. He also said that he wants to be quote super clear he's in favor of free speech, but quote against anti semitism of any kind. Now, the ADL is saying that anti Semitic posts on x increase sharply after Musk bought the site back in October twenty two, and the platform subsequently reinstated extremists and conspiracy theorists while allowing the harassment of former
members of its now dissolved Trust and Safety Council. A lot of money on the line here, Clearly, it does remind me of what some conservatives and argument you hear from some people on the right and in the center even about ESG that you can have one index that is following you know, whatever the rating system is, whatever the environmental score system is, and you know you'll get black rock embracing it. And this affects a wide swath of businesses. It really affects where money is going, It
affects all of that sort of stuff. And so I think Elon Musk is making a similar thing that like, if people are funneling their ad decisions through the Anti Defamation League, then in the Anti Defamation League has a bias against him. If you buy that argument, which I mean I do, but we probably disagree on that. If you buy it, then all of these advertisers are going to be affected by one bias source that's not neutral.
But I don't think they purport to be neutral.
Leader right, Well, first of all, let's score the hypocrisy.
Like, this guy is a free speech absolutist who is now trying to sue his second organization for their speech, and his top investors are recently Saudi Arabia recently implemented a death penalty for somebody for a retweet at eight followers a retweet, and this this is he has said
nothing about that. Where Whereas if you're a business partner with somebody in a major enterprise and they use your activity on your business enterprise to give somebody a death penalty for a retweet, you're you're free to speak up and say, you know what, I can we not do that? How about not how about we don't kill that guy for a retweet? Since now that goes against my beliefs as a free speech absolutist anyway, So taking taking taking him seriously for a second, which I don't think he is.
I think he just made a joke about defamation and defamation. I don't think he's actually going to just wanted the joke, but I think he also said that discovery as a part of this lawsuit will show whether or not it's true that the you know, ad L pressured all of these companies to pull out their advertising money. And then that's why you know, Twitter is worth half of them
what it used to be worth. The idea that you're going to win your advertisers back by suing them and going through their emails is like, it couldn't be any more absurd.
Yeah, like that that's how you're going to win your advertiser back.
And secondly, the idea that anybody needed the ADL to step away from advertising on Twitter is also absurd. So his theory is that if not for the ADL privately reaching out to these corporations, these giant corporations Dove, Unilever, Coca Cola, all the others, would just be bidding against themselves to get their advertisement under cat Turd two's hundreds of.
Millions of impressions.
Like if the CEO, then CEO is just constantly engaging with cat Turd and all of his friends, it's very clear to the entire world what type of platform it is, and then advertisers can decide whether or not they want to be part of that. The fact that the ADL was saying the exact same thing that everybody else was saying about the platform. He also flamboyantly unbanned a bunch of people who have been banned for saying like viciously anti Semitic stuff.
This is the true.
So you're like, okay, like you're gonna blame the ADL for that. And I'm no fan of the ADL. I think that they have stretched the definition of anti semitism for political purposes in order to kind of shut down any criticism of the Israeli government for instance.
However, in this case, I just don't think.
I think if the ADL never even existed, people would have clearly seen the changes that he publicly said he was making at Twitter.
Yeah, no, I don't think that's wrong, although I do think the ADL and I think the SPLC, which we've talked about here before. The SPLC is in a pretty gnarly lawsuit where it had to admit that it wasn't, you know, totally neutral and non biased I do think those have had sweeping chilling effects on you know, not just conservative organizations, but some other organizations that said and that's true with that different Yeah it is, yeah, it is.
But the definition inflation. It also reminds me of what
we're talking about in the last segment. But this is where it's an impossible circle to square, because I think one of the things people loved about Twitter in the first place, in the Halcyon days where Jack Dorsey was you know, renegade, is that it was this open platform where people were dunking on racists and people with horrific arguments, bad ideas, and it was you know, there there was a time when Twitter wasn't really even quite that political
and it was more just fun. But there was also time where like you went to Twitter and the level of open speech just embarrassed everybody who was remaining. You still have these like lingering, bigoted sentiments. They looked ridiculous. I mean, that was the beauty of these exchanges is that these minority voices, I think, if anything, were they were empowered by people who freaked out and tried to say, like, you don't belong on the platform.
It was it was there was something really.
Powerful about when they were on the platform and getting absolutely torched non stop, and there was something that people looked at that and was like, Yeah, this is what we do. This is what we can all agree the boundaries of decency and political speech are. We don't necessarily need big Brother in Silicon Valley or the government to
make these decisions for us. But that's obviously not happening anymore because when you rely on corporate advertising dollars, it doesn't matter, like they don't want their content next to for instance, here's a good one, Libs of TikTok, I'm reading for my colleague David Harsani. He says elon Musk Contents that the ADL wants him to ban the Libs of TikTok, a popular account run by orthodox jew Chiareichick, who gained fame by reposting real leftists saying real things.
It's certainly plausible, considering the ADL already has an entry for rightchick and it's quote glossary of terms. But well, Harsani says, I'm not a big fan of nutpicking. I haven't seen anything in her feet that could rationally be construed as anti Semitic and that speaks to the problem of who gets to decide what quote hate speech entails. And so it's fine, I mean that's a problem with Twitter. If you want to be in this business, you're gonna have a hard time being in the ad sales business.
These two things seem utterly irreconcilable. Even though Twitter and we've talked about like making Twitter a public you know, utility before, because it's, you know, basically this de facto town square for a very particular kind of speech.
I mean, it's it's a good like in this context.
There's some good reason for that because if you're you're looking at this and you're expecting advertisers to prop up a platform where you necessarily, in order to be a fair platform allow people to speak their mind and say things that not everyone's going.
To agree with. Who are you going to get to advertise there?
Yeah, exactly, Yeah, I mean that's right.
Yeah, make it a make it a public make an actual public square.
An actual public square.
I think my idea should be adopted.
I already solved the cattle on independence crisis of the Twitter crisis, that's right.
If you didn't catch Ryan solving the cattle in independence crisis. Just check out our video on the Spanish Soccer Federation ahead, because that's what you find it.
You know, have Twitter b like owned by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and you have five board members. The right can pick two, the left can pick two, and then whoever wins the White House guests to pick one and then they kind of like battle it out. You Marjorie Taylor Green can be on there, Elon can be on there, whatever, and they just then they set they set policy and maybe they even have to run, but they have to.
Get they have to get elected.
So we can all kind of democratically weigh in on how we want this public square. And you and in order to be on you have to show your driver's license. I don't know MTG can figure this out when she's when she and like Van Jones are on the board together or whatever.
Well, I mean, and this is the thing with Twitter, it's that nobody I mean, you can try to go to a subscriber model basically, which is you know, in some ways what substack is doing. You know, it's the New York Times thinks it's advertising revenue is going to be hurt because it now has this really small niche consumer base that's able to pay a lot of money. You know, you have these educated, sort of liberal people who have disposable income and can pay for the New
York Times. They don't want to see Tom Cotton's at bed in twenty twenty in the New York Times. So the New York Times takes it down, not for any journalistic reason. I would argue that was a pretense, but they take it down either way, and you know, then you can go to substack, which is basically what I mean. Barry Weiss ends up at Substack, is doing fabulously well in Substack, and it solves the New York Times advertising problem.
