Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 2/01/23 Counter Points: Biden Meets w/McCarthy, US Rejects Ukraine Jets, UK Threatened By Putin, General Predicts War With China, Abortion Emergency, Santos Polling Immigration Reform & MORE!

Episode Date: February 1, 2023

Ryan and Emily discuss Biden meeting with McCarthy on the debt ceiling fight, US rejecting please for jets to Ukraine, Boris Johnson saying Putin threatened the UK with missiles, A US general predicting war with China, Santos resigning from committees, Haiti turmoil, the immigration crisis, and the media being duped by an obvious hoax.Timestamps:Ilhan Omar: (0:00)Debt Ceiling: (06:11)Ukraine: (16:04)China: (26:07)Biden: (35:17)George Santos: (43:50)Emily: (54:28)Ryan (01:07:45)Todd Bensman (01:21:29)To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/AUSTIN LIVE SHOW FEB 3RDTickets: https://tickets.austintheatre.org/9053/9054 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it means the absolute world to have your support. What are you waiting for? Become a premium subscriber today at breakingpoints.com. Well, hello, everyone. Welcome to CounterPoints. Ryan, how are you doing? Wonderful. Happy Wednesday to you. Happy Wednesday to you. Now, there's a lot going on here because House, I was just going to say a House minority leader, but now Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy, is set to meet with President Biden today. And they're going to talk about whether we will default, basically, on our debt and what the path might look like to get there. Ryan, there was one thing you wanted to mention at the top of the show, an interesting development and some of the biggest news of the last week. Oh, yeah. A couple of things actually. So first of all, tonight in Memphis, the funeral

for Tyree Nichols will be held. Kamala Harris has told the family that she will be there to speak. Reverend Al Sharpton is going to lead the event. Organizers said they expect something like 2,500 people to go, even though Memphis is under an ice storm at the moment. It'll be right in downtown Memphis. We're also coming up to the culmination of the fight over Ilhan Omar's seat on the Foreign Affairs Committee. You had Matt Gaetz come out and say that he's undecided. And I'm curious what your sense from House Republicans is. Are there people like Gates? I think Gates might, in principle,

think it's a bad idea to start kicking people off committees on a partisan vote because you disagree with something they said, because who would be one of the first people that would be kicked off in reverse? Him. What's your sense of whether or not McCarthy's going to have the votes? Because it looks like he's wobbly, but he said today, or he said on Tuesday, when asked in the hallway, that yes, I have the votes. You know, this is an interesting case study because there's a huge distinction between Ilhan Omar and what happened with Eric Swalwell and Adam Schiff on intelligence committees, because they have both, I think, demonstrated really poor judgment in that arena. And you can look at Adam Schiff, I'll talk about this a little in my monologue, just being utterly unqualified

and making, egregious doesn't even begin to describe the lapses in judgment that he's had over the last several years, whereas they're upset with Ilhan Omar over this interpretation of what constitutes anti-Semitism, whether or not they believe that Ilhan Omar, as she said over the weekend, did not understand the tropes and was sort of unintentionally offensive with her language, or if she genuinely harbors some anti-Semitic beliefs and is willing to publicly say them, that's a different case study than lacking in qualification. So when Gates and Ken Buck, who we've had on, Crystal and Sagar have had on, say, I don't believe in punting people just to get even with Democrats on this case, but not the others. That is really interesting. And Republicans will say, well, Democrats started it. They had, because they kicked Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene off. That was a bipartisan vote, which means it's a slightly different precedent than kicking people off by a partisan vote. The Intelligence Committee is a separate precedent because the Speaker can kind of unilaterally

decide who goes on there. When it comes to Omar, it just really does seem like, like you said, they don't like her. Well, yeah. And listen, I mean, this is one of the biggest disputes in politics right now is how we define bigotry, how we define racism, how we define anti-Semitism. And I think Republicans have had a sort of experience over the last several years that shows them very clearly how easily those definitions can be inflated against them and their voters because it happens all of the time. How do they square in their minds this, they're driven by this anti-wokeness, like that's the thing that gets them out of bed in the morning is fighting the wokes.

And they're going to cancel somebody for something they said off of a committee like that like in their heads is is that something that conflicts or in their minds there's just there's a palestinian exception to to all of this and it doesn't even kind of right raise the level of something that they need to work out in their own minds? I think there are case studies, especially on campuses, in which proponents or opponents of cancel culture have been hypocritical when it comes to, as you say, like a Palestinian exception. I do, however, think that the standards for members of Congress are reasonably different. Even if you're an opponent of cancel culture, it's entirely fair to say members of Congress should be held to a different standard than a comedian or an actor or something like that. And if it's, you know,

you can then talk about what they think about everything that Trump has said. Hypocrisy in that too. I wish Republicans got out of bed every morning and, you know, actually wanted to do something and not just whine about what they see as wokeness or cancel culture, but we generally just have to settle for the whining. That's a good point. These are all Trump supporters, at least they were in the last election cycle. And Trump probably says more anti-Semitic things in a single day than Omar has said in her lifetime. He's like, Israel controls Congress. He did say that, didn't he? They're so good with money.

He's just constantly saying explicitly anti-Semitic things. And of course, he has Jewish grandchildren. His daughter is Jewish. Right, and he's like, they're going to be great with money. But this is an example of where Republicans, I think, understand how those definitions— I don't think anybody would say that Donald Trump, a man whose daughter who he loves is Jewish, is anti-Semitic by their definition. But if you're inflating that definition, it's going to get uncomfortable when you have to look at certain people who you would not consider. And so we just have inflated these definitions to the point where the political football is you toss it around and it's cheapened, I think, the actual definitions to the point where we can't agree anymore on like what actually is very much objectionable rhetoric. And that's a really sad state of affairs. We'll probably have to cut that into a separate block because it just went

on. But on that note, Kevin McCarthy is going to meet with Joe Biden to talk about a really big... Put A1 up there. Yeah, A1. Put that up on the screen. And actually, so this is a headline from CNN where it says, Biden's message to McCarthy ahead of critical White House meeting, which is today, by the way, show me your plan. Why don't we actually hear those words from the man himself, President Joe Biden? Let's roll A2. Show me your budget, I'll show you mine. Mr. President, what is your message? What is your message to Leader McCarthy? To Speaker McCarthy. Sorry, sir. What will be your message? Show me your budget, I'll show you mine.

