Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 1/11/23 Counter Points: Biden Responds to Classified Docs, Flights Grounded Across US, Net Neutrality Dedication, Mint The Trillion Dollar Coin, January 6th GeoFence, GOP VS IRS, Ro Khanna Interview

Episode Date: January 11, 2023

Ryan and Emily discuss Biden's response to Classified Documents being discovered in his office, Flights grounded across the US in a major airline disaster, historic flooding occurring all over California, a dedication to Aaron Swartz a major advocate of Net Neutrality, privacy violations against January 6th, Tesla's autopilot crashes and stock falling, GOP going after defunding the IRS, and Ro Khanna in studio to talk about a new bill for American Industrial Policy.To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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I've always been told I'm a really good listener, right? And I maximized that while I was lying. Listen to Deep Cover The Truth About Sarah on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you have your support. What are you waiting for? Become a premium subscriber today at breakingpoints.com. All right. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to CounterPoints. Emily, how are you doing? I'm good. How about you, Ryan? I'm fine. Good. I'm fine. Yeah. I like that you're honest. You're fine. Fine. Good. All right. Happy for you. Yes. There you go. So we got a big show today. That's right. And it's so big, actually, we're not going to be able to fit all of it into the show that goes out to premium subscribers. If you're a premium

subscriber, you get the show an hour early and you get it with no ads and all in one row. But we're going to have a couple of segments afterwards that aren't going to fit into that. So apologies for that. If you're a premium subscriber, you still have to come to YouTube afterwards. That's right. And if you listen to this on the podcast, just bounce over for a couple of guest segments that we're going to have after we finish. I was going to say, partially because we have an in-person guest today, we have a couple guests, so there's a lot going on. Right. And we've got to get the show done at a certain time in the morning so that it gets out. And it can be a morning show. Right. That's right. When we were doing the Friday show, it was coming out at like one or two o'clock. That's not a morning show.

That's when I wake up. Yeah. So what news do we have this morning? So President Biden has responded to the news that classified information was found at his University of Delaware office. Let's see what he had to say. Well, let me get rid of the easy one first. People know I take classified documents and classified information seriously. When my lawyers were clearing out my office at the University of Pennsylvania, they set up an office for me, a secure office in the Capitol. The four years after being vice president, I was a professor at Penn. They found some documents in a box, in a locked cabinet, or at least a closet. And as soon as they did, they realized there were several classified documents in that box.

And they did what they should have done. They immediately called the archives, immediately called the archives, turned them over to the archives. And I was briefed about this discovery and surprised to learn that there were any government records that were taken there to that office. But I don't know what's in the documents. My lawyers have not suggested I ask what documents they were. I've turned over the boxes. They've turned over the boxes to the archives. And we're cooperating fully, cooperating fully with the review,

which I hope will be finished soon, and there will be more detail at that time. The first question now I forgot. The end of that clip. So obviously there's drew immediate parallels with the documents found at Mar-a-Lago. I think there are some key differences. It is also, I think, amusing to revisit some of the sky is falling takes from the time when the classified documents were discovered at Mar-a-Lago, which weren't just over one of the key distinctions here, which is Donald Trump not returning the classified documents, whereas Biden's team reported them and was in the process of getting them to the National Archives, apparently pretty quickly. But there were people who were actually freaking out about the fact that classified documents were in an insecure location and had been moved to begin with.

That was in and of itself beyond the pale. And it was something that only we could only see from corrupt people who don't care at all about our democracy, et cetera, et cetera. That said, though, Ryan, that difference is, I think, significant. Yeah, and I subscribe to a kind of different version of the Chinese proverb, which says, may you live in funny times. This is funny. Oh my gosh. Absolutely. This is very funny. Yeah. We're very, by that proverb, we are blessed beyond belief. Yes. We live in very funny times. Now, in some ways, if you want to get super cynical about it, Democrats have already gotten everything they wanted. I mean, plenty of Democrats want Trump in jail. Right. Okay. But to me, if you're a Democrat and you want Trump in jail, put him in jail for the thing that you think is the biggest crime that

he committed. Stop doing the ticky tacky. Yeah. Put him and Stephen Miller in the same cell for separating children at the border or like whatever it is that you think is the real crime. Then you have to put Biden and Obama in the same cell. That's fine. Yeah. Well, I mean, not in the same cell. Put them right next door, right across the thing. Spread them out. Maybe in a big cell. Okay. Yeah. And they can interact and gen pop. Well, that can go through the legal process. Right. But so if that's your goal, that you want Trump in prison, I think you should go for the greatest crime that you think that he committed. But if you're a cynical Democrat who just is looking for political advantage, you got what you wanted out of this in the fall. Like you wanted the attention of the

public to be on Donald Trump. Yeah. Because that rallies Democratic voters and it kind of turns a lot of independents off of, you know, off of Republicans and moves them over to the Democratic side. And unless he's on the ballot, it doesn't necessarily, you can tell me if you think I'm wrong about this, it doesn't necessarily bring enough Republicans out to counteract it. Like Trump, to me, kind of has to be himself on the ballot, whereas just the ghost of Trump is enough to get Democrats scared enough to vote. Yes. And it's not what we, I think what we learned in the midterms is that it's not on the flip side of that enough to get Republicans. If you're running Dr. Oz, you're not going to put

up the same numbers in Erie County. So yeah. And I think the goal with that seemed to be pretty clearly, yes, it was the siphoning of the attention, but also in the direction of an indictment. Let's keep piling more and more things on Donald Trump that potentially one will get to an indictment, which would potentially disqualify him from running for office again. And that's definitely part of the strategy. Yeah. And now on the substance of this, to me, kind of the national security state has gone so far into over-classification in the sense that they are classifying so much of their content that they produce, either for turf reasons,

just to keep politicians out, to grow their own power, or to cover up their own embarrassments because they don't want it exposed. Think about how many things that we can just think off the top that they've failed on in just the last five years. They don't want all of their kind of internal deliberations, which have led to those failures, exposed. And you're not supposed to use classification to cover up errors.

And so to me, the national security state has so little standing when it comes to complaining about classification that it's very hard to take any of their complaints seriously about this. That said, if they could prove that Trump was trying to sell things that he had held on to, and he's doing all this very Trumpy stuff where he's claiming he's returned everything and then telling his workers to move them from one place to another. He's doing a lot of shady stuff. And if on top of that, he's like selling it or he's showing it to like people he really obviously

very much should not be, then okay. Or if it's accessible to people, like if Mar-a-Lago, as I suspect, is very vulnerable to espionage and that kind of activity, and there's material that's not being kept securely, the same applies for Biden's office. But to your point, we have no idea what really level of classification this deserved. And then on top of all of that, you have to think about the, so the hypotheticals are always there. And that's why we have the law, because all of those hypotheticals completely exist. But then what's the actual risk? Totally different question. And there's so many, I think, unanswered parts of it. I like Biden's response. He's like,

it was in a locked cabinet. Well, it was in a box. Yeah. That might have been in a closet. Yeah. It's like the Russian nesting doll of secure space. And also there's no loophole on that. Yeah. Like now. Well, that's the thing, right. So Hillary Clinton did not end up getting charged. It cost her presidency. But she didn't end up getting charged with mishandling classified information. And Comey went through the whole list of reasons why they had not charged with mishandling information.

Those reasons would seem to apply to Biden here because of its incidental or whatever. And the other problem is if you're classifying basically every single like lunch schedule at the CIA. Which I'm sure they are. They do. Yeah, they classify the lunch, the soup of the day. Yeah. Classified. And you wind up like with a receipt from the CIA in your box, like when you went out to Langley and had lunch. I don't think he's eating in the cafeteria. No, probably not. But if he did, then you'd be like, oh, that's classified document. Totally. But on the other hand, I have no sympathy. These are the people that write the rules. Well, that's the other thing that Trump can claim. He's declassified these documents, therefore they're allowed to be in the space. That's what Biden should have said. Right.

Although he was vice president. That's right. So he couldn't have. It doesn't have the same magic wand power that Trump technically, I think, is. There's a legal case that he can wield the power that way. But again, this is all a ridiculous sort of glimpse into the classification process. I think he also said he was at the University of Pennsylvania before he was vice president. He said that? I think that's what he said there. Great. Anyway. So we also have some heartbreaking news to share on the death of New York Times reporter Blake

Hounschel. He previously, as you may know, worked at Politico and Foreign Policy, and he leaves behind a wife and two children. His family said in a statement, quote, it is with great sorrow that we have to inform you that Blake has suddenly died this morning after a long and courageous battle with depression, unquote. And to me, it was extraordinarily courageous of the family to share that statement because suicide may be the thing in our society that is the most common, yet the least talked about. And breaking through that silence, I think, is something that takes an enormous amount of courage. And so for the past few months,

you and I have been talking about dedicating this show, which airs on January 11th, to the life and the legacy of internet pioneer and activist Aaron Swartz, who died by suicide 10 years ago. Just a tragic coinciding of events. Exactly on this day, right? January 11th. Exactly on this day, January 11th, 2013. And so we'll have more on that to come. Yeah. And you shared a really poignant piece from HuffPost, from your former colleague, on could it really be that simple about suicide prevention?

An experiment that ran over the course of years. A couple of different versions of it, actually, where you send vulnerable people letters and their responses about what that meant to them and how it changed their experiences, suffering with depression and trauma. Just incredible. And that's one of the interviews that we won't be able to fit into the show that we're going to be able to put together this morning, but it'll be up soon after. And Blake was a friend of yours?

