Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 12/08/22: China's Zero Covid, Twitter File Revelations, Immigration Reform, Trump Organization, Identity Politics Pushback, GOP Infighting, Julian Assange & MORE!

Episode Date: December 8, 2022

Ryan and Emily fill in for Breaking Points to discuss China's zero Covid, Twitter File controversy, immigration reform, chaos in Peru, a foiled coup in Germany, guilty verdict for Trump organization and MORE!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/Ryan Grim: https://badnews.substack.com/ Emily Jashinsky: https://thefederalist.com/author/emilyjashinsky/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it means the absolute world to have your support. What are you waiting for? Become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Welcome to Breaking Points. This is not Counterpoints. You're not being deceived. Right. So I guess I'm Ryan Grimm. I'm filling in for Sagar on this side. This is Crystal Ball.

This is Crystal Ball over here. I've been sharpening my anti-weed talking points. I'm going to fill in for Sagar respectfully. I would love to hear you argue against weed. I would love to hear it. A lot of people are feeling high right now. They're like, wait a minute. It just said that's Crystal and Sagar. I would love to hear you argue against weed. I would love to hear it. A lot of people are like feeling high right now. They're like, wait a minute. It just said that's Crystal and Sagar and that's definitely not Crystal and Sagar. We have a big show to get through today and we're going to start with China. So the protests in China are yielding significant

results. The Chinese government is saying that it's going to be rolling back its zero COVID policy. If you could put up A1 here. And also we can promise that no digital picket lines were crossed in the cropping of this New York Times article because it was done yesterday before the Times walkout. They did walk out, right? Like today is their digital strike. Yeah. Although admittedly, I would, that's a digital picket line I would probably cross. Oh, wait, if I'm, if I'm representing Sagar, he would have walked right across that picket line, right? Well, no, Sagar's pro-worker, but is he? Well, yeah, but you can be pro-worker without supporting this particular guild, yes.

So you pick and choose your unions. No, solidarity says you got to support any union for any reason. It does, it does, it does, it does. So anyway, so as the New York Times and many others are reporting that Chairman Xi Jinping, under pressure, is announcing that he's softening some of his zero COVID regulations. This comes after protests had broken out around a Foxconn factory, but also spread all across the country. There was a lot of attempt to kind of minimize it to a labor dispute between the workers and Foxconn, one that revolved partly around pay and significantly around conditions. Like the workers there were saying that they were, that, hey, you say you've got the zero COVID policies, but we're actually, it's not, these aren't completely safe conditions.

All at the same time, there are these draconian rules being put into place where you're locking workers in their dorms endlessly, you know, just handing kind of noodles through the door. The recent wave of protests started because Uyghur Muslims were actually forcibly locked into a building that caught fire and 10 of them died. At least, right. At least 10. Yeah. Right. And so this has been a huge part of China's zero COVID policy. We've seen some striking videos over the last couple of years, literally of buildings being sealed when there are outbreaks. And it seemed like the dam was starting to open up. It was really like the foundation was being cracked. And in fact, it seems that that's also true. Now, an interesting element of this is that there's a question of

whether this is a response to the protests or a response to the business interests that have been hampered by the protests. The reason I think it's the protests is that that's the much more proximate event. The business interests have been getting hurt by this. So actually, I mean, there's two sides to it. On the one hand, where zero COVID has been successful, it has allowed entire cities and regions to operate like New Zealand was, like with no COVID, like actually zero COVID. And so in those cities, it was actually good for business because everybody's just going about business as completely as usual. But then if a couple COVID cases would come in there, then the entire thing would get locked down and you'd see entire sections of the economy and then the global economy kind of grind to a halt. And you were seeing that in fits and spurts over the last two years, and it didn't persuade Xi to change course. Whereas at the Fifth Party Congress, he again reaffirmed his support for zero COVID. And since

then, the strikes, I think, really rocked the country. And I think it was because they turned from kind of issue-focused ones to party and government-focused ones. You started seeing, for the first time, a lot of down with the CCP, down with Xi. China historically, since Tiananmen, let's say, has developed what I've seen people call, it sounds like an oxymoron, but it's not quite, what they call responsive authoritarianism. What that means is you don't get any say in the way that this country is run democratically. This is an authoritarian government. We're the authority. We tell you what's up. But we're going to allow some protests. And so if you don't like the construction of a mall in this particular part of your town, you could protest

that. And Chinese do. Those types of protests are common around the country. And often they might punish the person that organized the protests just to show that, just to keep people confused about where the lines are, what you're able to do. So that's why they call it responsive authoritarianism, which is kind of ridiculous, but also if we're going to study authoritarianism, we should identify the different flavors of it. This became different. This was like, we're not trying to get you to stop a dam project. We want the entire government to fall. And so at that point, you can either kind of violently crack down around the country, which they did some of. You can round up all of the people that you catch in your mass surveillance, which they did some of too. But then you can also kind of give a little bit. Yeah. so Xi Jinping had just doubled down on this.

You mentioned that he was just reelected by the party Congress to a third term just back in October. And it was a show of force. It was a doubling down on zero COVID in particular. And now The Guardian is reporting last week road and rail shipments in China dropped by 36 percent. Chinese shipping to the U.S. has continued to decline and is down 34% compared with earlier just this year. Car manufacturers are seeing a shortage of supply from China. This is like, Apple was the really big case study because of what happened at the Foxconn plant in central China. And a lot of folks saw that there was an employee who described it to CNN,

tragically, as, quote, a river of blood. And there were videos that managed to escape the country of people being beaten just for protesting the zero COVID policy in Foxconn's plant. That is the number one supplier of iPhone parts. And that has caused a huge problem with Apple's holiday sales. It's like a 30 percent decline in iPhone supply, something to that extent right now. And Apple has had this really friendly, longstanding relationship with China. And so to your point, Ryan, is it the case that it's the business interest being impacted by the protests? So protests of zero COVID, this lack of just sort of going along with it, saying it's going to end at some point, it's going to end at some point. Well, now the Chinese economy is really bad. People have been enduring these waves of lockdowns for a couple of years. Xi Jinping has doubled down on it. And so

then you see this bubble to the surface. And Xi Jinping realizes the supply chains that come out of China that he has benefited from, profited from, and has tried to use to stabilize his authority and society, if you put a crack in that foundation, then I think it all starts to crumble. It's sort of a house of cards. If the supply chain, if having that much control over sort of the global supply chain is the foundation. Then you start to see problems. And I feel like that's where the crack started to grow. Yeah. And it cuts to the foundations of the social contract that the CCP has with the Chinese population, which is we're going to oversee the greatest economic expansion in world history. We're going to pull a half a

billion people out of poverty. We're going to do some of it by tinkering with poverty statistics, but we are genuinely going to transform this country. You compare what China looked like in the 1950s to what it looks like today. It outpaced any type of industrialization or modernization ever in world history. And even in a lot of the rural areas, they're starting to get some of the basic comforts of civilization that, let's say, like rural areas of Russia don't have right now. And so keeping a kind of rural population that is seeing massive economic growth happy is a little different than now that you have this significant middle class population in China, which is growing up with expectations of things continuing to get better. That might sound very familiar here to the United States.

Every generation in the United States after World War II felt like, all right, things are going to be better for my kids and things are going to be better for their kids. And when people stopped having that faith, that's when you started seeing a lot of discontent here in the United States. And so I think she's very nervous about the potential of that to then feed into the unrest. And actually, the Sun, take it for what it's worth, it's just tabloid. But you've seen other reports like this coming from people who are claiming some connection to the Communist Party orbit saying that Xi is at risk here, is significantly at risk. boss for life, that he was going to run China as long as he wanted. And now all of a sudden, you have people speculating that because of all of the turmoil, who knows? Now, I'm curious for your take on this. Modelers, epidemiological modelers, and we can put up A3, are estimating that if the winter wave hits and you have rapidly eased COVID restrictions, you could see up to a million

deaths. They talked about 20,000 a day or something in three major cities. A significant part of this is on Xi. Because if you were going to do a zero COVID policy while at the same time preparing your population to ease out of a zero COVID policy into a post-COVID zero world. Then the civil liberties restrictions that are so draconian, welding people in their house, taking toddlers away from their kids would not be justified, but you could at least see the logic behind it. Like we're going to lock this down while we get ready for the next phase. They didn't do the get ready for the next phase part. Vaccine uptake among even the elderly is trash, which is, I can't understand that. How do they have the authority to weld somebody into their apartment, but they can't figure out how to get old people

to take the jab? And their hospital situation, their public health situation, contact tracing, like the basics are not set up for a wave of the type that they might get if they significantly relax zero COVID. Yeah. And the other thing is they have, from what we know, I mean, again, a model like that is really difficult for me because there's so much we don't know about the Chinese population in COVID. What we have an inkling of is that immunity is lower and that the vaccine is slightly less effective. And so, yeah, I don't doubt that.