Show me your budget and I'll show you mine. Kevin McCarthy responded on Twitter to some of what was coming out of the Biden White House. We can put a three up on the screen. He said, Mr. President, I received your staff's memo. Space. Enter. I'm not interested in political games. Space, enter. I'm coming to negotiate for the American people. A very short, but very poignant piece of poetry. Looking at it on the screen, he did it in stanza form, which I think was- Could have been a haiku if he worked on it a little more.

Right. He was almost there. Certainly a choice. Ryan, they're going back and forth. McCarthy said this Sunday, we're taking Medicare and forth. McCarthy said this Sunday, we're taking Medicare and Social Security off the table. And that was always going to be a non-starter for the Biden administration. I do, however, have a quote from Kevin McCarthy, where he says, if you read our commitment to America, all we talk about is strengthening Medicare and Social Security. I know the president doesn't want to look at it, but we have to make sure we strengthen those. Seemingly in conflict, if you want to really do anything about the debt, there's not much you can do without tinkering with entitlement programs. So on that note what people in Washington mean when they say we're going to strengthen social security? How do you make it stronger? It's one of the greatest lies that is dropped on the heads of the American people.

I do technically think it's true that a solvent social security system would be a strengthened social security system, but that is mutually exclusive with cutting. When they say strengthened, they mean cut. They mean cut. They mean cut. And so, in other words, think of it this way. If everybody's social security benefits were dropped down to a dollar, that would be the strongest program ever. Right, because it's solvent. Because it's so solvent. Because you're very comfortable that the trust fund is going to have the money in it, that it can pay that dollar every single month, and you have then strengthened the program. So what they're saying is- Semantics. Right. And what they're saying is the fund runs out in a certain amount of time. And so in order

to make it go longer, we're going to pay you less, and that strengthens Social Security. Most people, when they hear the word strength in Social Security, think oh I'm gonna get a nice little extra Cola mm-hmm look another 50 bucks in my check is a stronger check it's bad it isn't like just BS political language right and so for McCarthy to say we're taking Medicare and Social Security off the table and we're just going back to what we said in our commitment to America and then you go back and you read the commitment to America and as you said the commitment America says strength strengthen Social Security and Medicare. So that's cut benefits for both so that you can supposedly prolong the actuarial and like

the different tables will work out a little bit better for them. Right. And one thing I think it just gets lost in this entire conversation because, you know, even Republicans now are talking about the Pentagon. Even Kevin, I forget if it was Kevin McCarthy, there's a Republican who said, and many Republicans would agree with this, that maybe there are some cuts that need to happen to the Pentagon so that it's more efficient and effective and can pass, for instance, an audit like any business with that much money and it would have to. But the other point that I wanted to make is all of- And you could put up the next element there, which is- Right. Manu talking about that.

Yep. Yep, exactly. So Manu Raju is reporting, he's saying that some have floated really stiff cuts, some Republicans, to domestic programs and to trim the defense budget. But Brian Riedel over at the Manhattan Institute has crunched the numbers on this, and it's truly astounding how many things you could cut without really making a dent in the national debt. So you could actually eliminate the entire Pentagon, and you still don't make a dent in the debt because those programs are overloaded with boomer benefits right now. They weren't designed particularly well. We haven't been managing them responsibly. But whether it's humane to,

let's say, strengthen via cuts those programs, I mean, I think at this moment in time, absolutely not. The answer to that is absolutely not, unless you have some political imagination that we're not cued into yet that does this in a humane way, I think we can all agree solvent Social Security would be better. But there's literally no plan for that other than yanking benefits out from under people's feet. Well, no, there's a plan. Raise the cap. So currently, you're capped on the amount of Social Security taxes and Medicare taxes that you paid. I think it's $116,000 or something like that. After that, you don't pay into Social Security anymore. And so what the left says is just get rid of the cap.

You pay your Social Security and Medicare taxes on everything. What folks like Bernie are saying is, okay, we'll allow a grace from like $116,000, I think it's up to $250,000, he says. Others say up to $400,000. So you're not going to see an increase in your taxes if you're making between 116 and 250 or 400. But over 400, you would then continue to pay into Social Security and Medicare. And boom, guess what? All of a sudden, those numbers start to add up and you have strengthened programs. Yes. The numbers start to add up until we have ballooning costs of healthcare that continue to create an insolvent problem over time.

Single payer can handle that. We'll get to that. Unless they can come up with a way to do it. I mean, it's just such, this is like the crux of it. It's such BS where they're selling out people's lives for political purposes again and again, whether it's on the left or the right. It's like, well, we'll just keep doing X, Y, and Z without tackling this because we'll get booted out of Congress. Again, whether you're on the left or the right, we'll worry about it later. We'll worry about it later. Well, at some point, and you can make an argument right now that the inflation crisis is partially because in some part, maybe it's a small part, but in some part, the average American, their bank account is worse off because of the incredible amount of debt that we have.