I knew Blake. I respected Blake a lot. It would be, I think, over the top for me to kind of claim that Blake was a friend, but I've known him for a very long time and somebody I've always respected. Yeah.

And it's heartbreaking to see somebody succumb to this with a young family. And we'll talk about this in our interview with Jason Cherkis later. He noted in his story that more than 9 million people a year contemplate suicide in the United States. And we're a country of about 9 million people a year contemplate suicide in the United States. And we're a country of about 330 million people. So that's an enormous number of people who are looking at the stress that our society produces and that life produces and just considering the solution of ending it. And we're going to delve deeper into that because despite that phenomenon being so widespread,

it just never gets talked about. You know, media is an interesting place. We don't need to get too far into this because it also kind of applies across the board. But people work so many different non-traditional hours and are traveling on the road and are up early late have just unpredictable schedules which brings them into closer contact with their colleagues in interesting ways and I think some of the

remembrances of Blake that have been shared over the last 24 hours are just by Tim Alberta and some other just really really beautiful memories and it's a it's a unique job in that sense that you get to know people better than others do in their workplaces, I'm sure. And so it's a wonderful, I think, honor to, an honor to his memory. Yeah, for sure. And so we'll also be joined later in the show by Representative Ro Khanna. You know, he represents Silicon Valley, and he's going to talk about Aaron and his legacy as well, as well as talking about an unusual bipartisan bill that he's introduced with Representative

Marco Rubio that's intended to rebuild American industry. And later in the show, we'll be talking with Aaron's friend and longtime collaborator, David Siegel, who co-founded the bipartisan organization Demand Progress with Aaron. And we'll also be joined, as you mentioned, by Jason Cherkus, the author of this groundbreaking article called The Best Way to Save People from Suicide. So, meanwhile, in California, in a bizarre kind of dystopian split screen, the Golden Globes returned from their kind of forced cultural exile. Ryan wrote a little script, and I like that you said forced cultural exile. It was, right? Yeah, that's perfect.

That's exactly what happened. They were exiled, and then they just kind of came back. Nothing happened? Hey, is everything okay? Are we allowed back in, guys? How is everything since we've been gone? And meanwhile, the state is just,

like 95% of it or something is under flood warnings. There was sunshine at the very moment that the Golden Globes were being held. A sign from God. So it's a sign from God. So there's approval passed over the Golden Globes. There's more torrential rains coming later in this week after some 17 people died over the last several weeks because of this. They're estimating already more than a billion dollars of damage. We can roll some of this. The footage coming out of California, like tons of our viewers are in California, so they don't necessarily need the footage. They can just look out their windows if they haven't evacuated. But it's receding in some places, but the torrential rains are coming back over the next couple of days.

It's also then expected to move north. Just utterly dystopian scenes while the Golden Globes are playing out. Did you watch any of the Golden Globes? No, I didn't. I'm probably going to have to go back and re-watch them, but they were running spots promoting the Golden Globes? No, I didn't. I'm probably going to have to go back and rewatch them, but they were running spots promoting the Golden Globes with Tracy Morgan, who I always refer to as Tracy Jordan because 30 Rock is so indelibly imprinted in my mind, saying, I am the face of post-racial America. Sorry, Cate Blanchett, which is really funny because the Golden Globes, one of the reasons for their forced cultural exile was that they had a controversy, basically a racial controversy that sidelined them for a year. And I see it as kind of a—

What did they do? They had no black journalists on the HFPA. That's kind of bad. Pretty bad. Bad by your own standards and sort of unthinkable in general. So anyway, the forced cultural exile, perhaps for good reason, but it's sort of like what everyone was talking about last year, the vibe shift, right? That now you're promoting the Golden Globes with this irreverent non-PC.

Golden Globes were always the boozy Hollywood's night of irreverent self-awareness. So I saw it as sort of a test of the vibe shift, right? Is it really happening? Hollywood had an interesting year. I could go on and on about that, but maybe I can do a monologue on it next week. You're right, though. It reminded me of the COVID-era Oscars

where they did it in Union Station in LA. They did it in the train station. And you had all these celebrities. They were separated and masked and all of that. But the party went on. And it's sort of like that with the split-screen Golden Globes and flooding across California, where you said we're already at a death toll nearing $20 billion of damage. Incredible. I didn't watch, shockingly, last night, but I saw somebody post that they were practically playing kind of funeral music at the beginning of it, rather than their normal

celebratory, like, we're about to party thing, because they were trying to read the room. They're like, are we allowed back in? Because if we're allowed back in, we're going to make sure that we're very somber, and we're very measured. We're not having much fun, because everybody else is suffering. But I think this is a glimpse into our kind of dystopian future where you're going to be seeing these images of our global elites just having the time of their lives within half a mile of complete carnage. And California is sort of the most interesting place in the world to watch for that because the wealth disparities in California are incredible. And at the same time, those go along with the, I mean, California is a crazy amount of natural disasters. But remember the wildfires year where Kim Kardashian and Kanye West hired private firefighters, right? They build in these areas that are very vulnerable to wildfires, but they can then afford the private firefighters to protect the property.

And same thing, if you're really wealthy and building on some of these grounds that are vulnerable, I mean, it's a different story for you than everyone else. So the confluence of wealth and vulnerability to natural disasters in California makes it one of the most incredible places to watch all of this play out. Our producer Griffin was pointing out that this is a rare case of kind of reverse environmental justice, that the super wealthy who have built all their houses on cliffs and on these hills are the ones that are actually, in many ways, the most vulnerable at this point. Have you been to Montecito, California? I have not. Oh my gosh, one of the most beautiful places in the world, let alone the United States, and one of the wealthiest places in the United States that just got battered. Ellen DeGeneres was out there with her selfie.

Ellen DeGeneres was saying this is a message from Mother Nature or something like that. But again, it gets this juxtaposition of extreme wealth and celebrity. And then you have real questions of privilege that I think are reasonably brought up. It is really interesting. This is from NPR, the World Meteorological Organization. They've calculated that while the number of disasters increased five times over the last 50 years, the number of fatalities has fallen by two-thirds, which makes sense for a lot of reasons. We have sea walls, more effective sea walls. We have more effective predictive meteorological technology. But at the same time, none of that is quite enough. Right. And so CNN, if we could throw this tear sheet up, CNN had an actually interesting

interview with a couple of scientists who are, they didn't quite make the parallel to the out-of-control fires that they have in California, but it kind of comes through in the article. But what they're basically saying is that because of the way that California has been built, and a lot of people would say overbuilt, that it was built for a particular climate. The climate has now changed. And so if you add on to that the way that on the fire side, it's constant fire suppression, which then interrupts the kind of cycle that forests need to go through. When it comes to flooding, because they have built up and channeled around so many of the natural water sources, that they don't have a natural way of flooding. And so when you get torrential rains like this, then you get explosive flooding.

We have one scientist, Peter Gleick, he says, we have to let our rivers flow differently and let the rivers flood a little more and recharge our groundwater in wet seasons. Instead of thinking we can control all floods, we have to learn to live with them. We need new thinking. We need to operate that infrastructure differently. We need to change more of these flood flows, store it underground in these aquifers, and then use those groundwater resources when we need them in dry years. And so this is something that California is going to have to do. Like, it's going to require Democrats who are a one-party state, practically, in California to actually do some governing and say, look, these are the problems that we have. We need to collectively govern as a people in order to respond to them rather than just lamenting the natural disasters and then just rebuilding precisely as you were built before the disaster.

Well, and California is a one-party state that's basically, the politics are co-opted by corporate interests. And it's not just California Democrats, although California Democrats are a huge part of it. What PG&E has been able to get away with in that state is incredible. And so it's not just a matter of saying we have to do X, Y, and Z. corporate interests that would prefer to control this in their own profitable way or their own controllable or the least harmful to profit margin way. And that's an incredible task for a state like California that I think is so deep in the one party corporate control hole. It's a really, really, really hard hole to start digging out of. And it reminds me actually of what we were talking about when the Miami condo complex collapsed,

which is in California, you see similar things, these beautiful locations where we've been able to develop technology really quickly that lets us build up. That's not always going to be there because that's just not how,

it's not how the world works and it's not how the world has ever worked that things just stay the same and you can be safe in one place for millennia. It's just not how it works. Flights across the United States were grounded at around, what, 720, 730 this morning due to a FAA outage of their NOTAM system, which is used to alert pilots about various hazards. Notice to air missions. Notice to air missions. The FAA saying

that they're going to be grounded at least until nine o'clock. United Airlines saying that they're delaying everything until 10 a.m. We don't know that if at 9 a.m. that means they will have everything cleared up. The White House press secretary has said that they don't have any evidence yet that this was a hack, that this was a cyber attack. Southwest also saying that it's delaying flights till, or that they're monitoring this closely. Southwest probably kind of breathing a sigh of relief that now they can blame the government for this rather than their own incompetence, because they've been under the gun over the last few weeks. This is producing, you know producing bedlam at airports around the country.

