Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 1/18/23 Counter Points: Davos Summit/GOP Dreams Social Security Cuts/Republican Candidate Arrested for Hiring Assassins/Joe Rogan on Biden Docs/MTG vs Lauren Boebert/Alexander Hamilton on Debt Ceiling/American Pessimism/Clinton Email Hacker Interview
Episode Date: January 18, 2023Ryan and Emily discuss the Davos Summit and what the speakers and guests have to say about their version of the future, GOP attacking retirement age and Social Security, a failed Republican candidate ...Solomon Pena arrested for potentially hiring shooters to attack Democratic opposition candidates, Joe Rogan speaks on Joe Biden's classified documents disaster, Poland's Prime Minister warns of WW3 if Ukraine loses, a bathroom fight between Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert shows divisions, Ryan reviews the words of Alexander Hamilton in regards to the Debt Ceiling, Emily discusses her thoughts on American Pessimism, and an interview with Sam Biddle from The Intercept on Guccifer a hacker incarcerated for years for an email hacking spree against America’s elite.To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/AUSTIN LIVE SHOW FEB 3RDTickets: https://tickets.austintheatre.org/9053/9054Merch: 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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BreakingPoints.com. All right, welcome back to CounterPoints. We put A1 up here. The global
elites, Emily, have all gathered in Davos.
Shouldn't we be broadcasting from there, you think?
I was going to pretend that we were.
We brought this out or it's a green screen.
We're here at Davos.
We just got eggs with Klaus Schwab.
It's not the same this year without all the Russian oligarchs throwing their parties off to the side because they really did throw the ragers.
Really?
Have you been to Davos?
I've never been to Davos, but that was always the word.
Word on the street. Back when I was at the Huffington Post,
my old boss, Ariana, obviously
was a celeb at Davos.
I was going to say. Absolutely loved Davos.
Yeah.
When I was there, Davos was
still on the edge of
having some cred
with hipsters.
Tech hipsters. Yeah, the like hipsters. Okay. Because like people like Aaron.
Tech hipsters.
Yeah, the tech hipsters.
Like this was,
there was still enough of a whiff of utopianism
in the tech world.
Yeah.
That you'd have people,
people like talking earnestly
about how they're going to make the world a better place.
Actually, they're still over there talking earnestly
about how they're going to make the world a better place.
Whether you want it to be a better place or not. Whether you want it to be a better place or not.
They're going to make it one.
Yeah.
Now, basically nobody takes them seriously anymore.
Now they just see it as kind of what it is, a gathering of global elites trying to keep
together the structures that have propped them up.
This theme, as that article just mentioned, was how much they're failing and how it's all
falling apart. And that they're trying to re-globalize or de-globalize and then re-globalize
or stitch back together this dream that they had of this globalized world, which only includes the
flow of global capital and global elites. Does not include kind of opening up the world in any
kind of broader ways. Right. No, that's a good point. And actually, on that point, we want to start with a clip from, hilariously, a panel on disinformation that was,
I believe, moderated by Brian Stelter. Now, this is funny for a couple of reasons. I have
absolutely no objection to Brian Stelter being on a panel about disinformation. In fact, I think it's
a great spot for Brian Stelter to be on a panel. But if he's reckoning with being a serious purveyor of
disinformation throughout the course of the Trump administration, of course, that's not what
happened. Instead, it was a panel about how the global elites can rein in the masses via new
censorship legislation. You had to have a Democrat pushing back. Weird. Check it out. Here's the clip.
That's why you're saying the rules have to be set up in a way not to be abused.
Congressman, should we learn in the U.S. something from the structures that the Europeans have adopted?
Well, look, I think in general the U.S. has a lot to learn in terms of data regulation, Internet regulation.
I mean, you're way ahead of us in that regard.
But we believe very strongly in free speech.
I believe very strongly in free speech.
And I think there is a healthy concern in
the United States that the EU might be going a little too far. So I think you look at this from
both perspectives. Yes, they're ahead of us and they're doing some smart things that I know when
I use the internet in Europe and I get all the warnings about cookies and whatnot, that actually
makes me feel safer. That makes me feel better. And a lot of American consumers want that level of security on the internet for your
own data privacy and whatnot. The EU legislation, I think, should be a non-starter, at least in
terms of censorship. And yet you have journalists sort of like Brian Seltzer kind of nodding
credulously, like it's a very interesting conversation to be had. Were you surprised
that Seth Moulton pushed back?
Yeah. And I think there's two points of European kind of internet regulation.
A hundred percent.
So on the one hand, like he said, the data stuff where big tech really is
blocked or also required to do a lot more transparency around the way that they collect
and cash in on your data.
Surveillance capitalism.
Right. That's some good stuff. They're pretty tough. It's so like big tech warning,
we're going to go out of business. We're going to be bankrupt if you keep doing this to us.
Whenever you hear those kinds of noises from big tech, you're like, okay, well,
maybe this is actually a regulation worth paying attention to. But Europe does not have the same
kind of affinity culturally for free speech that we have in the United States.
We're almost unique.
We've seen that actually from Prince Harry and Meghan Markle,
who I believe they're on an Aspen Institute board that deals with these issues
and have said, you know, I don't know what the deal is with the First Amendment here in the United States.
What the heck is this thing?
It's a very weird place to start from for a lot of people that, wait,
we start from the place that you can say whatever you want?
Yeah.
That sounds impossible.
How can that be?
That'd be so dangerous to society.
How do you control the peasants?
Right.
How do you control?
Yes.
Right.
And so that was interesting to see Moulton kind of saying, you know what, we got a tribute question.
He ran for president.
I actually completely forgot about that.
He was on like stage four, the like midnight debate.
Yeah.
One or two of them.
But I think your preface to this conversation about the sort of arc of Davos makes a really
good point, which is that what we've seen recently is, I think, a more naked and intentional effort
to rein in populism. This is a sort of theme of Davos recently,
is sort of how can we rig the system? How can we sort of copy and paste laws from one place
to the other so we can feel secure in the fact that we have these mechanisms in place
to control people to our liking.
And they obviously make this argument.
And you can see one of the good things about Davos is that you can see many of them sincerely think this is for the greater good.
They think they're speaking on behalf of the good of the public.
And it's great because you can see that.
You can see what they think they're saying.
You can see what they're working through in their own heads.
And it's never erring on the side of freedom.
Yeah.
And at a minimum, they think that the reforms that they're offering up and the ideas that they're throwing out there are going to stave off this populist revolt.
So oftentimes at Davos, you'd have people saying, you might not necessarily want to do this thing, a wealth tax, whatever it is, but you should do it or else the pitchforks are coming for you.
That would often be their relationship with populism.
And Davos has all sorts of kind of activists that come out there, often kind of foundation-funded activists who then deliver that message to the elites out there.
But oftentimes they just don't know how to deliver
it. And actually, if we could put up A3, my colleague over at The Intercept, Ken Clevenstein,
flagged this panel on retirement. The World Economic Forum, what's their headline?
We desperately need to disrupt our approach to retirement saving. And nobody, I just don't think that they understand
how frightened people get
when the global elites start talking about
disrupting your retirement.
They still have this attitude
that they're going to do good for a great number of people
and that they're going to say that
and that we're going to believe it
rather than that we're going to say, oh, so now you want to steal our retirement. You see a
profitable way to kind of siphon a little bit more blood out of this stone. Now, of course,
they're not wrong that in general, there's a retirement crisis, that people need more security,
but their solutions that they talk about here are get banks to make more
financial products for working class people, which is going to translate into banks just
hitting working class people with fees throughout their whole life.