And maybe the solution is mint the coin. Maybe the solution is MMT. But the bottom line is that it's not a solvent program, but cuts are also absolutely not a humane thing on the table right now. Even Republicans know that. So they're going to end up passing a CR because that's the way that they can sort of get themselves through the summer because you would likely default if you don't do anything on this around the summer. And they'll raise the debt ceiling, you think, without a fight? I think they'll go over. If you could put that Manu Raju tweet back up again. So what Manu says in there, he says, but there are ours who are no votes no matter what. And I think that's what you were sort of implying there. He can only lose like two or three votes depending on what's going on. He's in a bind. Is Santos still going to be in office by then? You know, we'll

see. Well, and here's Thomas Massey. He said one idea, according to CNN, he has been advocating for is passing a CR quote as soon as possible, but funds the government at 99% of its current levels and pairs it with a debt ceiling increase just so that they have a backup plan in case they're unable to come to an agreement on the debt ceiling or funding so that they have a backup plan in case they're unable to come to an agreement on the debt ceiling or funding the government. One reason that's important is because I think they're just going to end up going back and forth, ticky tacky, over discretionary spending. That will be the inch that Biden gives, and it'll be the inch McCarthy gets, is that you get some cuts to some woke program, a program McCarthy can say is woke

here and there. And Biden will give on that and they'll do their CR and that's how they'll avoid everything. We'll see. And we teased the McConnell one. We can put A5 back up. Right. If people got an early look at that. It's fascinating to watch the Senate just be like, this is my name is Paul. This is between y'all. You guys just work this out and let us know when you get to something. If you remember last time. Sucks to suck. Yes. If you remember last time McConnell allowed for the first time, he said this will be the only time, and nobody believed it was going to be the only time, a 50-vote threshold to get the debt ceiling through.

So in other words, there was Republican cooperation, but it didn't show up on the Senate floor, which is all they want. And McConnell has consistently said there is not going to be a debt ceiling crisis. We're going to raise the debt limit. Every time he says that, it undercuts McCarthy a little bit. And then he says, I'm deferring to Kevin over there. Good luck, Kevin, but we're not going to have a debt ceiling crisis. Right. So they're both in incredibly tight spots. Republicans are in incredibly tight spots on this. And the Biden administration, politically at least, is in a great position.

I mean, it's hard for them to lose on these negotiations because a default looks bad for Republicans. Prolonging, inching closer to a debt crisis looks bad for Republicans. You know, I think a lot of people, there are some people, and this was a huge part of the Tea Party movement, for instance, back in the day, that really wanted to see strengthening of Social Security and Medicare because people are worried about what their kids end up getting out of it. And I get that. I think that is very real, but it's a much harder sell, and it works much less effectively on a political level than protecting those programs. And even Donald Trump knows that. J.D. Vance knows that because they've both come out in support of getting that the hell off the

table before Democrats use it to tank the Republican Party and before Republicans use it to pull the rug out from under average Americans. The way to keep those programs solvent, though, is to keep the economy strong, which goes to immigration, which I think we'll talk about later. We will. We can go to Ukraine first. So this is, again, the tanks were sent last week. Germany and the United States sort of agreed on the Leopard tanks. Put a B-1 here. Yeah, if we put a B-1, this is a headline from Fox News. Biden says no to F-16 fighter jets for Ukraine. France considers sending warplanes. Now, basically what happened in the France situation is that Macron, along with the Dutch prime minister, both said that they wouldn't rule it out, basically,

sending fighter jets to Ukraine. Biden and Scholz in Germany have both said no to this. Biden replied with a simple no, this is from Fox, when asked if the U.S. would send the sophisticated warplanes to Kiev. Scholz has said, quote, he says NATO is not at war, NATO is not at war at Russia, and quote, we will not allow such an escalation. Brian, what do you make of the difference between Macron and the United states and germany there well it suggests that we might be entering the the pattern that we're getting familiar with which is uh ukraine makes a demand for something uh germany and the u.s say no we're not going to do that

that's going to escalate the war they ask again a couple times we're like okay you know what actually fine you can have that which you know which is what happened with the tanks with Germany and now the U.S. also sending tanks over there. And it feels next debate is firing up in Germany, that just seems frivolous. He's like, I just gave you tanks. Do you think, though, then them saying no is theater? They know they ultimately have to give on this or are they saying, please stop? I think it's them seeing where the line is. And then the Biden administration has been resistant to sending jets since February, March of 2022 at the time of the initial invasion. And Ukraine has been asking for them since then. If you remember, that was the thing that the White House press corps was banging the war jumps for for weeks at the early end. When are you going to send the planes? When are you going to send

the fighter jets? What about the F-14s? What about the F-16s? And so they have held firm on that. But that ask was up here. Meanwhile, the other asks up here. Now here are the tanks and the lepers and the Abrams. So it feels like Germany saying no, but wondering like, are we going to get steamrolled on this too?

And I think some of it depends on what happens with this upcoming Russian offensive that is being telegraphed. I was just going to ask you to talk a little bit about that. How do you interpret the gaining momentum post-tanks for F-16s in light of the Russian offensive that they've been telegraphing? That's the thing that kind of uncorked the tanks from the West is this sense that Russia's gaining some ground here and there and is going to launch this offensive. It feels like each side looking to the other for more permission to escalate further, just making the situation that much more dangerous.

You occasionally hear people saying, well, what this will do is this will help Ukraine when it eventually gets to the negotiating table. But nobody in positions of power or anywhere near positions of power will lay out a roadmap for what it would take to get to that place where there are actual negotiations going on. What do you make of the argument that if the United States and Germany and NATO partners did more right now, so increased spending handed over, for instance, F-16s right now and gave Ukraine a big jump in its capacity, that Russia wouldn't be able to withstand that level of pressure. And this would end sooner than trying to sort of do tit for tat de-escalation. I question whether or not there is the capacity to do that. Like you talk about they're moving

12 tanks from Germany and moving a couple dozen or whatever from the United States. It's going to take weeks and months to make that happen. People need to be trained up. That argument really only works if you're talking about overwhelming force, like some type of Powell Doctrine type of thing, which means American boots on the ground. And actually bringing the full weight of the U.S. military to bear on the situation because there are going to be constraints if you're dealing with the Ukrainian army.