And they're older. But at the same time, we have seen, so these are like very draconian lockdown policies. And I don't know that we have a perfect apples to apples of what we experienced here. That said, we're even seeing this being implemented unevenly already. So this is from CNN. In Beijing, authorities on Wednesday said a health code showing a negative COVID-19 test would still be required for dining in at restaurants or entering some entertainment venues, which is in conflict with the national guidelines that were released on Wednesday, which was it was a 10 point plan, keeps some some some of the restrictions, but gets rid of things like mass testing and allowing live between their shifts were, I mean, it was squalid. That's at best squalid. So this is all hard to, it's hard to actually totally know what's happening in China. But we do know, at the very least, this is a

dramatic pivot. And we know that the economic implications for the United States and for China, for Europe and for China are on the line. And the way that this progresses could really have an effect on the supply chains. It could, yeah. Yes. And also, if they're not careful, will lead to, as they described, a wave of death because they're not prepared for it. This could be done in a responsible and safe way, or safe as possible. It's still a pandemic. There are no good options. But it doesn't seem like that. And there might have been good options in the beginning, but the Chinese government didn't do it.

And that goes back to that term, responsive authoritarianism. Responsiveness is relative. Like a genuinely responsive government would be able to adapt to public pressure faster and to be able to then- Would be willing. And would be willing to. If it was truly responsive. Right. Literally responsive.

Right. Actually responsive. Yeah. Speaking of China, let's move on to Elon Musk. Tesla surely will be impacted by what we just talked about. Oh, yes. A big factory over in Wuhan. Elon Musk, if we could put up the first B1 here. Some tweets from Matt Taibbi, who has obviously been going through the so-called Twitter files since last week. And this, again, the Twitter files have Twitter completely divided. It has the media completely divided with so many folks saying, this is nothing. This is Matt Taibbi totally over-hyping this information and acting. I saw one tweet saying basically this was the right's version of Russiagate.

And of course, it's not just the right that's concerned about this. And it's not anywhere near the massive conspiracy that Russiagate was. It's indeed an extremely important story. Now, what's important about it is that it does confirm a lot of what people suspected. So it's not entirely new so much as it is filling in the background of what a lot of people like. The broad contours, I think, were understood and were known when it came to Twitter suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story in October of 2020. The New York Post story, which if you remember, you couldn't even direct message to somebody the day that it came out. If you tried to direct message it to a friend, you literally couldn't do that. So it's now become clear, as Taibbi reported yesterday, that Jim Baker, who, what does Taibbi describe him as? Something of a zealot of Russiagate, who went from the FBI after overseeing Russian collusion, goes from the FBI,

was involved in the Alpha Bank hoax, which the Intercept at the time, I think it was Lee Fong, had a great debunking of while the rest of the media was taking the bank, that the Trump campaign had a direct link to the Russian Alpha Bank, which was supposed to be kind of a smoking gun showing the collusion. It made absolutely no sense. Like they'd set some server up in the Trump organization that was like sending secret messages back to Moscow. It was full blown like tinfoil hat then. And it was being repeated by media outlet after media outlet. But it turned out to not be true. And Jim Baker was involved. And I believe he set up the meeting where Michael Sussman tried to plant that story. And turns out, this is the news that Taibbi broke,

Jim Baker was overseeing the release of the Twitter files without the knowledge of new CEO, Elon Musk. And Matt Taibbi and Barry Weiss, I guess, uncovered this as they were looking through the files. It said Jim. It said Jim. And Barry said, Jim who? And they're like, Baker. Oh.

That guy. And so, yeah, it turned out that's what was going on here. Let's put up B2. Jack Dorsey, former CEO, gets in on it. And he says, if the goal is transparency to build trust, why not just release everything without filter and let people judge for themselves, including all discussions around current and future actions? Make everything public now. And Elon Musk replied to at Jack and said, most important data was hidden from you too, and some may have been deleted, but everything we find will be released. That is key because it

means what we have been learning from the Twitter files has gone through this filter of somebody who's malfeasance. Who's motivated, yeah. Yeah, I mean, even what we have seen, I think, made Jim Baker already look bad that he was overseeing basically an FBI narrative. Remember, even Joe Biden cited that 50 former intelligence officials said the laptop story in the New York Post had all of the hallmarks of Russian disinformation. He cited that in a debate. Did Baker sign that letter? That's a good question. That is a really good question.

We should look at that right now. Not shocking. Yeah, that wouldn't be shocking at all. But the point is he's overseeing this at the time. And Twitter decides to side with the intelligence community and say, because this looks like Russian disinformation, you can't even direct message it, let alone post it on our platform. And here comes Jim Baker, once again, filtering. And per Elon Musk's tweet, actually potentially hiding and deleting evidence of malfeasance on the part of Twitter. Potentially, though, we need to see the receipts for Elon. Because I'm reminded of just a couple weeks ago,

he created an entire news cycle around the idea that the App Store, that Apple's App Store was going to take Twitter off for X, Y, Z. Yes, yes. Because they don't like free speech or whatever. And then he visits with Tim Cook, Tim Apple, over at Apple. And that was wrong. The most generous interpretation is that it was a miscommunication and that there might have been some automated message that Elon Musk misinterpreted. That's being extraordinarily generous.

So he spun this up. Now, if you are a Twitter employee, a Twitter executive, who oversaw a policy that the incoming leadership doesn't like, you are motivated to cover up what your role in that was. Like that's, we don't know that they did that, but that is, that clearly aligns the incentives against transparency. And so you also certainly should have somebody who wasn't involved in the original decision-making vetting those documents. And I like Jack's point. Why vet them at all? If you want to be transparent, you can scrub people's phone numbers, but publish everything. Forget, like... Do it like WikiLeaks style. Just WikiLeaks.

Just put it all up. That's not how corporations tend to behave. And so they're running up against all sorts of culture. Send Jim Baker a phishing link. Right. See what happens. Tell him to change his password. I'm kidding.

Jim Baker did not sign on to the letter from the 50 former intelligence officials. But even more powerful Jimss like Jim Clapper. Right. Michael Hayden signed it, of course. Yeah, and this is an important story because we've also learned Yul Roth, who clashed with Elon Musk, is now out of Twitter, had been meeting with federal law enforcement agencies in the election year. And ultimately, again, we'd heard from Mark Zuckerberg that he'd had conversations with the FBI who said basically, be on alert. What we know is not that it was specific to the Hunter Biden story, but before the Biden laptop story dropped, they said, be on alert for anything that could be Russian disinformation. The New York

Post story drops and the former intelligence officials, 50 of them, come out and say, this looks like Russian intelligence. It turned out, of course, that's not the case. Multiple news outlets have verified the contents of the laptop, not the entire contents of the laptop, but much of the contents of the laptop and much of the damning contents of the laptop that show, again, potential, really, potentially compromising relationships. No, not even potentially, very compromising relationships between Hunter Biden and business interests in other countries, including China. And you can add others to the list. Obviously, everybody knows about the high-profile example of Ukraine, but it doesn't stop there. There's also Mexico. There's all kinds of stuff on there, and that's what he was doing when he was lobbying. And meanwhile, we have discovered some speech and assembly rights that Elon Musk is less supportive of, and that is the janitors at Twitter headquarters who went on strike protesting

for better working conditions. Recently, he responded by ending the contract with the striking janitors. Done. Just struck him down. We have an element for that, right? Oh, yeah. That's the last one. Actually, the last two up there. Yeah, B4. You can actually see what it looks like. B4 and B5, it's how it started, how it's going. Right. They form a picket line and Elon Musk just terminates them.

We do want to move- And by the way, Elon Musk is sort of famously anti-union. And so he's coming into a unionized workplace, but he's famously not allowed Tesla workers to unionize. And so that creates, it's obviously a huge culture clash for Silicon Valley on many, many layers. And this is obviously one of them. And I think he knows that. He's aware of that and wants to be, especially in these early days that have been frenzied and chaotic to say the least, he wants to make an example and to put his stamp on the company as the eyes of the world are sort of watching. And in the climate bill, he famously fought legislation that would have given subsidies to unionized electric vehicle companies. And with Joe Manchin's help, he was able to get that provision out so that all companies can get them.