All domestic flights. I mean, all of them. That's what they did after 9-11. Yes. All of them. And when you have such a finely calibrated system that is so dependent, it's an ecosystem, basically. It is so dependent on getting things with a little wiggle room, of course, like point A to point B, then B to C. And if you break one of those links, let alone all of those links,

it's not going to go well for days. There's no digging out of this. It may seem like 90 minutes, no big deal, if in fact they get this back up by 9 a.m. But of course, the rest of us know that's just not how the flight system works. Once flights are delayed and canceled, it throws things off literally for days. Yeah. I wonder how long of a complete outage they could have, maybe a half an hour maybe, where they can kind of work the system through and get back on track by the end of the day. We're looking at a minimum hour and a half. If other airlines follow United, we're talking two and a half hours. But like you said,

it's an entire ecosystem. And so just moving it all this way is not so simple. Because now the flights and the crews that were supposed to head from Baltimore to Toledo are not arriving in Toledo. The ones that are supposed to leave Toledo for Atlanta. People miss their connections. People are certainly going to miss their connections. The connections won't actually be there. So this could result in days and days of carnage. Although, finally, here's an opportunity for Pete Buttigieg to do something.

I was going to say, this is another massive black eye for Pete Buttigieg. I believe this is the first time since 9-11 that the FAA has grounded all domestic flights. Obviously, it's a safety and security issue when you're talking about this particular system. But the question then becomes, and this is very early, this is literally a breaking story as we're talking right here. So we don't know what's behind this, if anything, we don't know if it was a glitch, we don't know if it was nefarious in some way or another, but we do know it's obviously another failure of American infrastructure on a massive scale. And once again, with air travel, an industry that has incredible problems that got bailouts to the tune of millions and millions of dollars over the course of COVID and has obviously struggled for market reasons, but also struggled

for ridiculous corporate reasons too. It's its own corporate greed and structure. And Pete Buttigieg has a real test in front of him. And I think he's repeatedly failed that test over the course of his tenure so far. Yeah. He's like, well, he wants to be president. He's going to land in as transportation secretary. Massive supply chain crisis that he was not out in front of whatsoever, along with the airline crisis. And then the failed railway fight with the unions where they ended up forcing a contract onto the railroad workers. And then Southwest.

And there was, as Matt Stoller has explained passionately and many times, there were things that could have been done from our transportation department, which has purview over all of this that were not done for reasons that seem to be their relationship with corporate America. And there's also a structural and fundamental kind of federal governing problem here that we've talked about before on the show in relation to the way that the federal government is still using Microsoft 97 in so many of its systems. And it comes down to kind of the way that the leadership is structured in our governing system. So if you are hired as a – if you're brought in as an appointed confirmable government official, you're probably going to do a year or two, maybe three years. Like it's unusual that people are doing like an entire like eight-year, two-term stretch as a director of a particular agency. Therefore, you don't have any incentive to look into the guts of the computer system or

any of the other broader infrastructure that your workers are relying on and saying, is that a floppy disk that you're saving this to? Because you're like, I'm only going to be here for 18 months. And I'm being told to Because you're like, I'm only going to be here for 18 months. And I'm being told to cut spending here. And I'm being told to save over here. So if I come and say, look, this system is just completely broken. Walk around a federal office and look at the size of the hard drives. What we need to do is we need to replace all this

with actual contemporary software and computing equipment, the people above you are going to be like, who's going to pay for that? You want me to go? Do you know what Congress is dealing with right now? Because it's always some manufactured crisis that Congress is dealing with. And so the FAAs, what's it called? The NOMAD, this agency that we've never even heard of unless we're pilots or in the actual system. They want $250 million for new software.

We're not doing that. Right. Are you crazy? Right. And so they're like, all right, well, we'll just keep rebooting this one and hope it keeps working. So that's why it may actually not be a cyber attack. It just might be a system that was developed in like 2004. And it's just...

Windows 98. Yes, Windows 98. They're running on XP. Yeah, and it no longer operates probably with airplanes built after 2015. There's just... At some point, you have to invest in your governing kind of fundamentals or it's not going to last. Yeah. And this is what we can talk about this more in the IRS block, but it's a frustrating thing that when you throw more money at government problems, you don't

always get better solutions. That doesn't mean that these things don't need more money. It just means that you can throw as much money at them as you want, and it's not going to necessarily yield the results. And just anecdotally, over Christmas, I was thinking last year, I had to mail a bunch of stuff home from Christmas when I went home to Wisconsin, and the package got lost. So just a lot of money worth of stuff got lost by USPS. I didn't use FedEx or UPS, which I should have, but I went to the Postal Service, paid money, sent it. It got lost. They were looking for it over the course of the year. Then this year, Southwest outages, right?

Like it was just infrastructure failure, infrastructure failure, bookending two Christmases. And that's why I think things like this are really worth our time, more than some other stories that people like to talk about in media, because the basic infrastructure, we are not functioning as a country in some very basic ways right now. And this seems to be another good example of that. And if you're watching this program on your phone, sitting in a terminal, wondering whether or when your plane is going to take off, we feel for you deeply, but we appreciate you sitting out there watching. You can head over to the airport bar.

You're allowed to get a beer. The rule is there is no time in an airport. 6 a.m., but if you're in an airport, you can still order a beer. It is 5 o'clock perpetually at any airport. Right, and you're traveling, so therefore time is different. Yes. So head yourself over to the bar because you might be there a while. That's right.

Unless you're in recovery, don't do that. Yeah, good advice. As always, good advice, personal advice from Ryan. That's right. Ryan, so you have a really interesting monologue on tap for today. Yep, stick around for that. Like I said at the top, we're dedicating today's show to the memory of Aaron Swartz, who died 10 years ago today at the age of 26, leaving so much of his work for us to finish

without his critical help. It's genuinely hard to overstate the role that he played in the development of the internet and its culture of openness, starting as a boy and through to his death by suicide in 2013. We'll do several segments today on his life and legacy with more to come in the following weeks because I think it's worth reflecting on his contributions at a time when the internet would in some ways be barely recognizable to him and in other ways would be just what he feared it might become. Now here he is speaking in a documentary that came out in 2007 before Twitter or Facebook were really much of a thing. In the old system of broadcasting, you're fundamentally limited by the amount of space

in the airwaves. You know, you could only send out 10 channels over the airwaves of television, right? Or even with cable, you had 500 channels. On the internet, everybody can have a channel. Everyone can get a blog or a MySpace page. Everyone has a way of expressing themselves. And so what you see now is not a question of who gets access to the airwaves. It's a question of who gets control over the ways you find people.

You know, you start seeing power centralizing in sites like Google, these sort of gatekeepers that tell you where on the internet you want to go, the people who provide you your sources of news and information. So it's not, you know, only certain people have a license to speak. Now everyone has a license to speak. It's a question of who gets heard. And for those of you who are unfamiliar with him, you're probably familiar with some of what he produced or produced in collaboration with other people. He helped get Reddit going, for instance, and was given the title of co-founder, though it's a more complicated story than that. He was also instrumental in developing what's now called SecureDrop, which has allowed countless whistleblowers to safely send documents

to the media. He was also dedicated to the free flow of information. In 2008, he downloaded more than 400,000 documents from the Westlaw database to comprehensively analyze them and was able to show that payments from corporations to law school professors were resulting in law review articles that would then be used by those corporations later in lawsuits, significantly benefiting them in court. He published his findings in a seminal Stanford Law Review article. That same year, he downloaded some 20 million documents from the legal database Pacer. The FBI tried to find a crime in that, but they couldn't.

As he learned more about power, he became increasingly involved in electoral and legislative politics, taking up the issue of corruption in Washington, fighting against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and trying to think deeply about how to respond to the climate crisis. He played a leading role in organizing the opposition to SOPA, which was an internet freedom bill, which was a titanic 2011 battle over the future of what the internet would look like, in which cable companies and internet providers were trying to team up with the government to effectively take control of the internet. Aaron's side of the battle called their goal net neutrality and they eventually won, but it's interesting to think now about how far we've evolved from there. Many of his allies at

the time no longer looked so fondly on the idea of a completely free and open internet. And into that gap, companies like Google, the ones he warned about, are cynically weaponizing fears of disinformation and hate speech to lock down their own control of the internet. In the fall of 2010, Aaron began downloading academic articles from the database of JSTOR. As a fellow at MIT, he had free access to the articles and there was really no legal limit to what he could download. Still, prosecutor Stephen Heyman and his boss, U.S. attorney Carmen Ortiz, threatened him with 35 years in prison. And when he rejected a plea deal, they slapped a bunch more bogus

charges on him. As part of their plea deal, they had wanted him to serve time and also not to touch a computer for 10 years. Prosecutors were warned that he was a suicide risk, and Heyman replied to Aaron's lawyers, fine, we'll lock him up. Aaron made a counter offer in January 2013 to the prosecutors, and it was rejected. Soon afterwards, he took his own life. Now, members of Congress, both Democratic and Republican, spoke at his memorial service, which was led by his friend and collaborator, David Siegel, who will join us later in the show. With everything that Aaron had accomplished at such a young age, Silicon Valley was really his oyster. He could easily have decided to mint himself several billion dollars. Instead,

he threw himself into making the internet and the world at large a better place. When today's billionaires decide that they want to get into politics, they start writing massive checks and just spreading them all over. Aaron decided to go be an unpaid intern in Congress. The congressman he interned for, Alan Grayson, was one of those who spoke at his memorial. I want to leave you with a little piece of his eulogy. If we let that lead us to the point where that is restrained, then going back all the

way to the time of Socrates, what we engage in is human sacrifice. We sacrifice their lives out of the misguided sense that we need to protect ourselves from them when in fact it's the opposite. Our lives have meaning. Our lives have greater meaning from the things that they create. So we're here today to remember Aaron and also to try to learn from the experience, to understand that prosecution should not be persecution. This morning I reached into the closet,

randomly took out this tie and wore it. And I have a sense that sometimes things are connected in ways that aren't exactly obvious. It happens that this tie is a painting of Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh, someone else whose life ended all too soon. And in Don McLean's song about Vincent van Gogh, someone else whose life ended all too soon. And in Don McLean's song about Vincent Van Gogh, it ends this way. They would not listen. They're not listening still. Perhaps they never will.