That's not great for journalism, and I don't think it's great for the public square either, if we can't you know, coexist together because we're all propped up by these niche you know, different advertising areas as opposed to I don't know. I mean, maybe a subscriber model can work for Acts, it's still very much influx and in transition between what it was and what Elon Musk wants it to be.
So I guess we'll just have to wait.
Yeah, we will.
Well, we are not waiting to find out it's in the new Huawei phone that wasn't announced was announced. Actually why while Gino Raimundo was in China, right, they unreal the un uh unveiled.
The Commerce secretary of former governor of Rhode Island was visiting China trying to cool tension, and yeah, they and they dropped this new phone that went viral over in China. It includes some type of uh, you know, I'm not even going to try to do the describe the technology.
Just be a waste of every just be a waste of everybody's time.
Super cool and fast phone basically operating on some cool technology, uh that Huawei has been able to develop despite and and perhaps in spite of or in the face of
US restrictions on Huawei. So the US block Huawei from all sorts of kind of technological cooperation with UH with US and US aligned chip makers and processors, and so they kind of went back to their own drawing board and came out with this with his phone that they unveiled to time clearly with the Commerce Secretary going over to China people saying it operates faster than.
Some of the best, you know, five G phones out there.
I don't know how it seems cool, seems good and this is related to and we can put up this this first element Reuter's reporting Bloomberg confirming that China is seeking a forty billion dollar fund to invest in it.
It's kind of on shoring of chip.
Making, which would be cool because hey, China, go ahead develop a massive semiconductor industry on the Chinese mainland, then maybe we don't have to.
Have a war over Taiwan.
For Taiwan, which the whole thing is great, like the precision needed to produce these semiconductors suggest that a war zone probably is not good for business there. You think good thing, Like I said, not an expert, but I think probably blowing up the factories doesn't help with the development. Well unless you just said, that means you have to rebuild them. And that's how Japan Germany did so well after World War two.
So maybe that's our plan.
Well in China.
On shoring chip technology also puts I mean it creates this or I think it exacerbates an existing tension in that European countries. Other people who are you know, for price competition reasons whatever, still relying on Chinese technology whatever, it is you can. I mean, they're creating more reasons like Germany with Russian oil, right, Like you're on the hook if you're really dependent on Chinese semiconductors because so
much of the global semiconductor industry. If that's what happens with this forty billion dollar fund continues to be exploding in China at competitive rates, then it can just exacerbate the dependency problem, which of course some people see is a good problem to have because it will de escalate any actual military tensions.
I'm not sure I buy that argument now.
Reuter's quotes an analyst with Tech Insights who says this development is quote a slap in the face to the US. He said, Ray Mundo comes seeking to cool things down, and this chip is saying, look what we can do.
We don't need you. This is also from the Reuters report.
They say from twenty nineteen, the US has restricted Huawei's access to chip making tools essential for producing the most advanced handset models, with the company only able to launch limited batches of five G models using stock piled chips. And so now you put the sort of feet to
the fire when it comes to tariffs. People are going to be saying US policy is counterproductive, that it's creating all of these different unintended consequences, when in fact, rian it is also these policies, whether or not libertarians want to admit it, are not just about low prices, of course, in this case, they're also about making sure that if there is an incursion in Taiwan, we have an ability to have not just phones, not just smartphones like this
new Huawei one, but also military technology to be able to defend Taiwan.
Right, And the kind of ban in the crackdown and Huawei also came because of these military connections. This wasn't just a kind of trade war between the US and China. Was also the US saying, look, we've we've discovered that Huawei is basically putting bugs and in a lot of this technology that's five G technology that that they're helping build around the world.
And so they told all their allies as well.
Don't know no Huawei technology, because you know, we believe that there were getting spied on, and US like we're the only ones that are allowed to spy on it.
I was just going to say, I don't take that message to.
Yeah exactly, And so that so that kind of fueled then this the trade implications here, which then result in Huawei uh coming through out with this breakthrough technology, which once again complicates this argument that the only way that you get innovation is through a kind of pure capitalist system. It's obviously the case that there's some significant, you know, market activity in China, but it's also very heavily directed by the state.
It's it's not a remotely pure free market.
And the fact that you can continue to get economic growth fragilize it is now and continue to get serious innovation, you know, really kind of undermines the kind of Western claim that the only way to do it is is through like you know, you know, tech bros taking acid in Silicon Valley and getting VC money or something.
Well, yeah, I mean that's the whole DARPA story.
If you like pulled, that's true exactly.
That's a that's a great point that was state funded and produced.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, if you if you pull that thread.
Long enough, general is taking acid, that's actually true.
It is amazing how many rich and powerful people were taking acid.
Well, you know, you wrote a book on it for those days.
This is your country on drugs by dying gram available at a bookstore.
You're probably not actually anymore, but probably find it in.
Some maybe available at a bookstore here.
Yeah, let's move on to Mitch McConnell, the big news of the week, and it is really big news, continuing to be really big news. Why because it's actually easy to forget this, but Mitch McConnell has been the Senate Republican leader.
For sixteen years. Sixteen years.
It's just mind boggling when you really think of how long Republicans have gone without having any leadership transition in the upper Chamber.
It's actually shocking. I can't remember. I mean, Nancy Pelosi's reign in the House wasn't that long, am I? I mean, it's it's.
Close the same, but she's gone.
Yeah, so she she also took over in two thousand and seven seven, although she became leader.
In two like two thousand and three.
True, she was leader minority leader and then yeah, and then took which is similar. Or maybe maybe she took over in two thousand and five when Gebhart ran for president in two thousand and four and washed out.
Oh cap heart.
Well yeah, well that's what the first element up here. This is from CBS News reporter. It says Congress's in house doctor says he's examined Mitch McConnell, including a review of as MRI results, and says there's no evidence of seizure's disorder, stroke or Parkinson's. A lot of people immediately reacted to this by saying, that's incredibly hard to believe.
It feels almost soviet in the level of like provda type spin that we're seeing, including it seems Senator rand Paul, we can put the next element up on the screen. Who is a doctor. He's an eye doctors, and he's an optometrist. He said, quote, I don't think it's been particularly helpful to have the Senate doctor describing this as dehydration, which I think even a non physician seeing that probably aren't really accepting that explanation. Yeah, I would think that's
dead on. If most people see that letter versus the two videos, one from July and one from just what was last week, they're not going to look at that and say, ah, yes, dehydration is what caused him to pause uncomfortably for like a minute in both cases, not quite a minute, probably thirty seconds, But you know when those seconds are so painful it feels like ten minutes the thirty seconds does.
But let's move on to the next element here.
This is from The Hill which points out that editors of National Review which have come out and they said that, you know, Mitch McConnell is quote a legend of the US Senate and quote, one of the most effective leaders in memory. He should step aside from his post. And then we have D four. This is from the New York Times on potential replacements. From potential replacements to Mitch McConnell, which they list as the three Johns, and that is
exactly what it sounds like. John Thune, John Cornyn, and John Morasso. They also float the idea of Jony Ernst and Shellie Moore Capito potentially going for that top slot. I have heard rumblings that Capito is a serious contender for that. Want to read a quote from a senior Senate staffer with some color here that says, basically, quote, it's an open field and there will be no coronation.
So this is two breaking points from a senior Senate staffer who points out it's the first leadership transition in sixteen years. Whoever replaces McConnell has the opportunity basically to quote.
Transform the Senate.
