Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 12/21/22 Counter Points: Zelensky in DC, Lee Fang Twitter Files, China Covid Disaster, Omnibus Explained, Lee Harvey Oswald, Religious Liberty, Elon's Animal Farm

Episode Date: December 21, 2022

Ryan and Emily discuss Zelensky's visit to Washington, Lee Fang's chapter of the Twitter Files, China's Zero Covid Disaster, the Omnibus explained, new details on the JFK files, an interview with Railworker Deven Mantz and much more!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 & Presale Linkhttps://tickets.austintheatre.org/9053/9054To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Great to be here. So I'm Ryan Grimm. This is Emily Jashinsky. We're going to be, I think, moving away from the whole CounterPoints Friday thing, so ignore the fact that it says that behind there. Probably do more Wednesday shows. TBD. TBD.

We'll see. It's the end of the year. We're rethinking everything, making resolutions, all that sort of thing, right? Right. And a great example of why is what Lee's been up to all week. Yes. Yes. And if you guys have been following Lee's reporting, you know why he's here. He had a huge scoop yesterday. What, I guess, series eight of the Twitter files. So talk a little bit about what you uncovered in the vault. Well, it's kind of two simultaneous stories. One, it's the Pentagon's-

And we can put A1 up here. It's kind of two simultaneous stories. It's the Pentagon's psychological influence operations, their efforts on social media, creating news portals, memes, fake personalities throughout the Middle East and all over the world to shape public opinion around U.S. adversaries, kind of pushing fake news or certain narratives that demonize Iran, Russia, other enemies of the U.S. military. And the story also looks at the

kind of hypocritical promises and pledges by Twitter. Twitter, since 2016, has promised to crack down on state-backed influence operations to shut down covert propaganda, and they brag all the time about shutting down Russian or Venezuelan or even Thai secret Twitter accounts that are run by the military. Or Azerbaijani. Yeah, Azerbaijan. Yeah, Azeris are always doing this as well. But really, the US is doing this. And Twitter, even though they promised to shut down all state-backed influence operations, they've worked hand-in-glove with the U.S. military, giving them special privileges for their fake Twitter accounts, these fake personalities that kind of make organic-looking conversations in Yemen or Syria or Iraq, promoting U.S. narratives in the region. And working with them, and Twitter was well aware of what was going on, and did not shut these accounts down for many years.

Some of them were suspended earlier this year, but this has gone on for three, four, five years. And one thing your story does so well is kind of disentangle what those special privileges are. And one thing your story does so well is kind of disentangle what those special privileges are, that the United States military had access to Twitter and folks at Twitter, they had a pretty easy line of communication. And I want to ask what you found basically when you were looking into the U.S. military. You can see this in Lee's story, the emails, some of them are just incredible, what they're asking of Twitter.

So what are some of those special privileges you found? Yeah, so one example of this, they kind of had concierge service, the U.S. military. At one point in 2017, someone from CENTCOM, U.S. Central Command, emails a list of CENTCOM controlled Twitter accounts. These are accounts in Yemen and Syria, or purportedly, really they're in Florida, but they say that they're in these places. And they ask for whitelist privileges. Now, this is a special tag. I was able to go into some of the Twitter tools in the backend and see how they kind of manipulate the reach of various Twitter accounts. And this is a tag that essentially gives verification blue check privileges without the blue check. So you don't see the blue check on the account. It doesn't say verified, but it has all the same powers. So

it doesn't get flagged for spam, doesn't get flagged for abuse. It doesn't get the NSFW tag for some of the kind of more graphic content. And it's more likely to trend on hashtags and in the region kind of participate in going viral. And the same day that CENTCOM sent that email with the list of accounts that they control and use to push narratives, someone at Twitter went into the back end and added that tag. So it was an immediate service.

And then some of the accounts at the time referenced some connection to the Pentagon, right? But then after they got their whitelist privileges, that faded, right? That's right. So most of these accounts in this particular list, there were several lists of Pentagon accounts that were sent to Twitter, and some of those were never identified as Ascent Comp Control, but some were. And after receiving the whitelist privileges, you can see through the Wayback Machine and other archives that these Twitter accounts started shedding their disclosure. Originally, they kind of operated under these rules of public disclosure.

This account is controlled by CENTCOM. It's based in Florida. But then over time, you see these bios change. They get deleted and changed to Euphrates Pulse. This is just an unbiased account for Iraqis and Arabs, you know, several other types of bios and the location is cleaned. And then for some of them, they actually used deep fake images using artificial intelligence to create fake images of people that don't exist, but look very realistic. And then slapping that in as the

kind of face of the profile. Did you get the sense that the PSYOPs, as you refer to them accurately, were directed at shifting public opinion in America, in the West more broadly, or globally? What's the sort of thrust? What is the Pentagon doing with most of the communications you found? You mentioned Yemen on Twitter. I think that was particularly interesting. What was their goal? It looks like they were mostly focused on shifting public opinion in the regions where they were targeted. But this is the Internet. For information that might be released with a targeted audience or demographic, it can then trickle into other markets and come back to influence in the US. Actually, first looking at the archives of some of these tweets, I noticed that a lot of American outlets, when they needed to learn about information regarding drone strikes in Yemen or in Syria, they didn't have much local reporting. They had to reference these Twitter accounts because they were on the scene kind of celebrating US drone strikes

or other military actions. And for US reporters trying to understand what's going on in the region, they might not have a person on the ground. The only place to reference are these Twitter accounts that look like authentic locals talking about these drone strikes. So it does trickle back to the U.S., though these were virtually all non-English accounts. So I think the reasonable inference is that they were focused largely on shaping local opinion in, again, like Yemen or Iraq or Syria. I want you to unpack this classification piece real quickly. So you have an email here from Yol Roth, former head of trust and safety at Twitter. And he writes, Facebook have had a series of one-on-one conversations between their senior legal leadership and DOD's general counsel re-inauthentic activity, like one of these bot network type things.

DoD have indicated a strong desire to work with us to remove the activity, but are now refusing to discuss additional details or steps outside of a classified conversation. And then Stacia Cardiel, an attorney at Twitter, writes back that the Pentagon may want to retroactively classify its social media activities, quote, to obfuscate their activity in this space, and that this may represent an over-classification to avoid embarrassment, which is the kind of thing we do see a lot in the classification space. We screwed up. Let's classify that. Yeah, that's fascinating because I think that's something, as reporters, you assume. Why is everything classified here? Is it actually top secret or are they just trying to

avoid any disclosure around something that might embarrass the government? Here, they seem to be discussing it in exactly those terms. Even the Twitter people are like, there's no reason this should be classified. Right. And if you look at the previous CENTCOM emails, they're unclassified. And then once they kind of reached some kind of boiling point, we don't know exactly what, they start thinking, hey, we need to hide some of our tracks. We need to classify all of this. Everyone has to sign non-disclosures. You need special national security clearances. Let's go to a SCIF, meaning no outside phones or whatever. We don't know exactly what's going on, but there's a few interesting dynamics here. One, Twitter, again, promises to invest so many resources into quickly identifying these Twitter accounts, state-backed influence operations, and shutting them down.

Here they are saying, hey, we shouldn't shut them down too quickly because then people might know what the U.S. government is doing. Let's work carefully with the DOD to make sure we don't shut these down in a way that lets maybe foreign governments or the public or the reporters know that this was going on. So they're helping kind of manage the secrecy of this campaign or at least provide some kind of service to the Pentagon. And the other kind of larger issue here is that they were aware of this. This email shows that they were aware of this covert network. Maybe they did recognize that these accounts did violate their terms of service, but this is in mid-2020. If you

look at the history of these accounts that they're referencing, they keep tweeting. The next year, they're still around. The following year, they're still around. So they're clearly aware of what's going on. We don't know exactly what happened in these classified meetings. We know they met with Chris Miller, who was a Pentagon official with the Trump administration and some other DoD attorneys. Don't know what was discussed there, but they were clearly going back and forth and trying to help the Pentagon figure out how to deal with this mess. There's an amazing exchange in email that you have where one of, I think it's a Twitter lawyer or somebody who works, it's a higher level Twitter person, sends an Excel spreadsheet of the names that they know and then the names that they've identified as basically PSYOP fake personalities

and sends them to the Pentagon basically for verification. Yeah, it looks like they say, hey, look, here's two lists. One is this list that you guys sent us. And then they're saying, hey, wait, here's a much longer list of another 150 accounts that we identified that are probably you guys. Like, what's going on here? So, you know, there's a lot of back and forth here. And, you know, to be perfectly fair to Twitter, it looks like, you know, at least some of these Twitter, perhaps lower level lobbyists and engineers who are working with the Pentagon on this, maybe they were deceived too, because they thought that this was something a little bit more above board. And there's a lot of kind of figuring this thing out.

But it's clear from some of the emails that Ryan just mentioned at very top levels, the high-level lawyers and executives, they knew this was covert. They knew this was violating the terms of service. They knew that this was highly secretive. And one of the messages was like, it was like, hey, FYI, Pentagon, if we can find these accounts, then your adversaries are going to be able to find them too. So you might want to step up your bot game. Yeah, exactly. So it's actually helping them break their rules. Yeah. If you juxtapose that email with what Twitter testified to Congress several times, including in 2018 and 2020, they're saying, hey, look, we invest so many

resources into spotting and shutting down these networks as soon as we can. It's like, no, they knew. And they were moving very slowly and shutting them down. And so can you talk a little bit about how this came about? And what's it like? So for people who don't know, Lee is based in San Francisco, where the Twitter headquarters is. So what do you do? Do you bring your own laptop into the office? How does it work?

Yeah, so we went in there. And did you have to make any agreements? Or how's it work? Yeah, so we went in there. And did you have to make any agreements or how does it work? Yeah, great question. I signed nothing. I made no agreements. They gave me a badge. I walked into the office

and a Twitter lawyer helped come talk to me and I gave them certain parameters for searches for different tools. And another engineer came and helped run a few other searches on some of the more specific tools. Like the profile viewer that I mentioned. They required a little bit more technical expertise. They ran some searches. They would kind of disappear and come back and then kind of

show me on a Twitter laptop. And that was basically it. You know, we went back and forth again for about three days. And I made no agreements. They made no editorial input. They didn't even know what I was looking for or reporting on. Again, since there was kind of an in-between, these engineers and lawyers who were running the searches, potentially what I saw was kind of limited. I don't know. Because they could have seen something and been like, don't share that.