It's time to listen. And so Aaron was somebody who would have described himself on the left. And his political allies, his social circle, were generally on the left. The internet at the time, though, was this place where people came together kind of from different corners. You had a lot of Ron Paul types. You had a lot of people who just believed in the value of openness and the value of distributing power downward and allowing it democratically to then flow back upwards. When you think about the things that Aaron was fighting for then, how does it make you think about where the right was then and kind of

where the right is now and where the movement for a kind of free and open internet is? You know, I was in sort of a rabbit hole reading about Aaron last night and followed a link to his Twitter profile, which is still live. And actually, one of his last tweets was at you. He was needling you for a headline. Yeah, he was like, Ryan Grim, why wasn't this headline this? Oh, it was a Peter King story. And it was incredibly depressing because it was a glimpse into what not just Twitter, but the entire culture of the internet used to be. It was just completely different. It looks the same on Twitter.

It physically looks still like Twitter, but it was a completely different mentality that the sort of tastemakers of the internet brought to it. You know, the leaders of this project that was the internet at the time had a totally different mentality. You know, one of those people was Jack Dorsey. And I was reading the New Yorker retrospective that I'm sure a lot of people are familiar with that was published after he passed away. And it quotes Quinn Norton saying, if you look at 2011 to the present, there's an incredible emotional roller coaster about internet freedom and the Arab revolutions. The internet was going to change everything. And at the end of 2011, you had

Occupy. And then that just got destroyed. 2012 was the year globally, the heightening of censorship and the heightening of surveillance. And then Aaron killed himself. Aaron was so much the internet's boy. And that's so much exemplified this machine crushing our hopes. I think you made a really good point about net neutrality in your monologue. It just, it's completely, the mentality of it has shifted to this almost safetyism that the Internet can't be free because freedom is dangerous. And the danger was sort of the point because it wasn't just dangerous to people. It was dangerous to corporations and to power. And instead of really protecting people,

the safety is in protects corporations and it protects intelligence agencies and it protects their power. But it's amazing how he saw that coming. Right. In ways that were unfathomable, I think, to most people in 2011. 2007, one of the clips that you showed. Right. We didn't see it coming to the extent that it has so quickly. Right. And that was something that was impressive about him

is that he could see, he could take stock of where we were and he could very easily see where this was headed. And I don't want to freeze him in place. I do think, like everybody, he would have evolved his thinking as new inputs came in. But I do think he would have continued to struggle for that free and open internet. And we'll talk with David Siegel more about this later. But in that net neutrality fight, there was this awkward coalition, and Aaron has spoken about this, that Google and to a lesser degree some of the other now big Silicon Valley companies were fighting against the telecoms. But they were actually ready to give in. that he was in very early on where he's trying to stop SOPA, where they're like, look, yeah, we don't like this, but let's see if we can get a couple changes made to it so that we can live with it. Because they had such entrenched power that even if the fundamentals were locked in,

they're good. That's why sometimes Facebook's like, sure, get rid of Section 230. Oh, of course, yeah. Because we're locked in. Yeah. They would prefer that you don't, but if you do, they're going to be fine. Well, and they might like it because it hurts the little guys and the competitors who aren't equipped to. And so Aaron saw that close up, and he saw, okay, these are somewhat allies in this limited fight. But they're not allies.

They wouldn't spend any money. Like, it wasn't like Google was opposed to SOPA and was therefore going to hire a bunch of lobbyists and instruct those lobbyists to cut checks to politicians and really fight this with everything they had. They would put out a statement. And so it was actually the rest of the internet, the small people that ran blackouts, that basically organized and let the public know, like, this is what's going to happen if you let the cable companies and the telecoms basically control the Internet. So while he was willing pragmatically to kind of work with them on that issue, he very much understood in real time, these are not allies.

These are not allies long term. I just found the post you're talking about. It's from about three weeks before you died. Can't believe Ryan Grimm didn't headline this quote, Peter King introduces Bill outlawing guns near Peter King. It's actually a good editorial judgment. Excellent editorial. One of my big regrets in life is that I never got a chance to work with him in the same organization. I would have loved to kind of – I was at Huffington Post at the time. And if I could have talked him into coming to work for us. You think he would have done it?

I think maybe. I think it's possible. I think he was open to a bunch of different things. We saw very eye- eye on everything. And I think he loved experimenting. And one of the things that I've taken from him is he would say always, just test everything. He would say A, B, test everything. So if you'd ask them, like, well, what do you think we should do about this particular situation? Say, well, we'll test it. Yeah. Like, don't assume that you intrinsically just know the answer. Like, try something and figure out a way to measure it and then go with the one that works. And then now if you have two other options that work, go with those two. And just constantly, and as I think about that, I think it just means be humble. Constantly question your own judgment and constantly test against reality, how your perceptions are faring. I heard that described one time, and this phrase has stuck with me,

as epistemological humility. And I feel like there was a lot of that. And this was by Nick Gillespie, I think, of Reason. So libertarian guy. And I feel like the culture of the internet, libertarian isn't the right word because it's reductive. But it had that sort of devil may care, everything is possible, and we're going to show you. We're going to show you what the best, we're going to find the best way to do this thing, which is life on earth, because we have all of these new tools at our disposal and we're gonna do it and internet pioneers had that spirit in a way that it's just the people who run our internet now don't.

Just completely randomly kind of segueing into this next segment, the last two posts of Aaron Swartz of his life were both about – and for many years I would think – look back at his Twitter account and think this is – I would regret that these were the last two. But there's something also profound about the fact that we're back now, 10 years later. His last two posts were about the idea of minting the coin. Mint the coin. And we are back. And because the Freedom Caucus, in exchange for its support of Kevin McCarthy, or those Freedom Caucus holdouts, were able to extract a concession from him. Although we can talk about whether or not it was actually a concession or whether this is the kind of thing that Republicans were going to do anyway. But it's to use the debt ceiling as leverage, as a hostage against the Biden administration, against the Senate to say, in order for us to not default on our debt, we are going to demand these following concessions around spending. And basically, they want to take all spending back to at most 2022 levels, including defense spending, which is going to cause some heartburn within the

Republican hawk community. The response when Republicans did this 10 years ago from the left was to say, use this constitutional but obscure and kind of weird sounding move, which is called minting the coin. The Constitution allows the U.S. mint to produce coinage of any value. It doesn't say what the value is. So the U.S. mint could take a platinum coin, put Trump's face on it, which they really should, and deem it to be worth $1 trillion, $30 trillion, $60 trillion. It doesn't matter. That's pointless for the exercise. And then that gets deposited.

The New York Federal Reserve then credits the Treasury with an extra $30 trillion. That doesn't enter that $30 trillion into circulation and spark runaway inflation. But what it does is it gives the Treasury the ability to then pay the debts that have been appropriated by Congress and have been authorized by Congress. So when somebody's got a T-bond and they turn it in, then they can cash the T-bond in. That's all it means. It allows the system to continue to function. And so I don't know if we have those, have his posts here. But so here's the U.S. Mint, one of the U.S. Mint guys like, yes, let's do it. And then his other one was linking to a White House petition, which we can put the second one up that which ended up collecting hundreds of thousands of signatures. If you click that now, it just goes

to a dead link because Trump got rid of all of Obama's White House petitions. Right. But I'm sure you're going to see this again. People saying, don't even negotiate with the Freedom Caucus. Just mint the coin and be done with it. So what do you think? I think the mint the coin folks have a point. And that's not good. I think it's actually like the real conversation here is about what's

happened to our monetary system post gold standard, what's happened to the world's monetary system in the last hundred years plus. It's happened very quickly, but I think they completely have a point. I mean, it's actually very hard without getting into the wonky sort of weeds of monetary policy on a very basic level to say that they don't have a point because they do. And they really do have a point. And so it's sort of like people are at an impasse. I'm curious what the Venn diagram is between MMT and mint the coin on the left. It's probably pretty. Yeah. It's just a circle. Right. Because if you're a modern monetary theory person, then you think what matters is

the money supply, inflation, tax rates, resources, basically. If there is too much money chasing too few resources, then you need either to invest in a way that produces more for the economy, it's more real stuff, or you need to tax money out of the economy. Nowhere in that is the debt, the deficit, the debt ceiling a factor. Right. That's not an issue. And if it winds up in the Supreme Court, that also gets interesting because then you're asking John Roberts and his crew to produce a global financial crisis.