And it looks like the Senate staffer is basically saying that John Thune is kind of doing the job of leader right now. And the more that Mitch McConnell seeds, the more ground McConnell seeds specifically to Thune, the more that there's just sort of the power of inertia moves in Thune's direction and gives him the clear advantage here. But John Cornyn really really wants it, is what I'm hearing from the source. And I definitely believe that John
Cornyn really wants it. He's a good fundraiser, so he's definitely a potential candidate. But you know, I think that's where you get an edge from Jony Ernst and you know, Shelley Moore capit if they want to run. Is that the optics in twenty twenty three of the three John's being the potential heirs to the McConnell throne are not great for Republicans when they're trying to also say, I mean, Barasso and Cornyn are both seventy one. Soon is like sixty two, so he's slightly younger.
But like a bunch of old white dudes.
You know, those are optics that some Republicans who like to exploit the identity politics angle I'm a woman angle could have.
A lot of fun with.
And we have a profile of Cornyn a couple of years ago that we did over at the Intercept that if anybody's curious about this next potential leader, is a fun one to read. He's just a very affable, old school Texas oilman Republican like a Karl Rove basically recruited him into politics. So that's kind of what you need to know about him. Like, he's just a Rove guy who's like good with the lawyers, he's good with the oilman. Uh, and he's going to go like in whatever direction.
You know.
He's like very much like a Chuck Schumer or Joe Biden in the sense that they're they're very good politicians.
They're just and if the.
Party is moving in one direction, they're going to move in that they move in that direction.
Tune. Uh.
You know, as he accumulates power, like you said in the Senate, he's going to be able to do favors for people, and he's going to be increasingly then able to get people you know on his side corner is very popular. It's Barasso though, that is more of the trumpy guy who tries to be more of the trumpet guy. You Neither fun nor Cornn are kind of obsequious Trump supporters.
They're very similar to McConnell.
Barasso is more of a kind of movement conservative. I would think.
That's interesting about Shelley Moore Capito, uh you know, good friends with mansion, like the mansion more Capito dynasty. This has been this bipartisan West Virginia powerhouse for years and the Mores and the Capitol is actually and she combines them both there and so so you think that she has a real shot or I just.
Think that's really easy to exploit the and if she wants it, I mean she's she's probably also pretty good fundraiser.
I'm not sure.
I would have to check on that, but like, if she wants it, the idea that you have these three guys who are also two of whom are in their seventies as well Thuhne, who's not exactly charismatic. If that's what you want in the Senate leader, it just depends. But I could see someone really exploiting the idea that listen.
This has been sixteen years. You guys have been in leadership. I mean thun Corn and Barasso, they've been in leadership for a long time. And look where we are.
I mean, Republicans in the Senate are not happy with where they are at all. And that's another interesting thing about this, where the more Mitch McConnell seems incapacitated, the more you have other people running the Senate, and the more people recognize exactly how poorly they think things have
been led under Mitch McConnell. And that's not to say they aren't you happy with some of the winds McConnell has sort of earned over the years, whether it's you know, getting Merrick Garland no vote on Merrick Garland and getting all of these Senate seats pushing through cabin eugh, et cetera. So it's not to say that people aren't happy with that.
But when you look around and someone else is running the Senate and there's a stark contrast with how it's been run, that's one of those things that makes you think, oh, actually the grass is really greener. That's a benefit for somebody like thun if they feel like things are going more smoothly under him now, but it's also an indictment.
If he's someone who had been carrying out Mitch McConnell's orders, people might say, well, I don't trust you to actually, you know, in the long term do a great job. We're going to bring someone new and maybe Jennie Ernst, maybe someone from the outside.
People are really unhappy.
From what I'm gathering, people are now just recognizing how unhappy they are with how things have been running in the Senate in recent years. So that could be a problem for people, or it could be a benefit. If you know, you're junk in and you're having some fun now.
Yeah, I mean Mitch McConnell gets selling rated as this, you know, absolute genius. And yeah, he was able to prevent Mark Carland from getting a vote.
That's basically his legacy.
That that plus what he was able to do abround campaign finance stuff. But yeah, his performance in twenty twenty one, and you know, the left, you know, thinks that Biden got nothing done. On the other hand, the Senate was divided fifty to fifty, Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinne being two of those fifty, and they pushed through like eight trillion dollars in spending American Rescue Plan, two trillion dollars the IRA. Then then he got played with that Chip deal.
He's like, I'm not giving you that Chip deal if you're still doing the IRA, and we were like, we're not doing the IRA. Then the past two three hundred billion dollars and then Chip deal. That afternoon, Schumer and Mansion put out a statement. It's like, oh, we have a deal in the IRA too.
That's true. I actually completely forgot.
How much humiliated blew up in McConnell's face, just humiliated him for two straight years.
Yeah, before he fell on his head.
Yeah, And I mean he had huge, huge problems during the Tea Party years sort of wrangling. Then what did John McCain say the wacko birds at the time was like Rand Paul and Ted Cruz and maybe someone would put Marco Rubio in that sort of bunch.
But it's never, you know, been smooth.
He's never had a in the last ten years, at least a super easy journey with the conservative movement. Although it was you know, there were these sugar highs during the Supreme Court confirmation battles and he's had a good relationship with like judicial, the conservative judicial movement.
That is really what people will see this legacy.
All that is to say, though, this is this is years of discontent bubbling to the surface, and that could manifest in some interesting politics that really changed the way Republicans work in Washington, d C. Like, the implications for this I think are really serious and and as somebody that's like subs staunchly on the right, I would say it's a time for the Senate to really really run.
Decide that it's running differently, decide that. You know, Kevin McCarthy is a great model for Republican leaders in that it's.
An establishment guy.
He's a politician almost corn and asque, although he was sort of changed by the Trump years. But he sees where the incentives are, and the incentives are, you know, not just paying lip service. They're not just saying X, Y and Z, They're actually taking action on certain things. So we'll see if that translates into the Senate. But for like legislation, people's daily lives, there is some stuff on.
The line here in terms of how Republicans decide to manage the Senate.
Right and McConnell.
As you know, it was endorsed by Planned Parenthood when he first started running, Like that's how much people are willing to.
Just move around.
Planned Parenthood endorsed the person who re engineered the courts, so that rog got overturned.
Well done, full circle.
About that circle. It's next.
We're going to talk about this this new Tucker Carlson interview. And at first I didn't even want to give this any oxygen, because yes, it's so absurd, But I think that it's worth talking about here because it's going to get oxygen no matter what we do. And I think there's some incredibly important context that people need to have.
Before the full video airs.
When I saw this going around on Twitter, Tucker put out this clip teasing this interview with a guy who says he had texts with brocken Bat, Like, wait a minute, guy looks familiar. Is that Larry Sinclair, this absolute notorious, fabulous and liar and con man from back in two thousand and seven, two thousand and eight days, And so I think it's Tucker has not put out the full interview. Maybe Tucker includes all that context and dismantles him by
the end of it. It's not what it sounds like from the trailer that he put out, So play a little bit of that, and then we'll talk about who this guy, Larry Sinclair is and why it's important that we understand what his backstory is since this is probably going to get tens of millions of views on Twitter or if you believe that counter. But even if you don't believe the counter, you think it's inflated by ten, it's going to be a lot.
And so let's roll a little bit of this clip.
You're just a guy who's in town for the night, and it sounds like you're looking to parties.