That's certainly possible, but it didn't seem like it. Were they doing it basically in front of you? No, they would do it in another room and come back. But I was able to authenticate all the emails and documents that we reported on. We provided more context. I talked to several former Twitter employees over the weekend in the last few days while reporting this piece to kind of correspond to all the facts here.

Yeah. How did you land on this as what you were interested in writing about? What struck you like looking through documents? What were you like, there's got to be some psyops going on here? Well, you know, Stanford came out with the report in August that really piqued my interest into this issue, looking at various U.S. propaganda efforts on social media. So I've been thinking about this for the last few months, and I actually interviewed a few people hoping to report on that report back in September. So, you know, this was kind of fresh in my mind, and I've reported similar stories, mostly about U.S. special interests and corporations running kind of their own version of this. So it's something I've reported on for years. But in this particular issue, yeah, the Stanford report got me interested. Yeah. Yeah. So are you going back? Like, what's your...

Well, I hope so. TBD. I mean, I love the idea. I wish every corporate... I've been critical of Musk's kind of pivot lately, the way that he's been. And we'll talk about that later in the show. But I love the idea of him opening up the corporate records to journalists. Did you chat with him at all? I did not meet Musk. But, you know, I think I'll have a lot more stories working on a few others. And I'm excited to see what other folks are doing. Barry Weiss has an excellent team working on stuff.

And Michael Schellenberger and Matt Hayubi. So, you know, I'm interested to read just as a viewer. It's so much fun to watch everyone just sort of pick at the, you know, and your insights into the process are really helpful because what we're seeing from the public perspective are these fascinating drops, you know, that are just drip dripping out over the course of several weeks. But to see the background and how you guys are doing the heavy lifting here is fantastic. Thank you so much. And it's been fun to participate in.

It's really unusual, but I hope to get some public interest information that can help enlighten the debate. And maybe more corporations will open up their files. That'd be nice. Yeah, that'd be great. Wonderful, yeah. So you can check out his reporting over at The Intercept. Lee also started Substack, where he'll be sending out kind of additional reporting and background. I think it's just called Lee Fong, right?

Yeah, Lee Fong, Substack.com. There you go. All right, well, stick around. Lee's got to go catch a train. We'll be back with more. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is coming to the Capitol today, as first reported by Punchbowl News. Emily, what's your read on the timing of this visit? It's funding, I imagine. There's a lot of money being debated right now, being negotiated over in the omnibus spending. And so it seems to me like Zelensky is coming. He's going to the White House.

And then potentially, it looks like a joint address to Congress at 7.30 p.m. This says they're debating the omnibus bill, which would include a lot more money going to Ukraine. So I think he's coming here to make the case, to make that vote a little easier for some senators whose constituents, and members of Congress in general, whose constituents may be getting a little wary of all the money going over there. And we can put up that first element here.

But yeah, so I think you're exactly right. The context here is that Congress is debating a $1.7 trillion omnibus spending package where they're trying, basically they're trying to clean the slate, like get everything that they can get through through during the lame duck. The White House had requested $37 billion for Ukraine as part of that package. As we've seen since, you know, the Obama administration, the Trump administration, and again, the request then gets upped by Congress for military spending. You never see Congress say,

you know what, you're getting a little greedy over there. 37 sounds a bit much. How about 30? Plus, we're going to put these conditions around it. There's going to be inspectors general that are going to make sure that it's spent accurately. Instead- Oh, you mean not a blank check? Not a blank. Instead- Quote, blank check. You want 37 billion? Aha, how about $45 billion? So, Congress in a bipartisan fashion has responded with 45. And I think, and without the types of guardrails and the types of IG restrictions

that people like Rand Paul have called for before. And I think that what's happening here is that the kind of triumvirate of Pelosi, Schumer, and McConnell are pushing this through now. And perhaps, and I'm curious if you're taking this, perhaps with the kind of quiet agreement of Kevin McCarthy to get this through now so that the House Republicans don't have to deal with this for a very long time. Right. And we're going to, I think, flesh this out a little bit more in the omnibus segment. But that's what a lot of conservatives, Freedom Caucus aligned folks are really upset about is that they could have passed a CR, basically a one-month CR that would avert the shutdown. McConnell could have pushed for that. He could have said, this is what we're doing, and that's it. And then Republicans could have set the spending priorities on the House side when they have control in the new Congress starting in

just a couple of weeks, and that would have been the preference. And they're saying, why on earth are we going along with this when it's got all the spending priorities of Democrats? So that's absolutely a sticking point for the kind of freedom caucus aligned folks. So did Democrats get a lot of their priorities into this omnibus because enough of the national security establishment wants Republicans to agree to this $45 billion? And so McConnell's like, okay, we really want this $45 billion for Ukraine. And in exchange, we will agree to do an omnibus. Right. I think that's probably part of it because you've seen this happen many times before.

When you're able to invoke the Pentagon spending, when you're able to invoke a cause as tragic and serious as this one, it's a little emotional blackmail. And obviously, it's not purely emotional blackmail because there's a lot of money that is involved here in the D.C. area particularly. But it makes it, again, easier to take that vote for anyone. And Sager tweeted a great thing yesterday where he shows on a chart that with the additional $45 billion, I'm quoting him, to Ukraine, the United States will have given nearly twice as much as the entire European continent combined. So when you think about that and you wonder why Zelensky has a suddenly announced trip to the United States as $45 billion additional dollars are being debated. And as you have even people that are as mainstream in the Republican Party, like Kevin McCarthy, saying, we don't want

a blank check to Ukraine. And there's a freak out over him even saying that. It's a pretty clear reason why you would want Zelensky to come and make the case emotionally, personally in Washington, D.C. And the strategic case from the U.S. perspective is clear. Putin was hoping, I think, with a Republican takeover in the House of Representatives, that it would be more difficult to get American money into Ukrainian hands, to get basically American weapons into Ukrainian hands, which could then give Putin a better bargaining position to try to maintain significant swaths of territory that they've occupied as part of their invasion. But by getting the not just $37 billion, but $45 billion worth of spending through Congress, if they successfully do it, then whatever House Republicans want to do,

whatever debt ceiling crisis they want to foment over the next year, whatever hostility or skepticism they have toward the conflict, it's not going to matter because the money will already have been appropriated and you'll see it then just dribbled out. Like, oh, we're sending another $500 million worth of javelins. We're sending another $500 million worth of javelins. We're spending another $500 million worth of anti-tank, et cetera, et cetera. And so that sets Putin's war effort back because he's like, okay, well, now my hope of using the winter leverage against these kind of allies of Ukraine isn't going to work because the money's already been appropriated.

What do you expect to hear from Zelensky? Anything in particular you think he sees as making his case the most strongest? how he came to power as a, not just a comedian, but kind of, you know, an actor and, you know, hit shows in Ukraine. He's an extraordinary performer, which turns out probably to have been a saving grace for Ukraine. If they had some kind of corrupt old stooge of oligarchs up there, like they used to have. Right. You could, I think. Lukashenko. Yeah, I think that even if it was like one of the pro-Western ones, I think you'd have

a lot more skepticism among the American public. Americans, so many of them just love this guy. Yeah, well, he was at the Grammys, do you remember when he made an appearance at the Grammys? It was a video appearance. so many of them just love this guy. Yeah, well, he was at the Grammys, do you remember? When he made an appearance at the Grammys. It was a video appearance. This is actually his first physical visit to the United States since the war. But he did teleconferences at the Grammy Awards, to your point, precisely because the theater is where he excels.

And he's done a lot of interviews with American media, too. Yeah, and if they started polling him in the Democratic primary for president, he'd be near the top. And it says, well, not only do you have to be a citizen, you have to have been born in the United States. So not eligible. However, seriously, if they put him in the polls, he'd probably be polling ahead of Biden. I don't know about that. I mean, he polls really well here in Washington, D.C., where all the defense money is. But I think among Democratic primary voters who, like, read the New York Times. Yes. Oh, yeah. Watch Colbert.

Maybe not in Iowa, but. It's a nationalized electorate at this point. But anyway, we'll never get an answer to that because it won't ever happen. But so I think he will. I think he'll lean into the cause of freedom and liberty. I think he'll try to flatter the United States. Absolutely flatter the United States for its generosity and support of freedom and liberty. Historically as well. He'll probably invoke the United States' historical support for all of those points. And if I had to guess, I would think that Pelosi had a significant amount

to do with this trip. She understands the politics of the House well. And I think what he's going to try to do is make it as politically painful as possible for Republicans to express skepticism

about the endless spending to support the war effort. And virtually impossible for Democrats. Well, they're not even trying. Right. So he doesn't really need to appeal to them. Well, yeah, they're not even trying now,

but eventually, you know, this makes it even harder when you're, again, just being, you know that they're going to call in the big guns, so to speak, when you have more, $45 billion more dollars on the table. Yeah. Have you seen that show that's on Netflix now, Servant of the People?

I haven't watched it. Have you? I've seen the first couple episodes. It's really good. Really? It is really good. You're going to have to do a full monologue reviewing it. I will.

I lost my glasses, you know, as you know, so I can't read the subtitles anymore. So I had to stop watching it. But the first several episodes are just, it's great. And it's also poignant to see kind of Keeve before the destruction and also to see him as just an actor.

It's kind of weird. It's jarring to watch. But the show itself, for people who don't know the premise, he's like a school teacher who does a rant about all the corrupt oligarchs that run the politics of Ukraine that his kids secretly film and post on YouTube. It goes viral. They demand he runs for president, and he shockingly wins the presidency. He may have to revisit some of those populist sentiments, anti-corruption sentiments. If peace ever comes,

there's going to be a lot to look under the hood of where the money went. Oh, for sure. And we're going to be dealing with these weapons probably for decades. Yes. They're not going to stay in Ukraine, all of them. Yeah, that's right. Well, and now Victor Boot's out. And Victor Boot's out. Work for Victor Boot. There you go. Yeah. All right. Well, we'll obviously be following this story very closely as it develops, so we'll surely have more.