Like to issue a ruling that knocks 10,000 points out the stock market and makes ATMs not work if we're going to take the worst-case scenarios on that. And that is, to me, you tell me, you know the conservative court better. To me, that's not what Amy Coney Barrett signed up for. That's not what John Roberts signed up for. That's not what Neil Gorsuch. None of them signed up for, not with Neil Gorsuch. None of them signed up for that. Like they have, they have an agenda that they want to accomplish as a majority on the Supreme Court. And I think

that destroying the global economy could actually get in the way of that agenda. You know, this is the thing though, that like it has to, because the way the Freedom Caucus sees this and the way Republicans see this is that their one point of leverage, when you have the sprawling administrative state that overwhelmingly leans Democratic, you can debate whether that means it leans left or not, but it overwhelmingly leans Democratic, mostly based here in Washington, D.C., in the wealthy, Democratic-leaning suburbs. And so their one point of leverage, they feel like in a government like that, is the purse strings. And if you control the House, even barely, you control the purse strings. And that means the only thing you can do for a Republican base

that feels like the government, not even just Republicans, independents, those sort of blue-collar Trump voters who voted for Obama on the basis of hope and change and then voted for Trump on the basis of making America great again, which is also kind of the same hope and change type populist messaging. Those folks want to see people in Washington get like a dose of populism. That's what they want to see. And so whatever form that takes, whether it's real or not, I think Crystal makes some good points about how it's being feigned and exploited and used. This is how Republicans say, this is the only thing we can do right now. Our hands are tied. There's nothing we can do at the EPA. There's nothing we can do at OSHA. There's nothing

we can do at X, Y, and Z. This is one thing that we can do. And so they're saying, this is our lever. This is the button that can be pushed. And it's not going to go well for them if it's cutting Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and all that. Right. On that point, it feels like they're already bungling the politics of it. Yeah. Trump showed them that the move on this issue is to say that you're not going to cut

Social Security, in particular Medicare. I think there's still room, even in a Trump coalition, to go after Medicaid. But you don't want to say that you're the party that's going after Social Security and Medicare. No. I thought Trump was pretty clear about that. No, they're absolutely bungling the politics of it. And Paul Ryan worked on this for forever. He had all of these really wonky plans to deal with entitlements, because it's absolutely true

that if you're worried about the debt and the deficit, you have to be worried about entitlements. It's the biggest chunk of government spending, basically. People think our defense budget is extremely high. It is, but our spending on entitlements is, like, way higher than that. And so, yeah, there's an argument that it's a very real substantive issue, that some of the inflation that we're suffering from now is because we run such a high debt. That's an argument people make. And so if you believe that you have to deal with it, then hey, but oh my gosh, running straight into cutting

Social Security. Like this is what Blake Masters had a real problem with because Rick Scott put it in his plan and then a bunch of Republican candidates had to answer for it in states with high populations of people who rely on Social Security, Arizona, for instance, being one of those. And so, yeah, if you're going to run headfirst into this, you need to be, speaking of A-B testing, like you really should have tested something here. Seems like it was tested. Yeah. And so there was a House Republican on Fox the other day, was it Jeff Duncan? I forget who it was, saying like, military, yeah, sure, but we got to focus on entitlements. When that sort of thing happens, do people on the right in your world freak out? Like, hey, get back on message here. Why are you validating the worst fears of the public that Republicans actually, as soon as they get into power, they're going to cut

Social Security and Medicare? Well, that's what's so interesting, because during the Tea Party era, it was the opposite. You had this chunk of the Republican base that was like, hell yeah, entitlement cuts, the country is on the wrong track, et cetera, et cetera. And there's the freeloading component and all of that. And it was popular messaging. Now, even the populist right is like, whoa, can't be doing that because I think there's a new awareness on the level of suffering that a lot of the folks who maybe want to go right into entitlements, Social Security, Medicaid, whatever, they probably don't have such a clear vantage point. They probably don't have as much contact with the level of suffering that exists among the American population, two things can be true. Dealing with entitlements might be important, but dealing with entitlements right now is not acceptable. I mean, there's just no acceptable humane way on the table or policy on the table from Republicans

right now to deal with that. Yeah, I think Trump at one of his rallies could look out at his audience and say, these are not the people that are going to necessarily benefit if I cut Social Security and Medicare, looking at that crowd. Yeah. When Paul Ryan is in a room, he's looking at it around a table or around a dinner table. Every single one of those people would benefit from that. So, yeah, I think you have different, just different audiences that people understand. Well, and you can't make the Paul Ryan argument that folks from all different socioeconomic backgrounds are going to benefit from entitlement cuts because that's an argument that he would make. That is so tonally off base. It's just impossible to make that break.

You will love getting a lower social security check. Just a little weight. And again, that's the fault of the Republican Party for not coming up with policies that actually really are able to deal with things like inflation, to deal with things like deficit, whatever, and also be humane. There's just nothing on the table. And that's why I think it's completely reckless and irresponsible to run headfirst into these conversations without having a way to deal with it that is not going to put vulnerable people at risk, because that's exactly what it would do. And that's why things like Mint the Coin, which are populist and fun in nature, are going to, as time moves on, get more and more traction. All right. So what else are you looking at today? What's your point? All right. Well, speaking of the internet, later this month, a January 6th defendant named David Ryan will be on trial here in Washington, D.C. His case is not a sympathetic one, but that's really the point.

Power grabs succeed by picking low-hanging fruit, and this particular power grab is happening very fast. noting how a filing, quote, shows that Google initially identified 5,723 devices as being in or near the U.S. Capitol during the January 6th riot. After three years, roughly 950 people have been arrested on J6-related charges, while the FBI says it's still looking for some 350 individuals. Again, that's compared to a roughly 5,700 device dragnet. The Justice Department has said somewhere between 2,000 and 2,500 people entered the Capitol that day. ABC News claims 10,000 people were on Capitol grounds during this crucial seven-hour period. Back in 2021, Wired found, quote, 45 federal criminal cases that cited Google geolocation data to place suspects inside the U. served on Google, a mobile device associated with phone number, that's Ryan's number, subscribed to by Ryan was present at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. In this case,

Google location data shows that a device associated with that number was within or around the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, between the time of 2.24 p.m. and 4.47 p.m. That's also, that's in addition actually to information that was gleaned from a search warrant served on Verizon. An acquaintance of Ryan's flagged him to law enforcement after his wife, Ryan's wife, posted on Facebook that he entered the Capitol. Court documents say Capitol police found two knives and pepper spray on Ryan after putting plastic cuffs on him, but he was told to leave and then someone later cut the cuffs off. Again, not a sympathetic case. Ryan's lawyer filed a motion to suppress evidence

from the warrant, writing, quote, the GioFriends warrant was an unconstitutional search that intruded upon Mr. Ryan's reasonable expectation of privacy in his Google data. This was a general warrant, fatally overbroad and devoid of particularity, and therefore impermissible under the Fourth Amendment. As a result, this court should suppress the results of the geofence warrant, including all of the fruits thereof. So things obtained on the basis of the geofence warrant. The government's response to that motion in defense of the warrant is instructive because it is so wrong. By the way, that motion to suppress was written by a public defender, as Michael Tracy has pointed out, and it's a pretty impressive overview of

Fourth Amendment violations. Wired's report quoted University of Utah law professor Matthew Toxin, who explained when it comes to geofence warrants, quotes, quote, some courts have said they are valid. Some have said they're overbroad and sweep up too many innocent people. We are still in the very early stages of this. In this case, though, Toxin said, unlike a geofence warrant for a bank robbery, the people in this location are all likely to be engaged in at least a low-level criminal trespass. And in some cases worse, there's a stronger than usual probable cause argument in favor of the government here. Well, Wired then added a comment from American University professor Andrew Ferguson, who agreed with that assessment, but said, that worries me because the January 6th cases are going to be used to build a doctrine

that will essentially enable police to find almost anyone with a cell phone or a smart device in ways that we as a society haven't quite grasped yet. That is going to undermine the work of journalists, it's going to undermine political dissenters, and it's going to harm women who are trying to get abortion services. So Toxin then expects appeals, he says, predicting Ryan's situation, quote, is going to be very high level, high profile case, likely to generate a major precedent out of the appeals court, if not the Supreme Court. Journalists also aren't super sympathetic these days, but say, like me, you were reporting on January 6th from the Capitol grounds trying to document the truth of what happened while it was happening. The geofence warrant may well have swept my information up along with information of other journalists. Perhaps that seems harmless. What could be done? Of course, when it comes to our powerful federal

government, the mind actually reels with possibilities, but that's not even the point. The right to privacy is a fundamental pillar of every person's relationship with their government, and the boundaries of that right are being erased and blurred under our noses in real time. It's in the government's interest to do all of that erasing by setting precedent on cases related to unsympathetic, open and shut cases like Ryan's. But that's exactly when the rest of us should be on high alert. So back in November, Elon Musk announced that full self-driving would be available for Tesla owners throughout North America. A few hours after that, this happened. And if we can roll the footage that my colleague Ken Klippenstein obtained, this is through an open records request, he obtained this video.

You can see the Tesla on the upper part of this video if you're listening. A Tesla just stalled on the road, and now all of these other cars are starting to pile up behind it. Which, no excuse for rear-ending. No, yes, that's a good point. Even if there's a self-driving car that stops suddenly in front of you, that's why you've got to be at least two seconds behind. I was just saying this before we started, but for the life of me, I cannot understand why Tesla went with the name full self-driving mode. I understand the benefit of having something that you can call full self-driving mode, but if it is not full self-driving mode, from a legal standpoint,

from a public relations standpoint, it seems like it was so easily going to backfire. And I understand, there are always technological change, especially on the level that could make a huge environmental impact, for instance, like Tesla potentially, although there are a million problems with that too, when you start talking about rare earth minerals and everything. Obviously, it's always difficult to make these major leaps. And there are always tragedies. I mean, you just never do it without the tragedies. You work to minimize them. So we can imagine that Tesla is involved in all of those efforts to minimize the cost of this leap. But calling something full self-driving mode and then releasing it and within

hours having this happen, it's just incredible. And it's a business decision. And if we can put up this tear sheet from The Intercept or from Ken Klippenstein's story, he quotes Musk, who had said last year, he said of full self-driving, he said it's an essential feature

for Tesla to develop. And he said, quote, it's really the difference between Tesla being worth a lot of money or worth basically zero. Right. And you got to love Elon Musk for just being blunt and lot of money or worth basically zero. Right. And you've got to love Elon Musk for just being blunt and laying it out in black and white. But what he's saying very clearly is that once we're competing with all these other electric car companies,

once everybody has access to the same minerals, our first mover advantage might dissolve unless they've built up some type of infrastructure around charging stations or something else. But as a car company, it's going to be difficult for them to compete with the legacy automakers once they're up and running. His differentiator was always going to be, quote, full self-driving. Right. As he said right there. As you said, what's it, Waymo? What's the Waymo?