This is why Daos, I think, has increasingly used the word credibility earlier.
It's increasingly lost credibility because the same people who got us into the Great
Recession are the same people who are trying to now get us out of this, the growing pains of populism or the
cultural pains, the economic pains of populism. And you can see under the surface at things like
Davos exactly where their motivations are for something like that. And another, let's actually
roll this video because it is pretty interesting if we roll a four, it ties into all of this when it comes to Social Security.
This is Congressman who?
I forget.
Some Republican.
Yeah, some Republican.
I was Republican.
Yeah, play it.
Here's the video.
What reason to age retirement?
You know, that's interesting that you ask that question.
People come up to me, they actually want to work longer.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
So that's on the table you're saying?
Well, you know, if people want to work longer, maybe you need to give them an incentive to do it.
Okay.
Yeah, that's the way to solve every one of these problems, by the way.
I know, I know.
And actually grow wealth at the same time.
Okay, literally nobody is saying that to him.
That was Rick Allen.
He's from Georgia.
What's the chance he owns a car dealership?
Yes, if you're listening and not watching, I think Ryan just picked up on something aesthetically.
That makes a lot of sense.
Nobody is coming up to him and saying that.
And you know what's interesting is that actually at the same time, Republicans are making this message,
nobody wants to work anymore. He's saying people want to work more. Now, I agree that people want
to work generally. I think the right overplays this idea that nobody wants to work. But you can't
have both of those things at the same time. And I think I would be shocked if more than just a
couple people who
were in different sets of circumstances, maybe they retired and then the market tanked because
of the pandemic, which I know happened to a lot of people. But I would be surprised if any folks
were genuinely coming to him and saying, let me work until I'm 68. Just let me work until I'm 70.
Why not? I did Google, and there is a Rick Rick Allen who's the owner of a GDA vehicle fleet
sales in Atlanta, Georgia. If you're right about that. I think it's a different Rick Allen. There
are a bunch of members of Congress who have owned car dealerships or still own car dealerships.
But right, of course, yes, like work often does provide meaning to people and if people want to continue working longer into their life, of course, I don't think there's anybody who would really support a mandatory retirement except for pilots or other professions where you're like, okay, maybe it's time you do something else.
You can keep working, just maybe don't fly the planes anymore. But I love how he goes from
what you pointed out rightly is an obvious lie that people are coming up to him and saying,
Congressman, I would just wish that I could work more. Is there something that Washington can do
about that? To force me to. To force me to work longer into my life. I don't want to do it of
my own volition. What I want is you to. I want to be incentivized. Then he goes in and he says,
you're going to use our head and we're going to incentivize people to work longer.
But what he means by incentivizing somebody to work longer is basically raising the retirement age of Social Security and otherwise making people more economically insecure deeper into their life because then they're incentivized to go out and get more money.
And this is what the Davos blog post that Ken picked up on is talking about.
They're saying people are living longer.
Thus, we need to create a pathway for people to work longer as opposed to, let me just
try something out on everyone.
Maybe the benefit of living longer is having more time as you're older to make decisions
about leisure.
To actually, like, that's the point of the industrial system.
You can debate all of these different things about industrialization,
but one very clear point of the reforms that have happened is that you earn a retirement.
That is a huge part of our system that we have agreed as a society
is a worthwhile ambition for people that they bust
their butts for 40 plus years, for decades, provide for themselves, provide for their families,
provide for the communities, and then they retire as their body gets older, as their mind gets older,
and they can enjoy life. So perhaps instead of saying the opposite, right? Instead of saying,
you know, we're going to make you work.
Now that you're living longer, we have to find a way for you to work longer. Maybe what we should
think is now that you're living longer, we have to find a way to make your decades of work sustain
you into the future. And so to bring this back into the news cycle, you've got House Republicans,
not just Rick Allen at the back bench there, but you've got some leading
House Republicans who've consistently floated the idea that cuts to Social Security, Medicare,
Medicaid ought to be part of some type of reckoning with the deficit and the debt around
the debt ceiling that you had McCarthy say, I think, during the election, like that's something
we're going to look at. And then you had a lot of like Rachel Bovard and others were like,
what are you doing? Like, we're done with this. Shut the hell up. Stop. Don't do this. Don't
talk about it. Like, this is not a winner for you. People don't want. And there's also so much
more precarity than there was in people's lives even 20 years ago. It's getting to a place.
And also people are older.
The Republican base is older.
The American public is older.
We're an aging society.
And so the idea that you're going to go after people's retirement in this way, the way that Bush tried to do in 2005 after his election, strikes me as a political blunder.
But Trump's tax cut was a giant political blunder, but they did it anyway
because it was what they wanted. So what's your sense on how serious they are about really pushing
forward on this in the context of a debt ceiling crisis? I think this is really the thing to watch
on the right right now because they're in this transition period and kind of developing a new prioritization, a new set of priorities.
They sort of understand, at least people who are involved in the conversation about where the party should go,
understand that the Paul Ryanism, like you were saying, in the latter half of the Bush administration was a political blunder,
that the tax cut bill is a political blunder.
That is basically a point of consensus in the conservative movement right now, that the tax cut bill was completely
misprioritized, that like maybe that's fine. Like it actually did.
Billionaires are good with it.
Millionaires are good with it. Corporate tax cut, like you can make an argument that it creates
jobs, et cetera, et cetera. But we're in a state of cultural crisis. And if all you can talk about
is cutting corporate taxes and just sort of doing,remember Paul Ryan said he was going to do this very populist thing, which would be to get the tax code down to a postcard. You'd be able to file your taxes on a postcard. It didn't come anywhere close to that because as soon as you try to do that, lobbyists latch onto it. And if you're Paul Ryan, you don't have the power to resist that or the will to resist that. So what's happening is this question of priorities and this narrative that
is congealing on the right is that these spending cuts, when you're talking about sequestration,
when you're talking about negotiating tough with the debt ceiling, which is imminent,
that's on the table, that's going to start happening like now. It is happening. What are
you going to say? The Biden administration is saying we're not negotiating, period.
Republicans are saying, well, how do we sell this? Because we are going to
negotiate because there are serious arguments about spending there. Like you said, aging
population, totally outpacing the growth of the economy in terms of Social Security, Medicaid,
Medicare. And one of the big questions is, is this about tyranny? And that's the word that
keeps coming, statism, tyranny, the gas stove argument,
right? Jim Jordan tweeted last week, God, gun, guns, and gas stoves. And that's the argument
that they're starting to land on, that a bigger government means more Davos control in your life,
basically. That is not Medicaid. That is not Medicare. That is not Social Security. So if
your priority is cutting down big government tyranny, or is it the debt, right? Which one is it? Because if it's big government tyranny,
you're not going to want to start with that. There's also just such an extraordinary amount
of blasphemy, though, in that whole God, guns, and gastos, right? I mean, God, and then guns. Like, okay, love, we're all one people, and guns. Then
you're going to slap that next to it. Okay, but that's fine. You've been doing that for long.
And then gastos. Doesn't that so radically diminish the, like, you're talking about the
infinite, the greatest, like, force on the planet, in the galaxy, on the planet. You're talking about gas stoves.
No, God.
Gas stoves.
I mean, gas stoves.
But putting those on the same plane,
the Trinity, the Holy Trinity,
being guns, gas, like, come on.
Well, but that's what they're trying to do.
This argument is that it's all part of the same thing.