The Ukrainian army can only do so much. So that to me seems dangerous, this idea that you're going to get peace through annihilation. Right. And that's where I was going to go with it. My response to that argument would be, I'm not sure that we're in a position where we want to be testing Vladimir Putin's tolerance for escalation at that level. There are nuclear weapons involved, right? There are nuclear weapons involved. and the importance of Ukraine to Putin, or let's say even he, let's say his end goal is just some sort of, maybe he has to use tactical nukes in his perspective to, to seize what he wants from Donbass. Um, is that more

important to him, um, than it is to NATO and to the military budgets of other countries and the people of other countries that have supported this war effort rightfully up until this point. I think the answer to that question is very much up in the air, how far Vladimir Putin is willing to take his country to unlawfully seize that territory, how much blood he's willing to shed to unlawfully seize that territory. I feel like an enormous amount because his survival, his political survival, requires him not to lose this war. It's been framed as basically an existential test for Russia. And it doesn't require, and I think that one mistake people make is it doesn't require, in order for him to stay in power, he doesn't need to win. He just needs to not lose. And so to not lose, all he has

to do is continue to feed Russian lives into the maw of Ukraine, just destroying Ukraine and destroying Ukrainian lives in the process. And so as long as he's doing that on some scale, he can continue to claim that he hasn't lost the war. And so what capacity does Ukraine have to prevent Russia from ever doing that? Because that's such a low bar for Russia to do. Are Americans willing to put boots on the ground? The answer to that question is absolutely not. No. Absolutely not. Despite funding the war at such a high level compared to other countries. American people weren't really asked if they wanted to do that. We never ask anymore. It was a decision that was made.

Basically, U.S. policy. And then once Republicans took over, they funded it, you know, for the next six months or whatever through the lame duck. Yeah. And on that note, this question of how far Putin is willing to push things. Boris Johnson, I don't mean to chuckle there, but you have to see this clip of Boris Johnson because it's Boris Johnson being very Boris Johnson. Let's roll that clip of him talking about a, quote, extraordinary phone call he had with Putin. He said, Boris, you say that Ukraine is not going to join NATO anytime soon. He said it in English, anytime soon.

What is anytime soon? And I said, well, it's not going to join NATO for the foreseeable future. You know that perfectly well. It fundamentally wasn't about, you know, he threatened me at one point and said, you know, Boris, I don't want to hurt you, but with a missile it would only take a minute or something like that, you know. Jolly.

But I think from the very relaxed tone that he was taking, the sort of air of detachment that he seemed to have. He was just playing along with my attempts to get him to negotiate. First of all, props to Boris Johnson for giving up on the accent after the first word. He started to retell. I've done it myself. He started to retell the story in Putin's voice, but just gave up on it right after the word Boris.

Second, the Kremlin says this is a lie. It is worth, I think, zeroing in on what Johnson himself said, where he says it was a very relaxed tone. There's this Arab detachment, and he was just playing along with my attempts to get him to negotiate, just some casual missile jokes to further, to sort of grease the wheels on the negotiations. Also, the evidence that it might be a lie is that we do know that the other part is a lie. He was not trying to negotiate. He was, if you remember, there was a reporting that he went to Kiev and pressured Zelensky not to try to negotiate with Putin. So Boris Johnson was on the other side of that question. Boris Johnson was trying to stop negotiations, not produce negotiations. That's a good flashback. I look forward to his memoir in which he says the exact opposite in these interviews where he's, oh yeah, I was trying to negotiate an end to it and

he threatened me with a missile. Yeah, surely the memoir is forthcoming. But would he have made that up, the line about it'll only take a minute for a missile? I don't know. No, it's very, I think it's honestly, it's honestly very specific. And to put it out in public, if anything, Putin likes that. I mean, I can't imagine Putin is upset if people think he's tough enough to joke around with the prime minister about hitting him with a missile. I mean, it makes him look like he's the stronger one in that negotiation. He's got the upper hand there if he's going to joke about that. Yeah, and there was some reporting that Russia has said that London would be the

first place they'd hit if they went ham. There you go. Now, speaking of our Pentagon defense budget and all that wonderful stuff, this is a really big story that I think has gotten buried in the news cycle. We can put the first tear sheet up for this block. A leaked memo. Here's the headline from The Hill. U.S. General predicts country will be at war with China in 2025. Now, where that news comes from is a leaked memo. Two troops from a four-star Air Force general, Mike Minahan.

He's the head of the Air Mobility Command. That's like 50,000 service members, some 500 planes. They do transport. They do refueling. According to press reports, this memo got leaked. I think it was first to NBC. He said that he believes the country will be at war with China by 2025. So that is a four-star Air Force general putting in writing in a memo to everyone under his command that he thinks the U.S. is going to be at war with China by 2025. His reasoning is that because both Taiwan and the U.S. have presidential elections coming up in 2024, the U.S. will be, quote, destructive and Xi Jinping will have an opportunity to move on Taiwan

in the shadow of American attention that's devoted to the presidential election. It's addressed to all of the air wing commanders and the AMC and other Air Force operational commanders. Here's the other part. It orders them to report all major efforts to prepare for the China fight to Minnan by February 28th. That's from NBC. Orders them to report all major efforts to prep for the China fight by February 28th. So the word of caution that I would offer there is that there are about 700 four-star generals out there. Yeah.