Yeah, pulled up in a bar outside, and there's this guy that's introduced to me as Barack Obama. I had given Barack two hundred and fifty dollars to pay for coke. I start putting a line on a cdtroit to snow it, and next thing I know, he's got a little pipe and he's smoking. So I just started rubbing my hand along his thighs to see where it was going, and it went the direction I had intended it to go.
Even though you had sex with him twice, you did cocaine with him watching him smoke crack twice.
You had no idea who he were. I had no idea who he was.
He just asked the obvious question, what was Obama like on crack? Is it your sense that that sewerbamba is just transactional, or that he's bisexual, or like, what is that?
It definitely wasn't Barack's first time, and I would almost be willing to betch it wasn't.
As long the guy's running for president and credible information comes out that he's smoking crack and having sex with dudes, that seems like a story.
Well it would be a story of the media really cared.
I would hope that people could see that and just see how little sense all of it makes, Like paying he gave him two hundred and fifty dollars, like the meat outside of a bar. All of a sudden, he's giving him two hundred fifty dollars. Then somehow crack shows up like just the details on its own don't make sense.
What didn't he go by Barry at the time, not for rock.
So this is inside the four corners of the guy's story and the best parts that go up like it to me, it's not credible, like not making sense.
From the trailer, just from the trailer, and he's dropping the interview. What Thursday so tomorrow? Is that what it is?
That sounds right?
Yeah, But now since Sinclair himself basically spent most of his adult life in and out of prison for fraud and for lying, for writing fake checks, for all sorts of other like.
Stealing tax returns.
Yeah, signature, yes, con Man type crimes. There's this is if you notice the byline on this. Spence Smith, my old colleague at Politico. I was at Politico Political at this time. The Politico his attorney or I don't think you'd call him attorney. I had to call him spokesperson because he'd already been disbarred at this point. At the time was Montgomery Blair. Montgomery Blair Sibley, who people can kind of google him too. Just an extraordinary kind of
figure in our politics like this like Gadfly. He he represented the DC Madam, and I worked with him on a story back in two the Hound Steps. That's another reason I remember this, which involved me like calling him in him answering the phone like that's what I mean by working on the story, and he said a couple of
funny things, and then I quoted him. He also told, and Ben has this in his story as well, he told a judge in two thousand and four or something that he couldn't show up for sentencing or couldn't show up for his trial because he had terminal disease.
That was twenty years ago. Clearly he's still alive.
Yeah, I forgot about that part too.
Like you couldn't.
And he also so he booked a National Press club during the two thousand and eight campaign, trying to get the media to pay attention to him, and it didn't work because he was never able to produce anything that could even remotely show that he and Obama were even in the same area at the same time. You have to have something, and so not only did he have nothing, no corroborating witnesses, no people that he told over the years.
If you were trying to construct the backstory of a non credible person, you couldn't do better than this guy who's spent most like spent, who's been charged so many different times for crimes related to lying and deceit.
It's not a good start. It's not a good start. And the other thing is.
That's why I wanted to talk about this because I think, as as kind of untoward as it feels to even air those allegations, they're going to get aired.
And I think I'm curious for your taking this.
I think it's a cynical move by Tucker Carlson here because he understands that in two thousand and eight there was the internet. He did put his stuff on YouTube and it got almost a million views or something, but the mainstream media and the conservative media as well, was still playing a gatekeeper role. And there are good elements
and bad elements to this gatekeeping, yep. And I think Tucker knows now that the gate the gates are off, and that he's going to be able to like basically put this into the bloodstream and tens of millions of Americans are going to believe it without ever knowing this backstory. I mean, maybe he'll put it in the interview, but a lot of people won't even get to the end of it.
And here's the interesting context. This is why I think the Barack Obama this is like we're going into the two thousand and seven and eight fever swamps. It was all all kinds of stuff circling circulating the primary. There's plenty of dirty tricks being played by the Clinton campaign.
There was plenty of wild.
Stuff coming out of you know, even conservative appo dives like crazy.
Yeah, Clinton oppo dies like crazy.
Stuff was circulating around back then because Barack Obama's had like an interesting life. He lived in all kinds of different countries, and he was a new type of politician that you know, was like, first of all, he had been a senator for a couple of years and people were trying to vet his record, and some really crazy stuff.
Came out of that.
I can't imagine what it was like to start covering some of this stuff back in two dozens.
It must have been wild.
One whild I think it was Ben Smith who had the story that a bunch of his friends came out and publicly said that Obama was inflating.
His drug use.
I actually remember that it.
Was the first presidential candidate in American history who was maybe falsely elevating. The people were like Coke Barry. I don't think so, I don't think so. Yeah, this smoked a lot of weed.
But now we have Kamala Harris like on Breakfast Club being like Oh yeah, I smoked weed and it was just Charlaman being like when she's like that was listening, the Snoop dies that's right.
So she's the second yes, and Snoop wasn't even like signed to a label yet at that point.
Yeah.
Right.
So the reason that this has become is like sort of bubbled to the surface of discourse again, I think is in large part from this Tablet magazine interview that David Garrow, who's Obama's biographer, gave in early August, and he found here he talked about in his book, and the story just did get kind of buried that you know, this is this is I'm reading from a letter that Obama wrote to Alex McNair in November of nineteen eighty two.
Quote in regard to homosexuality, I must say that I believe this is an attempt to remove oneself from the present, a refusal perhaps or perpetuate the endless farce of earthly life. You see, I make love to mend day, but in the imagination my mind is a drogynist to androgynist to a great extent, and I hope to make it more so until I can think in terms of people, not
women as opposed to men. But in returning to the body, I see that I have been made a man, and physically in life, I choose to accept that contingency.
Now that letter is at.
I think it's actually at the it's in the Emory University archives. They don't let you take pictures. They don't let you take it out. But Garro's friend transcribed those paragraphs by hand. He wrote them down himself and then gave them to the New York Post. It ended in and Garro's a Pulitzer Prize winner. It ended up in Garro's book. People didn't notice it when it came out.
In the book, it seems to like a thousand page book, and it seemed like that tablet article, which was also like a thousand pages, is what got people to pay attention to this, because you know, everyone started accepting it on Twitter. And so the bottom line is a people are gonna be like, first of all, why does it matter that Barack Obomba sounded like Judith Butler when he was writing to a girlfriend in nineteen eighty two, And
what does it matter if Barack Obama was gay? I feel like that's pretty much what the public is going to say, other than the fact that there's some intrigue to the idea that you know whatever, there are questions of why, you know, the corporate media didn't dig into all of this, you know the letter, Where was the curiosity about this because it does seem strange for a man who's married to a woman. But then you get back to the bottom question of who cares? Yeah, like, yeah, again,
who cares? But I think that's why Tecker Carlson, to your point, every interview that he's done so far with Tucker on X, which I still think like X itself, is this in this flux transition period has been essentially not like perfect, this like immaculate manifestation of journalism, but a giant middle finger, intentionally, a giant middle finger to
the gatekeepers. I think that's very intentionally what he's doing and saying, Look, if the media didn't want to touch this, despite you know, having an actual letter itself that Emmer University is you know, not letting anyone. But if they don't want to touch it, I'm gonna have fun with it and screw you guys for not doing it. An understandable sentiment, I will say, I'm not sure this is the best use of Tucker's time though.
Yeah, yeah, I can only imagine that. Yeah, he sees that tablet thing. He's like, oh yeah, there was that crank back in eight you know, he said he hooked up with Obama. Let's let's see if that guy's still alive. Said he was termally ill. Oh turns out, aren't we lucky?