We do have some breaking news and some really good news that we want to move to next. Brittany Griner has been released from prison in Russia. I can't remember how. She's been in for months at this point. She's the WNBA basketball star. Since February. Since February. So, yeah, nearly a year.

Nearly a year. Who was leaving the country. She had played some games in Russia, was leaving the country. She's in line. And at customs, they pick up a cartridge of weed. Yeah, vape oil. Some weed vape oil. Yeah.

Obviously for personal use. Right. And they charge her with like trafficking and distribution. We do that often here in the United States that where, you know, if somebody is a daily user of something, they're going to have like a week supply or a two week supply with them. And we'll see that and we'll say, well, that's trafficking. That's intent to distribute. Russia did the same thing to her, recognizing the geopolitical value of taking, you know, what amounted to an American hostage,

but moving her through the Russian criminal justice system and saying, hey, you know, this is our system, it's going to work out. But she didn't have a weak supply. I mean, I think she had a very small. Small. Well, a weak supply can be pretty small, too. Well, sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But this was obviously— This was obviously for personal use. Yeah, yeah. Yes. Clearly. And so, according to NBC News, Brittany Griner's wife, Cheryl Griner, was in the Oval Office with Biden, and the two were able to speak with her by phone. That's according to a senior White House official reported by Kyle Griffin here on NBC News. She was facing more than a 10-year sentence and had recently been transferred to kind of a long-term prison.

A penal colony. Yeah, just an absolute nightmare situation. Right. Like a Midnight Express all over again. So yeah, this is breaking, as we are talking to you. Except in Midnight Express, that character was actually trafficking significant amounts of heroin. Right. This is nothing. Right, right.

A little bit of vaping. And so, yeah, as we were talking, the White House posted a tweet where President Biden and Vice President Harris are in the Oval Office with Brittany Griner's wife. And President Biden says, or whoever tweeted this says, moments ago, I spoke to Brittany Griner. She is safe. She is on a plane. She is on her way home. This is a deal that was negotiated with the release of an arms dealer. Oh, Boot, Victor Boot. Victor Boot, that's right. Victor Boot, known as, quote, the merchant of death. So the swap of him for Griner had been sort of in the works or part of this conversation since at least May is what we know. And the Biden administration here obviously was able to negotiate that. He was in the middle, I'm reading from Fox News right now, of a 25-year sentence in federal prison after he was convicted of conspiracy to kill Americans relating to the support of a Colombian terrorist organization.

Yeah, and I know a prisoner who was held with Victor Boot, who's been corresponding with me about this, and he said that boot has been and I credit credit Martin Gottesfeld who for this news if boot has been an extraordinarily bad health in in the CMU I think has he'd been in terror out terror Hote which is a maximum security prison in which you know communications are heavily heavily managed and limited oh he's the Lord of War guy. Yeah, so he's this globetrotting arms dealer who was kind of blown up into this larger-than-life type of figure. But when you look into him a little more, he's just kind of like a run-of-the-mill arms dealer.

That, like, would Surt would... Just your neighborhood arms dealer? Yeah, justmill arms dealer. That would serve... Just your neighborhood arms dealer? Yeah, just neighborhood arms dealer. The boy next door. That would service conflicts, and sometimes both sides of conflicts, that the military-industrial complex or the legitimate above-board arms suppliers

were either legally or politically blocked from supporting. So he would be used by intelligence services all over the world, but also by rebels, by government forces. But like I said, he was blown up into mythical proportions when really he was just an arms dealer. And he's in failing health. And in failing health. Maybe we'll go back to dealing arms. But it's not like if you take an arms dealer out of the sky, all of a sudden nobody has any way of moving arms. Somebody else is going to criticize the Biden administration for giving up this guy.

I don't think that allowing Victor Boot back into the world actually makes the world less safe. I think we're already in an extraordinarily unsafe world with unchecked arms flowing across borders. And this isn't going to make it like that's happening any faster, especially if the reports of his health ailments are what they are. It makes it even harder to kind of fly into these remote locations and make your little arms deals. The media's coverage of Brittany Griner's situation, this was a huge story throughout the last year. I mean, throughout the last 10 months, it's been a huge focus of media attention. So just on a political level, a big win for the Biden administration. Again, I'm sure that he will get criticized for this, but at least from the public relations perspective, you can see in the initial tweet

from the White House where you have President Biden hugging Brittany Griner's wife and you're saying we're bringing her home for Christmas etc etc they feel like that's a big win yeah I it it warms my heart like it's great I like it's it was just tragic to think of somebody just completely innocent so what she smoked a little vape like okay like who cares uh Vladimir Putin yeah Yeah, Vladimir Putin. And he doesn't. That guy doesn't. Like, it just kills me to see, like, civilians caught up in this stuff. To think of her, like, going to bed and waking up every morning in a penal colony for utterly no reason. Yeah. So, if it takes a sick Victor Boot going to some villa somewhere in Russia and living out his days there. Or, you know,

Victor Boot also has more enemies around the world, I'm sure. He might have been safer in some ways. He really might have been. At CMU. So we'll see how post-prison life is for Victor Boot. I wouldn't guarantee that it's going to be just a day at the beach.

So you were sort of casual about it, but I think your piece of reporting from the person you're corresponding with is really critical that he's in poor health. I haven't seen that in the national media reporting as international press as we've just been discussing this. It's breaking, of course, but I hadn't seen that yet. That seems to be a pretty critical piece of this puzzle. Yeah. And that was reported to me by, so his name is Martin Gottesfeld. He is, he's serving a, he's a hacker accused of being a member of Anonymous who, who went after Boston Children's Hospital during one of their fundraising drives in order, in order, in order to protest the way that they were treating a young girl. So you can Google Martin Gottesfeld and read up on the case that he was protesting. And he was offered a plea,

which would have had him out of prison by now. He refused it because he argued, I wasn't the criminal here. Boston Children's Hospital is the one who was doing wrong. I was trying to raise awareness for this. He had hoped that Trump would pardon him. If he was appealing now to Trump with children's hospitals less popular among the right, maybe he would have done better, but saying that you hacked a children's hospital isn't a great first line when you're looking for a commutation or a pardon. Yeah, it's not an easy one. So in any event, he's serving out his time in a CMU, a communications management unit. He was in the same one as Victor Boot. He was also with Chapo. He wrote a piece for The Intercept about

his time with Chapo in the Brooklyn, I think it was the Brooklyn federal prison there. Oh, I read that. Yeah. Well, let's move on to the immigration news this week. It was reported first in the Washington Post that Senators Kyrsten Sinema and Tom Tillis, so that's a Democrat and Republican respectively, have been kicking around a framework for a bipartisan immigration deal, which comes at a pretty crucial time for the Biden administration because Title 42 is set to expire, which is a big deal on both the left and the right. Title 42 is that Trump-era policy that allowed the United States at the border to turn away people seeking asylum without a chance to enter the United States because of the pandemic and because of the health concerns related to the pandemic. Now, the loose framework that is being circulated by Senators Sinema and Tillis would include a pathway to citizenship for the Dreamers.

That's 2 million of them. And then there's roughly, this is per Axios, $25 to $40 billion in increased funding for Border Patrol. That is a huge range. I'm not even sure that's helpful, the $25 to $40 billion, which would include a commitment to hiring more agents and increasing their pay. It would extend Title 42 until there's a formal plan in place to stop an expected surge of migrants at the border. Again, that's per Axios. And then the last bullet point in the Axios report, if you're watching, you can see it, is just, this is my favorite, an overhaul of the asylum system to prevent abuse of the law. The asylum system, to just say it's an overhaul of the asylum system to prevent abuse of the law. The asylum system, to just say it's an overhaul of the asylum system

to prevent abuse of the law. All of this, of all of those different bullet points, you can have a highly funded border patrol. You can have Title 42. You can give the dreamers a pathway to citizenship. If you don't overhaul the asylum system, this will mean absolutely nothing. And that's what's, I think, been really misunderstood about Title 42, which sounds cruel, denying anybody entrance into the United States when they're claiming asylum, which means they're seeking refugee status. A lot of people have still been able to get asylum through different bureaucratic channels over the course of the pandemic. That has actually not stopped it. But what Title 42, as it has been sort of floated, it's going to go. It's been working its way through the court systems.