And so think about it. There are 435 members of the House of Representatives, and we would not put stock in the word of every one of those bozos. We sure wouldn't. So out of that 700, you're going to get a few that might be a little bit

off the reservation when it comes to some of this stuff. Eccentric, but it's not just the kooky thing he said. I mean, he put it in writing in a memo and asked for action points. It's kind of kooky, too. Now, the Pentagon was asked about this

and said that this guy's note to his airmen does not represent the thinking of the United States Army or Air Force or Pentagon or anybody else other than him. However, we can take the question on the merits. Like, is it reasonable that this could happen? Of course it is. China is closely watching, I think, how the world responds to Russia's invasion of Ukraine and whether or not they kind of back-channel financial systems that they've built up to try to get around United States sanctions, to try to continue to have a robust economy with sanctions in place, whether that's enough. They're looking at the capabilities that the West has and whether or not that's going to be enough to kind of, you know, to succeed in an amphibious invasion of Taiwan.

The Taiwanese say that they don't, they're not worried. Everything's fine. What else would they say in some ways? So it's certainly possible. But the fact that I think the guy's four stars give him a little more credibility than maybe his argument deserves. Yeah, although to your point, is it possible, is it plausible? I think clearly the answer to that question is yes.

And one thing I would look at in particular is the semiconductor chips, which we've talked about a lot on the show. And I know Sagar and Crystal have talked about it as well. That's really one of the key issues when it comes to Taiwan because you said amphibious invasion. So only real way for China to invade Taiwan or for military incursion into Taiwan. Couldn't they send like, slowly send 20,000 people and then they all change into their uniforms there? I don't want to give anybody ideas.

I was just going to say, what are you doing? I mean, you can travel back and forth. So like, why would you have to do like an invasion at gunpoint? I mean, Taiwan might figure that one out. Like, wait, what's going on here? But gosh, now it's going to happen. Well, if it's peaceful. It's one country anyway, according to our policy. That's right, according to our policy. And again, the semiconductors, we had this big piece of

legislation that I would argue is probably way more cronyistic than was appropriate. But it takes some, by estimates, like some three to four years for that process to really complete itself, for the United States to open semiconductor factories and start manufacturing the stuff that is essential to modern life for the American people and for our military. That's a process. To get these factories up and running takes several years. And that's one of the biggest things that concerns me about the timeline here. Because as we're going about that process, as we're trying to reshore the essential sort of critical parts of our supply

chain post-COVID, we all learned that with various parts of protective equipment and everything, China knows that. And they know that once we get the capacity to do those things, the calculus shifts a little bit. Right. And relevant to that, the Dutch prime minister was here in the middle of January. And while there, there was a lot of news reporting about this. Biden pressured him to stop exporting these semiconductors, these chips, to China. They're the makers of a certain type of chip that is the only factory that makes it, top of the world, essential to the semiconductor supply chains. They have not agreed to that yet. But the fact that the U.S. is applying so much pressure to a country like the Netherlands to get in line with this attempted semiconductor isolation of China is extraordinary.

It's unlike anything that the U.S. has done before on kind of trade and national security and foreign policy. And so if anything, that could push things to the brink. So on that note, speaking of things that from the Chinese perspective they're projecting might push them to the brink, this is from a foreign ministry spokeswoman on Monday at a news briefing said, quote, we urge certain individuals in the U.S. to earnestly abide by the one China principle, and they should, quote, stop doing anything that violates the basic norms in international relations. Now, on its own, that quote might seem very vague in general, but as Fox reports, quote, Mao is responding, that's the spokeswoman, to a question about a report last week that Kevin McCarthy was planning

a trip to Taiwan, something he said he would do should he be elected House Speaker after saying he supported the August trip by Nancy Pelosi. Now, Mao, the spokeswoman, according to Fox, quote, later reaffirmed her government would never promise to give up the use of force to unify Taiwan and China and said the Chinese government hoped to resolve the situation peacefully. You think McCarthy goes? How long does he last as Speaker? That's entirely fair. I think he goes. Maybe he tries to wait it out, actually. I think if he lasts as Speaker, then he'll probably go. It'll become a new tradition, bipartisan tradition in America to attempt a world war when you get the gavel. I think this makes it more likely that

he goes, if anything, having the spokeswoman for the Chinese foreign ministry talk in terms like that, basically dare him to go. I think now that he said he would go, if China says no, that makes it all the more likely that he has to do it. I mean, it basically forces his hand. Well, I mean, he's not forced to like walk us closer to a nuclear war. No, of course not. From a political perspective, from a purely political perspective. I guess, but I just don't think the public cares that much. Like that, I mean, they don't want a nuclear war, but I mean, I don't think they're following along with Taiwanese and Chinese and American relations enough to like be able to answer basic kind of trivia questions about it, let alone have a firm opinion or even understand why him traveling directly to Taiwan would even be that offensive.

And like, I feel like it's, you know, it's an internal, like it's kind of an insider politics thing rather than something that matters more broadly to people. Well, but except for the broad China question, which is really important to Republican voters, that Kevin McCarthy, and again, he's in a really tight spot with his own caucus because there are these divisions within the voter base or these demands and this atmosphere within the Republican voter base. It's tied into this broader China narrative and makes him look weak and makes Republicans look weak against China. Again, that's why I think politically it's sort of unfeasible for him to now back away from what he said he would do because China warned him like, don't do it, Kevin. He just said he just kept keep saying I'm planning the trip. I'm gonna do it. Don't don't you worry. It's coming up. It's just around the corner. Any day now. So moving on, there's a new report in Axios actually that came out on Tuesday. They say the Biden administration, quote, is weighing a plan to declare a public health

emergency that would free up resources to help people access abortions. That's the first tear sheet we have. We can put that up on the screen. You know, there's some debate, even within the Biden administration, because they're kind of noncommittal in this Axios thing. Basically, they're saying, the administration is saying, this is from Javier Becerra, he told Axios this on Monday, there are discussions on a wide range of measures that we can take to try to protect people's rights. It would allow the administration, according to Axios, to help support states that protect abortion, deploy public health services core

teams, and give the government, quote, the ability to accelerate access to new medications authorized for abortion. But there's debate within the administration itself, which has been getting pressure from Democrats who say, and abortion groups who say, this is a necessary step. This is a public health emergency post-Roe, and the White House has an obligation to do it. But there's debate within the administration as to whether this would do much, if it would free up enough resources to make a difference, to be worth it. I think, you know, again—

Yeah, we were talking earlier. It doesn't do a whole lot, or it depends on how you interpret it. Yeah, exactly. I think that's the thing. They said—the Biden administration over the summer said basically they went back and talked to experts. And experts, after they'd consulted with experts, they realized it would free up a pool that amounted to, quote, tens of thousands of dollars as opposed to hundreds of thousands of dollars, tens of millions of dollars, millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars. And they weren't confident it would do a lot on the other fronts that people claim it would do a lot on. So what is your take on that?