It's all part of the,
and Jim Jordan didn't say this,
but it's all part of the Davos. It's all part of the, and Jim Jordan didn't say this, but it's all part of the Davos agenda.
Jim Jordan on an acid trip.
And by the way, we have an update.
Rick Allen would have been my second guess.
He owned a construction company.
Oh, okay.
That's close.
That was close.
We've got one more thing to show you guys.
This is a good one.
And here's Davos in a nutshell.
Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin surrounded by billionaires.
Let's roll that.
Difference for the American people in the last two years.
We still don't agree on getting rid of the filibuster.
That's correct.
Thank you.
They high-fived.
If you're listening, what you missed is...
You need to play that one back.
Yeah.
Manchin jumping in and saying, we still don't agree on getting rid of the filibuster.
And then they just
come together for a beautiful moment. Yeah. Nice little high five there. Former Democrat,
Kyrsten Sinema. I forgot about that. The news cycle moves so quickly. All right. Let's move
on to the news about Solomon Pena. This is a developing story that really caught a bunch of
traction yesterday. So he was arrested by-
A B1 here.
Yeah, B1. He was arrested by Albuquerque police on Monday. They call him the, quote,
mastermind behind a recent string of shootings that were targeting Democratic lawmakers' homes.
I'm reading from the Albuquerque Journal right now. The suspect is a Republican who unsuccessfully
ran for office. He ran for a state representative slot back in
November and claimed that his election was rigged. He seems to have been at January 6th.
He's accused of paying four men to shoot at the homes of two county commissioners and two state
legislatures. We actually have video of his arrest. We can roll that on the screen.
You see right there, he's being arrested by police in Albuquerque. Ryan, what do you make
of the situation? So, I mean, first of all, people should understand that, so he got something like
25% of the vote and there are, you know, maybe thousands, certainly more than a thousand of these types of races around the country where you'll have a fringe, basically a fringe candidate.
The party doesn't want to put anybody up because they know they're going to get absolutely hammered. run those campaigns, kind of run them for practice? Yeah. To say like, all right, let me see what it's like to kind of hire a campaign manager, to
do call time, to go to town halls and eat the rubber chicken.
Let me see if I enjoy this knowing that I'm going to lose by 50 points.
And then you're going to have some complete lunatics who are going to run for these positions.
And so it appears that he was one of these.
The police say that it, or the New Mexico news media say that he may have even accompanied
these hitmen that he allegedly hired on some of these. In one of the shootings,
a 10 or 12 yearyear-old girl.
Sleeping in the home.
Sleeping in the home.
And three bullets went through the bedroom.
Yeah.
Which is just utterly horrifying. Nobody who is running for office signs up for that.
Nobody deserves that. And so I do think we have to ask the question, like, what is it that's driving this
sense that the stakes are so high that it requires firing bullets off into people's houses? And
there's got to be some mental illness going on here. But we've always had mental illness,
right? Although we have higher rates. We have higher rates of it, probably. But we've always had mental illness, right? Although we have higher rates.
Higher rates of it, probably.
But we've always had significant rates, non-trivial rates of mental illness in this country.
So what is it that's producing this? Yeah, that's one of the interesting questions that I was actually going to ask is, you know, whenever there's, like you said, a lunatic, you know, the shooting from the Bernie
Sanders supporter of the congressional baseball practice or the pipe bombs that were mailed to
CNN or what, I think there were pipe bombs that were mailed to CNN. Whenever there's a lunatic
who appears to just sort of be somewhere on the map, maybe leaning left, maybe leaning right,
it gets really wrapped into this narrative about
one side's deep-seated problems. And this story absolutely has. I mean, this was blanketing MSNBC
yesterday, which I keep on in the background, of course. I have to see my girl Andrea Mitchell,
what she's up to. I've got to keep up with Stephanie Ruhle. But it's being used in that
respect. Basically, this is indicative of a broader trend on the right.
And whenever it's a lunatic, I just hesitate to do that.
I think it's entirely fair to say January 6th is indicative of something deep-seated and something broader.
I would say the same thing about riots in 2020.
And I think people on both sides would probably have no problem actually saying that in an honest conversation.
But this guy, he's also a felon.
And you have this red flag question that was raised actually by the House Republican leader who says this is yet another example of a convicted felon unlawfully gaining access to firearms, which they are barred from owning or possessing and using the weapon in a manner that causes public harm. And we land again on this question of like,
can we function as a society anymore? Can we do the basic things, not just as a government,
but as a society that are needed to have any sense of coherence? And it seems the answer
to that is increasingly no. I think that point about the guns is a good one and goes to
the question of like, why is this happening more?
Because if you have more anger and you have either a stable or a slightly rising level of mental illness, but you have three times more guns than you had in the past, then you're going to be more likely to see gun violence flowing out of that. It's kind of a fantasy to think that you could have
300, 400, 500 million guns in a country with 330 million people and that you would then be able to
precisely keep those weapons out of the hands of every single felon or every other person that
has them. If you're going to have a culture that has that many guns, this is going to be a result
of that. But you're right that in the wake of one of these shootings,
you see everybody scouring kind of the social media feed of the person who did this.
This one, they didn't have to go far because they're trying to divine where the political leanings are.
Like, oh, ran for office as a Republican.
He was out January 6th.
I'm going to go ahead and put that one in the R column over here.
But you're right that it is a contest.
And you'll see people saying like, oh, God, I hope this wasn't one of our guys, whether that's left or right.
As they're kind of waiting with bated breath to find information on the shooters, then everybody can go into their battle stations and make their political points. Well, and you just also, I think, raised something that you said earlier, actually, that
he was, what's the word you used? Oh, that this is, what is it that, is there something that's
sort of seeding this more and more? And I do think there's plenty of reason to point to
Donald Trump specifically, the lies that
he told his own supporters between the election, the exaggerations and lies and like theories that
he, I think, irresponsibly, recklessly floated between the election and January 6th and continues
to float. That, I think, is extremely serious. I mean, on the right, I'm happy to
admit that. It's not even an admission. It's just like obvious reality. And when you have someone
that powerful, that powerful using his power, I think, recklessly, yes, you're going to get more
of this because none of us know who to trust anymore. And the people who come out and say,
you can't trust anyone, are the ones that are going to get trust. And then if you abuse that trust, I think that is a really dangerous and immoral thing to do.
And I certainly think we saw that. I think there are examples of that, you know, from folks on the
left too, where there's just these nonsense narratives that aren't actually rooted in
reality. But this is a really big one. And it is actually, I think, causing some serious cultural tension in ways like this.
Right. Because if you believe that elections are legitimately being stolen by shadowy forces, then you can imagine why you would feel morally compelled to do something about that.
That was 100 percent the case on January 6th. You talked to folks who were there. It was this idea that they really truly believed that Congress was stealing the election
out from under their noses in that building. Which for the YouTube censors, by the way,
they were not. No, they were not. Joe Biden lawfully won the election. Yes. Thank you.
And so a lot of that is completely downstream of somebody who's in a position of power and whose supporters say, well, he knows more than I do. He's the president. He has access to classified information. He has access to all these different things. So if he's saying it, there's probably more legitimacy than even I know or the media knows. So it's just an abuse of that power. Speaking of YouTube, so Joe Rogan threw out
an interesting theory we're going to bat around today. Let's listen to Joe Rogan on his take on
this drip drip coming from the Joe Biden team around the classified documents that keep turning up in his garage, his closets, boxes, elsewhere.
I don't know jack shit about politics.
But if I had to guess, they're trying to get rid of him.
My guess would be they're trying to get rid of him.