News on the Iran nuclear deal front this week, as President Biden even responded to somebody just in a photo handshake line about whether or not he would announce that it was dead. We can go ahead and throw B1 up on the screen. So you can see there Biden is saying that it is dead, but he's not going to quote announce that it's dead because it's a long story. Again, that's a quote. Why don't we just roll the clip so you can judge for yourself. This is B2. President Biden, could you please announce that JCPOA is dead? Can you just announce that? No. No? Why not? No.

For a lot of reasons. It is dead. We're not going to announce it. I'm sorry. We're going to make sure that... We just don't want any deals with the Mullahs. No deals. No deals.

They don't represent us. They are not. They are not our government. Ryan, I want to read a quote from you from the Axios report. It says, in late October, U.S. envoy for Iran, Rob Malley, said the administration is not going to, quote, waste time on trying to revive the Iran nuclear deal at this time, considering Tehran's crackdown on protesters, Iranian support for Russia's war in Ukraine, and Iran's positions on its nuclear program. This is an argument, it's a version of the argument that was made against proponents of the JCPOA for years on

the right, which is that you are doing business with a regime that has countless human rights abuses, is aligned against the United States, aligned against Israel. And they're now invoking very similar arguments, very similar points, because it has become politically less convenient for them to pursue the JCPOA right now. Isn't that essentially their argument? You got them. I mean, fair enough. That's a clean shot. It shows that it's a matter of degrees, that it's all relative here, because it was, like you said, it was already the case that Iran was supportive of actors around the region that were hostile to the interests of the United States. Whether that's Hamas, Hezbollah, you could argue the Houthis, the elements within Iraq that are hostile to kind of U.S. allies inside Iraq, Iranian hostility to Israel, refusing to recognize it, constantly threatening it with obliteration. That has been a condition of the Iranian Republic, you know, since the

revolution. That's accurate. And so, yeah, to say that, well, now they've gone too far. And also, domestically, it's not as if they've been kind of bastions of liberty. Right. Like they haven't been engaging in these types of crackdowns, although in 2019, there was an extraordinary domestic crackdown of popular unrest. And during the Obama administration, that happened as well. In 2009, very early, right, there was that Green Revolution that was suppressed violently as well. And so, right, what Malley is saying here is that, okay, now it's gone too far because, you know, that the support of Russia and the extent and length of the crackdown is too far. So they are, in fact, like you said,

legitimating that argument that they're too bad to work with. Whereas people who are on the side of the deal, if they're going to be principled about it, ought to argue, yes, they have always been bad. This is about a nuclear deal. And it is about keeping nuclear weapons from a bad and dangerous regime. And in fact, the worse they are, the more reason there is to strike a nuclear deal with them. Because we're not striking a nuclear deal because we love them, because we're good friends with the mullahs and we just want to reduce sanctions on them. We would be doing it so that they don't have a nuclear weapon, so that the world is a safer place. And there's basically no other option.

And incidentally, so gas prices are cheaper, but that's neither here nor there. It's always incidental. Incidentally. Yes. No, that's neither here nor there, of course. It's always incidental. Incidentally, incidentally. But yeah, it's not. So Mali's kind of argument there recasts it a little bit as a favor to Iran, which now I think what's actually going on here is, yes. And I think just the domestic politics are too extreme. Like if you're a bad regime, but you're not on the front pages, then the U.S. can strike a deal with you domestically and get away with it. Haiti, for instance. Yeah, you can do whatever you want in Haiti because nobody's going to cover that. But if they're on the front pages, then it's more difficult politically for you to strike that deal. So

that's what I think is going on. And so I think by them saying it's dead, that's an acknowledgement of that political reality. And also is leverage in the negotiations, because Iran does want this and nothing's ever dead when it comes to diplomacy. Ask Manchin and the Build Back Better thing. I was dead in the past. That's right. Well, it was interesting because you said it is a concession, really, that Iran wants this, that Iran obviously sees that there's something good for Iran in this. This is not just a clear-cut win for the United States, and that's not the argument that proponents of the JCPOA are making sort of in the honest sense. And the last point I think we should absolutely touch on here is the role Russia has played in all of this. It was a very strange situation when they were really, this was heating up earlier this year, the negotiations of their Iran nuclear deal. And Russia is basically mediating because of some of the parameters

from the original deal during the Obama administration, which Trump scrapped. It was a huge part of his campaign, actually, was just scrapping the Iran nuclear deal. And he did it. Biden administration has been trying to bring it back. And Russia has been trying to bring it back and Russia has been in the middle. So how much of this is also the Biden administration just saying, listen, this is basically impossible right now anyway, because our middleman, we're basically at war with them. We're in a proxy war with them. Right. And they're also, and we could put up the third element here, they're also engaging in public displays of atrocities, which, again, makes it relatively that much more difficult for the Biden administration to kind of deal with a government that is out here publicly executing people for participating in these protests. So they have started, this is NBC News here, Iran's government has spent months violently cracking down a protest group in the country. Now it has started hanging people in public and approach. Some demonstrators

and experts see as a desperate attempt to crush the dissent that has posed an unprecedented challenge to the clerical regime. So U.S. media is still framing this as a desperate move from the Iranian regime here. Either way, it's atrocious. Yeah. And again, it is quite interesting to see that leveraged in the JCPOA negotiations, which actually, yeah, I get the point that nothing's ever really dead and that this is obviously, I think, probably in some way a ploy to nudge the negotiations if they can be nudged. But I just don't see this budging at all for now. And the biggest player in that really seems to be the war in Ukraine. Yeah. And so their executions by hanging are far from rare in Iran. NBC reports, Amnesty International says it put 314 people to death last year, the most in the world after

China, although the United States does continue to execute people at a pretty fierce clip as well. So that's our company. It's China and Iran when it comes to the death penalty. Although there's a matter of due process and trials, I imagine, that differs. It's true. I'm sure that our bureaucrats are making no mistakes on the march toward death row. Believe me, I will never defend that as atrocious. And in Iran, these, in a lot of cases, are what mirror protesters in support of women against the regime oppressing women. So just unbelievable story as it continues to unfold and affect the JCPOA. And the last piece, we can put up the fourth element. What we're seeing is

an increasingly tight relationship developing between Russia and Iran. They have been soft allies for a long time, partly enemy of my enemy kind of situation. But now you're seeing the military cooperation ramp up as Russia is cornered and has few outlets and allies. Here, you know, here's the Guardian reporting that they're boosting military links, exchanging military tech, Russia exchanging military technology with Iran in exchange for the help with their drone war effort. Right, and so you can see why the Biden administration

is invoking that in, again, the JCPOA negotiations precisely because they're saying, why are we dealing with, first of all, somebody that we are fighting a proxy war against to the tune of billions and billions of dollars? Why are they negotiating this deal for us that's making it impossible to do? And secondly, we don't want it to be a reward for a regime that is sort of actively engaged in bad things. But at the end of the day, from my perspective, all of that is a concession. It's a concession that they've just decided to draw the line on Iran being bad here, when all along that was the argument that they were saying, oh, don't worry about it.

There's a much more honest stance, and it's the one you laid out at the beginning of the segment, but that's not the one that they've taken. Right. And it's not my job to give advice to the American empire, but it is interesting that their inability to create normal relations with Iran over the years is now complicating their war effort in Ukraine in multiple ways, both because it's complicating their effort to wind down the war in Yemen, but also now pushing Iran and Russia into tighter cooperation. If you're going to be waging wars in Yemen, in Ukraine, saber-rattling around to Taiwan, you would rather, I think, not have Iran allied with Russia at this moment. And if instead of this kind of hostile saber-rattling relationship that we've had with them over the decades, they had instead taken the Iran deal from 2015 and then built on top of that new diplomatic advances. Because Iran, unlike Saudi Arabia, has a, you know,

has an educated middle class that remains pro-American. It's an utterly bizarre situation in which a significant amount of the population is favorable toward the United States. If you remember after 9-11, there were, you know, where a bunch of Saudis were involved and Saudi government officials were, you know, seemed to also have been involved. Those are our allies. Our enemies, there were candlelight vigils all over Iran, you know, in sympathy with what had happened on 9-11 in the United States. If we had developed that into normal relations, our war effort in both in Yemen and in Ukraine would be strengthened. Like I said, not my job to help the U.S. war effort, but it's like you got to pick your battles at some point. And we just, and I think significantly this was

related to our relationship with Israel. Is Israel and Iran absolutely mortal enemies? And so we kind of outsourced our diplomacy there. Speaking of saber-rattling in Taiwan, we should move on to China because there's huge news. Again, this is a headline from NPR. We can go ahead and put the first element up here. We're talking about 800 million possible COVID infections in China. And as NPR puts it, that means about 10% of the planet's population may become infected over the course of the next 90 days. This is coming as China, we've covered it here, took a couple steps back from its lockdown mentality or its policies that were zero COVID, known as zero COVID by Xi Jinping, a huge thrust of his broader policy was zero COVID. We are locking everything

down. In some cases, that means sealing people into buildings. And the result is that this is not a population prepared to weather surges. And what's happening exactly right now is a surge that China really doesn't have the ability to safely deal with, or even the will to safely deal with. What do you make of this development? Because, again, there's going to be new COVID variants, and we've made peace with that here in the United States. It was, I think, difficult. It took politically, culturally, it took about a year of Omicron and other variants to say,

this is not something that we can control, but it is something that we can mitigate with responsible policies that allow people to live their lives, not to exacerbate addictions and suicides and loneliness and mental health problems and economic problems downstream of all of that. We can have policies that control and mitigate it. China has no experience with that. Right. And zero COVID was demonstrably unsustainable because it led to the types of protests that were threatening the regime itself because the restrictions had just gone into such absurd and draconian directions that people were standing up against them, that you would

take a toddler away from their parents based on secondhand exposure, like just absolutely extreme measures. And so at the same time, the Chinese government did not use the time that they effectively built with their zero COVID strategy to get the elderly population vaccinated. There was a, it seems like the data shows that the Chinese vaccines have been less effective than the American vaccines at preventing severe illness and death. But also there's been even less uptake among the elderly Chinese population. And it's curious that you can have an authoritarian government that can weld somebody into an apartment but can't get their elderly population vaccinated. There's some type of gap there that I can't quite figure out. And so they go into this relaxation of zero COVID with an already aging population more vulnerable than they would be otherwise had they been vaccinated. What's your read on why an authoritarian government

like this can't do the thing that you would think an authoritarian government could do? It's the easiest thing. Right, just the jabs. Yeah, I mean, I think in general, it was this problem politically was zero COVID, was just dogging Xi Jinping. And if you're, I mean, so when you look at how that's handled right now, you have a population that doesn't have a lot of natural immunity, period, because people have just plainly not been infected to any degree. They haven't gotten over smaller COVID infections.