They don't use that term. Nobody else is using that term anymore because they want to say basically driver assist. Now, it is full self-driving sometimes when it takes over. There was this harrowing footage from India, if we can roll this VO, where this guy pulls, you see him pull over and then boom. Oh, this is in China. Boom, all of a sudden just takes off. Just flying down the road. I think at least two people died as a result of this.

And you can see him just kind of veering in and out. You'd much rather have it stop on a bridge and cause an eight-car pileup that nobody died in than you would have it just accelerate unexpectedly. So in some ways, that was full self-driving. It wasn't safe driving. Yeah. And listen, the old outdated car technology that Tesla is trying to replace has all kinds of functioning issues as well. You can point to basically any technology that has dramatically changed human life for the better. And I do not deny that this is remarkable technology.

I think it's important to acknowledge that it is remarkable technology. And Elon Musk is working on some important and remarkable technology. There's always going to be problems. That doesn't mean, though, that you can call things full self-driving mode and get away with having problems like this and get away with, there have been stories of people who, it was a TikToker who put himself in the backseat of a Tesla and let it drive itself. I believe, yeah, I believe it was a Tesla. And people who have said, you know, I was probably driving drunk, but my Tesla took me home and all of that stuff. There's so, it's just happening so quickly.

And I think we take for granted the public safety that we've, the public safety infrastructure that we've developed over the last hundred years. This is like a shock to that system. The point that the Musk defenders on this do have is that people are not good drivers either. That's a really strong counterpoint. Especially drunk people, like you just talked about. So anyway, I think everybody should go back to manual

and all the cars should be stick shift. So my opinion in here isn't even worth anything. So the House Republicans, with their first bill, let's roll. Lauren Boebert, tell you what she's up to here. Hey, everyone. We are back in session here in Washington, D.C., and I'm about to cast my vote for our very first bill this Congress. It's two pages, not thousands. It has one subject and zero earmarks. Oh, and it'll

help stop the harassment of the American citizens by prohibiting those 87,000 IRS agents from ever even being hired. That's conservative governance at its finest. More freedom, less government, and we are just getting started. Okay, that's like bad high school theater i get it and like it would be much easier to make fun of that and spend the whole time talking about the the circus in congress right now than uh acknowledge i thought that was fine as a performance it's typical congress performance yes um but all that is to say i think she's talking about something very serious. And one of the reasons we wanted to talk about this is because there's a debate raging both the left and right right now about IRS, about IRS funding.

Because there's this intense, I think, point that the IRS needs more money because you cannot audit high income earners if you don't have a robust and powerful IRS. Meanwhile, let's say this is last year, and this kind of confirms that point. The odds a millionaire was audited by an IRS revenue agent was just 1.1%, whereas the taxpayer class with unbelievably high audit rates, five and a half times virtually everyone else, were low income wage earners taking the earned income tax credit. That would be your argument for why, for instance, the IRS needs more funding, I imagine. Right. It's fascinating to me to think about so many people who are persuaded that this is going to be working against them as middle class or working class people. So if you look at the current stats and you see that the working poor are the ones who are overwhelmingly and disproportionately getting audited, and then you take from that, we should defend the status quo, like that's the system that we're going to stand up for, then you're just not, to me, you're just not thinking it through. Because if you, now,

I understand what they're saying. They're thinking like, well, working class people disproportionately are getting audited. If you give them more money, they're going to continue to disproportionately audit working class people, and it's only going to be much worse. But that's just not the case. Like, A, if you just look at it from a cynical perspective, there's only so much blood you can squeeze from that stone. Like, the purpose of this for Democrats was to raise more revenue from the wealthy, because that's where the money is. Who was it? James, who said, you know, they asked him, why do you rob banks? He's like, well, that's where the money is. Who was it? James, who said, you know, they asked him, why do you rob banks? He's like, well, that's where the money is. And so if you ask Democrats, why are you taxing

the rich? Because that's where the money is. And so it actually just, it wouldn't make sense as a matter of kind of policy or politics for Democrats to have thrown a whole bunch of money at the IRS in order to get them to audit the working class more. That's just not where the money is. Well, it's interesting because I think there's evidence that suggests without higher audits on the working class or the middle class, I should say, you can't make up the amount of money that is projected to be made up with these increased budgets. If you throw more money at the IRS, as Democrats propose, for instance, you're not going to be able to raise the projection without also extracting more money from the middle class. Now, if people are not paying taxes that they owe,

sure. I mean, we absolutely should hold people to account for that money. I think the middle class is already overtaxed in this country. I think audits are disproportionately expensive for the middle class. And the Tax Foundation, which is right-leaning, they project most of the additional audits will be executed on those making between $75,000 and $200,000 annually. So depending on how many kids you have, the size of your household, that could be anywhere in the middle class to upper middle class range. But the Senate also rejected an amendment from Mike Crapo that would have limited audits and the enhanced enforcement to taxpayers and companies that are making more than $400,000 annually. Every Democratic senator voted against that amendment. And I think that's because you can't make up that projection. You

can't hit that projection if you limit it to high-income earners. Well, didn't they keep it at a lower level, keep it constant, say you can't do – now, 400 is pretty high. But I believe the legislation – I'll look into this afterwards – did say that below a certain threshold, you couldn't do – you can't do more. You can't – they have to report back, you know, they have to report back and there can't have been more audits as a result of this. But going back to our conversation earlier with Representative Khanna and automation, the real goal here for Democrats is getting the computer system up better. So because this is not something that you should actually need people with pencils going over paper. Like you should be able to have the IRS collect all of

the tax returns, analyze them, and say, oh, here's one, here's one, here's one, here's one, here's one, here's one. These guys are probably lying. And I think if you can actually get some investment in the technology, you won't need those 87,000 agents, which actually would then free them up to do what? Is this Jeff Duncan? Do we have D3 here? This is we have this shot from the house floor. We'll talk about that one. Actually, we'll talk about this first and then we'll call you in suspense on this amazing House floor speech. Everyone's waiting with bated breath. Yes. And so one of the

concessions that the holdouts won from Kevin McCarthy was an aspirational vote on the floor. Sounds familiar. This one, though, is not for Medicare for all. It is for abolishing the IRS, getting rid of the income tax, the death tax, the gift tax, and replacing it, I think, with a 23 percent consumption tax. How is this a – like how big a base is there for this among Republican voters? Is this something that – like why did they ask for this? Well, yeah. I mean I think we should say like with the IRS legislation that Boebert was talking about, this is dead on arrival in the Senate. This is not going anywhere.

When we were talking about the Crapo Amendment, that was on the— Won't pass the House either, probably, right? What do you think? I don't know. That's actually a very good question. But, like, the Crapo Amendment was on the infrastructure—or it was on the Inflation Reduction Act. And you're right that it was – there's an order from the Treasury Department to ensure that audit rates of people making less than $400,000 a year won't rise. And so the IRS is basically saying, trust us. Okay, trust us.

We won't do that. Trust us. So that is like the – But they didn't put it into law. Right. So that mechanism is there. That said, I don't know. I mean, I think this is an interesting question because one thing that I've heard more and more from Freedom Caucus types is that, and I think it's correct, that a smaller government it's the IRS targeting people. We've seen that happen. And a smaller government sort of, it takes the teeth out of tyranny. And so I think that that's

the sort of messaging that's being worked on right now. I do think there's an appetite for that. But Democrats have really powerful rebuttal, which is people need these various services and rely on it. And just sort of yanking the floor out from under people is cruel. And my counterargument, which would be hard to put into a 30-second commercial, though, would be that tyranny exists as a thing in all societies and that if you, let's say you get rid of a tyrannical federal government, like that means it's only going to be replaced by, the vacuum is going to be filled by corporate tyranny. And I've been making that argument for 20 years and it was often landing flat everywhere except on the right, except for the kind of the libertarian right. But even a lot of, there's, you know, a wing of the libertarian right that's, you know, very pro-corporate power,

because that's freedom, the freedom for that corporation to do whatever it wants. But now, I think with the way that big tech has taken such a kind of dominant role in our discourse, I think people on the right are starting to understand that, oh, there are tyrannies that are not just government tyranny. And government tyranny has within it checks and balances, the potential of democratic control. And so what I would say is fight that. Fight for the ability of a citizenry to control its destiny through its government rather than destroying the government, replacing it with corporate tyranny, which then you don't have any mechanism other than complaining on Twitter or trying to-