What that does is bring more migrants onto the sort of pathway up through South and Central America into Mexico because cartels are telling them. There's an open disinformation campaign, a coordinated disinformation campaign by cartels who use the Title 42 basically as bait, as the potential end of Title 42 as bait. And they use these other bureaucratic channels that the United States government negotiates in different parts of Mexico. It's completely uneven depending on where you are at the border. You could be in Tijuana, you could be in Matamoros or Reynosa, and who's getting through and why is totally different. And sometimes there's absolutely no rhyme or reason for it. People

get different papers. I've looked at some of the papers in these border facilities. Haitian migrants will get totally different papers from each other with different court dates, et cetera, et cetera. So we've seen a huge surge in immigration this year. We've seen a huge surge in illegal immigration. There's a stunning number of known gotaways. The Biden administration's policy is failing. They're nervous about the end of Title 42 because they know that it's going to cause an influx. There's already an influx because people are getting through these different bureaucratic channels. Sometimes it takes staying and sleeping in the streets in the border town for a little bit to be able to hire a lawyer.

And as long as you can hire a lawyer, that's the sort of sentiment among migrants because it's correct, you can find a way. You can find one program or another to get into the United States. So I think an overhaul of the asylum system sounds great. The fact that this plan is being kicked around with no serious ideas of what that overhaul would look like and it's just kind of more money, it seems unserious to me and it seems unlikely to pass. The overhaul, tell me if this is what you've been gathering, the overhaul to me seems to be more facilities, more administrators, basically more staff in order to move people through faster coupled with, they say, more effective mechanisms for removal of people who fail at the process.

Because right now, you don't really go through the process until years. And if you fail at the process, you can pretty much stay. You can stay. I mean, unless something goes badly wrong for you. You can stay, especially if you're in a sanctuary city, you can stay as long as you're not on the wrong side of law enforcement, you're fine. And even if you're on the wrong side of law enforcement, as long as you're not too far on the wrong side of law enforcement, you're probably not going to get looped up in it. Progressives seem ambivalent about this entire thing because of the Title IV elements, but not totally opposed to it either. From now, the fact that Stephen Miller, for instance, is losing his mind over it, I think, probably ended up increasing progressive

support for it. Like, okay, well, if Stephen Miller thinks it's this bad, then maybe there's something in here, you know, worth salvaging. And all of the money that, one of the problems is that all the money spent, that would be spent to like staff up, it's not clear they can actually staff up. Trump added what? Wanted to add what? 5,000 border patrol agents, right? He's added like 150 or something. Like the number of people who can pass a drug test and who are otherwise qualified to serve as a border patrol in the areas where they need border patrol agents. Well, a border patrol agent just died yesterday in pursuit of people crossing the border. His ATV hit an object, I believe it was a fence, as he was in pursuit of people who were running across the border. The Border Patrol job has gotten increasingly dangerous because, again, coyotes are, they have industrialized these pathways, like through the Darien Gap into Central America, then up into Mexico, and they have bought off law enforcement, the federales,

all throughout Mexico. And that means they basically own certain checkpoints. It means that this is an industrialized trafficking system, and migrants who are desperate for a better life are coached on what to say to get asylum in the United States. And again, like, it is heartbreaking to talk to folks who are in this situation, and they are being preyed on by cartels. If you talk to them, they have dealt with attempted rapes, actual sexual assaults. They have dealt with violence, kidnappings. They have just been kidnapped and put in safe houses and then forced to sort of call family to get money to be released and being used as human ransom by cartels. But the only way to cross now is by coyotes. There's some people who try to do it without. And if you try to do it without—

More dangerous to get caught by a coyote than a border patrol. One migrant that I talked to over the summer, he got across after, and this is, I'll talk about him in a second. He got across and called another reporter I was with in the middle of the night. He was in the United States and was terrified that the cartels were onto him. This was like happening at three or four in the morning. And one of the reasons that I wanted to talk about this is because if just a couple of weeks ago, we can put up the next element from this block C2, there was reporting, the Biden administration basically said, was going to begin deporting Cuban migrants who had crossed illegally into the U.S. from Mexico

on flights back to Cuba because they had secured an agreement with the Cuban government to take them back. Now, this person that I, this particular Cuban migrant that I'm thinking of had been, he showed us a mark. It's always hard to verify the stories, but he showed us a mark actually on his shoulder. He had been beaten during the July 11th protests, not even for protesting, but for going outside to watch the protest, raised a bunch of money, flew down into South America, made his way up through Central America, crossed twice, and got sent back. And the first time because Cubans had no longer been able to stay under Title 42. And that had happened the day before he crossed.

And he was so desperate to be in the United States. It's just incredible the way our asylum system is broken, that funneling more money into it is not the answer. It would be helpful to be able to process more asylum claims, but the bottom line is our asylum law just needs more clarity because right now it is really specific. You have to be fleeing prosecution from a particular group. So that means you have to be fleeing basically like threats of political violence or you have to be fleeing because of racial discrimination, sexual discrimination, whatever it is. And it creates this entire lack of clarity that you talk to all kinds of folks.

A lot of the Haitian migrants that are crossing the border right now, they're economic migrants. They haven't lived in Haiti since, in many cases, the earthquake of 2010. They've had fairly decent lives in Brazil and Chile and Mexico. They'll tell you this, but they're really desperate to get into America because they know that they can have even better lives there. urgent asylum claims, that because the asylum system is so confusing and so easily gummed up with all kinds of different bureaucratic problems, there's just no way for people who need immediate refuge to immediately get it. Speaking of gumming up, if this doesn't get through in the lame duck, the chance that McCarthy brings it to the floor is basically zero. So it has to happen now. What are the chances that, as far as you understand, of there being 10 Republicans? I could see some, Tom Tillis, who negotiated this with Sinema, obviously is one. So where do you get nine more senators? Is it possible that there could be 10 Republicans on this? I tried to do

the math and could only get to five or six that I think would be easy. That always seems to be, yeah, you can get to five or six Republicans, but getting past that is so hard. And I think that's why if you look at this, the bullet points are a pretty sweet pot for Republicans already, like funding border patrol, keeping Title 42, and overhauling asylum. Those are three things that Republicans would really get on board with. It's the dreamers that'll be tough. Just to give two million kids, people who've been here since they were two or whatever, like citizenship, that's their red line. It's politically impossible for Republicans to do anything called amnesty. I wonder, we keep saying, you know, Trump, what Trump showed. Trump said he would give amnesty to the Tiers. He did. And Trump also showed us so many times that our understanding of what's possible and impossible politically is wrong.

Right. You can't make fun of John McCain for getting shot down. Right. In the middle of a presidential campaign. That doesn't mean. Oh, turns out you can. This is what I'm going to talk about a little bit in my monologue. But, like, that doesn't mean national Republicans have internalized that lesson.

Yeah. So, I think it's. Well, if they're watching, wake up, people. You'll be Yeah. So I think they're watching. Wake up, people. You'll be OK. Give the dreamers some citizenship. Get all your goodies. You can do it. Speaking of South America, let's move on to Peru, where the country is in turmoil right now. They did their own little attempt at January 6th. There are some parallels because actually the president who was ousted yesterday in a vote, a majority vote, was like 101 out of 130 members. He basically said this was a coup by investigations. He was like, this is a new kind of coup. And that, we were talking before the show started, I was like, that's pretty interesting.

Because you see that really happening in the weaponization of special councils now that's at a rate that seems incredible. And you could maybe go back to Whitewater. You could probably go to Watergate and say something like that. But I think we're at a different level here. And obviously, it's not apples to apples. But that is one of the more interesting elements of the story is the president who was elected in that pink wave that got a decent chunk of media attention here in the United States, had been up to a lot of reforms, increased minimum wage, and tried to do all kinds of different things in Peru, was ousted by a majority vote yesterday amid all of these investigations into allegations of corruption, helping family members, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. So this is Pedro Castillo, who was a poor campesino. Still to this day has, or as of yesterday, still had roughly the same approval rating out in the countryside in Peru. He'd lost a couple points, but not many. It was in the cities where his support really collapsed.