They really just like most people have not been infected with COVID. And so now they have a very transmissible variant spreading. They have a few variants spreading. But you have this really transmissible one that to the point where even zero COVID may not have prevented a huge surge and a huge spread of the virus. And you have a population with a vaccine that's perhaps not as effective as people hoped that it would be, no natural immunity immunity and exhaustion with intense lockdowns. So I think it was just a botched response all the way around that there was no expectation or anticipation that this type of thing could happen. Because if we can always have zero COVID, we can weather the storm for several

years until COVID goes away, and we can pop back out like hibernation and mostly be fine, then you're not as the incentive to push for that third shot isn't as high, especially if it's not preventing infection, which as it came to be realized is that it prevents severe, it can help mitigate the severity. It's not going to prevent infection. So I think it was probably just not as high of a priority because zero COVID was seen as the ticket. Like this is what is going to take China out of this. And there are now implications, significant implications for the U.S. population. One of them, and if you've been sick lately, you have probably realized how difficult it is to find cold medications, to find ibuprofen, both children and adults. And there are images coming out of China of Chinese people kind of mobbing ibuprofen factories.

And they're also going, so just aside from that, you're going to see, I think, a diversion of cold medications that otherwise would be exported to Europe, to the United States, to other countries used for domestic purposes because there are so many people getting sick that need them. And we're now facing a situation where you have, what's it called, RSV, other viruses that are circulating in the population, COVID variants still going through the American population, flu ripping through, all of it layered on top of people's diminished immunocapacity as a result of lockdowns and the pandemic. Just from people not getting sick as much from 2020 on, they're now getting hit harder. And so there's been a run on Advil, ibuprofen, Motrin, Tylenol,

all of the different cold medications to the point where some drugstores are rationing them. And I would suspect that that's going to get worse before it gets better because of the situation in China. There's 8 billion people on this planet that are all going to be getting sick together. Yeah. And again, with no real clear idea of what a balancing mitigation policy looks like. And here in the United States, it took us a while, and especially in certain states, to figure out what that should look like, how you can keep people safe in terms of their mental health, in terms of their physical health, and in terms of their economic health. What does that look like? What do those policies look like? And again, China has had zero COVID to the point where they lock down places that are seeing waves, contain the wave geographically, and life goes on as usual in other places where there's no COVID. Then there's COVID,

like a switch, get shut down. And so that's not, they haven't had experience really allowing their population to exist with some semblance of normalcy while also trying to mitigate the spread of something that could knock a whole lot of people into hospitals and possibly worse, tragically worse. So again, you know, the NPR reports that there's some actually vaccine hesitancy in China as well. Some doctors have been nervous about administering it to elderly patients. And China's healthcare system, depending on whether you're in a city or a rural area, is very, very different. And that will, I expect, affect all of this as well. But also, they just didn't have the incentive to go super hard on those third shots and on the shots in general because zero COVID was seen as—

But a lot of them have zero shots. So, I mean, it was seen as like this was the policy. This was taking care of it. So it wasn't necessarily the demand from the government wasn't as high because they really thought that they were on top of it. Yeah, they had a chance to do it like New Zealand, basically. New Zealand pursued a kind of zero COVID type of approach, but their effort was to keep it off their island. I was going to say, I mean, it's a tiny country compared to China.

Right, but they were effective at keeping it out. But then once the vaccine came out, they used that opportunity to vaccinate their elderly population. And then they were able to relax their restrictions and get to a place that's more like where we are, where you're still seeing COVID ripping through, but you're not seeing the cataclysmic fatality rates that you saw in 2020. Anyway, here in Washington, Congress is putting the finishing touches on a $1.7 trillion omnibus spending package. And we're going to talk first a little bit about the politics of that and then also what's in it and what did not get in it. So Emily, the Freedom Caucus, and I was over on the Senate yesterday talking to some of the Senate Republicans who were getting asked about the threats from the

Freedom Caucus, and there was kind of a lot of head shaking. And it's an interesting kind of both cultural and political divide on the two sides of the Capitol here between the Senate Republicans and the House Republicans. So, there were, what, 13 members, I think, of the Freedom Caucus who sent out a letter saying, if anybody votes for an omnibus, and that includes the leader of the Senate Republicans, we will go out of our way to crush any of their priorities over the next two years.

Don't even bother sending us any legislation because we will kill it no matter how much we like it. Right. And Senate Republicans kind of shrugged and said, okay, whatever. Yeah. And are sending it over anyway. So where did this, why are they making this threat and why are Senate Republicans kind of shrugging it off? Well, that's the question. And what happened basically is that the House, which largely controls the purse strings, is going to have Republican control by a slim majority, but is going to have Republican control in just a couple of weeks. And so funding the government by omnibus at the end of the year is a terrible American tradition,

but it is tradition nonetheless. The way House Republicans see it, though, is that you can pass a stopgap bill, a CR, that would fund the government for a month. And then Republicans can come in in that month, the first Congress, and prioritize Republican spending items so that a bill full of pork for the political establishment here in Washington, D.C., and priorities that the left wants. You know, they're saying, listen, we took control of government back, and here's an opportunity to punt the ball for us to run with. And Senate Republicans say, we actually got you the best possible deal that you could want. We have extra funding for all of these priorities that you have in this bill. So just sort of swallow the bitter

pill. Take it. It's the best you're going to get. And the Freedom Caucus, House Republicans are flexing a little bit and saying, screw you. This is not what you were elected to do. It feels like shades of the Tea Party. But again, this is- These our Tea Party folks, a lot of them, right? They're Tea Party folks or sort of Tea Party, post Tea Party, Trump Tea Party. Neo Tea Party? Yeah, Neo Tea Party. Well, it's already the Neo Neo Tea Party. But it's one of the things that honestly, like the squad should learn from, I think, because if you look at back at how the Freedom Caucus has been able to flex its own muscles in different battles, and this one I think is going to end up being a good example, it's true. And people, populists on the left and the right, just average voters,

they see that stuff and they're like, that's the reasonable position. Mitch McConnell forcing the bitter pill of earmarks. And you can have a debate. We could have that conversation about what is more reasonable. But most people are like, are you freaking kidding me? Are you kidding me, Mitch McConnell? You're making us take all of this when you could punt it over to Republicans instead. It also, though, shows the limits of their power because I think that they're going to get steamrolled. They're absolutely going to get steamrolled. And I think it'll be interesting to see if they can stick to their threat next year because what does that mean? I think that Senate Republicans just don't believe their threat because they're saying, wait a minute. So next year we're going to send over whatever, a defense

bill, and you're going to block it. And your argument to the public is going to be you're going to block it because we did this thing six months ago that you don't like. Like that doesn't work with the public. Public wants to know right now why it is that you're doing something. But it shows that I don't blame them for making that threat because that's the only threat they had left because they're in the minority right now. And so they can threaten to vote no, but nobody needs their votes, which is a problem that squat often runs into. Now, sometimes their votes can be pivotal. 99% of the time, it's like, oh, that's nice that you're voting no.

We don't need your votes. What's so revealing to me here is that it very much feels like Senate Republicans looked at two negotiating partners, one pre-January 3rd, House Democrats, the other post-January 3rd, House Republicans, and they chose door number one. They would rather work with House Democrats and Senate Democrats than they would work with these Freedom Caucus folks. So here's what Rachel Bovard over at the Conservative Partnership Institute said. These House Rs are using the only leverage they have.

She's referring to the 13 who signed the letter you mentioned, Ryan, opposing future votes and in a narrow majority that's meaningful to the point you just made. Meanwhile, a single Senate Republican can block the consents necessary to pass this thing by McConnell's deadline of the 22nd, yet just watch and see if anyone does, because McConnell is able to sort of whip them into order pretty easily. And they're even sort of going, taking shots back and forth with Kevin McCarthy. Kevin McCarthy has been pretty favorable

to that position, the position of sort of Freedom Caucus people. And of course, he needs to do that right now because he needs their support in order to secure the speakership because some of them are kind of balking and saying, no, absolutely not. So it makes sense politically what Kevin McCarthy is doing here, although it's very rare for Republican leadership in Washington to talk the way that Kevin McCarthy is. It's much more common to hear the Mitch McConnell line, which is that don't be naive, don't be silly, this is how we have to do it. We can't have another shutdown, et cetera, et cetera. So really, really interesting preview of, I think, the power dynamics that are to come because there are a whole lot of people after the Trump administration on the right who

are sick and tired of getting steamrolled. They saw the January 6th committee, for instance, which used unprecedented subpoena power by its own admission, was using unprecedented subpoena power, taking phone records from members of Congress. They see that and they say, so you're just going to continue letting yourself be bowled over. And this is another sort of dust up in that larger fight. Rachel's point is an incredible one to absorb, which is that any of the 50 Republicans in the Senate could stop this. Yes. Because, like you said, it has to get done in the next couple of days.