That was a lie? Yeah he's still he's still alive.
Yeah, but yeah, and that's that like you read you read it. Obama's letters from that period, from the early nineteen eighties, they're all dripping with that philosophical just you can just see it's early twenties now, men working through, working through what it means to, you know, be a person in this world. And then and this was the period when letters were still a thing.
Yeah, you had to put everything down and write.
And there was a there was kind of a cachet to being able to write, like these kind of profound sounding letters. People were kind of working out their identities through their letters. That's something that's basically gone. Now we're doing the same thing, but through like TikTok or Twitter or whatever.
It's a shorter form too.
It's more snippets that you know, you have to sit down and be really deliberate if you're writing a letter, as opposed to when you're just like.
Firing off a text message.
Yeah, but for hundreds of years, this was the thing that young men and young women would do.
They would just.
Write these like super purple letters exploring like the deepest thing He's like the philosophers and writers that he named checks in these letters are just absurd and over the top.
And I think the bit yes, And I think one of the big narratives that this is framed within is that there were things about Barack Obama that people felt like were what's the word. I mean, he definitely was a new type of politician, and I think some folks felt like the media kind of glossed over some of these things that like if you go back to.
Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers.
And Obama coming out like genuinely coming out of the left in a way that I can't think of another like super mainstream politician after since I mean, like maybe the only other example would be Bernie Sanders in twenty sixteen.
And Obama wasn't static. He changed after he came out of the left, very clearly, but he did have a huge sort of his genesis politically was in the organizing areas, the organizing community in Chicago of the left, and that was intriguing to a lot of people, and they felt like maybe didn't get quite the attention it deserved.
In the media, although it was and it shows the paucity of the left at that time. And it was kind of like the Harvard law firm left, like the community organizing was done in like and garyl gets into this in the book in kind of collision with like these law firms, and it's it's it's it's not that the kind of it's not that the it's not the Black Panthers. That's it's a much different type of community organizing going.
On the ag.
Like the post Well, he ran against Bobby Rush. He ran against Bobby Rush, who was a leading black book but before that and then he was very big into the anti nuclear movement, anti nuclear proliferation. That's like that was a big niche issue for the left because they were they cared a lot about Latin Central America, like because of Reaganomics and Reagan like they had been so severely routed in the kind of new deal and anti anti war stuff that had kind of fueled what was
a left, but there wasn't much left. It's like this, the left was left of the left, and so yes, he comes out of that. But it's a it's a it's a much kind of weaker and kind of more elite aligned movement.
Yeah.
I mean, he's just a fascinating figure. So lots for David Garrett to work with. Regardless. All right, Ron, you're gonna take us through some election results from Rhode Island.
What have we at so progressive?
Aaron Regenberg was defeated in the Rhode Island House election last night, despite the support of Bernie Sanders and AOC.
We can put up this first element.
Biden and Obama official named Gabe Ammo ended up eking out a victory against Reaganberg. This came after consolidation by the establishment against Regenberg. A good example of it playing out here is from former Congressman Kennedy.
If we can play this clip here.
And I really hope this district takes Gabe and moves them on as their congressman because they won't go wrong with Gabe. I will tell you his opponents, especially the one that's in the front runner status right now. The notion that he would come out against the largest economic driver in the first district, the defense economy, left me flabbergasted. The notion that you can be a good Democrat and a liberal and not also support a strong national defense
and good jobs here at home makes no sense. Gabe is a good Democrat and a strong liberal, but it doesn't mean he's not going to fight for Rhode Island jobs. And the way you fight for Rhode Island jobs is you don't cancel out Jack Reid, whose chairman of the appropriations for Defense spending. That's what Aaron Regenberg would do.
So Aaron Regenberg.
They're getting slammed by Kennedy, who seems genuinely angry because he recommended a significant but not that significant cut to the military spending budget. And and people need to understand that is the reaction that you that you get from even you're, you know, a standard establishment Democrat who will just publicly say, you know, how air you what on
earth are you possibly doing now? Bernie Sanders Helper rally last Sunday in Providence, Rhode Island for Aaron who was a former state legislator who pushed through a sweeping set of kind of progressive legislation while he was in the Providence State House. But he didn't just have Kennedy and the establishment as his opponent.
And this is the story we'll talk about here, and we're.
Also going to get to the big mistakes that Aaron Regenberg himself made at the end of this. But what's amazing here is that for all of the anger that former Congress and Kennedy felt toward Regenberg, that was matched or even eclipsed by the anger of what you would call say the post left or maybe the online left, well, chaos left, I don't know, Emily. We got to come up with a name for them, non electoral left that believes that.
We can put up this Boston Globe article.
Who's led here by an organization that was called the co Op and then also Rhode Island DS which said that they were not they were not participating in this primary because they believe that Democratic Party is thoroughly corrupted and et cetera. To me, that is a perfectly defensible position. You don't want to participate in a Democratic primary, You're under no obligation to participate in a Democratic primary. You want to run a third party candidate. Wonderful, do that too,
this is America, run a third party candidate. But they didn't do those things. The only they did participate in the Democratic primary, but the way they participated in it was by solely going after the most progressive candidate in the race.
Like that was.
They didn't have somebody else that they were supporting. They just didn't like Regenberg. And part of it is strategic, because the idea is that if you can elect kind of a if Bernie and AOC can team up and go to Rhode Island and elect a progressive legislator to the Rhode Island Congressional delegation, then that encourages more people then to participate in Democratic primaries and try to take
over the Democratic Party from the inside. If you believe that that's a dead end and you want to build a third party instead, or you don't want to be involved in electoral politics at all, then you need that project to fail. And so in some ways it is strategic. I think in other ways it was just nihilistic. That there's a lot of bad blood between Regenberg and some of these other Rhode Island lefties, and so they just didn't want him to win, so they end up getting
a Biden Obama official instead. This is a really kind of sad and ignoble end to a story that started out with a lot of promise in Rhode Island. If we can put up this next clip, run through this story pretty quickly, so this is from twenty twenty one. In twenty twenty, the kind of broad Rhode Island left came together and in September of twenty twenty ousted ten incumbents in the Providence State House and ended up bringing about a lot of progressive change in Rhode Island.
And it was great.
It was great to see because the idea was, look, a lot of working class people in Rhode Island. The Democratic Party, which is basically the only party in Rhode Island, is not responsive to working class needs. We don't need to collect that many votes to actually get these people out of the State House and State Senate. So let's combine our forces and let's take it seriously and let's throw these bums out.
And they did that.
Then in twenty twenty one, as I covered there, they put together a slate of kind of fifty where they're going to run a governor, a lieutenant governor up and down, they're going to take over the state House. Before that
could happen, it just collapsed in drama, utter chaos. Some people who had been elected by this co op left the co op for all sorts of reasons, saying that the co op was a mess, the co op wanted to kick out some of the other members, and then and through this period DSA is kind of collapsing in its own acrimony, and recently the estate is size that they're not doing electoral politics at all, which although that wasn't sure, they're doing electoral politics, just not running candidates,
just engaging in electoral politics.
So we can put up this next clip.