South America has the kind of reverse left-right axis as we do here in Bolivia, for instance. The support for Evo Morales and his party and the new president, Luis Arce, all comes from the countryside, whereas the wealthier cities are the right-wing elements, whereas we kind of have reversed that in a way here and in Europe and in some other industrialized Western countries. So Pedro Castillo, though, was a populist more than he was kind of an old school leftist. And if you're going to be a populist, you also have to be able to govern. And the problem with populism is sometimes you get a genuinely a populist, you also have to be able to govern. And the problem with populism is

sometimes you get a genuinely authentic populist. And what that can sometimes mean is that they have an enormous number of grifters kind of attached to them. And his family and his inner circle were in fact, now every government is corrupt to some degree or another. The public has less appetite, maybe ironically or paradoxically, for the type of petty corruption that actually kind of ends up hurting the population, the public less, but is more obvious and in your face. Like if you are corrupt in the American way, where you've got lobbyists who are pushing for trillion-dollar weapons systems or multi-billion-dollar weapons systems that don't work within a trillion-dollar Pentagon budget that can't be audited, that is going to cause a lot more pain for the local population, the Americans, and also then around the world when they have to be used so that they can go make new ones. But that's kind of the legalized corruption on a mass scale. It's when somebody

gets caught with like $50,000 of cash in their freezer that people really lose their minds. Or handouts to their family. Like I said, really obvious, not convoluted, just clear-cut personal corruption. And like his daughter got caught in one of those petty corruption scandals. Police came to arrest her in the palace. She was able to like escape out of the palace. And then Castillo was like, real shame. We lost all of the surveillance equipment and we have no idea where the daughter is. It was like just clownish levels of things. But it is true that the right wing was like investigating him for the purpose

of ousting him. This was the third impeachment vote. They had come after him twice already. It is also true that in Brazil, Dilma Rousseff was the victim of basically a right wing coup through the kind of judicial and legislative slash impeachment process. Like, these things are all true. Castillo, though, was, you know, was kind of guilty. But like I said, everybody's guilty. Anyway, so he goes on the air, and he's like, look, we're suspending the government. We're declaring an emergency government. I'm dictating. These are the things that I'm dictating.

Use the word dictate. He's trying to get rid of the Constitution. He's going to have a new Constitution. They're going to draw it together. And it just, it was about as effective as Trump's effort on Truth Social to suspend the Constitution. And the cops arrested him by the end of the day. He was replaced by Dina Buluarte, Peru's first female president. So girl boss win there.

There you go. I'm kidding. I'm being glib. But, yeah. From a Marxist party, so maybe. Now, her problem is that she doesn't have any mandate. Right. There's this huge question of whether she has any ability to govern whatsoever. The sixth president of Peru.

Did we put up A1 here? In less than five years. Again, we did not cross the digital picket line to grab this image. We grabbed it before the picket line was put up. So the sixth president of Peru in under five years. I mean, just a stunning sense of turmoil in the Peruvian government. It's hard for anybody to find a way to calm that, let alone somebody who comes in without any clear sort of mandate in the legislative body. Yeah.

So we'll see where this goes from here. Around the world, we're also seeing all sorts of unrest. Haiti continues to see its capital, Port-au-Prince. We can put up, I think, what do we have? It's a D2 here. Yeah.

It continues to be divided into increasingly calcified gang-controlled areas as the United States continues to support an utterly illegitimate interim president in the form of Ariel Henry, who has been credibly tied to the assassination of the former president, Jovenel Moise. And as long as the United States is propping up a president who has utterly no legitimacy with the Haitian population and doing so, so that we can send Haitian migrants back to Haiti. Exactly.

That's the whole point. That's our deal with Henri. And the media is reporting this. You may have killed the president. We may have even known about it. But as long as you take Haitian migrants, you can stay in power. It's shocking how little attention in the press and in the government, that deal, that we've talked to people here who have knowledge of it. And it's exactly what's happening. Todd Bensman reported it out in the New York Post. He's a great immigration reporter.

And he was saying, basically, the agreement here is that if you continue to take Haitian migrants back, these are Haitian migrants who have not lived in Haiti for 10 years in many cases. It's their worst nightmare to be sent back to Port-au-Prince. And if you will do that, Haiti, then that's the deal. We'll back you up. We'll back up your government. Which then produces even more instability, which then produces more migrants, which then solidifies our support for the person that will take the migrants, who then produces more migrants.

And the question of the assassination of Moise continues to roil Haiti. The Miami Herald has done some tremendous reporting on it over the months. And they have a new piece out. Let's see if we can put this up. There's this wild interactive. I really urge everybody to go check it out at MiamiHerald.com. It's basically like that Always Sunny in Philadelphia meme except totally real. And so what you can do is you can hover over particular figures.

Say like, let's say, where's Colonel Mike? We love Colonel Mike. Yeah, Colonel Mike just flashed across the stream. Yeah, we love Colonel Mike because Colonel Mike was also involved in the effort to assassinate Luis Arce, who we were just talking about. He was, at the time, going to be the incoming Bolivian president. He's now the Bolivian president. Colonel Mike failed. That's something we reported over at The Intercept that this same guy was doing both. So you click on Colonel Mike, it tells you who he is. He's currently jailed in Haiti, but then it gives you all the people that he is linked to, many of whom, and you'll see over here in Triago, CTU Security are American-based kind of military consultant slash contractor types. It's like six degrees of Kevin Bacon, except instead of Kevin Bacon, it's the Pentagon.

Right, yes. And then you have, like, you click on Joseph Barrio. This is a guy who was at the scene of the crime, who called Ariel Henry multiple times. We're not making massive conspiratorial leaps here to say that Ariel Henry was potentially involved with the assassination of the last president. He was getting phone calls from the scene of the crime. And American mercenaries are clearly implicated in what happened. Oh, American mercenaries and then these Colombian mercenaries that many of them U.S. trained. Yeah, the entire thing is just extraordinarily fishy. And extraordinarily sad as Haiti continues to be, and Port-au-Prince continues to be in gang control,

rival gang control. This type of war is causing enormous suffering. The reporting suggests the streets are just disgusting. I believe the word that the Guardian used was putrid. So it's a mess and our role in all of it is fuzzy, remains fuzzy. Although we're supporting the guy who seems to have done it. Yeah, that's not fuzzy. Speaking of coups, in Germany, arrests were made across the country in response to a sweep. And we can put up D4 here in response to a right-wing coup attempt. What did you make of this? I have absolutely no idea what to make of this.

This story is absolutely wild. You can see it through the New York Times there. Once again, this was grabbed before the digital picket line. Special forces in Germany have arrested 25 people, as per the New York Times, suspected of supporting a domestic terrorist organization that planned to overthrow the government and form its own state, the federal prosecutor said on Wednesday. So these are early morning raids. Germany's special forces are arresting folks. Some people were arrested in Austria.

Another person was actually arrested in as far away as Italy. About 52 suspects here. So that's a pretty big orchestration. So this is, again, like I have absolutely no idea what to make of this. I think this is fairly new and we're going to learn a lot more about it in the coming days. But the European right, and I don't know that this is the right necessarily. They're saying it is. They're saying it is?

Yeah. Okay. So the European right is a very interesting movement. And it's like the country to country kind of distinctions in the European right are often fascinating. And I, frankly, I, you know, a lot of people pay attention to Hungary. A lot of people pay attention to obviously the UK and sort of the Northern European countries, Spain and France. But I have not paid much attention to the populist right in Germany. Yeah, and they are severely handcuffed by anti-Nazi laws that prohibit them creeping back into places that a lot of right-wing elements elsewhere around Europe or elsewhere around the world, you know, like to creep into.

And so I don't know if this is a Gretchen Whitmer situation or if this was like a real, like, attempt at a coup. 52 suspects. 52? What did they round up in Michigan? Like a dozen? Mm-hmm. Yeah, a little. I think we've been a little higher. How many of those 52 were informers? We got to find out. What was the FBI up to in Germany? Anyway, we'll see. Speaking of corrupt former presidents, the Trump organization was found guilty of criminal tax fraud. We could put up, what is this, E1?