And that deadline, Thune said, has actually creeped up a little bit because he was saying, this is South Dakota Republican, he was saying that because of the Arctic blast, you know, ripping through a huge swath of the country right now, that you're getting senators like even more antsy to get home. They always want to be home for the Christmas holiday, but now they're like, can we hustle? Like, we need to go. And if one person were to say, I object to this bill going through, that makes you drag it out to the 30-hour filibuster procedure. You could still get it done, but it punts you close to Christmas. And at that point, they might say, you know what, just do a CR. But it does, and Rachel seems to be cynically predicting that not a single one will do it. And I think that she's right. Like, Ethune, yesterday talking to reporters, was pretty confident. He's

like, yeah, we're going to get this done. Yeah, and Mike Lee has been extremely critical of this entire process and is on the same page, essentially, with the House Republicans here. But it's a question of whether this is ultimately defeatist, right? So what are we holding people back for? Is it because we actually can do something meaningful, even if it's a sort of PR thrust that says, we come out of this showing exactly how corrupt Mitch McConnell is, and it's worth it. We will keep these members in Washington, D.C. Through Christmas. members in Washington, D.C. until the 23rd, whatever it is, it's the least they can do. That kind of mentality, maybe. That might be part of the calculation there. But if it's ultimately

just, you know, it's going to look bad, then maybe it's not worth it for anyone anyway, because there's not going to be enough. If it is just one person or two people that are, you know, in that position of not just voting against, but actually trying to stop, then maybe it's not worth the push. Well, let's talk real quickly about what's in this $1.7 trillion omnibus spending package. And also, just as importantly, what's not in it. Because this was the moment for legislation that didn't make it through over the last two years to kind of just like what they call the last train out of town. So if you didn't get a ticket on this train, you're finished. And if you needed any House Republican support,

then you're finished for the next two years. And so a couple of the things that got blown up on the way out here would be, I think, most controversially in an Afghan piece of legislation where it was heavily pushed by the Pentagon and also by people who served in Afghanistan. It was a measure that would help facilitate the safe evacuation of Afghans who aided with the American occupation over there. And that was blocked by Chuck Grassley, basically, and a handful of other Republicans in the Senate. An odd look for Republicans. Grassley's concerns were about vetting. That's what he conveyed as he pushed through his opposition. But it had a lot of bipartisan support, and it also has a lot of public support. But what to you accounts for the kind of some Senate Republicans' willingness to block that. You know, these omnibus negotiations, and they

were talking for a little bit about putting the open app bill in. And so the omnibus negotiations- The antitrust legislation aimed at big tech. Would, yeah, open up app stores from the duopoly, which I don't even consider a duopoly. I consider it individual monopolies between Google and Apple and their app stores, which is just a huge piece of legislation that was briefly in the omnibus bill and then taken out. And that's what's fascinating about omnibus. Schumer's saying that McConnell was the one that took it out despite having Grassley's support. Yeah. But also Pelosi and McCarthy are both against it. Yeah. So what's interesting is you find out what's truly a poison pill in these types of negotiations.

Or they're sort of against it. They're not for it publicly. And you can suspect that they're privately against it. And that it's not worth, again, like, but that's what omnibus negotiations are an interesting sort of glimpse into D.C., like where people really stand, where the parties actually are on these issues because you find out what is an absolute non-starter when a shutdown is on the line. And so those two things, I mean, you have to swallow some bitter pills and that's just where it is. But it's also just like these earmarks that are appropriations that create earmarks. There's one for, did you see the Leahy one? The Patrick Leahy Lake Champlain Basis Program, $35 million a year from 2023 to 2027. Richard Shelby, who already has tons of things named after him. It's just to clean up the lake or what's...

The basis program is what I'm seeing right here. That's a good question. But it's renaming. And he's the outgoing appropriations chair. So basically Leahy had the checkbook. Right, renaming it the Patrick Leahy Lake Champlain Basis Program. And then, yeah, so Richard Shelby gets the facilities at the FBI at Redstone Arsenal to be known as the, quote, Richard Shelby Center for Innovation and Advanced Training. And then we have the Presidential Museum for Jimmy Carter, a $7.25 million upgrade, $6 million to the Ulysses S. Grant Museum. And this is a good one, $1.5 million for the COVID-19

American History Project, which I'm sure will be very flattering to Dr. Fauci. Interesting one. My favorite is they're putting in money to direct to the Army Corps of Engineers to find suitable beach spaces on the Potomac here in Washington. So I am a partisan in favor of more beaches here in Washington, D.C., so I'll take that along. package, people should understand, that includes $45 billion for the Ukrainian war effort and roughly $850 billion for the Pentagon, you know, approaching the largest spending basically in American history on our military. It includes the Electoral Count Act, which is a piece of legislation that tries to smooth out the transition process so that you don't need the same type of kind of complicated January 6th type situation that could get disrupted. It did not include the SAFE Act, which is basically weed banking. And people thought that it had a very, very strong chance of getting in.

Chuck Schumer blamed Pat Toomey mainly. I asked Thune if it was true that it was Pat Toomey who's an outgoing Senate Republican. It would be really obnoxious if an outgoing Senate Republican as a lame duck kills the weed thing. And Thune said there were a handful of other Republicans who were against it as well. But this basically would allow pot shops to legally use banking services. Yeah. And I asked him, what do the opponents think? That this is just like a fluke and that eventually they're going to re-ban pot everywhere? Right.

Like this ship has sailed. Right. Wake up, people. Right. And the argument is, well, let's do it more rationally. And, like, let's actually create a regime of taxation and regulation that kind of marries up across federal and state policy. Okay, fine. Right.

But we live in the real world. Right. So, let's do what we can now. What else didn't get—oh, the PRESS Act, which I talked about last week. Yeah. Tom Cotton arguing that the Pentagon Papers is a reason that we ought not to have press freedom defense and whistleblower protections. That argument won out. Yeah. Well, it won out because as we were talking about earlier, when you asked about the Afghan question, you find out what really is a nonstarter. What is the absolute worst case scenario for some senators?

Because then they go into the office and say, this is it. This is my red line. And so what you end up getting into these bills is things that are not anybody's red line. And to prevent something from being somebody's red line, you get things like federal buildings named after Nancy Pelosi, $3.6 million for the Michelle Obama trail. You know, again, like this is, if you live in the real world, this is just how it works, right? This is, you can have Republicans come in and fund the government and you will get plenty of this stuff too. If they were to negotiate spending later in next year, you're going to get plenty of this stuff too. It's sadly how the system works. And, you know, there should be an overhaul.

We talk about it year after year. I mean, how many Tea Party conservatives railed against the way that we fund the government here? And they had full control in 2017, and we're still here. There's incredible structural changes that need to happen to prevent our government from being funded in this utterly corrupt way. But there's really no will to do a damn thing about that. So we're stuck picking apart these omnibus bills. Well, and at least we might get some nice clean beaches and some cleaner Potomac and Anacostia rivers here in Washington, D.C.

So take that. I guess that's not the end of the world. It's something. So first of all, thanks to a lot of the readers who sent in pieces of JFK documents and flagged for me, hey, check this out, search this, here's the document number. It was really helpful. well. So we have another segment, if we can put E1 here. The CIA really has long claimed that it had no contact with Lee Harvey Oswald before President Kennedy's assassination. But that claim is undercut by a new document released last week by the Biden administration, which involves George de Maren Schilt, who's a known CIA asset. Now, it's long been known that the two became

close friends in the months before the assassination, but skeptics have called that a coincidence. But in spring 1963, DeMoren Schilt traveled to New York, Philadelphia, and Washington. According to the documents found in the newly declassified files, at the same time as his trip, the CIA's Domestic Operations Division ran a search on DeMoren Schilt, quote, exact reason unknown, according to these documents created by a CIA analyst included in last week's declassification. Now, we talked about those documents briefly last week, and we can put up E2 here, but didn't have time to dive into their significance, but now we can. So I talked to Jeff Morley, who runs a sub-stack JFK Facts,

and he noted that it was known that Oswald had told DeMoor and Schilt he'd soon be traveling to New Orleans. Oswald's time in New Orleans is critical to understanding how a conspiracy may have unfolded, and there's a reason why it was Jim Garrison, the New Orleans district attorney who later tried to prove the conspiracy in court, which later turned into Oliver Stone's drama JFK, which itself led to the JFK Records Act of 1992, which is the law under which Biden released these documents. Now, it's also worth knowing that the covert arm of the division mentioned in this memo was run at the time by E. Howard Hunt, a black ops specialist who actually confessed, and we can put this element in the Rolling Stone article, he confessed later in life to learning

ahead of time of a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy that involved high-level figures in the CIA. So the CIA memo reads, we can put up this next element, it is interesting that Gail Allen's interest in DeMorenchild coincided with the earlier portion of this trip. The memo concludes referring to Gail Allen as a case officer with the CIA's Domestic Operations Division at the time. And the information would suggest that possibly Allen and DeMorenshield were possibly in the same environment in Washington, D.C., circa April 26, 1963. So that's a critical new detail to add to this puzzle. And this week, Tucker Carlson's Fox News show added another piece of the puzzle.

Let's roll that. We spoke to someone who had access to these still-hidden CIA documents, a person who was deeply familiar with what they contained. We asked this person directly, did the CIA have a hand in the murder of John F. Kennedy, an American president? And here's the reply we received verbatim. Quote, the answer is yes. I, an American president. And here's the reply we received verbatim. Quote, the answer is yes. I believe they were involved. It's a whole different country from what we thought it was. It's all fake. It's hard to imagine a more jarring response than that.

Again, this is not a, quote, conspiracy theorist that we spoke to. Not even close. This is someone with direct knowledge of the information that once again is being withheld from the American public. And the answer we received was unequivocal. Yes, the CIA was involved in the assassination of the president. And so, Emily, why this new clue is so interesting is that there's been a lot of questions about who did Oswald talk to in New Orleans? Did he interact with CIA assets? Is this where he was kind of roped into this November plot? And now, if it's the case that this CIA asset, DeMore and Schilt, went to Washington and hung out with CIA people, that would make the link. That would explain how the CIA would have known

that there was this interesting figure of Oswald who's going to New Orleans over the summer. Because why else would the DOD, the E. Howard Hunt's division, be running this search if there wasn't some interaction between people in the DOD. And actually, last week when I was reading this document, I thought DOD was Pentagon. As you know, it's a reasonable assumption. But no, it's Domestic Operations Division, which itself is an extraordinarily controversial operation because the CIA should not have a domestic operations division. And they certainly shouldn't have a goon like Howard Hunt running it, who later became the Watergate guy before

confessing on what he thought was his deathbed to knowledge of this conspiracy. There's a great line in your story for The Intercept where you say, Oswald's next few years make more sense with a CIA connection than without it. They make much more sense with the CIA connection than without it. And I think this new evidence suggests that the CIA connection in and of itself makes much more sense now, that there's just much more, it's becoming a much clearer picture. His relationship with the CIA is becoming a much clearer picture, which is an enormously helpful thing to have from our vantage point now decades and decades in the past. And the Tucker segment is interesting, too, because it's like the Hunt

article in Rolling Stone that you pointed to. The dam has to break, right? Like the facade at some point, you just see these little cracks where they're not little cracks, they're actually huge cracks where people come out and say, yeah, hey, you know, but it's one person, right? And then the CIA shuts it down and you get it. Someone talks to Tucker. Someone says they themselves had knowledge of this. But it's still right. Like the government still doesn't tell the full story. So you can still just sort of dismiss that. Right. And so the big question is, what evidence remains in these files? And one, you know, the person who would know that is somebody who has run the CIA before. And so let's roll a second part of this Tucker segment. And people have known this for a long time.