Dan Maren's over at huff Post kind of did a good story on this back in, you know, the end of twenty twenty one. If people want to read the kind of sad drama that brought this to an end, and that brings us up to the place where then in twenty twenty two, David Siegel runs in an open primary. He has the support of the CPC, of the support of Bernie Sanders. He ends up falling short. To Seth Magazine or who's now going to be in office as long as long as he wants. And then now Progressives
have swung and missed at this. So they had a chance to have two Bernie backed members of Congress representing Rhode Island in Congress. Instead they will now have zero now not to let Aaron himself off the hook. If the election were held a couple of weeks ago, he probably wins. And that's why you hear so much panic
in Kennedy's right there. At the last debate, he was hammered from all sides for a superpack that his father in law had funded on his behalf to the tune of about one hundred and twenty five thousand dollars, which is a small amount of money in today's politics, But when you only need ten thousand votes, you know, and you can.
If you can get one hundred thousand dollars of mailing, it helps.
So the question that people were asking of Aaron was did you coordinate with this super pack? And in the debate he was accused of having what's called a red box.
We've talked about redboxes before.
This is a little tiny piece on your campaign website where you click on it and it goes to it's messaging for a super pack, like what demographics you want to target and with what messages it's intended. And it's a way to get around coordination laws because as long as you have a link on your campaign website that somebody can find, then you're not coordinating because it's just public information and a superpack go out and find it. So Mattos challenged Aaron directly, you know, did you have
a red box on your website? And he flat out lied in the debate and said no, he did not have a red box. They all it took was the way back machine, and Matos was able to show later like, no, he did have one. So there are a lot of different ways you can handle that if you're going to do a summer Lee did a super pack like candidates should not be. I mean, she didn't do a s
There were super PACs working to benefit summer Ly. Summerly would not be in Congress right now if the Working Families Party, Justice Democrats you know, had not come in at the very end with this big outside spending which is called a super pac. But Summerlee was open about it. She's like, these super packs are supporting me. I don't,
I don't I don't like this campaign system. But a pack is spending millions of dollars against me, So if they want to spend a million at the end, I'm not going to tell them not to.
And she didn't lie.
About whether or not she had a red box on her site and was coordinating with them the decision to have a father law do the super pac kind of independently. If I were going to be cynical about it, I'd tell them go give it to the Working Families Party, Go, you know, give it to some other organization.
We'll just do your own super pac.
And also don't lie, like, don't if you have a red box to be like, look, the talking point is out there. I'm not going to unilaterally disarmed like that's what everybody says, like I want the system to change, but until the system changes, I'm going to fight fire with fire, like that's all you had to do.
Instead, he said no.
And because turnout in this election was so small, that means it's a highly informed voter demographic so and a highly informed electorate, so they knew like this penetrated the consciousness of these voters. They're only thirty five thousand people that voted. Total in this primary. This was another case where, like with AOC, if the Left had been able to
cobble together eleven twelve thousand votes, they win. I think we'll see what Amo winds up with, but I think, you know, eleven twelve thousand votes and he'll probably end up winning by two or three thousand votes against Reagenberg.
And so a pretty pitiful end.
To what began as a kind of hopeful moment in twenty twenty, which kind of sums up the left I think for.
Over the last like three years.
Yeah, no, that's interesting in the unilateral So there have been a lot of responses. There has been a lot of responses to Washington Post journalist Philip Bump's appearance on Gnomedwarman. He's the owner of the Comedy Sellers in New York, his podcast, and it was fodder for a lot of critics of media, especially to watch Bump have a very very difficult time defending his stance that Hunter Biden doesn't go to Joe Biden, so anything that sort of affects
Hunter Biden. There's not enough evidence suggesting that Joe Biden was implicated and wrongdoing to basically draw conclusions about the President Dorman and says as he opens the podcast, Basically, I was looking for the smartest person who disagrees with me on Hunter Biden to come on and have a conversation. And basically I want to learn what the other side is and the best version of the other side, because I'm genuinely curious and want.
To see how it holds up to scrutiny.
Well, if you accept this as an experiment to test that question, how well does the defense of Joe Biden basically hold up to scrutiny? Uh, the video didn't go so well for Philip Bump, So let's take a look at a quick clip from how it went.
What do you take from the text message to his adult daughter A hundred texts, I have to give fifty percent of my income to pop.
I have no idea what that means. I don't. I have no idea what that means.
It's it's it's.
I know, it's circumstantial evidence, and you prefer that what what could be? I have no idea, but doesn't don't know. Well, I appreciate your.
Has anybody has anybody asked her?
I don't know, I don't know.
Don't you think somebody should ask her.
Okay, like, I'm not I just said I don't know, and I don't know what to make of it, so I have nothing I could say about it.
Yeah.
Yeah, but you say there's no evident evidence.
But then there's a text message where he says, I get top fifty cent of my money.
That's that's evidence.
Okay, well, okay, fine, fine, so evidence.
I appreciate your.
Having me up.
It doesn't that's something like that. Who do you think is the more I saw? I lived at that I'm saying you cagure. I don't feel you want me to leave, Like just walk out in the middle of this. You can that way you can, you can go.
Is this a standard?
Really?
This is the way the Washington Post handles people who.
Disagree with When I agree to be on for forty five minutes and then I get on for an hour and fifteen.
Yeah, so that is at the end of the interview, because Bump does get up and leave, but he had been there for some hour going back and forth with Dorman.
You can actually watch the interview.
I think it's very interesting because Philip Bump repeatedly says that he's kind of debunked.
He uses the phrase debunked this idea that Joe.
Biden is potentially implicated and Hunter's wrong doing. Dowrman there is referencing that text message from Hunter Biden to his daughter Naomi Biden that was found on his laptop suggesting he had been siphoning that his father had been getting money funneled to him from Hunter's work, and we know that his work was peddling essentially. So if you don't care about the Hunter Biden thing, I don't particularly blame you. I care about it because I like covering influence peddling.
But what I want to get to the bottom of, whether it's on the left or the right, by the way, is what the real world serious consequences of the double standards in our politics are. And at this point I am talking about left and right, although I think it's particularly a problem for the left because the left is largely in charge of the media, and the media does largely purport to be a neutral arbiter of a lot
of these things. You know, Philip Bump isn't out there saying listen, I'm a partisan Democrats, so take my perspective with a grain of salt. He's not saying that and I think that's a real problem. Let's put up the second element. This is a story that you may have also heard. I think Crystal and Sager covered it about this serious attempt to reign in corruption in Ukraine.
So that's from Reuters.
It says Ukraine lawmakers back antigraph disclosure rule Comma.
But with loophole. I wonder how the loophole got there.
There's a lot of money flowing in the United States in Ukraine, as we all know. We basically understand that at this point. But what I just want to focus our attention on for a moment is something a lot of the media isn't talking about when it comes to Joe Biden and when it comes to Ukraine. If we go back to when Joe Biden had Ukraine in his portfolio during the Obama administration, there's this serious question of him being sent over to Ukraine to have these conversations
with Victor Schoken and whomever else. He's the prosecutor that Biden ended up firing about corruption in a foreign country when his own son is being paid tens of thousands of dollars a months, like eighty thousand dollars a month by Barisma by a corrupt oil and gas company in Ukraine. So this is America taking their credibility and all of their aid money back in the Obama administration over to Ukraine and saying, you guys, really got to clean up
your corruption. The messenger for that really needed to clean up his own corruption, as even people in the State Department recognized when they realized what Hunter Biden was doing with the Biden family name back at the time. Fast forward to twenty twenty twenty three, Joe Biden is overseeing millions and millions of dollars going over to Ukraine, and he is completely compromised.