If all of a sudden his own aides are sending these, instead of like taking these classified documents, which you have located, and go, well, let's not do that again.
And fucking locking them up somewhere.
His own aides.
Self-reporting?
Dude.
Come on.
That sounds sus.
Well, no one self-reported that fucking laptop.
I know.
That laptop.
Well, that was Russian disinformation.
That reeks of Russian disinformation.
They got a hold of the social media companies and lied to them.
They did whatever the fuck they could to keep that from happening.
And even this, they discovered this before the midterms.
Yeah.
So they didn't release the information until after the midterms.
He picks up on something that I think is important that the media is not picking up on, which is these documents were discovered, the first batch that we heard about at Biden's think tank on November 2nd.
And when was the election? Like the 8th or something?
Something, yeah, it was a few days later. So November 2nd. We don't find out about any of
this until January. And they turn them into the archives right away, right?
That's what they say. And then the archives alerted the Department of
Justice. Right. And the Department of Justice eventually decides to appoint a special counsel.
Yes. But not until it's public. They didn't have the FBI director go out and hold a press
conference like with Hillary Clinton. Yes. And so I think a big part of the story we don't know yet
is how this became public, why it became public, how it did and when it did. And then Walter Schaub
is a sort of ethics analyst, ethics expert, told The Hill something interesting. He's saying,
you know, one of the biggest problems for the White House here is that when they were asked
about whether there were more documents, they said they just had the pen documents.
And it turned out, of course, it seems they knew earlier than when they told the public that there were more documents. And that is the big remaining open question. So does any of this point in the direction of what Rogan is talking about, that perhaps, you know, the Democratic Party realizes that Joe Biden is potentially senile, he's sort of past his prime, He's not their best, their freshest, youngest,
most politically expedient face right now going into a presidential cycle. And they sort of see
an easy way out given what happened at Mar-a-Lago. And I do, so let's take two of the other points
that were made there. One of them being, if this happened to a Trump kid, would the media go
absolutely berserk on it? And I would say that it did happen to a Trump kid, would the media go absolutely berserk on it? And I would
say that it did happen to a Trump kid, kid-in-law, and it didn't. They didn't go berserk on it. So I
just pulled up so I could find the date. March 2018, I and my other colleagues over at The
Intercept reported, there's our headline, Saudi Crown Prince boasted that Jared Kushner was,
quote, in his pocket. MBS told Confidence that Kushner discussed
the names of royal family members opposed to his power grab right before he then locked up a bunch
of those same family members in the Ritz-Carlton torture. A bunch were tortured. One died from
torture. The Daily Mail subsequently also reported that Kushner had gleaned classified information on
enemies or adversaries or skeptics of MBS within Saudi Arabia and given that intelligence to
MBS, who then acted on it by rounding them up. So we don't have to ask the question of what would
happen if one of Trump's kids had some classified document
scandal and what the media would do. Media did almost nothing with that. And it gives you a
sense of how little and how in bed the media is with the Gulf monarchies that they hated Trump
so much and loved any story that they could find. Right. That was going to nail Trump. And then they have one where this guy's dead to rights, like taking U.S.
intel, handing it to MBS, who then uses it.
And at least one person winds up dead.
Although MBS, the media really turned on MBS post Khashoggi.
Post Khashoggi.
Yeah.
Right. But March 2018,
they had every opportunity
to unleash on Kushner
over doing this.
And they covered it a little bit.
Like, they would do a couple,
they did a couple segments
on our reporting,
but it certainly did not become
the kind of cycle
that they could have made it into.
Well, and that's a frustrating
part of this story.
Whenever there's an opportunity for the corporate press to latch theatrically onto a narrative to
make them look like they're really tough, like they are not lap dogs, they're watch dogs.
They just take it with a plum and then it's trotted out by them as evidence they're really
tough. They did this with some of the Hillary Clinton stories and they're like, well, listen, we do this to everyone. And it's
like, that's utter nonsense and you know it. Right. And think about the stories that the
corporate press latches onto and really drives home. They are ones that are theatrical,
but pure theater because they don't challenge any of the current power arrangements. They only kind of
reify them in a lot of ways. So when it came to 2016, going after Hillary Clinton's email scandal,
they were fine. They're fine doing that. They lit her up for a year over whether she, like,
well, you know, about her handling of classified information on this server.
But who did that challenge? It challenged Hillary Clinton, but it didn't challenge any of the structural relationships that the United States
is embedded with around the world. Russiagate, what does that do? That just portrays Russia
as malign and nasty and adversarial to the United States. That's already the status quo.
Everybody already believed that that was the case. But if you have
a story that is going to require you to go up against Saudi Arabia,
that is challenging the status quo power arrangement.
To Rogan's point, it's a very precarious position for a party to be in when their president
loses the internal party consensus. And Trump is obviously an exception, I think, to a lot of this,
but you really start to see things disintegrate whenever you have that internally the party is
like, ah, what do we do with this guy? Which is interesting in Biden's case, because
if you are holding Biden to his own standards, he's passed a ton of
legislation, some of his target legislation. He's made good on several big promises,
and people feel like he's been productive, but also that he's sort of not very popular with
the American people and is obviously struggling on a just sort of mental level. So if you start
to lose the support, you potentially
can get things like, I don't think anything was planted or planned here, but I do think you get
people who are excited at the prospect of saying, well, maybe he just, this gives him an exit to
sort of gracefully bow out and things can, leaks start happening, things start snowballing. And I
don't think that's a bad point at all. Yeah, I think taken literally, you could kind of reject Rogan's hypothesis. But I don't think you
should wave it away that easily, because if you don't take it quite as literally as he means it,
but in the way that you mean that Biden's weakening power sets up what people would
kind of pedantically call like a permission structure for those underneath him to say like you know what you know if
there's a choice of how to handle a particular situation if somebody has an
intense amount of power at the top and is cruising to re-election that changes
your decision about you know what you're what you're what you're able to do what
you're willing to do in a particular moment if you if you sense that
somebody's weaker almost a lame duck you're like well do, what you're willing to do in a particular moment. If you sense that somebody's weaker, almost a lame duck,
and you're like, well, you know what?
There's another document.
Alert.
Call the cops.
Call the Washington Post.
Call the cops.
Yeah, get everyone together.
And Karine Jean-Pierre keeps getting asked about this.
If we could, let's roll this latest clip from her.
Last week, we told, I think it was Phil, that we all could assume, American people could assume that the searches were complete and all the documents had been recovered.
On Saturday, the White House Counsel's Office said that five additional classified documents had been found.
Is it safe to assume now that all the documents have been recovered, all the official records, all the classified documents are back in the custody of the National Archives?
Or are more searches underway to find out if there's anything else there?
Look, I understand your question. We have addressed
multiple questions from here. Multiple questions have been answered by the president. I know that
you all, I just spent about, some of you, some of your colleagues, maybe you yourself, Zeke,
was on the phone with my colleague for about 45 minutes that addressed a lot of your questions.
I'm just going to continue to be prudent here. I'm going to let this ongoing review that is
happening, this legal process that is happening, and let that process continue under the special counsel.
I'm not going to comment from here.
Yeah.
I don't envy the position she's in.
Last week, this week, and in the weeks ahead.
Yeah, and it's like, because the second that she says, nope, we found every single one, be like, oh, underneath the kid's bed.
Whoops. Found another box of memos.
And then you get into the Veep scenario where it's like, well, what did KJP know and when did
she know it versus was she just intentionally kind of kept out of the loop or unintentionally
kept out of the loop? And, you know, again, do not envy her position.