Yeah, we covered this a couple of weeks ago, and it seemed pretty clear that prosecutors were feeling good. They thought they had it, yeah. Yes, they thought they had it to the point where I think even a key witness, I think they just moved on from having that testimony. So the jury found the company guilty of federal tax fraud crimes. And again, this seemed pretty clear cut. I don't think it's really even surprising to big supporters of Donald Trump. I actually also don't think the Trump Organization ever anticipated being hauled into court for this kind of behavior, which is an interesting element of it that like,

and this is over, you know, Allen Weisselberg's actions. The question is, was he doing it on behalf? I think he was the CFO, right? Is he doing on behalf of himself or the Trump organization? Is it personal fraud or is it Trump organization fraud? Can you connect the dots? Obviously, the jury thought that you could connect the dots and that I think is probably fair. But again, this is a kind of, I feel like I would say this is just kind of soft corporate corruption that you don't expect to get hauled into court for all of the time. It's fairly easy to hide. And I don't think the Trump organization ever expected, you know, obviously Donald Trump to win the presidency and have his business

deals sort of raked over. Right. I think probably most New York real estate conglomerates could be caught in some type of tax shenanigans. I think Trump has always made it clear he has less respect for rules than pretty much anybody. Yeah, he says, I alone can fix the system because I've benefited from it. And so the organization was found guilty on 17 counts of criminal tax fraud and falsifying

business records. But the maximum penalty is only $1.6 million. So look for some more emails in your inbox promising to match 1,000 times the Trump organization because he needs $1.6 million to pay this off. They say that they're going to appeal this. Here's a statement for the Trump organization. He said, the notion that a company could be held responsible for an employee's actions to benefit themselves on their own personal tax returns is simply preposterous. That might be true. What they had to prove is that the organization was central and complicit in the arrangement that was benefiting the employees. So basically what was going on is that the Trump organization through Weisselberg and perhaps others was figuring out ways to arrange its compensation so that it was basically off the books compensation for

the family and for other people associated with the Trump organization. So that if you get a free apartment, if you get free this, free that, then it doesn't show up on your tax returns. Yeah. So Weisselberg had already pleaded guilty. That's basically what it is. But the Trump business entities did not. And so what was presented, for instance, this is an NPR call that some of the most attention

grabbing evidence presented to the jury were documents with Trump signatures. So that included a rental agreement for a luxury apartment that Weisselberg used, a private school tuition check for one of his grandchildren. And Weisselberg then admitted he didn't declare the benefits as income. So you can see then connecting the dots to the Trump organization. That's where the Trump organization says, this is just Weisselberg. And the jury obviously found this is a Trump Organization arrangement. Right. So the Trump Organization would say, look, our job is to pay people.

Their job is to file their taxes fairly. And look, hey, we paid his grandkids' tuition. We fully expected him to pay the taxes on that. That's where the jury was like, no, you didn't. Because that's not how people normally get paid. If he wants to fund a $30,000 private school for his grandkid, you give him $30,000, then he goes and funds that, and then he has to pay taxes on that. And so clearly the jury was like, no, obviously the reason that you were cutting this check was so that, and maybe you're, maybe they tried, maybe they cut it as a, I didn't follow the details, but if they were trying to be extra greedy, they could, they could pretend it was a donation to the school.

Yeah. And then, and then there's a deal with like the principal that this kid gets, you know, gets in tuition free. And then so then Trump organization gets the tax benefit from that. Weisselberg gets the tax benefit for not having to pay taxes on his compensation, which basically gives you kind of half off of that tuition. You end up with a situation where this kid's getting a private school education basically fully subsidized by taxpayers. Yeah, and this was not reported to the state of New York or to the IRS. Right. Shocking.

Yeah. So, there you go. Again, listen, I don't, my beat is not New York real estate. It's not real estate either. More generally, I imagine this kind of thing is not entirely uncommon. Yep. And that's, I imagine this kind of thing is not entirely uncommon. Yep. And that's, I guess, a sad reality. And so we'll see if Trump's opponent, potential opponent in the presidential campaign can make hay of this. No, they can't. We can put up the next element here. His opponent could be none other than John Bolton. Yes. Speaking once

again of coups, we've covered a lot of coups today, Ryan. And John Bolton hopes to plan another coup this time in his own country. Roll E2 here. You've just made some news there. You are essentially telling us that you would consider getting into the 2024 race. Absolutely. I think to be a presidential candidate, you can't simply say, I support the Constitution. You have to say, I would oppose people who would undercut it. You know, we used to have a thing in the House of Representatives called the House Un-American Affairs Committee. I think when you challenge the Constitution itself the way Trump has done, that is un-American. Let's stay here for a moment. Just walk me through your thinking.

What does your timeline look like? What would cause you to cross into saying what you're saying now and actually being a declared candidate for president? Look, all of the potential candidates know what Trump has said. This is no secret to anybody. I don't see why they aren't saying it right now. I think the voters, the Republican voters, people who choose the Republican nominee, nearly 95 percent disagree that Donald Trump is more important than the Constitution. I'm afraid there are some who would stick with Trump on this. What does a candidate have to lose by appealing to 95% of the base of the Republican Party? No, his math doesn't check out. I don't think that's the case. John Bolton, what does

a candidate have to lose by appealing to 95% of the Republican base? The idea that any anti-Trump candidate, let alone somebody with the history of John Bolton. People forget so, so easily how hard Trump campaigned on ending endless foreign conflicts in 2016. He actually really didn't campaign too much in 2020, I think probably to his detriment. But a huge part of his campaign in 2015 against other Republicans and in the Republican primary was, and against Hillary Clinton. Like, what is the difference in the foreign policy of Hillary Clinton and John Bolton? Somebody please tell me, because I'm sure we could find so many similarities that would probably outnumber the differences. And Donald Trump campaigned very effectively on the failed foreign policy of the United States

that John Bolton has had a huge hand in. Including as a member of the Trump administration. Including as a member of the Trump administration. And let us not forget one of the greatest quotes in the history of neoconservatism from John Bolton, when Jake Tapper in July, during January 6th coverage, special January 6th coverage in the Capitol, he says to John Bolton, one doesn't have to be brilliant to attempt a coup. Yes. John Bolton says, I disagree with that as somebody who has helped plan coup d'etats. So good. Not here. And he actually said it more accurately. He said coups d'etat. Not here. Coups d'etat. But you know other places. It takes a lot of work. And that's not what Trump did. It was just stumbling around

from one idea to another. So Trump's greatest flaw that John Bolton thinks 95% of the Republican base might go for, or a major Trump flaw at the very least, is he's just not good enough at planning coups. He doesn't have the attention span to plan effective coups. Got to out a hilarious tweet uh on pedro castillo saying we urge the peruvian people to remain calm should do it not saying the u.s led a coup i mean that seemed u.s was glad to see Castillo. Yeah, but that's different than planning the coup. It's a key distinction. Yeah, I normally think any leftist leader that gets ousted is part of a coup. I don't think this is exactly a coup because Castillo was just so kind of brazenly over the top about some of the corruption.

Yeah. So. Yeah. Either way, John Bolton's not going to be the Republican nominee for president. I feel very confident. Like, listen, pundits are. Maybe he's going to run as a Democrat. He would have better luck as a resistance Democrat going on MSNBC and CNN just talking about how terrible the man that he agreed to work for was. All right. And up next, Daniel Ellsberg says that he got a backup copy of the documents that Chelsea Manning leaked in case something happened to WikiLeaks and they weren't able to publish them. He's now daring the Biden administration to prosecute him, just like they're prosecuting Julian Assange. We're going to talk to Stefania Morizzi, who is out with a brand new book on Assange. She's a journalist who has probably spent as much or more time covering WikiLeaks and Assange as anyone on the planet. So stick around for that.

To talk about the latest news on the Julian Assange case, we're joined now by Stefania Morizzo, who is an Italian journalist and the author of the new book, which is called Secret Power, WikiLeaks and Its Enemies. Stefania has been covering WikiLeaks and Assange probably longer and with as much depth as maybe any reporter on the planet. And we're glad to have her here, Stefania. Welcome to Breaking Points. Thanks so much for having me.

So we wanted to start by getting your reaction to this explosive news from Daniel Ellsberg. Daniel Ellsberg, obviously famously the whistleblower who revealed the Pentagon Papers, said this week that he, well, in fact, let's just play the shot from Ellsberg himself. Let me tell you a secret. I had possession of all the Chelsea Manning information before it came out in the press. I never said that publicly. Julian Assange had conveyed to me as a backup in case his was, you know, they caught him and they got everything. He could rely on me to find some way to get it out if I felt. So I had all that, and when I say that, I'm saying that by the current standing of the

Department of Justice, I am now as indictable as Julian Assange and as everyone who put that information out. The papers, everybody who handled it. Yes, I had copies of it, and I did not give them to an authorized person. So if they want to indict me for that, I will be interested to argue that one in the courts, whether that law is constitutional. The Supreme Court has never held that using the Espionage Act as if it were a British Official Secrets Act, which I would clearly have violated, but if that, using

the Espionage Act as if it were an Official Secrets Act, which has never been passed by our Congress, that would be criminal. They've never ruled on that. I'd be happy to take that one to the Supreme Court. Yes, so Stefania, was this news to you that Julian Assange had given a backup copy to Ellsberg? And what do you make of his espionage point? Yes, first of all, it is new. I remember that at the very, very beginning when Julian