The people who knew would include every director of the CIA since November of 1963. And that list would include Obama's CIA director, John Brennan, one of the CIA since November of 1963. And that list would include Obama's CIA director, John Brennan, one of the most sinister and dishonest figures in American life. That list would also include, we are sad to say, our friend Mike Pompeo, who ran the CIA in the last administration. Mike Pompeo knew this. We asked Pompeo to join us tonight, and though he rarely turns down a televised interview, he refused to come. We hope he will reconsider. It's just such an effective barb. It's subtle but poignant, even though he rarely turns down a televised interview. Right. Hey, Mike, you want to come on to the Tucker show? Absolutely. What are we talking about,

JFK? Yeah, no. Wow. Yeah, really just slammed tonight. Can't make it. The big picture question, I think, I mean, obviously there's a huge question about our involvement historically in world affairs that this is, and in domestic affairs, to your point about the DOD, that this case reflects. But in terms of implicating Mike Pompeo, it does raise a really interesting question, which is, how are these things still functioning? How are all of these mechanisms that we like to pretend and hide, we're not functioning the way that it seems very clear? I mean, again, this is from the memo that you plucked from this new stack, Ryan. It says,

Shep phoned to say that James Wilcott, a finance clerk with the agency from 57 who served in Tokyo 60 to October 64, has told HSCA people that CIA hired Lee Harvey Oswald when Oswald served in Atsugi. Atsugi, a Japanese naval base, which may have been your grandfather's. I have no idea. But he served in Japan. But you say that this overlaps, or this is interesting because it overlaps with a lot of your work on drug policy and with the United States military's record on drug policy. Because Oswald is then part of that program. Well, he may have been, and there are people who suspect that he was, and this tightens the link. There were two things going on at this CIA base. It was both a naval base and a CIA base that are of importance. One, it was a CIA base

because they were launching U-2 spy planes over the Soviet Union. Two, it was a central component of the CIA's experimentation with psychedelics, with LSD in particular. And so, you know, did Oswald participate in this? We don't, you know, we don't know for certain. But like you were saying, everything he does after this makes more sense if he did make a CIA link at this point. So he goes from there to a base in California where he appears to have then through a joint kind of intelligence and military school in Monterey learns Russian. He then gets a completely bogus discharge where he claims that his mother is ill. That turns out that that wasn't true.

But if you're moving into kind of agency work, covert agency work, often you can get a facilitated bogus discharge. So he gets this discharge. He then, within nine days of getting his discharge, with $203 in his bank account, he sails for England. His wife later tells, I think, the Warren Commission that he took a hop, which is a military, basically a military flight from England over to Helsinki in Finland. With his $203 bank account, he then stays in two of the fanciest hotels in Helsinki before having enough money to then book an overnight train to Moscow, where he then shows up at the American embassy and announces that he has flipped and he's becoming a follower of the Soviet Union. And the embassy staff later said that his entire speech sounded weird and rehearsed.

And so then he spends the next two and a half years in the Soviet Union as this defector and then comes back. Just, it's cool. Come on back. Winds up Mexico, then Dallas, where he is befriended by the CIA asset, who then, the CIA asset, travels up to, after learning he's going to New Orleans, travels up to Washington.

In Washington, E. Howard Hunt's division reported right up to Allen Dulles, runs a search on this guy's name. They make connections. Connections are made with Oswald in New Orleans. And then Oswald in November 1963 is somehow involved with this assassination. We don't know.

We don't know precisely how, what his role was. Warren Commission says he was the lone gunman who gunned him down. But if you were to concoct some type of conspiracy, you'd want a guy like this who would take the fall for it to be at the scene. Right before he's killed by Jack Ruby, he's telling the press, I'm a patsy, I'm a patsy, I'm a patsy. Yeah. And this, again, the document that you flag here just creates a clearer picture of how that could have been the case. It's plausible. So here's some more JFK declassification files because they push people out of the woodwork like Tucker's source, and you get closer and closer to the truth. And the reason Pompeo was mentioned is that 2017 was a year that they were supposed to release a lot of documents. They released some. Pompeo fought internally extraordinarily hard against basically people like Roger Stone, who had Trump's ear on the

other side saying, release this stuff, man. Right. But you have to put yourself in the perspective of an American president who isn't sure, but believes that the CIA may have done this to Kennedy. And then you start wondering yourself, well, if they, and that is what is so transformative about this act, whether they even did it or not, the fact that presidents since then have believed that they did it.

And there's a great article about Richard Nixon in Politico years ago. Nixon completely believed that the CIA did this and basically pressed the helms of the CIA saying, if you don't protect me around Watergate, I'm going to expose your hanky-panky with Kennedy and the Bay of Pigs. And what all happened there, as Richard Nixon said, who shot John?

The whole who shot. You want to go into the who shot John question? That's Nixon kind of blackmailing the CIA. But that's another point as to why they're so sensitive about these records. I mean, there are a million reasons, of course, but there are so many other people that could be implicated whose names aren't involved yet. And it could be tangentially through things like that, like the soft blackmail for Richard Nixon about, quote, who shot John. So there's some things that have sort of seeped through the cracks over the years that are tangential or implicate people that are

randomly involved, whatever. Someone knew this, someone knew that. But we, I mean, you don't know what you don't know. And so that's the big lingering question mark. What we do know is that there are a lot of things we don't know, and we continue to fill in the sort of lines as best we can. But the Mike Pompeo angle is a really interesting one. It reminds me of Pompeo and Trump's disagreements over Assange that ultimately Pompeo won out on. You can understand where hawkish sort of conservatives and Democrats even, like Pompeo, would come down on that question and say, this utterly will obliterate the credibility of the United States on the world stage. If it gets out, it's not worth it, et cetera, et cetera. But obviously, the American people deserve to know

how their money is being spent in heinous ways like this. Yeah, and same invitation to Mike Pompeo. Welcome to come on CounterPoints anytime. Absolutely. And talk about this. Oh, and the Warren Commission run by Alan Dulles. He loves Alan Dulles. I'm concerned. What's your point today? Okay. Well, naturally, with Christmas and Hanukkah here, many of us are spending even more time than usual on faith traditions. Both holidays, like many others, have been secularized in recent decades, but even so, nobody can escape mentions of Christ at Christmas or the Maccabees during Hanukkah.

During this year's Christmas season, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of 303 Creative, which challenges a Colorado public accommodations law. After Thanksgiving, Congress passed the Respect for Marriage Act, and President Biden signed it into law just last week. We talked a bit here about the 303 Creative case earlier this month. It raises an interesting legal question, and it's one that liberal democracies and constitutional republics like ours have basically grappled with since the Enlightenment. The owner of 303 Creative is an artist named Lori Smith, who creates websites for businesses and events. She wants Colorado to protect her from celebrating marriages that fall outside of her faith tradition. She's a Christian. Put another way, Smith is happy to serve LGBT customers, but she doesn't believe the state can compel her to create

wedding websites for same-sex marriages. Lori's position on same-sex marriage puts her in a clear minority of Americans. There is no question about that, which is why it's no surprise at all that Congress passed the RFMA with enough Republican support, and then Biden signed it into law. America went from disapproving of same-sex marriage to overwhelmingly supporting it in about a decade. Congress represented the consensus position then by passing the bill, which was pushed, especially by Democrats, after Clarence Thomas' concurring opinion in the Dobbs decision, since he mentioned that Obergefell may not be on solid legal footing

like he thought Roe wasn't. But the bill had a wrinkle that incensed some Republicans. Senator Mike Lee offered an amendment that would, in his words, quote, prohibit the federal government from retaliating against any person or group for adhering to sincerely held religious beliefs and moral convictions about marriage. Because of the bill, Lee said, many religious schools, faith-based organizations, and other non-profit entities adhering to traditional views of marriage would be at risk of losing tax-exempt status and access to a whole wide range of federal programs. That would include wedding vendors like kosher caterers, for instance. That was one of the examples Lee provided. Ultimately, the law was passed with Republican support and without Lee's

additional protections. Now, I've never believed the federal government should have a role in marriage, period, precisely for all of these reasons. But as support for same sex marriage became a consensus position, clashes like these became more and more common and more and more difficult for Orthodox Jews, Christians, and Muslims. In Smith's case at 303 Creative, the question is not whether she would serve LGBT customers like segregationist business owners in the Jim Crow South. She will serve any customer, but she does not want to be compelled to create speech that violates her beliefs. Now, that is a reasonable position. I don't think her critics are unreasonable either, but I do think the lack of interest in Mike Lee's RFMA amendment to strengthen the bill's protections indicates we are hurtling towards a future of more and more religious clashes, which is really interesting, actually,

in a world where Catholic churches are seeing surging interest in the traditional Latin mass, secular women are questioning the sexual revolution, and people like Jordan Peterson, for instance, are finding huge audiences. People are looking for something, some source of meaning and purpose. Some people are landing in traditional faiths.

Others, like the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, believe they're, quote, more of a free spirit without the Holy Spirit, but still want to sing hymns in a choir to connect with their spirituality. An interesting little plot line on this season. The world has changed a lot in the last century. It's changed a lot in the last several centuries at a faster pace than any other time in human history. We are all living through an extraordinary change in our species right now. So what does any of this have to do with Christmas or Hanukkah or kosher wedding vendors? Well, these traditions and holidays are a very good reminder of something that sounds very basic.