Some of the Biden classified documents were about Ukraine, which brings us to
our next piece of news. Let's roll the clip here of the Polish prime minister warning of World War
Three. Ukraine's defeat may become a prelude to World War Three. Therefore, today, there is no reason to block support for Kiev, to procrastinate.
Thus, I call for decisive actions by German government on all sorts of weapons to be
delivered to Ukraine. Yeah, so this is, they're calling for an increase in tanks, by the way,
that has induced somewhat of a debate from Germany because Germany has to give permission, the way this works, for their tanks to be sent to Ukraine.
If it's a German tank, then they have to give permission.
It seems it's leaning in the direction that they're going to do it.
So here's Ben Wallace, the British defense secretary, who says there's a debate in Germany at the moment about whether a tank is an offensive weapon or defensive weapon.
Well, it depends on what you're using it for.
If you're using it to defend your country,
I would wager that is a defensive weapon system.
This is all coming on the heels
of that just absolutely awful strike
on the apartment building.
We have some footage of that.
We can roll right now from Reuters.
Look at that.
How do you pronounce the
name of the city, by the way? Dnipro? Yeah, Dnipro. Yeah, Dnipro. So it's just incredible
scene right there. There's actually video. See that yellow kitchen that it just zoomed in on?
Some news outlets got video from that kitchen before the strike of a girl's birthday party.
Right. Blowing out of candles. And you can see that it's the same yellow. Yeah. Yeah, it's a pretty striking juxtaposition of how life can be so normal
at one moment and then devastated in the next with these technologies that exist right now from
distances, people can be struck. And you also had at the World Economic Forum, you had Joe Manchin saying that the United
States' commitment to this war was indefinite.
You had the Finnish prime minister saying that the only way this war could end is if
Russia loses it. You have basically a global elite consensus in the West that negotiations around a ceasefire and talks to end this war are just not worth considering.
It's just not something that is going to be on a panel at Davos and kicked around as an idea that anybody should take seriously. It's quite striking. The only possible strategy,
it seems like, for the West here is relentless support of Ukraine until Russia is defeated.
Without anybody presenting a picture of what that looks like. How does that actually happen?
And you'll have people like the Finnish Prime Minister say, well, Russia could just leave. Anybody presenting a picture of what that looks like, how does that actually happen?
And you'll have people like the Finnish prime minister say, well, Russia could just leave.
That is true.
Russia could indeed leave, and I think that they should leave.
I don't think they should have invaded in the first place. But we're also on planet Earth.
They're not going to just pack up and leave.
There is no realistic indication of that. And they continue to act.
Their strategy is built around exactly that notion that someday the Russians can be induced to just
pack up and leave. And, you know, short of nuclear war, it's incredibly difficult in the real world
to envision a scenario. And that doesn't mean appeasement. It really doesn't need to,
it doesn't necessarily mean appeasement, but the solution cannot be a long drawn out quagmire that's much better for defense contractors than it is for people living in the region.
Right. I mean, it's insane. The strategy is insane.
Because what they're really calling for is basically an endless kind of low grade war.
Right. And because they're fine with it now, because they make a bunch of money off of it,
and it allows them to do this sort of theatrical warmongering on the sort of campaign stage.
It allows them to funnel money to people who funnel money back to them. And it seems like an
all-around win-win. And, you know, obviously, obviously nobody would disagree
that there's strategic importance of Ukraine to the West, that this is an incredible, immoral
devastation of innocent people and of civilians, and that what Vladimir Putin is doing is an
atrocity and is incredibly wrong. But again, if you live in the real world,
it doesn't mean you just hope and pay defense contractors enough money that Vladimir Putin says,
I'm out. Right. And it seems like both sides are kind of comfortable with this low-grade war that's
going to leave thousands dead every single year and make reconstruction extraordinarily difficult
because you'll continue to
have attacks like the one you just saw in Dnipro. And Putin is just fine with it too, I think,
because the big risk for Putin at this point, because his main goal basically of installing
a puppet regime in Kyiv has failed. And so he doesn't want to come out a loser. He wants to be able to declare victory
somehow. And so if the war never ends, then he never loses. So for that reason, he'd be okay
with basically keeping this war that was going on in Donbass starting in 2014,
going basically the rest of our lives and then some. But that's another really good point, which
is if you want regime change in Russia, you can surely change the regime fine.
Let's say you wave your magic wand and you do something extra judicial and you just change the regime, whatever, everything's fine.
Or that's the outcome of a massive war that's waged. age, that doesn't erase sentiments in Russia and it doesn't erase sentiments in the Donbass
and Ukraine that are going to continue to be seeds of tension and turmoil over this
sort of complications of this region and the battles.
We can all agree about where we think the boundaries of Ukraine should be.
We can all agree what is an illegal
incursion that doesn't change the reality that people there don't always agree that people in
Russia don't agree with that. And they don't agree to the point that they're willing to,
to wage war over the territory, um, to, to make that point. So, I mean, it's a, none of that goes
away, um, with the strategy.
The strategy doesn't deal with any of that. And there's an argument, of course, that it's the thing that sort of creates, that just totally destroys the incentive that Putin or anyone else would have to make illegal invasions and incursions like this.
But I just don't see any evidence for that because Putin is, he's taking losses
and he's continuing to do it. If we could put up this next element too,
among the fallout from this, Topselensky advisor resigned in the wake of comments that he made.
Basically what he said, he went on live television. He said that it looked like
a missile had been intercepted, a Russian missile had been intercepted, knocked off course, and landed in this building, which is
the death toll is up to 44 at this point, including five children. Whereas other officials
have pushed back and said, no, the evidence is that it was a direct hit from a Russian battleship, that the damage to the
building shows that it was a direct hit rather than something knocked off course. And so,
the advisors stepped down as a result of this, though I don't know if it's been conclusively
shown what precisely happened. It's very, very difficult to say.
Yeah. Well, we'll continue to follow that story. And speaking of foreign affairs,
let's move on to news about the Foreign Affairs Committee's committee. Final committee assignments
were released yesterday by the new House Republican majority, slim majority. And there's
some news on that front when it comes to the Foreign Affairs Committee. Let's put up the tear sheet there. You can see Marjorie Taylor Greene received a slot on the Foreign Affairs Committee.
Gosar got his committee back.
And Foreign Affairs Committee, I'm sorry, she's put on Homeland Security.
The debate is over Ilhan Omar and Foreign Affairs.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is on the Homeland Security
Committee, which is going to investigate and potentially impeach Alejandro Mayorkas
basically right away. Gosar had also lost his committee assignments in the last Congress and
has them back now. This is also on the heels of news that Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert were fighting in the bathroom during Kevin McCarthy's speakership battle.
Let's put that up on the screen.
You can see this is a story.
I believe this is a story from the Daily Beast.
Yeah, the Daily Beast had this very gossipy piece of information that says, according to another source familiar,
well, in the bathroom, Greene asked Boebert, you were okay taking millions of dollars from McCarthy, but you refused to vote for him for Speaker, Lauren? The first source said Greene
was in a stall and then upon coming out, confronted Boebert about taking that money.