There's just no other question.
There's no question about it, because even Philip Bump recognizes that what Hunter Biden did with the Joe Biden family.
Name was wrong.
And whether or not you think Joe Biden literally profited from any of that, whether or not you think he's been honest, et cetera, et cetera, it is absolutely no questions asked affecting the way affecting the moral credibility of the United States as they say, hey, let's put a pause on some of this corruption. This is hard earned American tax payer dollars we're giving it to you to fight this war effort. We need to make sure that
it's going to the right places. Our moral credibility is absolutely hampered by the reality that the Biden family name was being used to pedal influence for the last decade. Essentially, Now this goes in both directions. We can talk about Jared Kushner. For instance, you get to a place where
basically the left has no ability on Jared Kushner. There's some serious problems there people on the left who don't care about Hunter but care about Jared, which I would argue is most of the left is in a huge credibility deficit once again, and I get that they'll say, you know, why should we talk about Jared? Or I get why people on the right would say why should
we talk about Jared? When when it came to Hunter, you know, you had twenty twenty In twenty twenty, the intelligence community, you had top democrats, you had big tech rallying in this concerted effort to censor information about it. I get why conservatives don't want to touch the Jared stuff.
But once again, if you are implicated in influence pedaling, as Jared Kushner has been, when it comes to Saudi Arabia, leaving the Trump administration with Saudi Arabian in his portfolio and then getting a massive influx of investment money from Saudi Arabia from the Saudi Investment Bank, then yeah, you're a huge credibility problem once again. And let's put up the next element, because this is another serious consequence of
double standards. This is a New York Times headline, and if you're listening to this, I wish you could see the picture. It's a juxtaposition of Diane Feinstein and Mitch McConnell. The New York Times asks reluctant to require retire leaders raise a tough question how old is too old? Once again, a consequence of the double standard is that the left has no credibility saying that Mitch McConnell needs to retire, which, by the way, Mitch McConnell absolutely needs to retire, and the.
Right loses credibility.
Although most people on the right are not defending Mitch McConnell, as we talked about earlier in the show, most people on the right are eager for Mitch McConnell to go, but defenders of Mitch McConnell lose their credibility on Joe Biden and on Diane Feinstein if they are defending Mitch McConnell or not saying anything about Mitch McConnell. What is the consequence of all of this. That's the central point I want to make. This is not just a media
play thing. It is not a political football that would just punt around to what about Jared Kushner, What about Hunter Biden? What about Mitch McConnell, what about Diane Fines's. This is a political football that's way too often treated like it's part of a game here in Washington, d C. But there are actual serious consequences to it, which is that, in a normal circumstance, you look at Joe Biden and say, it is abundantly clear this man should not be running
for a second term as president. He wandered out of a medal of honor ceremony just yesterday in a painful way. It happens every week, seemingly every day, there's a moment that is just cringeworthy, and you feel badly for the man because perhaps you see some of your own relatives in him.
We've all watched this happen before.
And it's sad it belongs to nowhere near the presidency, and in a normal media atmosphere and a normal political discourse, we would know that we would understand it, and we would be able to have somebody, whether Democrat or Republican, who's at least more competent and able to have conversations with world leaders that they understand, is able to be trusted when they're negotiating with world leaders. That Okay, I believe Joe Biden heard me and understood me, and whatever
we're working on, that'll be just fine. Same thing with Nann Feinstein, who's been and Senate leadership for forever, Mitch McConnell, who is Senate leadership for Republicans. It's a real problem for the United States both how we're negotiating with Ukraine and negotiating with Saudi Arabia that we lack credibility.
On those two fronts.
So all of this is just to point out that, you know, it's easy to do the what about thing, and I actually believe that there are some legitimate circumstances to do it, because again, well what about Hunter Biden. When people are bringing up Jared Kushner and you had all like this massive concerted effort to blott it, to
block out some information on him. I get it, but I just wanted to pause for a moment as we kick around these things like political footballs, and realize that the double standards, I think, largely fueled by the media, fueled by people like Philip Bump, this hypocrisy actually is. It may not have real world consequences for reporters in Washington, d C. Who have comfy lives, but it does have consequences for the country in.
The near term and in the long term. Ryan. It's just frustrating because I know it's also.
We're joined now by Sarab Amari, the founding editor of The Great Compact magazine, which you should subscribe to if you're not already subscribed to it. He's also the author of the new book Tyranny, Inc. How Private Power Crushed American Liberty and What to do about it. We're going to get into the question of private power in just one second, but so Rob, first of all, thanks for coming on the show.
Thanks for having me in. Good to see you Emily at a distance. Nice to meet you Ryan.
Same here, same here.
Yeah, let's start with this question of private power. Especially we can put the first element up on the screen when it comes to a couple of things that I think are creating a really important moment for the right this fall. Actually just this fall, we have real safety on the table. There's a bipartisan rail bill has been supported by the likes of jd Vance, but opposed by other people on the right. Actually, you know, John Thune comes to mind, somebody who was involved in the private
power of the rail industry. Actually for a while has really stalled out in Congress. I think that's both due to corporate Dems and corporate Republicans, but truly on the right. This has created a huge debate. It should be on the table this fall, it may or may not be. And also if we go to the second element, the UAW we can talk more about this in detail, but huge, I mean the labor movement right now I think is creating in and of itself a put up or shut up moment for the right and.
Digging into some of these disputes.
So I want to get your take on the kind of confluence of these two things as Congress is back, you know, basically this week and they have a hugely chaotic fall in front of them.
It's absolutely packed.
Do you similarly see this as a kind of put up or shut up moment for the realigning conservative movement? The realigning right that now has this more working class coalition, especially among voters than it did in the past, likes to talk about the middle class a lot because of agreement consensus on some cultural issues, but you know, maybe hasn't taken the steps necessary. A lot of people in the left are skeptical that has taken the steps necessary
to really support the working class on policy measures. So A, do you see it as a put up er shut up moment? And then B, how are Republicans faring in this test so far?
Yeah, it's absolutely a put upper shut up moment emily, but it's not the first one.
Certainly. There were many such tests that came even during.
The Trump administration, and despite the Trump campaign's very pro worker rhetoric that was born out in some things like trade policy, but in many other instances, even the Trump administration, notwithstanding the president's own kind of sensibility and instincts, ended up acting like any other union busting type of conventional Republican party and its largest biggest legislative accomplishment, as you know, was a corporate tax cut engineered by then House Speaker
Paul Ryan. But here we have another one, and I think it's it's a very important one, because the right made a lot of noise after East Palestine, Ohio, that incident, you'll remember, was framed in its typical kind of the right stance for the working class, for the heartland, for
kind of the forgotten inner country. But right now, as you said, this reform legislation that's been pushed forward by actually Senator Vance and a number of Democratic allies he's found on the other side of the aisle is stalling mainly because of you know, Senator McConnell and other other kind of hardline free market Republicans who answer to the Chamber of Commerce more than they do to any other
constituency in the United States. So I think, and it's very important to note what the what the cause was actually Senator Rubio, Senator Vance wrote a letter, you know, homing in on the fact that it's kind of this neoliberal model of absolutely minimizing labor costs so that you have ever more material on the nation's railways with ever fewer workers because they do this kind of just in time scheduling, which was popular especially before the pandemic, to
minimize labor costs. But what that means is that each sort of ton tonnage of rail content has fewer safety professionals to deal with it, and therefore, if there is an accident, both they're more likely and more likely to be catastrophic. So yeah, it's a put up er shout up moment, and we'll see how the Republican Party fares
the UAW. I could just briefly say, what the you know, there's an element of fears about what the green transition will mean, which I think are pretty legitimate, and I think Republicans can speak pretty cogently to that given.