Well, maybe not even that. Or buying the company. You can try to buy the company. We'll see how that goes. Yeah, I think the problem right now is you have government tyranny and corporate tyranny working in concert, colluding against average Americans in a really dangerous way. And my argument would be that it doesn't take a big government to restrain the power of corporations. It takes some really basic laws. But when you have corporate capture of government and campaigns

because of our campaign financing system, then it does make it really hard, even if you have basic laws on the books that restrain market power, to do the right thing. So, yeah, we're in need of some serious changes. But that's part of the reason I wanted to do that debate was precisely because I think this is a very interesting case study in that exact question as the right sort of re-evaluates

its take on government power. And as the left re-evaluates, and we were just talking to Ro Khanna about the Twitter files, re-evaluates government power, what's the balance? So I think this raises good questions. If you can automate the audits, here are a couple of ideas from the House Republicans on the floor about what they could do with these 87,000 agents. Chairman McGovern, a ranked member of McGovern mentioned the IRS bill coming up. Let me just point out, we need to rescind that. 87,000 IRS agents. You know what that equates to? 200 new IRS agents in every congressional district in this country. That's 1,740 new IRS agents at every state for one purpose,

to go after small businesses, hardworking Americans, to try to raise money to pay for reckless spending. Reckless spending that's cost $31 trillion in debt in this nation. This is the right thing to do. I'll tell you what, we could repurpose those agents to the southern border. Or we could repurpose them and let them build the Keystone XL pipeline. You know what? There was about estimated 61,000 lost jobs with Keystone XL pipeline when Biden administration canceled that project. But yet we turn around and government hires 87,000 new IRS agents to go after your constituents and mine. And if the big concern of the Keystone

pipeline is that there are going to be oil spills as a result of shoddy construction, I'm not sure that having a bunch of IRS agents be the one building it. Well, the same thing with the southern border. I know we have to wrap, but like, you know what's not going to fix the problem at the southern border? More manpower there. It might help a little bit, but unless you fix asylum laws, which our government is utterly incapable of even thinking about addressing, there's nothing. And he might be joking, but at the very beginning of the Biden administration, they sent notes out to the entire federal government and said, we need people at these shelters to volunteer and volunteer your time. And so people at, say, the Bureau of Indian Affairs for a month would go down to a shelter down at the border

just to be a body to try to take care of this flood that was coming in. But you're right, we do have to wrap. Up next is going to be Congressman Ro Khanna. Stick around for that. We're joined now by Congressman Ro Khanna. He's going to be, and we can throw up this first element here, he's going to be talking to us about his fascinating, really forward-thinking bill that he's written with Senator Marco Rubio, which is interesting in its own right. The legislation itself is interesting, basically developing practically for the first time American

industrial policy. We want to get to that in a moment. We're also going to talk about Aaron Swartz and his life and legacy. And relatedly, I want to start by asking you about the tragic death yesterday of Blake Hounschel, who is a New York Times reporter who you had worked with a little bit. Tell us a little bit about how you got to know Blake. It was devastating and shocking. I mean, I had sat down with Blake actually when my book came out, and we spent an hour and a half, two hours talking about philosophy, talking about economics. He was someone so well-read, so thoughtful. And he had texted me in December saying let's get together in the new year just totally shocking my heart goes out to his family he had children and he was really one of the thinkers in journalism. Right yeah I think that I

think that's well said he did stand apart in that way. He did I mean he was at the New York Times but he had also a little bit of an independence. He had his own newsletter. He'd do longer form pieces. It wasn't always for him about the news of the day. It was about ideas. He did this wonderful piece on Jamie Raskin during the time where Jamie lost his son. And of course, a deep irony there with the struggles that Jamie's son had and it seems that Blake had. Yeah, right. His family said that he'd lost his battle with depression, lifelong battle with depression. Same with Raskin's son and other people.

And that brings us also to Aaron Swartz who also had depressive tendencies. And I think there was a flattening in the wake of his suicide back in 2013 when he was facing this relentless and unforgivable to me prosecution at the hands of the U.S. attorney and her deputy, Stephen Heyman, there. But it's a more complicated story than just that. But I wanted to ask you, you know, what Aaron means to you and to back into it and say, when did you arrive out in the Silicon Valley area? And, you know, how have you seen kind of the culture around their change from the kind of pioneering openness and hostility to greed that Aaron represented? Hostility to power. Hostility to power and hostility to greed that Aaron represented. Hostility to power. Hostility to power and hostility to greed.

I didn't even mention this at the top of the show, but he helped develop, when he was 13 and 14, RSS feed. Somebody like that can go out there and just print money in Silicon Valley. And he actively fought against that. Is there some of that still in Silicon Valley? Or when did you see it start to change? Well, first of all, I appreciate your writing on Aaron because his prosecution was totally unjustified. They went after him on a computer statue because he was basically making information public in the public domain. Whatever you think of the law, it certainly wasn't criminal. And that was one of the causes, I think, of his taking his life.

I went out there, I went out there probably because of Larry Lessig. And Larry Lessig is a great scholar on cyber law. Mentor of errands. A mentor of errands. He was teaching at Stanford. I had done some research for him. He said, well, the place to be is Silicon Valley. It's such an interesting place in thinking about the issues of the future.

And when I went out in 2001, it was still a place where you had a lot of iconoclastic people, people who didn't see themselves as the winners, actually. They were the folks who didn't make it in San Francisco at the banks and at the traditional firms. And they had kind of come down to Silicon Valley where there are all these immigrants and people's names you couldn't pronounce. And there's still an element of that. I mean, we think of Silicon Valley as just Apple, Google. There's still that counterculture entrepreneurial spirit, but it's been dominated now by some of these companies that are the winners, that are no longer the upstarts. And I think they have to have much more serious reflection about what it means to have power. They're no longer the challengers of power. They are the people in power. Well, the drip drip with the Twitter files,

one of the early Twitter file documents showed an exchange that you had with someone at Twitter. I think it was an executive at Twitter about the First Amendment, about free speech. And it seems that mentality, that attitude that you were trying to impress upon him, that's absolutely essential if you're running a speech platform, sort of lost on these corporate giants. Twitter has become a corporate giant, started by somebody like Jack Dorsey, who used to have more of that open source, like countercultural mentality. Where did that change? How did that change? How did we go from point A to point B, where you're the only one on the left standing up in that moment for the right position there? You know, I think it was an overcorrection to 2016. These platforms got beaten up in 2016, saying there was foreign interference. They allowed all this hate to proliferate. Their reaction to that was, we're going to have

content moderation. Some of the content moderation, in my view, is justified for these forums. In doing that, they didn't really think through what all the principles should be. And content moderation shouldn't mean taking down the New York Post. It shouldn't mean not sharing an article by a journalist. So, yeah, they have the right to do that. They're not the government. But it violates the sense of open, robust debate that's the hallmark of our country. And so, turning to your legislation with Marco Rubio, so first of all, and this could be a challenge for our audience, needs a better...

It does. It does. I mean, it's straightforward. It's called the National Development Strategy and Coordination Act, but that doesn't beat the Patriot Act or the other kind of... Just call it the Patriot Act. Just call it the Patriot Act. Yeah, just call it the Patriot Act. It's more patriotic. Patriot Act would be good. Repeal the Patriot Act. Replace it. You used to not need clever names, right?

I mean, FDR had the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and the War Production Board, which is partly a model. But FDR also was fighting World War II and the Great Depression. In today's day and age, you need a good name. But look, Sarah Rubio has been pretty forward thinking on this in his own party.

When you have some people in the Freedom Caucus basically not wanting to spend a dime, he's saying, no, we need to actually have the government working with business, working with educational institutions to have manufacturing production here. It was a colossal mistake to allow it all to go to China. And we talked about working with Caleb in his office. Caleb gets it. I mean, you know, I joke around that I want an order of magnitude probably 10x or 100x of what Senator Rubio wants to spend. But the point is we both see the need for the government to be involved in revitalizing production in this country. And can you take us through the guts of the bill, basically exactly what the mechanism is to invigorate this industrial policy via this piece of legislation? So the legislation basically says we have places in this country that have been gutted.

Jobs have left, factory towns have been totally shuttered, and we need massive economic development there. So we're going to create this Economic Development Council, like a National Security Council. It's going to look through research at what are the places in America that need economic revitalization? What is the industry we can bring there? Not just semiconductor chips. We're talking about steel, aluminum, textiles, masks. How do we do it so it's sustainable? And how can we have the financing for government purchasing, for low interest loans, for the investment, massive investment in the engineers or the trades that we'll need, and work with the private sector to rebuild these communities. It's almost frankly like we saw after communism in parts of Europe.

There were places that were decimated, and there was an effort at economic redevelopment. We've never tried it. We went to these places that lost factory towns. We've lost 70,000 factories in this country. Fred Anderson in Indiana came up to me with a binder of 40 factories that had shut down in his town. And what did we say to these folks? We said, here's your unemployment check. Here's your trade adjustment assistance.

Now go fend for yourself. Did we ever even try to say we're going to rebuild your communities? We're going to partner with you to have new economic development. This is the central failure of American policy over the last 40 years. Here's your unemployment check and here's your opioid prescription. Yeah. The county I grew up in, Kent County, Maryland, over on the eastern shore, the biggest town in that county has about 5,000 people, Chestertown. And the main employer there is a manufacturer called Dixon, Dixon Valve and Coupling. They employ something like 500 people in a town of 5,000. If that goes away, just complete wreckage. You get it.

Yeah. It's just completely wiped out. So what do you do about manufacturing facilities that still exist and are under a ton of pressure? it's still there is that this the family that owns it just has deep roots in the community and has resisted kind of profit pressures to first go to the south because that's the that's the first place you go the south of the united states and then you go somewhere else whether it's you know central or south america or china or india or elsewhere uh they've resisted that uh but at some point generations are going to pass down and somebody's going to take over that's going to look at the numbers and say, this doesn't make sense anymore. We love the Eastern Shore.