And the Colorado Republican, that's Boebert, was allegedly unaware that Greene was also in the
bathroom at the time. And that's when Boebert says, quote, don't be ugly. And according to another
like a little school girl, Debbie Dingle from Michigan is was apparently a witness to this
event and has said she stayed silent, the same as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, except for adding that what happens in the ladies' room stays in the ladies' room. I guess that's a good rule,
just sort of in general. But Ryan, the Marjorie Taylor Greene-Lauren Boebert drama played out
during the speakership battle. Marjorie Taylor Greene supported Kevin McCarthy, ends up on a
sort of plum committee assignment. I'm sure that's very much what she wanted. She got a slot that she wanted, Homeland Security, because it's
going to be a part of this high-profile investigation that they intend to land on
the impeachment of Alejandro Mayorkas. They have not been quiet about that. Kevin McCarthy
shifted from what he told me in an interview in September, which is that we don't start with
impeachment. Democrats made everything political. We're not going to do that. To a couple months
later saying, yeah, we'll do a little impeachment. So this is going to be a really high profile
media narrative. It's going to be a really high profile set of hearings. And Marjorie Taylor
Greene got it. And it looks like her support for McCarthy, as was expected, paid off.
But Boebert too, right? How do you mean? She's getting on the
oversight committee. And a couple of other of the McCarthy critics who held his speakership up
also were rewarded with seats on the House Oversight Committee. And it began, if you
remember, with McCarthy telling them in a private
meeting, if you come at me, I'm going to kick you off of your committees. And one of the pieces that
they negotiated towards the end of it was, you won't retaliate against us for this. And in fact,
it looks like they're going to wind up with some of the plum committee assignments that they wanted.
So McCarthy tells this story a lot that he, when, speaking of the oversight committee,
when Jim Jordan ran for speaker and Kevin McCarthy drops out, Paul Ryan ends up speaker,
Kevin McCarthy goes to the mat for Jim Jordan going on oversight eventually. And McCarthy loves this story because for him,
it shows the sort of wisdom behind his strategy,
which is you give everyone a seat at the table.
And he thinks of it in terms of, at least he said in an interview with me,
money ball, which is kind of interesting.
But he thinks of it in terms of that you've got all these great players,
how do you make them work together?
That's something he told me.
And he wants to give people a seat at the table,
make them feel heard.
He meets with the Freedom Caucus people.
He meets with the establishment people
and makes them feel heard.
And so it's fascinating,
your point about Boebert getting sort of rewarded too,
despite not being an ally of his,
is that clearly what he's trying to do
is make those, build bridges, right? Build bridges
so that when he needs the leverage to say, we are not doing this debt ceiling thing over X, Y, and Z,
they have a relationship, an existing relationship and the ability to have those conversations and to
do those negotiations. Now, I don't know that that's going to work out for him. Maybe it makes sense in the sort of cost
benefit sense to try. But I think that's probably what his idea is like, these people do not want
to get on board with me. So I'm going to, you know, sort of kill them with kindness in that sense.
Yeah, that's, yeah. Right. And he got the thing that he wanted, which is to be speaker.
Right.
And he's going to get this thing that he also probably wants is a little bit of a showdown over the debt ceiling, which we can talk about next.
We got Alexander Hamilton.
Let's talk about Alexander Hamilton.
To help explain this.
Why wouldn't we? It's a Wednesday in January. Why not talk about Alexander Hamilton? Ryan, this is your point for today.
Although we're sort of going to, yes, this is my point for today.
And so let's throw old Alexander Hamilton up there.
And because everybody knows they ought to read the Federalist Papers, right?
We all know that.
Yeah.
But it's not, we'll get to it eventually.
But today we're going to help people out because we're going to read a little bit of Federalist Papers number 30.
So Alexander Hamilton, who wrote almost all of the Federalist Papers, it was supposed to be a joint project.
The other guys just didn't do their assignments.
Didn't turn their work in.
He also was the first Treasury Secretary. And so, you know, his views
on the debt ceiling are important, not, you know, as both the first Treasury Secretary and also
as one of the framers of the Constitution. And so, you put up number, you put up Federalist
number 30, and I'll just read a couple of excerpts from this and get your take to see if there is
any ambiguity here about whether or not
the debt ceiling is unconstitutional. That's my take, that there really can be no such thing
as a debt ceiling given our constitution and our framework. And so Hamilton writes,
the federal government, quote, must embrace a provision for the support of the national
civil list for the payment of the national debts contracted or that may be contracted and in general for all those matters which will
call for disbursements out of the national treasury. Money is, he says, with propriety
considered as the vital principle of the body politic as that which sustains its life and motion
and enables it to perform its most essential functions.
A complete power, therefore, to procure a regular and adequate supply of it, as far as the resources of the community will permit, may be regarded as an indispensable ingredient
in every constitution.
From a deficiency in this particular, one of two evils must ensue.
Either the people must be subjected to continual plunder as a substitute for a more
eligible mode of supplying the public wants, or the government must sink into a fatal atrophy and,
in a short course of time, perish. And so from there, he goes on and he talks about,
okay, imagine that you're not allowing the government to have any access, any significant
access to resources. What happens when a war comes? So he writes,
to imagine that at such a crisis credit might be dispensed with would be the extreme of infatuation.
In the modern system of war, nations the most wealthy are obliged to have recourse to large
loans. A country so little opulent as ours must feel this necessity in a much stronger degree.
But who would lend to a government that prefaced its overtures for borrowing
by an act which demonstrated that no reliance could be placed on the steadiness of its measures
for paying? What he's saying there is that if you default on your loans, who's going to give you
more money? What kind of a country could you be if people don't trust your word. Like if you're setting your economic foundation on the idea
that at any moment you could just decide for some political reasons that you're not going to pay
back your debt, then you're going to be cast out basically of the international scene. And
the way he puts it is, quote, the loans it might be able to procure would be as
limited in their extent as burdensome in their conditions. They would be made upon the same
principles that users commonly lend to bankrupt and fraudulent debtors with a sparing hand at
enormous premiums. So what he's saying is like, you're not going to get rid of debt. The United
States is still going to borrow. But what it's going to do is it's going
to go out and borrow and people are going, okay, how's 25% sound? And then that creates a cycle
then because all of that, that's actually the cycle that Haiti got itself in because of the way
that France basically came back at them, that all of their revenue, something like three quarters at some
point of their revenue, was just going off the island to their creditors. And so when you do
that, then you don't have anything to invest in developing your own country. And so it seems
pretty clear just from that, and there's a little bit more we could get into, it seems pretty clear
from that, that Hamilton, the designer, you know, one
of the designers of the Constitution and the first Treasury Secretary would
scoff at the idea of a debt ceiling. That you could just, that Congress could just
say, you know what, we have appropriated money lawfully, but we are going to then
separately say that you can't come up with the money
in order to cover the appropriations that we lawfully created. Hamilton would be like,
that's no. We're not running a government that way. That's a joke. We're not doing that.
And the argument from the right would be the debt ceiling was sort of lawfully,
constitutionally imposed through the system of government. And what you're saying, though, I think raises the question of the 14th Amendment,
which was a huge debate over the course of the Obama administration. Bill Clinton, actually,
there was a debate in the Clinton administration. Clinton said, hey, I actually think, I've talked
to my lawyers, I think this clause- Clinton was ready to blow right through it. Actually,
we have that. Can you put up the final element? Yeah, there you go.
The validity of the public debt of the United States shall not be questioned.
That's the key part of it.
That's shall.
Everybody who's into government will tell you the difference between shall and any other word.
Like shall is the strongest word you can write into law.
It's like that's it.
Like this is it.
This is how it shall be.
Right.
Or how it shall not be.
Right.
So what do you do with that if you're Republicans?
The validity of the public debt of the United States shall not be questioned.
So then is the debt ceiling an opposite?
Speaking of American pessimism.
Yeah, what's your point today?
It's exactly that.