Their skepticism of.
Some of the green agenda, and some of that skepticism,
as you know, I think is well founded. But there's this other element that has to do with the fact that there are two tier contracts at the Big three automakers, where typically younger workers who come in don't get to benefit from the same sort of middle class stability and lack of precarity that used to characterize manufacturing jobs in the auto sector back in the day, and so the battle is over workers, including older workers, out of solidarity
with their young successors on the factory line, demanding that there should be kind of uniform contracts that are you know, you don't have this tier model again if you have a Republican Party that claims to be pro worker, and you know, President Trump, as you know, won the highest marginal share of union households for any Republican nominee since Ronald Reagan in nineteen eighty four. He won those union households by precisely by speaking to you know, those kinds
of workers. And so if it doesn't deliver for them, and continues for the most part, with few exceptions like Senator Rubio Vance Holly, for the most part gives workers the back of the hand, then I think that it's easy to predict those workers becoming apathetic again and certainly leaving the Republican Party or finding you know, their more comfortable home on the on the Democratic left, which is all sorts of other problems. But in short, I agree with you.
Yeah, and so what what's going to shake things loose for the Republican Party. So next next week is the contract deadline for the UAW after which you could see a strike. And I'm curious if you think you're going to see support for let's if they do go on a strike, support for the striking workers like it.
Are we at a point where you're.
Starting to see a transition from Republicans saying that they're pro worker to Republicans also being pro union or is that too big of a bridge at this point because of the kind of you know, power base that you accurately identify in the Republican Party as the kind of you know, car dealer Republican, the small to medium time gold wall, you know, the same kind of force that fired Goldwater is filled so dominant within the Republican Party, and.
They are you know, they hate nothing more than unions.
So what you know, are you know, how how far do you have to go to you get from pro work at a pro union?
Well, that's that's a really good question.
I would say that as far as this battle coming up next week, you know, I can't predict what individual senators will do, but if you know, if the past is any precedent, you know, you'll remember when there was a the looming rail strike last fall.
If I remember correctly, I think last November.
Uh, you did have a number of Republicans in the Senate stepping in and saying no, Congress should not put a put a stop to their ability to to strike, actually going against the Biden administration in that case, that rare case. You've had Senator Rubio speak out for Amazon workers at at a warehouse in Alabama and Bessemer.
Uh.
So there are these kind of green shoots, and so we'll see how they react to this case. But more broadly, I mean, I think the dynamic is such that if the Republican Party doesn't deliver for the growing number of working class people who rally to it, often for cultural reasons, then you know they will become apathetic and begin to get disillusioned with the party. Now, one of the reasons that existing unions are so close to the Democrats is
precisely because they've since the Nixon era. Nixon was the last president who actually competitively fought for their union vote. Since the next in era, the party has become much more again I use the term neoliberal, much more sort of resolutely just on the side of employers and corporations, and so unions keep getting the back of the hand from the Republican Party. Of course, they'll just cling ever
more tightly to the Democratic Party. The reason that's the problem is because, first of all, it means that we don't have an independent labor movement. We have a labor movement that is deeply dependent on one side of the political aisle. It also means that we have a labor movement that, you know, becomes ever more culturally polarizing in
a way that's not good for its larger cause. Right when the AFLCIO says we are basically maximal on abortion rights, you know, some workers might be pro abortion, but plenty are more conservative.
They may not be, you know, utterly completely.
Opposed to abortion, but they may want limits at fifteen weeks or twenty weeks or what have you. There's no reason why their labor union should take a stance on that that is so at odds with what they believe. But things will stay that way unless enough Republicans reach out to organized labor that it becomes possible for there to be for workers to have an organized voice in the Republican Party in the same way that, for example, small business has an organized voice within.
The Republican Party.
And then you can do coalitional politics, like you can between the various coalitions of the Republican Party and achieve things that are you know, maybe not everyone will be completely happy, but everyone will be somewhat happy.
But in order to.
Get there, you need the courage of a few Republicans who are willing to break with the orthodoxity.
Yeah, and I think this fall is such a big test of that. I want to get your temperature. My last question for your so, Rob is on the Trump I think this was a truth social post where he goes after the UAW and says, basically, Mexico and Canada love Biden's idiotic policy, Save Michigan and the other auto states, save the American consumer basically from electric cars. Trump says, you know, Sean Faine, the respected president of UAW, cannot
even think about along all electric cars. They will all be made in China, and the auto industry in America will cease to exist. And you mentioned so, Rob, how a lot of union workers particularly flock to Trump for cultural reasons. Now, I think you'll probably have some people flocking or people posing the u a W if they give in too much to the kind of green agenda
of the Biden administration. So how then do Republicans morally do the right thing when it comes to the UAW electric cars, the workers in Michigan, and then politically do the right thing. What is the answer to that kind of difficult balancing act.
Yeah, well, first of all, I mean, if they're if Republicans.
Are in the arena and not so utterly hostile the bulk of them to organized labor, then you can influence organized labor.
Right, This is how kind of politics works.
Uh.
You know, if you have a stake in something, you get to have a say in it as well. And so you know, I think that that is a reasonable concern about Green, the Green transition threatening existing manufacturing jobs that are high, you know, relative hy wid and quite secure. And I do know that the UAW has made public noises about its concerns, you know, public it's concerns to the Obama sorrys of the Obama investration for Indian stuff.
To the Biden administration about the transition.
That said, I will say that, you know, I'm of the view that green needn't necessarily mean job killing it. You know, in other words, there's a tendency on the right when they look at something like the Inflation Reduction Act, and they think, oh, it's all green subsidies. The Green transition is something that a lot of our kind of rivals like China are putting enormous amounts of investment into because they see it as an industry of the future
that's important. And so you know, you know, we should absolutely try to preserve existing auto manufacturing jobs. I'm in favor of that, but to look in a long term and think about what we can do industrial policy wise to bring these jobs, which can be high waged jobs, to the United States or more of them to the United States and take them away from China. I think
that's part of this kind of industrial policy package. And when I compare, for example, how someone like National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan thinks and talks about this stuff with the republic Can Party, I can't but say that, Okay, this this, this is a serious party of government, the Democrats with which I have big disagreements, to be sure, and then you have a Republicans who are just I don't know, there's a kind of just nearly reactionary and
saying like, well, they're going to take your jobs. You know, it's sort of lopsided you look in terms of seriousness, So anyway, I think that's a it's a hard needle to thread.
No doubt, we'll say Sorbo Mari. The book is Tyranny, Inc. Thanks thanks for joining us. We'll be following the w strike closely. The rail fight hopefully isn't over yet. Appreciate you joining us.
Thank you both, Thanks Ryan.
Thanks so much so Rob. That does it for us today. We'll be back next week. And again, I think we're at the one year anniversary of counterpoints, so maybe we'll do something a little special for that.
I don't know. Maybe you'll bring in brownies. Oh, there we go, who knows, we'll see, We'll see
All right, stick around see you then, Ms.