Assange started publishing the first bombshell, and I know because I was already there. I was basically my first time in which I worked as a media partner with Wikileaks for my newspaper, I never worked for Wikileaks as a collaborator. I have always worked with Wikileaks as a media partner for my newspaper. So back in 2010, I contacted Daniel Ellsberg and he told me how he was skeptical at the beginning when Julian Assange had contacted him. And he was thinking maybe they want to trap some whiplower. So he didn't trust this Wikileaks idea, this Wikileaks project. But later on, when Julian Assange started releasing the collateral murder, the Afghan war logs,

of course, Daniel Ellsberg felt his kinship with this project, with Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and the Wikileaks journalist. I think Daniel Ellsberg is saying something really important. First of all, he says the Espionage Act should not be used as the Official Secret Act. We know that in the U.S. there is no such a thing as the Official Secret Act, which allowed the U.K. authorities to go after reporters for publishing state secrets. We know that in the U.S. the press enjoys such constitutional protection, thanks to the First Amendment, that the U.S. authorities couldn't charge reporters for publishing state secrets. And indeed, state secrets get published on a regular basis, basically. It's what national security journalists

do on a regular basis. So what Daniel Erdberg says is really important. The U.S. authorities, especially the Trump administration, which charged Julian Assange, are trying to use the Espionage Act to destroy the freedom of the press, the freedom of reporters to expose state criminalities at the highest level, like the one we have seen on collateral murder or like the one we have seen on cables on Afghan war logs, Iraq war logs, torture. And they had abusing the Espionage Act to do this. And in addition to this, Daniel Ellsberg makes an important point. If they charge Julian Assange, as they have done,

they should charge me as well. They should charge Daniel Ellsberg for receiving this document. They should charge us, the media partners. We have published the very same documents. They should charge John Young from Krypton, who published the cables even before Wikileaks. So this gives you an idea of how incoherent is this legal and judicial case against Julian Assange and Wikileaks. Yeah, I was actually just going to ask about your experiences in all of this, because last week,

the editors and publishers of several major publications, The Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and El Pais published a letter saying even though they have concerns about some of the ways the information was made public by Julian Assange. It's a huge threat to press freedom. And there's some pictures that we can put up here, G4, some great images of you, Stefania, with Julian Assange that were taken over the course of your reporting. One of the reasons we have that lower image is probably of interest to some of the listeners and the viewers. Tell us, Stefania, how your, just your interactions with Julian Assange are wrapped up in this and, you know, your fears of maybe whether or not you

could have ever pursued this course of reportage, this journalistic inquiry, if the crackdown, the full crackdown that a lot of the political establishment wants to bring upon Julian Assange ever happened? Yeah, thank you for this question, because I have, I can bring my experience. I have been there for the, from the very beginning, even before collateral murder, even before they became famous. So, I mean, even before the large majority of mainstream media were interested in Wikileaks. And I can tell you why I started looking at them. I started looking at them, first of all, because one of my sources had stopped talking to me. And at that point, I decided I needed better source protection because clearly the old-fashioned techniques

which we journalists use in our newsroom are no longer suitable in this era of mass surveillance. So I wanted to learn from them how to use cryptography to protect my sources. I'm a mathematician. Before journalism, I got a degree in mathematics, so I knew that it was possible. I had the theoretical knowledge, but I was unable to use it. So at that time, one of my sources in the field of cryptography told me, you should have a look on that bunch of lunatics. And the lunatics were Julian Assange of Wikileaks.

And the reason why my source put Wikileaks on my rather screen was that Wikileaks was the only media organization in the world using cryptography systematically, cryptography to protect journalistic sources. Not even the New York Times, not even the most powerful newsroom in the world were using cryptography back in 2006, 2007, 2008, when Wikileaks was starting doing this. So they were pioneering this cryptography, and I was very, very interested in this. But in addition, I was really interested. What really impressed me was that they were able to obtain documents that no other media organization was able to get. And not only that, they were able to publish. They had the courage to publish.

For example, when the Pentagon asked them to remove a document about the Guantanamo Task Force, the military task force operating the Guantanamo detention camp, they said no, they refused to remove the document. So for me, it was really, I mean, it was really something very important because I'm sure you remember that after the 9-11, there was such conformism. The media were almost publishing whatever the CIA or the Pentagon were saying with very, very few noble exemptions like Seymour Hersh, who exposed the Abu Ghraib torture and so on. widespread conformism. And so for me, it was really important to see that there was a media organization able to get these documents because clearly this cryptography appealed to a community who had important documents and they disagree with the Bush administration. They disagree

with this atrocity. They disagree with this brutal treatment. And they came out of the dark because they trusted this security process, these security procedures provided by Wikileaks. And they were encouraged to provide documents because Wikileaks published them. And Stefania, I want to quickly get to a couple of the revelations in your book. One, you have a letter, if we could put up G3. So Julian Assange, you have a letter with him reaching out to basically government sources saying, look, we'd like to cooperate. Our objective is to publish the maximum amount

of information that's in the public interest, but we want to make sure we do this safely. And they respond to them, no, we're not discussing this with you. Just don't publish anything and give the documents back. Then you also have records that show that the Guardian was able to speak directly with the U.S. government and work cooperatively with the U.S. government to say, hey, please redact this, don't publish this. The Guardian not prosecuted, Assange prosecuted. Can you spell a little of that out? Yes. I mean, you have to realize that I have been fighting to get the full documentation on the case for the last seven years. I have been litigating my FOI requests in the US, in the UK, in Australia and Sweden, because four governments are refusing to release this documentation, and some of them admitted that they destroyed key documents about this case,

which is high profile, which is highly controversial, and which is really, really important when it comes to press freedom. So it is very suspicious that they destroyed key documents and they have refused to provide any information on why they destroyed these documents. And so those emails that you mentioned were internal emails from the State Department, which I obtained after suing them in the U.S. And they clearly showed that the U.S. authorities had the double standard. While they were willing to provide assistance to the mainstream media, to have a dialogue with them and to help to redact the documentation, especially the cables.

So that documents are referred to the cables. And while Julian Assange tried to do the same, tried to contact him, tried to contact the State Department to ask for assistance, to ask for any suggestion, whether they could suggest any name that they should have redacted. And the State Department refused, absolutely. They didn't want any dialogue. They didn't want any, provide any help. And they asked Wikileaks, please send back all materials you have, stop publishing, and remove from your website. I have the very same correspondence about the Guardian meeting at the highest level, the Guardian editors at the highest level of their newspaper meeting the State Department of Authorities,

at no point they ask, stop publishing, stop revealing these documents, giving us whatever you have back, remove from the Guardian website. So, I mean, this double standard makes you ask, may prompt you to ask yourself why they behaved like this. Clearly, they wanted to prosecute Wikileaks from the very beginning, or maybe they hoped that someone would die as a consequence of these publications so that they could blame Julian Assange and Wikileaks of having blood on their hands. Maybe they wanted so. I mean, otherwise, why not to provide assistance? Otherwise, why not have such dialogue as they did with the New York Times, with The Guardian,

with other newspapers? Yeah, it's a good question. And I think your conclusion is disturbingly plausible. Stefania Morizzi, an investigative journalist. The book is called, if we can put G2 back up, the book is called Secret Power, Wikileaks and Its Enemies. Congratulations on the publication. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Absolute pleasure.

I can't wait to read that book. All right, Ryan, what is your breaking point today? Well, it's not often that an article in a quarterly trade publication dedicated to organizing can set off a major conversation, but a new piece by Maurice Mitchell, who's head of the Working Families Party, has done just that. The piece has a deceptively mundane title. It's called Building Resilient Organizations, but the content of it speaks a whole series of truths that until recently have been essentially off limits in progressive spaces. For some context reviewers who aren't deeply involved in progressive politics, it's important to know that WFP has often been criticized by some

inside the movement for being too committed to identity politics and what some people derisively call wokeness. So to have these criticisms coming from the WFP and from somebody with impeccable progressive credentials like Maurice Mitchell has forced people to stand up and take notice. Now, Maurice, in a video that accompanied the piece, said that it was written in collaboration with people across the movement. And I can confirm from speaking to people who helped in the editing and drafting that it was indeed widely circulated before it was published. Here's Maurice. Article is kind of like a love letter to organizing more than anything else. Yeah. So I'm the principal author of the article. However, this article has dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of contributors. This is the summation of consultation, conversations, several edits that included the feedback of many, many leaders, including folks in our staff union at Working Families Party.

Like this is the summation of all of those inputs. So Mitchell has also told people that the piece built on some of the things I outlined in my June article in The Intercept on meltdowns inside progressive organizations. And you can hear some echoes of it while Mitchell also forges ahead with some new observations. So he breaks the piece down into what he identifies as 10 common destructive trends and the fallacies behind them, followed by solutions. The whole article is worth a read, but I want to highlight a few of them here. So he goes right for the jugular in the beginning with his first identified trend, not pulling any punches with his description of what he calls, quote, neoliberal identity, unquote, which he calls, quote, using one's identity or personal experience as a justification for a political position. You may hear someone argue, as a working class first generation American Southern woman, I say we have to vote no.