It's about American pessimism. What's your point today? It's exactly that. It's about American pessimism.
And this is a basically Ryan and I are going to be doing something a little less scripted as we go.
We go forward with the monologues maybe on a weekly basis.
Maybe sometimes we'll write it all out.
But just so that we can kind of talk through some of these issues in a more free flowing way.
I want to talk about David Brooks's recent essay in The Atlantic, in which he's basically saying,
if Americans feel pessimistic, they're wrong.
This pessimism that has descended
upon the American population is unwarranted.
And he gives a few reasons for that.
First, he says it's ahistorical.
He says, quote,
the first problem with all this pessimism
is that it's ahistorical.
Every era in American history
has faced its own massive challenges. And in every era, the air has been thick with gloomy
Jeremiah's warning of catastrophe and decline. Pick any decade in the history of this country
and you will find roiling turmoil. But in all those same decades, you will also find alongside
the chaos and prophecies of doom, energetic dynamism and leaping progress. Of course,
this is true that you always find these things alongside each other in the United States of America. He then goes on to cite
a Gallup poll where 17% of Americans said that America was on the right track in today versus
69% in 2000. Think about that. Personal satisfaction in the meantime, David Brooks points out,
your satisfaction with your personal life, that stayed pretty stable in the mid 80s. About 85%
of people say that they're personally satisfied with their own life. So where satisfaction with
the direction of the country plummets from 69% to 17%, you have people remaining relatively
satisfied with their own lives. Well, here's an important
counterpoint to that, no pun intended. Arthur Brooks has written about the general social
survey. He's also written about this in The Atlantic. He calls this one of the greatest
paradoxes of our time. All of the statistics that David Brooks rolls out on these reasons for
American optimism and dynamism, et cetera, many of them are correct. Not all of them are correct.
Many of them are correct. But Arthur Brooks points out that one of the biggest paradoxes is that as our material
comforts have increased, our happiness has decreased. And a great source to look for this
is at the General Social Survey, which has been tracking American happiness for a very long time.
And Brooks points out that a long-term gradual decline in happiness, So this rise in unhappiness, both a decline in happiness
and a rise in unhappiness, you can find in the General Social Survey from 1988 to the present.
So why on earth would that be happening alongside all of these trends and rising material
happinesses? And I think that's really where David Brooks is missing the point.
He's saying that this is distorting reality.
This is the second point that he makes,
that the pessimism is unwarranted
because things aren't all that bad.
Well, first, of course, on the ahistorical point,
maybe people are pessimistic because they're less happy.
Maybe they have all of these material comforts
and they're not making people happy.
Therefore, their pessimism is warranted.
Now, is it a distortion? Things are actually okay? This is what he says. The second problem
with the decline narrative is that it distorts reality. He goes on to say, you know, I'm no
Pollyanna. I basically think though that America today is objectively better than it was before,
but subjectively worse. Objectively better, but subjectively worse. So this isn't
the fault of the system. It's your fault for blaming the system when everything is good.
He says, we have much higher standards of living and many conveniences, but when it comes to how
we relate to one another, whether in the realm of politics, across social divides, or in the
intimacies of family and community life, distrust is rife. Bonds are fraying and judgments are harsh,
but that doesn't mean the future isn't going to be brighter than the present or that America is
in decline. The pessimists miss an underlying truth. The society can get a lot wrong as long
as it gets the big thing right. And that big thing is this, is if a society is good at unlocking
creativity, at nurturing the abilities of its people, then its ills can be surmounted. He talks
about how it's so much easier to get water now than it
was when you had to go, you just get it out of the tap now as opposed to go getting it out of the
well. Productivity is up. The price and quality of education compared to others in the world is up.
Long-term longevity trends are good, which I don't think is necessarily true.
We have innovation infrastructure. We have small businesses booming. We have carbon emissions down, economic expansion, cheaper goods,
and a small surge in manufacturing. This is ridiculous because he's cherry-picking statistics
that distort reality, right? You can cherry-pick statistics that show decline or an increase or
the fortunes of America sort of increasing.
But that's really not what's happening because I think the better statistics to look at is
you have a reversal of life expectancy at birth and mortality about 25 years in the past. We're
like basically around the mid to late 90s on both of those measures. That has not happened.
You saw a dip in that when you had the after World War I and with the flu epidemic, the flu pandemic in the late 1910s and around 1920. That did happen then. It didn't last that long. It started to tick back upwards. But what we're seeing right now is a huge drop. And it is not distorting reality to be pessimistic about that. It's not distorting
reality to look at happiness dipping. It's not distorting reality to say adult and childhood
obesity rates have doubled in 30 years. How much of our health and happiness is connected to that?
Things like heart disease, things like cancer, all of those things are directly in many ways
connected to those surging rates. We're talking about
doubling in just 30 years. We're talking about rising loneliness, rising addiction on some counts,
failing rates in marriage, births, religiosity. All of those things are associated in the United
States with happiness. So it makes sense that as those have declined, happiness has declined.
And David Brooks says, you're distorting reality. The system is fine. It's you
the problem is with. So he thinks it's top down, that it's not bottom up. And this is also just
totally conflating two different arguments, right? That reality can be trending bad, but you can
still have reason for optimism. And he's saying those things are mutually exclusive. But it is,
those are different arguments, right?
Things can be bad and you can still have reason for optimism, as I think we have probably more reason for optimism in this country than in many other countries.
Because we do still at present have the freedoms, I think, to correct the system.
But because we have the freedoms to correct the system doesn't mean the system isn't broken and it doesn't mean the system hasn't failed and that people are right to be pessimistic about that. And that's what he totally, totally misses.
And this is the elite myopia, right? That if you're experiencing hyper novelty as all of us.
All right. The hacker that you all know as Guccifer, his real name is Marcel Levar,
was recently released from a Pennsylvania prison after serving time for his various legendary exploits.
He's now back in Romania where he had launched his hacking career and was interviewed by my colleague at The Intercept, Sam Biddle.
Sam joins us now to tell us more about Marcel.
Sam, thanks so much for joining us.
My pleasure.
And so back when you were at Gawker, Guccifer.
So how did Guccifer get in touch with you and with Gawker back then?
Was there like an open tip line?
Was your email public?
And what was your interaction with him?
Were you going back and forth back then with him?
And then I want to get into who he is for people who don't remember.
Sure. So it's it's it's funny you mention that, because when I was interviewing him,
when I was finally speaking with him on the phone after all these years,
he said that he had the hardest time getting anyone in the media to notice him, to respond to any of his messages at all for a really long time.
He said he was basically just like spamming, not just Gawker,
but the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian,
every outlet he could find in the English speaking world and beyond.
He said that no one cared.
But yeah, he would send updates to Gawker and the Smoking Gun were his two favorite
outlets, probably because we responded.
Because you actually responded.
That's such a throwback, refreshing Gawker and the Smoking Gun back in 2009.
What were his messages like?
Did they look deranged in all caps and that sort of thing?
They would always start with, which I found to be very catchy, with Guccifer transmitting, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot.
Which was like, you know, much like the name itself, just, I think, a sort of stroke of self-branding brilliance.
But it was always very crude and sort of DIY in that, like the images he would share, which he stole out of people's email accounts.
You know, he watermarked them himself with this very crudely done, sort of look like it had been done in Microsoft Paint.
He would sign the images, I think, often with the spray paint can tool.
I'm just saying Kuchifer.
So, you know, this did not have the trappings of like a sophisticated intelligence operation, which, of course, it was not.
It was just a guy.