As a Christian, for instance, I don't merely believe Christmas celebrates a story. I believe it celebrates a true story, history. It is absolutely a thousand percent fine with me if you think that sounds insane. I don't think you're being unreasonable. But because I believe God sent his son in human form to be born miraculously to a virgin and was literally resurrected from the dead, I believe he is the creator of all things, so I don't get to change what he said. Nancy Pelosi made a wonderful accommodation for members of Congress to wear head coverings, allowing Ilhan Omar to become the first member to wear a religious headscarf on the floor. That's not the case in every context in every European country. They've been dealing with these questions a lot. And I understand why many people find head

coverings to be misogynistic and outdated. But I believe Ilhan Omar believes her religion is fact, not a nice story or one of many relative truths that we all just sort of pick and choose. I believe she believes her God is God, just as I think the same. The less popular these beliefs become, the less our system of government is going to work. Unless, of course, we can find a way to respect that some people will continue to worship faith traditions that are more similar to what people generally believed for thousands and thousands of years before modernity and post-modernity and technology made those beliefs seem less plausible to many, many people. Religion may fade, but it will not disappear. Our liberal

democracies can't erase these faiths or their texts, but we can adjust to changing public opinion by protecting the balance of our freedoms. All right, Ryan, what is on your mind? What is your counterpoint this Wednesday? We're running up against our deadline here, so I'm going to run through this pretty quickly. We've got a little thought experiment for people out there. So imagine that the New York Post somehow winds up in possession of a laptop belonging to Elon Musk and begins publishing articles based off of what it finds in there. Now, some of it is a bit risque, but other revelations are clearly newsworthy, relating to deals he made with, say, Saudi princes or American political leaders or Chinese government officials, what have you. Now ask yourself, how do you think Elon Musk would react?

Go ahead, sit with that for a second. Do you think he would say, you know what, I'm an absolutist when it comes to free speech, and while this is painful for me, my principles require that I allow this to be published and shared on twitter.com. So I posed this hypothetical on Musk's website yesterday and I got a fascinating response from some of his defenders. They didn't argue that Musk would follow his free speech principles and allow the documents to be published. Instead they argued that he would be right to step in and censor the articles.

After all, they said, it's a private platform, he's not running for president, and the real problem is government censorship. Now, Twitter users are mostly adults, so it's strange that I have to make this point. But let's be clear about something. Two wrongs do not make a right, saying that Musk would be justified in censoring a New York Post story because the previous version of Twitter censored a New York Post story violates that basic rule that we all learned as kids. It is also wrong that the FBI and DHS have put pressure on big tech to police speech, as my colleagues Lee Fong and Ken Klippenstein recently reported. And yesterday, Michael Schellenberger published another edition of the Twitter files, which included evidence of FBI pressure of Twitter, including something sent to them the night before the New York Post story ran.

We don't know what was in those files that were sent the night before, but Twitter attorney Jim Baker, who was former general counsel for the FBI, also had a call the next day with an FBI attorney on his calendar. There's no smoking gun yet that the FBI told Twitter specifically to censor the Hunter Biden story, but there was clearly general pressure. But more importantly, even if there was zero pressure for Twitter on its own to censor the New York Post story was wrong and troubling. Another argument people made is that I personally have no standing to make this point because the intercept where I work blocked Glenn Greenwald from publishing a story on it. But as Glenn has said repeatedly, I had zero to do with that and didn't even learn he was quitting until after he'd quit. And I was publicly critical of the decision at the time to censor the Post reporting. Glenn, meanwhile, has had some fun by mocking Democrats

who have suddenly become champions of free speech, but he's also been critical of Elon's suspensions of them. What's important when you hold a principle is to apply it equally to your friends and enemies alike. In fact, it's more important that you apply it to your enemies because it's easy to be nice to your friends. And that's what's been so disappointing about Elon Musk's turn away from free speech

and that he has maintained the support of so many of his fans while he has done it is even more discouraging. Like you don't get to call yourself an independent thinker if what you think depends on what Elon Musk says at any given moment. Oh, and by the way, there's just as much evidence that Elon is being pressured by governments as there is that the old Twitter was. When he was at the World Cup, for instance, leaders of the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are major investors in Twitter, were overheard telling Musk that he had to stop being so erratic and hire a stable CEO to run Twitter. Shortly after that, he published the poll asking if he should step down. What's that

if it's not government pressure? Sure, it's not the U.S. government, but is that somehow better? And then when 57% of nearly 20 million people said yes, he should step down, he started complaining about the vote and his supporters urged him to do a new one that only people who pay can participate in. One of his most vocal supporters even started arguing that the founding father's vision of democracy was that only property landowners ought to be able to vote. So therefore, restricting the franchise for Twitter polls to people who pay for Twitter Blue was basically the vision of the founding fathers. By the way, this is neither here nor there, but that's a misunderstanding of the founding. In many states, you did not actually have to own property to vote after 1776, though you did have to be

male. In any event, if you want to understand the collapse of Musk's free speech revolution, just go reread your copy of George Orwell's Animal Farm and remember how quickly the revolutionary animals reinstituted the old farm's rules and hierarchies after they'd taken over and even invited the humans back on the farm. As the Vox Populi watched the increasingly authoritarian Twitter CEO implement new rules on a whim, even within 24 hours of promising not to implement new rules on a whim without a new vote, it's a reminder of the great last line from Animal Farm in which Orwell writes, spoiler alert, the creatures outside looked from pig to man and from man to pig and from pig to man again,

but already it was impossible to say which was which. So as we're, and I'm constantly reminded of that last line, as people kind of move in and out of different contexts in their lives. It's one thing to hold a position, say, with regard to... All right, we're joined now by Devin Mance, who's a trackman foreman with BNSF Railway, which is the Warren Buffett-owned railroad company. Devin is actually joining us from North Dakota where, good Lord, what is the wind chill where you are right now, Devin?

I believe it's right around 30 below at the moment. It should get colder overnight. Good Lord. All right. So the reason, Devin, that we wanted to have you on is that Devin featured in an article that I wrote for The Intercept about the union organizing that went into the recent railroad fight that went through Congress. you helped pull together what's called BMWD Rank and File United, which is kind of a caucus of rank and file workers that is designed to kind of put pressure on the company, put pressure on union leadership to make sure that they are responding to the needs of rank and file workers. How would you put what BMWDmwd rank and file united does no that's exactly uh what the point of the caucus is we're a reform caucus that uh just began because we saw that there needed to be a change um there needs to be that constant pressure from below and we want to give that voice to the rank and file members and that's what we're trying to

do also we're trying to help out doing some education. A lot of union members don't know really about trade unionism at all and it's a tough thing to learn how to do when you're going through union bureaucracy and the normal conservative union stuff that we always do, claims and grievances and that kind of stuff. And so we're just trying to uplift the rank and file members and let them know that they have a voice in their workplace. And so for background, people can check out the piece I did over at The Intercept. But basically in mid-November, about 25 workers came straight from the tracks to Washington, met with more than 100 members of Congress. At the time,

you met with staff for Jamal Bowman. And then once Biden dropped the hammer and sent the contract over to Congress to be ratified, you were one of the workers who was in touch on the House side with Bowman, putting together the strategy of how you were going to try to salvage something from this wreckage. Didn't want to have you on to rehash all of that. What I wanted to hear is how the company has been treating you since then. Yeah, it's really interesting. Railroads have been known for a long time to do different sorts of retaliation. And I'm sure a lot of different corporations do the same kind of stuff.

But right now I'm under an investigation for kind of some bogus charges. And, you know, I could possibly be fired here in the next few weeks or be penalized and be on probation for a year, in which within that year they can fire me for the silliest little things. Fortunately, I do have a good union rep who is on my side and trying to fight to get rid of those charges. They're all trumped up and, you know,

BNSF knows that it's all and that um if it goes to arbitration which it will if i do get fired or if i get that probation then uh it'll be dropped you know the arbitrator is going to agree with us but you know that's two years away so i might be out of a job here for the next two years um so if anybody's looking for an organizer. Well, and that has to have a chilling effect on other members of the rank and file and people who might be considering speaking out against BNSF over for very reasonable purposes over ridiculous policies going forward. So if they make an example out of you, Devin, how do you think that affects people, whether it's a probation or being fired? How do you think that affects the sort of momentum among your colleagues that are sort of fed up and ready to be public about a lot of this? Yeah, that's a really great point. It's really cheap for them to do. I mean, look,

I know I'm a pain in their butt. I know that. If, you know, arbitrator comes back in two years and they have to pay me back all my, you know, lost wages for the last two years or three years or however long it takes, it's still cheaper than what it is for me to be out there, right? Like I know I'm a pain. But yeah, I mean, that is a chilling effect on them. I would hope that that would lift them up a little bit more and get people to talk a little bit more to each other and say, you know, this guy got that,

so we need to stick together. And so you need to keep a positive spin on it and not go to the, everyone hush, everyone be quiet. Don't bring up anything because you know, you're worried you might get fired just like Devin did or get penalized. You know, I'm, if this happens I'm definitely going to put that word out there that, that they should still keep fighting, they should band together, and that's the only way we're going to win this thing. And I don't want to get to how you're a pain in their ass in a moment. But first, I think it's important for people to understand the kind of banal ways that this retaliation works. So how much, because you and I were talking last night

about the details of this, I think it's really interesting to window into the way that corporate retaliation against workers actually plays out in the workplace. How much can you talk about? Can you tell us a little bit about precisely what these trumped up charges are? And the timing, when do they slap you with these? Yeah, so basically, I'm going to try to explain it as easy as I can because every industry has their own little things. But basically, we're told to put our time in.

We do it all on the computer. We do it all on application and we put our own time in. And we're told to do our time for the day before or the morning before and then change it the following day. Now this, they want us to do that because on their scorecards, they get bonuses for on-time performance, right? So if you put your time in, that's what we call it. It's just putting in the time that you worked on time, then they get a better bonus at the end of the year. So why wouldn't they want you to put it in early? So anyways, without going into all the details, essentially, I did that and my job had ended. I wasn't able to change my time the next day. And I had asked

a timekeeper, I'd sent an email. This is a very common thing to do. Just send an email to a timekeeper and ask them to change the time. And they did it. Three days later, I get an investigation notice that I was stealing time. And I'm like, no. And I talked to my union rep, I talked to my manager, they're all like, oh, sorry, I think you could do it. My union rep's like, this is BS. This happens all the time. We get cut letters all the time, constantly. They're trying to take time away from us. And it happens like three days later that I get this charge. And it's just so silly because this happened to me about three years ago once, too,

when I explained the situation and my manager's manager who's in charge of these investigations says, oh, yeah, no, that makes sense. That's fine. We'll drop it. So they dropped it because they understand. Now the same exact manager is still coming after me for the same exact thing that happened three years ago. And it's a total common thing to happen. So, yeah, it's really unfortunate that it's going

down that way. Yeah. And so basically the way it could unfold is they would fire you, say you stole time and then force you to go to arbitration. And then, like you said, even if you win an arbitration two years from now, three years from now, they would owe you every penny of lost wages over that period of time. But like you said, to them, it's worth it to have you out of there. And can you talk about that a little bit? What are the types of things? And you're a shop steward as well for your shop. And so what are the kinds of things that an active shop steward does that would make it so that a company like BNSF would say, you know what, it's actually cheaper for us to pay this guy for a couple of years just to not show up to work. Yeah. So as you said, I am the shop

steward. We call him local chairman where I come from on the railroads. But essentially what you do is you try to force the railroads to abide by the agreement. And sometimes it's management just doing whatever they want. And sometimes it's the corporate side of things doing whatever they want. And either way, if it's against the agreement, we have to file claims or we try to get them done right away. I mean, I go into the manager's office and talk to them and say, hey, like this isn't right. You got to do it this way.