Do you think there's evidence that suggests a public health emergency in this case? I mean, one thing that I seen in this article from NBC News, under the PrEP Act, the HHS secretary can issue a declaration that a countermeasure, a drug device or biological product is needed to respond to, quote, a disease or other health condition or other threat to health that constitutes a public health emergency. So then the article mentions the health secretary would define the countermeasure and population that needs it, but that federal declaration would preempt any state law that is in conflict with it. So the public health emergency can basically say, hey, this over-the-counter abortion, not over-the-counter, this prescription abortion pill for first trimester, which is a very common use of that pill, qualifies under the public health emergency. So states that ban it, you can go around. I don't think they need that though to allow legal access to abortion medication. Reclassify it in the same sense as like Plan B, is that what you'd say?

Well, yeah. I mean, as long as it's FDA approved, then my understanding is that states cannot come in and ban FDA approved drugs. That federal law preempts when it comes to whether or not that can happen. So they wouldn't, I don't think they would need a public health emergency for that. But they would need the FDA to come in. The FDA has already approved it. But states have banned it, have they not?

But they can't ban it by mail. Right. Yes, yes. You can ban like the selling of it. Right. So would that and I think then the question is whether this would would it stand up in court? Would it hold up in court? Not this court, right? Well, in lower courts, even. Would it would it hold up in court? constitutionally allowed to preempt those laws because it's he if he's declared it a public health emergency has defined that access to abortion being curtailed in the wake of Dobbs has constituted a public health emergency he's defined it as such thus this would have to qualify because it's a drug that would treat right it's it just depends on who wins the elections and is

able to appoint the justices because like before Republicans had the majority on the court, it would have been obvious that, yes, like, I mean, it was obvious. Like, there's a constitutional right to abortion. That was the law of the land. Now they've reinterpreted the Constitution to say that there's no constitutional right to abortion. So I'm sure that they would say, I have no doubt that Alito, right, comes down and tries to nuke something like this if it actually does anything effective. Yeah, no, absolutely. But though it raises the question for me of why politically the Biden administration wouldn't just do this. It just seems to me like it's an obvious thing to do if it's going to be, from their perspective, inconsequential.

I mean, I don't think they're that worried about setting dangerous precedent at this point. So just from a surely like nakedly political perspective, I don't understand why they're not just doing it unless they consulted sort of constitutional legal experts and those experts told them this could create a legal nightmare because it would open up things that perhaps the Biden administration is worried would be used against Democrats, would be called radical, et cetera, et cetera. But I actually, I mean, I could see it in the case of the abortion by mail drugs being used that way by Republicans to say they just mandated access to this. They undercut the Supreme Court. But if that interpretation wouldn't even fly,

it seems to me like politically it would be a winner for them. Yeah, the bigger win to me would be getting abortion access on federal property, on federal land. So in any state, if it's federal property. Yeah, so, right, exactly. And so if you can then get abortion medication through the mail and you can get abortion services in federal property, then, you know, then you're going to have, you know, access restored in a substantial way, I think. The interesting thing also from my perspective is the Biden administration has recently said the COVID emergency is ending in May. Right. So it's just I hate to be cynical here, but it's just the these things are just being used as political footballs.

Right. Like Biden says the pandemic is over and then he gets hit by some people who are still clinging to the idea that the pandemic is very much raging and he has to take it back. And then we're in a public health emergency right now. And you look around, obviously there's still suffering and tragedy from COVID. It's still real. It's still happening. But the public health emergency level, I think that's a pretty open debate. And so when these distinctions just get tossed around like political footballs, I don't actually even blame either party for doing it at this point because they become so meaningless that it's like a winner for your side to cling to one side because it's all been blurred anyway. The importance has been blurred. And if you remember Ted Cruz back when Trump was declaring a national emergency to build his wall when he couldn't get wall money through Congress, Ted Cruz was saying,

be careful because you're going to have a Democratic president who's going to declare a climate emergency and implement communism. Green New Deal via climate emergency. Right. He didn't realize at the time that he would so quickly get to see Roe overturned, but he probably would have said, look, they're going to do something like this. So you're right. Both parties, when they get into office, are having a hard time getting an agenda through Congress. Voters are demanding that they do something. So they're just going to find ways to do things. Or Republicans are probably a little bit better at that than Democrats. That's why they're still hemming and hawing over doing a

thing that isn't even obviously going to do anything. I remember talking to Ted Cruz back in like 2018 about his position on the legislative filibuster, which has obviously been a huge debate on the left and even on the right too, even though the right is basically against overtraining the filibuster. And at the time, Ted Cruz is like, it's actually a really serious question as to whether, because it's like a done deal. His perspective at the time is it's basically a done deal. Democrats retake the Senate. They just kind of opened up the floodgates yet. Yeah. So speaking of George Santos. I was so happy.