What's implied is that one's identity is a comprehensive validator of one's political strategy. That identity is evidence of some intrinsic ideological or strategic legitimacy. Marginalized identity is deployed as a conveyor of a strategic truth that must simply be accepted. Likewise, historically privileged identities are essentialized, flattened, and frequently, for better or worse, dismissed. He then critiques it by saying, people with marginal identities as human beings suffer all the frailties, inconsistencies, and failings of any other human, genuflecting to individuals solely based on their socialized identities or personal stories deprives them of the conditions

that sharpen arguments, develop skills, and win debates. We infantilize members of historically marginalized or oppressed groups by seeking to placate or pander instead of being in a right relationship, which requires struggle, debate, disagreement, and hard work. This type of false solidarity is a form of charity that weakens the individual and the collective. Finding authentic alignment and solidarity among diverse voices is serious labor. After all, steel sharpens steel. Neoliberal identity politics strips from identity politics a focus on collective power or a

political project and demand. What's left is a narrow tool used as a personal cudgel or, as Barbara Smith has said, quote, it's like they've taken the identity and left the politics on the floor. It should be noted that we have already seen this tactic used against us on the left and the right in the fight for racial and economic justice. Identity in this context reaffirms the individualistic principles of neoliberalism instead of challenging them. So Maurice also identifies, quote, anti-institutional sentiment as something that he calls, quote,

reflexively disdaining institutions and organizations as inherently oppressive and antiquated, including the institution one may be associated with. This point of view casts institutions themselves as the problem, even those with a social change mission. And so he responds to that by saying, quote, organizations and institutions are political vehicles. They are also spaces where individuals develop skills, connections, and ideological alignment. Institutions transmit knowledge, hold strategy, and cultivate power. Atomized individuals that loosely assemble cannot do this at the scale needed to take on entrenched power, unquote. Now, half the viewers watching this right now

might be stunned at how obvious these insights might appear, yet it also took courage to say them, which is itself a depressing testament to the cultural paralysis at the heart of progressive organizations right now. Now, with his fifth observation called, quote, cherry-picking arguments, he takes on the way that people throw around the terms intersectionality or white supremacy in incoherent ways. He writes, for example, using the term intersectionality to, let's say, defend edits to a press statement, or employing the Audre Lorde quote, caring for myself is not self-indulgent to give gravitas to a desire to stay home from an action or to take off time that you've earned and deserve as a worker. Or arming yourself with the concept quote, small is all from Adrian Brown's emergent strategy framework outside of its global fractal context to resist taking responsibility for a larger scale intervention or growing your community group into a mass organization. This tendency presents itself in language as well. Certain phrases and words carry cultural currency and cachet, he goes on.

We often find words like revolutionary employed non-ironically in the service of bourgeois individualistic demands. Decontextualized or uncritical use of intellectual material, like the Tama Okun essay on white supremacy culture, has at times served to challenge accountability around metrics and timeliness on the use of written language. Yet metrics and timeliness and the ability to communicate in writing are not in and of themselves examples of white supremacy, Maurice Mitchell writes. And so when you hear something like this coming from a real leader in the progressive movement. All right. Well, what's your point today? Well, as expected, Raphael Warnock eked out a 51-49 win

in the Georgia Senate runoff on Tuesday. No small feat ever for a Democrat in a red state like Georgia. So you can add Herschel Walker to the list of Republicans who've lost Georgia Senate races since 2020. Walker, David Perdue, and Kelly Loeffler all landed right around 49% of the vote, as did Donald Trump, actually, in 2020. 49's the magic number. Perdue was the former CEO of Dollar General, whose prior career involved heavy outsourcing. Loeffler is also a C-suite denizen whose net worth hovers near a billion dollars, thanks in no small part to her husband, who chairs the New York Stock Exchange.

Trump and Walker are both rich and famous, too, although for various reasons promoted populism a bit more persuasively than Perdue and Loeffler. No matter, none of those four are slam-dunk candidates, that's for sure. Walker's loss is reigniting the, quote, candidate quality narrative in Beltway circles. What explains Brian Kemp winning 53% of the vote in his re-election bid against Stacey Abrams? Why did Tim Michaels underperform Ron Johnson? Why did Don Bullduck underperform Chris Sununu? And what the heck is going on in Florida and Arizona? We've said repeatedly here that Republicans like Brian Kemp and Ron DeSantis are bridging that gap between pro-Trump rural populist voters and Trump-weary suburbanites. This is very difficult

to do, but it's not impossible. We disagree on a whole lot, but former McConnell chief Josh Holmes of Ruthless made a similar point after Herschel Walker lost. Quote, one thing Republicans need to understand, the new-ish coalition of simply swapping rural working class for suburban ours works on paper. Hell, it works in presidentials. The turnout discrepancy in midterms is significant. Need to either fix the rural midterm turnout or mix the appeal, he tweeted on Tuesday, adding, quote, rural versus suburban is not a mutually exclusive appeal. Brian Kemp did it in GA. Ron DeSantis did it to historically significant margins in Florida. Anyone who tells you Republicans need to excise one part of a coalition for another is prescribing a destiny of losing four generations. Here's what the consultant class is both unwilling and

unaware enough to consider. When your alternative to John Ossoff is a guy who outsourced American jobs, you might lose. We all know the problems with Michaels and Mastriano and Bull Duke because the consultant class that loves Martha McSally would prefer to focus on the problems in MAGA world. But MAGA world only exists because of the consultant class. Again, most Republican primary voters in 2016 actually picked someone other than Donald Trump. He is loved by a chunk of the GOP base and then tolerated by some of it. The math barely checks out in presidential's as we've seen twice and clearly doesn't check out in midterms. The electoral failures of MAGA do not vindicate the electoral appeal or the platform of the establishment GOP. Rewinding the clock but adding a

populist gloss, see Dr. Oz's weird campaign, is just not the answer. Just like crazy people aren't the answer either. What's weird campaign, is just not the answer, just like crazy people aren't the answer either. What's happening right now shouldn't totally depress conservative voters, though. It's kind of the natural result of voters pushing their party to transition, and that won't be clean and easy in a country that's under major transition, too. These races are also not easily nationalized. What we're seeing is just this tug of war, and that's perfectly normal. Now, I know it's asking a whole lot for politicians to believe in anything, so I won't do that. But Republicans can't just talk about the border and China, then sit back and support, say,

Mitch McConnell's leadership as he lets Democrats and members of his own party pass bad bill after bad bill without even mounting much of a fight? What's the Republican plan to lower health care costs and increase health care quality? What's the Republican plan to reform asylum laws so that we can undercut cartel trafficking, secure Americans, and make space for refugees? What's the Republican plan to make housing more affordable, to boost stagnant wages, to fix schools, to reform the Pentagon, to deal with the mental health crisis, the obesity crisis. How can they help cities beyond just firing radical prosecutors?

You can talk about inflation and woke education, sure, but for the past 20 years, even as material comforts have expanded, American happiness has dipped. That does not demand the old playbook. It demands something completely different, even if it's based on the same principles. Republicans aren't talking about some of these issues, and even when they are, they aren't offering actual alternatives that voters take seriously, nor should they for the most part. Right now, some 10 Republican senators are reportedly considering a bipartisan immigration bill that could well make the border situation even worse. It doesn't matter if you're Martha McSally or Herschel Walker. If you can't answer those questions in a way that makes sense to voters, Republicans will continue picking people like

Tim Michaels, like Blake Masters in primary races. Because if you're asking people to choose between someone molded into shape by a consultant cookie cutter, and someone who's promising to metaphorically blow DC up, a whole lot of people are going to vote for the explosion, and a whole lot of people are just going to stay home. Great place to end. This is perfect. All right. Happy Thursday, everybody. Don't read the New York Times in solidarity. Or just ever. We won't be back. We gave you two shows this week, so there'll be no counterpoints. Friday,

Crystal and Sagar will be back next week. They're out on their live tour right now. I got a complaint that they didn't hit the West Coast. I consider this now me relaying that to them, but I'll relay it to them personally. They're on notice. We'll be back next week, and so will Crystal and Sagar. Thanks, everybody, for watching. I'm Ryan Grimm. I'm Emily Jashinsky.

We'll see you then. See you later. See you later. This is an iHeart Podcast.