What do they make? Valves and couplings. Yeah. So pieces for the economy, for the industrial economy. Right. Yeah. Well, one, Ryan, I think it's important that you focus on products like that. Because we talk about, I was the author of semiconductor

The chips manufacturing, but you can't put a semiconductor factory in every town in this country You can't put a battery plant new battery plant in every town We've got to talk about people making the gaskets the textiles the valves. How do we keep that competitive? I'd say a few things if they're critical supplies for for the country Have the government assist in some of the country, have the government assist in some of the purchase agreements. Have the government assist in the financing. But the biggest advantage we have is new technology. It's allowing for digital technology and AI is actually making it easier to produce. It's making us more productive. And the government should be assisting in having

that investment, both in the workforce and in the technology. You know who does this is Germany. I mean, Germany has 20% manufacturing workforce and a lot of it's specialty manufacturing. So I think there are ways that we can keep a lot of these factories open. And not every factory. I don't want to mislead people, but factories that can use new technology, new processes, the government as a partner, we can do this. Tyler Cowen, oh, sorry, he had a really interesting post this week about how it may be unworkable, CHIPS legislation in

the United States, for example, because of the qualifications of the American workforce overall. Who do we have that's qualified enough to run a chips manufacturing place? For instance, does legislation like this need to be coupled with legislation that also brings more immigrants into the United States that have qualifications to work on these projects? Or do you think the American workforce as it is today is capable of plugging into an industrial policy like this? We need both. I mean, we need massive investment in engineering in this country, software engineering, the trades, electricians, plumbers. And we also need some immigration. I mean, a lot of the production expertise right now is sitting in Taiwan. And it would be very hard to

do without some of that immigration. But this is where I think the debate in this country is flawed, where we're putting blue-collar workers against the PhDs. I mean, you could say we need more PhDs. We should celebrate college education on math, science, engineering, and also celebrate the electricians, the plumbers, the tradespeople who we have not done enough in providing pathways for for manufacturing. And it's going to take all of us to actually re-industrialize both the 60 percent of folks who don't have a college degree and the advanced college graduates in science and technology.

And as you were talking about the way to save some of these manufacturing plants in the U.S., I'm thinking of the 500 employees who are working for Dixon, but it doesn't matter. Name a plant around the country. Let's say you can use automation and AI. Do some of those people have to then worry that they're going to be automated out? I know that as you've traveled the country and you've written about this in your book, you've encountered lots of fears about automation. People see that. And I think some ways it's a proxy for people's fears about the uncertainty of the future, but in some ways it's real. Like that they're seeing in the grocery store and Home Depot, now that there aren't checkout people like there used to be. So is there something you're doing

or trying to do that pairs the loss of jobs with a necessary expansion? In other words, in order to get the investment, if you're going to lay people off, you have to also then build another plant so that you're producing more. Because the world needs more valves and couplings. It's not like we need to stay flat. Well, I'd say there are two points to it.

You know, it used to be a traditional steel mill had 4,000 people. A mini mill with more production has about 1,500 people. So as you have higher productivity, as you have new technology, for a particular product, it may mean less jobs. But if you massively increase production, if you massively increase exports, then you can have more jobs with the higher productivity. That's what we need to do. Plus, if it's higher productivity, they need to be paid more, so you're having a multiplier effect in the community.

So I don't think you can be for American manufacturing being a superpower and say, we don't want technology, we don't want innovation in manufacturing processes. That's selling the country a lie. You're not going to be able to compete. But I think what we say is we can have these processes and massively expand production so that ultimately we're going to increase jobs. And again, I point to Germany, where 20% of their workforce is in manufacturing. So the automation actually hasn't displaced German workers.

Yeah. I was thinking recently about, I'm from Wisconsin, Milwaukee Tools recently got, I think, some subsidies from the government to ramp up production actually in Wisconsin. I'm curious about your conversations with people in the business community. Is there increasing awareness maybe post-COVID that this is something that needs to be done, that there needs to be an increase in the United States? So obviously subsidies are helpful, but do you think corporate America is coming around to the necessity of some of this, or do you encounter serious resistance when you're talking to the business community? I think the thinking is changing. Look,

the corporations made out extraordinarily. They shipped our production off to China. They had labor arbitrage. They didn't have to have the environmental regulations, and they sold cheaper products to the United States. And the bargain with the United States, with Americans, was we'll give you a cheap TV, but in the process, you're going to lose your job. And that's a bargain today that didn't work. I mean, people rather not have, in my view, just the cheap TV if it meant the loss of their factories. So I think people now in the corporate America

are understanding two things. This led to massive social disunity in this country. This led to things, not a direct line, but a contributing factor to things like January 6th. I mean, it led to people being upset, being frustrated. And I think they get that. They're beginning to get that. And second, they get the risk of having supply chains overseas with the political volatility, with the pandemic. And they understand that there's a resilience argument for having it here. But we can't just trust corporate leaders to bring it back. We need policy to bring

it back, which has to include, in my view, buy American tax credits. It has to include certain strategic tariffs so that if you're polluting offshore and you're bringing it here, there's a tariff and it has to have government investment. I don't believe this is protectionism. Protectionism is saying we don't want the global economy. I think this is smart economic policy, the kind that Hamilton had, the kind that FDR had, the kind that we need now. And so last week, you had a lot of people on the left watching the Freedom Caucus hold up Kevin McCarthy's speakership in order to extract concessions and saying, this is the kind of fight we want to see. You had plenty of people saying, wow, what a disaster, what a circus,

what a mess. But then you're others saying, no, this is what an actual fight is. And if you want to throw down... That's what democracy is. Look at the way that they're throwing down here. Was there any part of you or any part of your colleagues in Congress who were watching this and saying, all right, I don't like what they're fighting for, but there might be something we could learn from here in the future about how we're going to fight our own party leadership? I joked with someone, I said, this is the first time I've been in Congress in six years,

and I don't know what's going to happen. I mean, usually you go in, everyone knows what the vote's going to be. You pretend to hear the arguments in, everyone knows what the vote's going to be. You pretend to hear the arguments. No one really is paying any attention. They're all on their phones texting. And here there was a sense of drama, right? I think that's why people were glued in. It was different than the talking points.

My concern was not the drama. If there was drama in 15 votes and we ended up electing people who were going to help bring American jobs back, make the proper investments, and not have frivolous investigations, I'd be fine with it. My concern was that the deals that were made to get there are exactly the opposite of what I think this country needs to be doing. They're talking about not increasing the debt ceiling for past debt that we have.

They're making deals with very, very far right folks who I just philosophically disagree with. So I'm less concerned about, oh, it took 15 votes. I'm more concerned about what McCarthy had to give up to get those votes. But as if Democrats take the House back in two years, which seems plausible, it'll probably be by a narrow margin. Is there any thinking going on in the Progressive Caucus now to say, what are we going to demand when that comes around? Hakeem Jeffries was warned by Kevin McCarthy, right? He said, I had a unanimous vote two years ago. Look, I think there are arguments for it, For example, Medicare for All, to get hearings on that, to get a vote on that.

But here's the difference, and I believe the fundamental difference with the Freedom Caucus and the Progressive Caucus. The Freedom Caucus, by their own definition, just wants to blow things up and cut things. I mean, that's why they're in Congress. And I disagree with it. I'm not questioning their motives. They're in Congress because they want to reduce spending, cut government. That's an easier thing to be a no on than saying, okay, we want Medicare for all, which is one of, we have to have legislation drafted and just say, it's a harder thing to do when you have an affirmative agenda. So the progressives are never going to be blow up

government or let's just hurt government. But are there lessons in terms of saying we want more progressives on certain committees, we want progressives, we want certain bills to come up for a vote? Sure. I mean, I think that those are things that progressives should consider. I'm very curious to follow the single subject bill situation that you guys got going on this Congress. That'll be a fascinating experiment, I think. Yeah, not all the rules were bad reforms. I mean, the fact that members can't introduce amendments, the fact that 72 hours we have to see the bill, the single subject bill seems to me thoughtful. Some of the rules I understand, I have to look at the details, make it easier to do war powers resolutions to stop wars and make

sure that those are privileged. So I think it's too broad a brush to just say everything that was done was wrong. But then you also have that with the gunning of the congressional ethics. I mean, who's for that in this country, that Congress people should have less oversight on our ethics? I mean, that probably polls less than Congress itself. I don't know who came up with that idea. What about their so-called church committee? Would you join that if you were invited? The criticism of it is that it's just going to be kind of a Hunter Biden witch hunt type of committee.

On the other hand, they might stumble on all sorts of interesting revelations. Yeah, so where do you come down on that? No, look, the church committee had, in my view, two big insights. One, the role that unfortunately our government played in interfering in countries overseas with self-determination. And the church committee exposed that and I think put appropriate guardrails on these agencies. And the second thing is they discovered a lot of the surveillance of the Black Panthers and civil rights dissidents. I just don't think this committee, I think it's going to become too politicized in going after the investigators of January 6th and other things. We'll see. I mean, I hope I'm wrong.

Would you take a seat, though? Probably not. I'd have to have a lot of assurances that it's not going to be used for those partisan purposes. Right. Well, thank you so much for joining us. Really appreciate you coming by here. Appreciate it. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. All right. So we're going to have to wrap here so that we can get our show out, but we have a couple more guests that are coming around. So if you're listening to this on the podcast or on the kind of main premium thing, jump back over to YouTube later. That's right.

Once you've made it this far. But Congressman Conant, always appreciate you coming by. Always great. Thanks for the detailed discussion. I wish we had more of this in the media. Me too, me too. All right, see you guys soon.

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