I was so hoping that you would take the top of this block. Please update us on George Santos. George Santos. Well, first of all, there was some CNN reporting from his ex-boyfriend. I think it was CNN. You can go find that. If you want a little scandalous drama. His ex-boyfriend is appalled at his psychopathic lying. But over here in Washington, Santos has told Republicans, and you can put up the first one here, that he's going to voluntarily step off of the committee science. He was given three panels by Kevin McCarthy. Kevin McCarthy, you know, needed every single

vote to become speaker and did not want to hear word one about not seating George Santos or kicking George Santos out until he was through. He now has to govern. We talked earlier in the show, he needs George Santos's vote to kick Ilhan Omar off the Foreign Affairs Committee, which is rather incredible to think about that you're going to have a member in good standing elected three times by her district, sent to Washington to be a voice for the people of Minneapolis. And George Santos is going to cast the tie-breaking vote to kick her off of the committee. Just utterly appalling. He said he felt like his appearance on these committees was a distraction,

which maybe there would have been more ratings for them. I'd like to see George Santos kind of interrogating some of these guys. And then we also had, we could put the second one up here from Sahil, a poll from his district showing that basically everybody wants him to step down. Except what, is it 13%? Like some funny number of people who are like, no, I'm good with him. 13% say he shouldn't resign. 9% say they don't know. That's me. If I were him, I'm like, this is too entertaining. Stick it out, man.

Yes. Come on. This is good stuff. Well, obviously he won a swing district. So Republicans are very hesitant to do anything that could damage them holding that seat or that could jeopardize them holding that seat, especially with such a slim majority in Congress. Now, what continues to infuriate me about the story, and we talked about it last week, to your point about Ilhan Omar, is that, first of all, what did Republicans know about whether this man was qualified to hold office, whether he would completely embarrass his constituents, their party, and the whole—embarrass and bring shame to the institution of Congress to the extent that it's still possible to do that.

What did they know about that when they were doing their vulnerability studies? And why did Democrats not have the resources to come up with the oppo research on this? And why did local media pay no attention to it? The owner of the publisher of a really small paper on Long Island said it was because everyone was distracted. He broke some stories about Santos before the election and said everyone else was sort of distracted by bigger races. Well, when you have paltry local media presence, that's what happens. And it's not what voters deserve, honestly. And the Santos voters should have had the appropriate information that we expect to have as voters, that you and I expect

to have in front of us as voters, as journalists. You and I can't look into every member of Congress and every single story, and so we expect that other people are covering these bases in local races, et cetera, et cetera. People deserve to have that information before he was elected. And the big questions for me, when we're looking at the fact, I mean, the investigations into him, the fact that these are happening after this guy's elected to Congress, not during his campaign or not during, before he even decides to become a public figure. I mean, this stuff is horrible. The FEC stuff makes sense that it's after the election because obviously it's campaign finance stuff. But he's now allegedly

involved in this Harbor City capital Ponzi scheme. Have you looked into this? The SEC is looking into it. Shocking. Have you heard about this? A little bit, yeah. He's like, the SEC is now asking people basically, you know, what he told them when he was pitching them on Harbor City Capital, the campaign finance stuff that the FEC is looking into. This is a quote. This is from the Washington Post. Over the past few years, FEC analysts have repeatedly identified problems with Santos's filings with the regulator sending multiple letters seeking clarification or correction of apparent issues, including accepting contributions beyond the allowable limit, omitting required donor information, and filling to fill out required

forms to report details of the loans Santos claims to have made to his campaign. Did he think he was going to win? I feel like he didn't even think he was going to win. So he just winged it. Yeah. He's, he doesn't seem like the kind of guy that has a long-term plan that you're just, what's just one lie after another to cover, cover up the last one. Um, and yeah, and problems with its expenses, like people going through like his disbursements are just making absolutely no sense and not adding up. And again, to linger on the point again for a second, the House Republicans are going to vote because it'll be a party line, I assume, unless Josh Gottheimer does something weird, will vote on whether or not Ilhan Omar should be booted off of the House Foreign Affairs Committee

for her alleged anti-Semitism. The tie-breaking vote could be cast by a guy who got elected by saying that his grandmother died in the Holocaust and his mother died in the Twin Towers in 9-11. Yeah. And who faked being Jewish and then said, no, no, no, I meant that I was Jew-ish. Right. And he's going to cast the tie-breaking vote to kick Omar off the committee because of concerns around anti-Semitism. Yeah, that's a really good point. That's the situation that we find ourselves in right now. You know, it is. And Republicans feel like if you talk to Freedom Caucus people, even if you talk to leadership people at this point,

they were so exasperated by what happened after January 6th, the way Nancy Pelosi transformed the powers of leadership in Congress and by the sort of escalation in media corruption and media, media corruption, particularly as it pertains to Republicans and conservatives have been so exasperated by it. They say our voters want us to demonstrate raw political power right now. So George Santos might be a horrible human being, and we could probably all agree on that. Might be, you know, maybe we can all agree on it. The evidence suggests he is, but he's a vote, and he's a vote to advance your interests. You saw this all the time over the conversation about Roy Moore, for instance. You had all these voters in Alabama. Everyone in Washington, D.C. was like, get this guy out of here. This is an embarrassment. But there are a lot of voters in Alabama. And this shows you where the Republican

base is. Obviously, he ultimately lost. But there were a lot of people saying, we want to overturn Roe. We believe this is a matter of life and death in the same way that people on the left believe climate is a matter of urgent life and death. And that's, I think, speaks to the, I think, confluence of different emergencies that we're facing. Again, whether you're conservative or whether you're liberal, the stakes just feel incredibly high right now. And that's driving these sentiments among voters. And it's translating into our politics now, too, in that we're seeing leadership take, you know, the most overused word in politics, unprecedented steps in different directions and start breaking the norms, breaking the norms, breaking the norms, because all of the norms

have been broken in the culture. People are just really fed up and they want raw political power. And I think in the case of Santos, it's really unfortunate. And Santos juxtaposed with Omar, the Omar question about alleged anti-Semitism. That is really important and really unfortunate and a sad statement on sort of where we are. And that's why I think that Republicans probably won't force him out, although interesting to note that this decision came a day after he met with McCarthy. Yeah. And he was asked, did McCarthy tell you to do this? Why do you ask George Santos anything? Such a good point.