This is what the agreement says. Sometimes they're like, oh, okay, we'll fix it. Or sometimes you have to, and it may cost them a little more money now, but sometimes you have to file these claims and grievances and those can take two to three years to get paid or not get paid. It depends on the arbitrary that you get. It's kind of a crapshoot, to be honest with you. And so that's years down the road.

And so what ends up happening is if you keep filing these claims is you get a steady income of thousands of dollars being put in your members' pockets by the railroads. And sometimes it's, you know, they're paying contractors to do our job. And those are claims that we should be doing those jobs. And we're able to, right? We're trained to do that. But then they're going to have to pay twice. And like, that's how much money these railroads have is they cut all these positions, but then they hire contractors and then they end up paying now for the contractor, which is more expensive. And then they end up paying in two to three years after the arbitration is all done. And so they end up paying double. And so I try to abide by our agreement as much as possible.

And I try to help our membership do that, too. They're doing an excellent job at letting me know what's going on. But, you know, when you bring up these issues, they don't like it because it's not as easy for them, right? Like they just want to do whatever they want, even if it's against our agreement. And so I'm fighting to keep that all the time. And so if that costs them a lot of money, then it is what it is. But that's what I'm talking about is where it would be easier for them just to fire me because money doesn't mean a lot to them. Yeah, except when it would require a total rethinking of precision tactics because they would have to actually hire more people instead of just giving sick days. Amazing how steep that uphill battle is for you guys just to get those sick days. And while you're here,

you've been kind of roped into this kind of debate that's been going on among what they kind of call the independent left about the whole strategy to get Jamal Bowman to push for the seven-day sick leaves. The strategy has been called by a lot of people naive, saying that there was no chance that Senate Republicans, the 10 Senate Republicans, were ever going to go along with this. And then it's just a giant kind of cover for the squad who's just a sellout to Democratic Party leadership. Wanted to kind of quickly get your response to that.

And also, what's it been like to kind of see yourself as, you know, become part of this online debate? Well, it is really interesting to see this national news and national audience of people talking about this kind of stuff. So it's very odd, just coming from the tracks and just doing my everyday job to something so nationally recognized. So it's really interesting. So I appreciate that article,

especially because that's pushed a lot of that out there. But, you know, I've been in contact with Bowman's office, with Cori Bush's office, and a couple other progressives too. And it's been, it's been really great, really cool to see it all happen. And they've been awesome and wanting to help. I remember Cori Bush's office was like, well, why can't we ask for 15 days? You know, like they wanted more. And it just, it didn't line up with the strategy that National had pushed for in the first place. And you need to push as one. You can't just change it up and ask for 20 different things. I mean, I'm sure all their offices would have rather given us way more, but that's just not the reality of what we do. And as far as, you know, the left bashing on all these progressives are helping us out, I just, I understand their point. I really do. But it's just not our reality. It's not what we have today.

Now, should we try to fix that for the future? Absolutely. Like, great. Do we want to put timelines on the Railway Labor Act? Great. I would love that. You know, I don't want to wait three years for my contract. But, you know, that was our strategy. And that is what we asked them. I specifically asked them for that.

And telling us that we're naive because we didn't think that or you didn't think that some Republicans were going to come with us. Well, I mean, look at Ted Cruz did. Yeah, exactly. I mean, he's a populist, right? Like he sees that, hey, you know what? You might be able to get some workers actually with the GOP here right now, right? So, and they saw that, Marco Rubio, right?

Like these odd people came out and actually supported us. So to say that we're naive or we're dumb, we don't know what we're doing because we didn't think or we knew it was going to fail in the Senate, that's incorrect. That couldn't be more far from the truth. Actually, a lot of our members are conservatives and they vote for these people, right? And they know that, right? These representatives know that they vote for these people, right? And they know that, right? These representatives know that they vote for them. So now that they're on record saying that they didn't support our sick days, I've actually had people say, hey, look, Bernie Sanders, Jamal Bowman, wow. And these are

conservatives, right? Like these are Midwest flyover state conservatives, right? Trump folks. Yeah, absolutely. And they're saying, wow, they actually stood up for us. I have a lot of respect for these people now. And they're actually moving a little bit more to the left. So the people that are far to the left and are trying to push these progressives that actually helped us out,

I think you're doing a giant disservice. And I understand your point and what you're trying to get at, but it's really coming from the wrong place. And I really think that you need to rethink and talk to some actual workers. I think you guys had a much better pulse on the situation. The Republican Party is as corporatist as the Democratic Party increasingly, especially in some swing states, like Wisconsin and Ohio, Pennsylvania, et cetera, et cetera, know what's in their best interests

and are responding to that. And you picked up on that. Obviously your workers know that in a way that I think people in the sort of progressive movement, professional activist class. You think the independent left might have their finger on the pulse

of the Republican Party? Is it shocking? I don't know. Shocked. It's just a hunch. Oh, and one, Devin, one quick, fun story. Devin and I were in touch a lot throughout this in my capacity of reporting on this for The Intercept. But then at the very end, Devin's like, wait a minute, you're the guy on counterpoints. So Devin has been a viewer of Breaking Points for a while. That's awesome. And didn't make the connection until the very end. Proud to have you as somebody who watches the show.

And we're going to keep following your case because we're not going to let them retaliate against workers who are just asking for their basic rights without at least facing some public shame for it. Well, I appreciate it. Thank you very much for having me on. Appreciate you guys a lot. Thank you, Devin. And please stay warm and safe during the crazy weather hitting the Midwest this week. Yeah, it's insane. Yes, it's just going to get colder out there. So he's in North Dakota. I'm heading straight into it later today. Minus 30. Yeah. And he was saying like, they're going to like, so he, it's an hour earlier. He's, he's working today later. Uh, they're, they were trying to get them. He said to do a bunch of routine maintenance and he's like, you're somebody could die out there. Uh, now if there's, but if,

but if a track breaks and the tracks do break, he's going out there. There's a lot of, well, yeah. And, and I've seen a lot of people saying, listen, real workers are already really highly compensated. They're not the biggest case study. They're not the best sob story for workers right now. And it's like, no, real workers are relatively on average. They make good money. They make decent money. But it's a very high risk, dangerous, vulnerable to the elements type of job that explains exactly why, first of all, you're going to have a hard time recruiting people to do those jobs and a hard time, obviously, maintaining them. But that money is hard-earned because of exactly the conditions that we were just talking about. Yeah. And I should have given him credit for this while he was here, but one of the reasons that these companies are so furious at people like him

and are so willing to pay so much to get rid of him, a lot of people have talked about how crappy the contract was, and the contract was crappy. Zero sick days. Yeah. And one little personal day. Awful. It's planned.

It's still planned. You should have planned it. His particular union, BMWED, won something that they had lost three years ago, which is basically expenses for when you're on the road. So because he fixes the tracks, obviously the tracks don't break next to his house. You could have to travel 600 miles and be there for several weeks. And they won a concession that ends up being estimated at $80 million a year for mileage and for lodging, because you had people who were sleeping in their cars

and were basically working for free because of the expenses that it cost them to get to where they had to go. They talked about people who were going from Illinois to Northern Nevada, like regularly. And so now, and the Presidential Emergency Board said, look, this is the business model that you, the railroads, have chosen. If you want to make Devin drive 500 miles, rather than hire somebody who's closer, then you have to compensate him for doing that. So that's a big win, and it comes because the BMW ED, in particular, was more mobilized and organized,

and particularly thanks to people like Devin who have been organized in the rank and file. And I know we have to run, but I was just thinking as we were talking to him from a 30,000-foot view of how ridiculous the sort of basic contours philosophically of shareholder capitalism are, where you say, well, if somebody doesn't want to do this job, they'll go find another job. It's not the responsibility of this company to provide a decent, reasonable lifestyle for its workers, a quality of life for its workers. If they don't want to pay out of pocket for expenses to get from point A to point B, screw it, right? Like, screw them.

We'll find someone else. We're just trying to maximize the value of this company. That might involve buybacks. It might involve extreme compensation for people at the very, very top. And if people like, if our rank and file doesn't like it, screw them. They'll go find a job somewhere else. And there are enough desperate people who need cash that'll take this position that we can continue to exploit them and not allow them to have a normal family life and keep money that is rightfully theirs. And it's just, it is so on its face, insanely ridiculous. And when you even have people like Ted Cruz, as Devin said,

recognizing that because their workers, their voters recognize it because they're dealing with it. I mean, the farce is exposed. Right. And so not only is Mike Pompeo, welcome to come on to the show, BNSF, open invitation to come on and justify the charges that you're trying to level after the work that Devin Manstead. Open invitation, come on on. Please come on and defend it. And that's our show for today. Hopefully we'll have more on this in the future. Maybe BNSF does want to come on.

Maybe Mike Pompeo wants to come on. Be a great panel. That's right. Of course, we will be on top of both of those storylines going forward. And we hope we're signing off for the year, technically. That's right. We'll see you in 2023. 2023. Maybe with intro music.

What a great time it is to be here. We're so lucky to be here with this team. We're so thankful to all of the viewers, all the subscribers and to Sagar and Crystal and all of the team here. And the crew that we make scramble at the last minute with all our changes. So thank you to everybody out there. Appreciate it. I hope everyone has a great holiday season and a great end to the year. See you later. I'm Michael Kasson, founder and CEO of 3C Ventures

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