And that's what I'm glad Ryan asked about the Gawker thing, because that's one of the things I picked up in this interview, which is not just an excellent interview, but excellently
written. It's so interesting. And the arc of this man from someone who's sending ostensibly
weird emails to Gawker to someone who had a huge influence just from his computer guessing
passwords is incredible. So Sam, if you could catch people up on the OG Guccifer, this is not
Guccifer 2.0. This is a very different situation than how it, I guess, how it became, how it
evolved over the years. What's his backstory and what did you learn when sort of reconnecting with
him after all of these years and after all these changes in American and world politics?
Absolutely, yeah. So he was a taxi driver in Romania in a city called Arad,
which is about the size of Syracuse, sort of industrial town.
He has no technical training whatsoever, sort of just a computer amateur.
But he was fascinated by and remains fascinated by American politics and American – the power culture of the American elite.
So he literally just started reading their Wikipedia entries and guessing their passwords.
He had had a string of account break-ins with some Romanian political figures.
But in 2013, he started branching out significantly to the U.S.
and had an incredible string of, I think, something like 100 different targets, victims, and who's mostly AOL and Yahoo accounts he broke into.
And he was masterful at identifying people who were sort of adjacent to power,
like Dorothy Koch Bush, sister of George W. Bush. That's how we got the incredible George Bush
oil paintings that became a sensation and I think really unprecedented look into a former
president's psyche. And, you know, he also perhaps most famously broke into the email of Sidney
Blumenthal, a longtime Clinton advisor, which is how he,
I think, inadvertently revealed the fact that she had a private email account.
Oh, sorry. Yeah. Did he know that at the time? Because it's fascinating how that came out. So
Sidney Blumenthal basically was emailing with an account. I don't remember exactly,
something like HDR22 or something like that.
That's right.
At Clinton email or whatever.
Basically, it alerted the world to the fact that, oh, wait, Hillary Clinton has this personal email
and then more importantly has this private server, Clintonemail.com.
So what else is on that?
Did he notice that or was that just in the dump that was sent to you guys and then it was just figured out subsequently?
So he had shared a cache of emails with Gawker and also published sort of dumped on the internet. It wasn't exclusive to us. You know, I don't believe that he highlighted the fact of the email
in that initial outreach. I think that, you know, the emphasis at the time was,
here are messages from, you know, a close Clinton confidant, associate, advisor.
But I don't think that the existence, you know,
it was supposed to be about the substance of the messages,
not the sort of metadata, as it were, that included her contact,
her private contact.
And one of the interesting things you pick up on in your piece is that
there's this, he obviously always had this kind of quest for
notoriety, but he also kind of wants to be able to be a private person and to, I don't know,
absolve himself of wrongdoing. And he admits that it was wrong to get into people's property
without authorization, et cetera, et cetera. But Sam, how is he reckoning with going from a dude who's guessing people's
passwords to somebody who absolutely reshaped the world from behind his laptop, basically?
I think he's conflicted about it, which I think probably most people would be. I credit him for
being sort of transparently and authentically self-contradictory about it,
right? Like he is, in a sense, trying to have it, seemed like he was trying to have it both ways.
He would, you know, sometimes act contrite and then boastful. And he also, you know,
repeatedly downplayed his influence on recent history and then would take credit for things.
I think that going to prison in the United States for four years, over four years, is a generally horrible experience.
And to go through that as a foreigner, probably even more difficult. I think he is now, he seems sort of discombobulated
now back in Romania with this family that he spent eight years away from. I mean, his daughter
grew up without him because he spent a prison term in Romania and was then extradited to the US. So
he's been in behind bars in one country or
another for a long time. And I think that experience of just suddenly being back with
this family that you had been pulled away from for eight years is a really devastating one.
So it seemed to me like he was trying to sort of err on the side of being normal again, just being a nobody again.
You know, if I can play sort of armchair psychologist, I might say that sort of that seemed understandable to me after what he had been through.
He talked a little bit about his motive to you, looking at, you know, it involved the Iraq war and American decline and the Bush administration.
Talk a little bit about why he originally did this and how he now how he views his motive.
Sure. So, you know, it's interesting because when he first was reaching out to us at when he was reaching out to Gawker and other outlets,
his emails were in terms of any kind of motive or ideology, kind of incoherent.
It was a lot of references to like really, really worn out conspiracy theories,
like, you know, about the Illuminati, for example.
And like, it was really sort of like throwback stuff.
And, you know, sort of hard to take seriously.
But 10 years later, like I say in the piece,
he still is in a sense a conspiracy theorist
in that he thinks there is an elite pulling the strings behind the scenes,
but not in a way that is kooky the way Illuminati stuff is.
Yeah, as you mentioned, he says now that what he was trying to do all along was look for
essentially evidence of systemic corruption among the American elite.
And he says that's why he broke into the email of Colin Powell and Zadie Blumenthal
and Bushes and people who were famous in entertainment and so forth. He thought that
watching from Romania, the United States had lost its way. He described admiring the U.S. deeply as a Romanian living under
communism and talked about looking to the U.S. for guidance. And then in the 21st century,
seeing the U.S. as something no longer to be admired as a country that had sort of lost
its way. And he thought he would find an explanation
for what you call American decline, and what I think is the right term for that too, in these
emails. And he said openly on the phone to me, he said, it was a failure. I never found what I was
looking for. But that's what he says today was motivating him back then.
Such a great line at the end of the piece where you say,
Lazar is a conspiracy theorist, it seems, in the same way everyone became after 2016.
He's a man ahead of his time.
And helped to build the time.
I think so.
I mean, it's incredible the extent to which he has, he said that he spent a ton of time in prison reading.
But the books he was reading that I note in the piece are like these sort of memoirs of the the deep status yeah yeah right like like the the autobiographies of
like spy agency chiefs and like muller report uh cinematic universe people and like it was it was
these were all sort of like airport politics books that he
was just guzzling in prison and as a result you know he he sounds like someone who has been
watching um cnn or msnbc or fox for the past uh well probably less fox but you know someone someone
who's been watching uh trump russia coverage um obsess obsessively and tweeting about it for years and years.
Of course, he wasn't.
He was in prison.
But he has sort of taken on this mode that I think has become super popular in the U.S.
of believing in these great political conspiracies.
And as we've seen over the past several years,
those often end up being, you know,
if not as true as they were supposed to be at first,
you know, having elements of truth in them.
And one takeaway from the story, I think,
is that if your elementary school is on your Wikipedia page,
don't make that one of the answers to your email recovery question.
As you said in the piece, he was using email recovery questions of these super famous people as a way to hack into their emails.
So if it's publicly findable information, just pro tip right there.
I'm going to check your webpage.
Use two-factor login.
Two-factor, yes.
Sam, thank you so much.
My pleasure.
Thanks for having me.
Well, Ryan, we started the show with Davos and we're ending on this note about Guccifer and how
he was able to guess the passwords of sort of the Davos set and change the course of world politics
by doing that behind his laptop screen in Romania. He got locked up for years. He comes back out.
And what we've seen transpire in the years since is
this sort of desperate clinging to power. And that was sort of a theme of today's show.
I think that's fair. Actually, a coherent show. How about that?
Actually, a coherent show. Yeah, we can tie it all together.
Don't worry.
Yeah, don't get used to that. Well, we'll see you back here next week, Wednesday. As you can tell, we're here on Wednesdays these days.
Yeah, it's Wednesdays.
It's good to be here on Wednesdays.
There's so much, so much news.
So we'll see you then.
All right.
See you later.
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