Such a good source of information. Did you see he's been leaving out Duncan and Chick-fil-A for reporters? Yeah, I did see that. Did you take any of it? No, no, I have not gone by there yet, actually. Would you have taken it? You shouldn't, but I probably would have. Real quickly, we can put up the second style, the third element here. Santos voters say, this goes to your point, that Santos voters say 63% to 31% is the third element for the block. So one out of three Santos voters look at what he's said since then. And they're like, yeah, I'd still vote for him. And I think those are probably the most rational ones in some ways.

Yeah, I agree. Because they're the ones who are like. Principal. Well, what do you want to do? Vote for a Democrat? Exactly right. Like it's a matter of ideological consistency. And I think you can disagree with the ethics of actually taking that vote on the question of character, on the question of reliability and responsibility, et cetera, et cetera. But that's 100% where we are.

The stakes are that high. I don't blame people for making that calculation in their own head. Even though I disagree with it, it's just hard to argue back. Again, I disagree with it, but it's hard to argue that people aren't coming from a legitimate place of desperation. And Santos, given where he's from in that district, they're probably a handful of sort of independent, there are probably a lot of independent, maybe some democratic voters who cast their votes for him. Maybe they liked where he stood on cultural, social issues,

which there's a lot of lies going on there. There's a whole lot of stuff going on there. The idea of him standing anywhere is like Jew-ish. Yes. So anyway, it's just pathetic that none of this came out before, but hopefully some justice will be served now. One last point on that. Cuomo gets some blame for this, and guess how? So because his conservative Democratic judges threw out the Democratic map that had gone through the commission and then kicked it over to some guy in Pittsburgh, a Republican in Pittsburgh, to redraw it. That delayed the primaries in New York until, if you remember, close to mid-September.

Interesting. Really, really late. So you didn't know who the Republican candidate was until after, well after Labor Day. Slim window for. Right. And so, and now you're into, you're done with House races. Like you're down with that portion of House races at that point. But at that point, you're looking at control of the Senate.

You know, you'd still have a time, you'd still have time to vet a handful of them. But, you know, at that point, you're nine weeks away from the election. Yeah. Or less. That's a great point. I'd forgotten about that. So thanks, Cuomo. I'm always willing to thank Cuomo. So Santos is Cuomo's fault.

Sounds good to me. What's your point today, though? Yeah, I want to talk about a sad story. I'll start with the sad story that they don't teach you in most history classes. And Ryan, you probably know about this, the story of Jean Seberg, an actress that was familiar to many people, pulling this out of the COINTELPRO files, familiar to many people back in the 60s and 70s. This is from 53 years ago. I'm going to read a quote from a report and we can put the graphic up on the screen. In The Independent, after a movie was made about Jean Seberg's life in 2020, quote, I should preface this by saying she ultimately took her own life, and Independent writes, days after her suicide, the FBI admitted that its agents had plotted to ruin her reputation as part of their counterintelligence program, COINTELPRO, authorized

by J. Edgar Hoover himself. Seberg's crime in Hoover's eyes was her involvement in political causes and her support of the Black Panther Party. In particular, they were suspicious of her close links with Black power leader Hakeem Jamal. In 1970, The Independent continues, the FBI planted the false rumor that Seberg was pregnant by a Black Panther Party member in order to, quote, cause her embarrassment and, quote, cheapen her image with the American public, and their plan worked. It was dispiriting but inevitable that some gossip columnists followed the false leads that the FBI dangled in front of them. From the FBI's point of view, the Independent continues, she was involved in radical politics, had contributed financially to the Black Panthers and was therefore fair game.

You can just sort of see the wheels turning in Hoover's head. The story was picked up by gossip columnist Joyce Haber, who referred obliquely to it in the Los Angeles Times. Newsweek also wrote about it, and they named Seberg. After that story came out, Seberg was so distressed by the attention that it had brought to her by the false story. By the way, the FBI that was trying to exploit racist animus about interracial relationships at that point, just completely disgusting and cynical move by Jared Gover. She lost her baby. She was so stressed. She lost her baby. She was depressed about that for the rest of her life. She would attempt suicide in every anniversary that she lost the baby until

she took her own life, unfortunately. And again, the stress is downstream of the FBI deciding that within its scope of authority and just a moral use of state power is to create a completely false story and plant it in the press. And guess what? In this case, two journalists played ball with them. Granted, they're gossip columnists, but they're still putting stuff in print, serious stuff that affects people's lives and that is coming to them from powerful people in the FBI. Again, we're not talking about small little publications. We're talking about, at the time, Newsweek, which actually named her in the Los Angeles Times. So what does any of this have to do with the case of Hamilton 68? Well, that's what we're going to talk about. Matt Taibbi had an

excellent report and it turned into a series of reports in the Twitter files that was published last Friday about Hamilton 68. You might remember that name. It's sort of in those hazy days of the early Trump administration when the Russia collusion narrative was in full blast and there was just frenzied media coverage from wall to wall. Hamilton 68 was a dashboard that was a project of the Alliance for Securing Democracy, which is in and of itself a project of the German Marshall Fund. Hamilton 68 was created by Clint Watts. He's an MSNBC and NBC News contributor. You'll be shocked to learn he also happens to be a former FBI special agent who has still consulted with the FBI. I don't know how recently, but he has consulted with the FBI in the past. And of course, he's an ex-FBI special agent. Twitter disproved the results of the Hamilton 68 dashboard. In October of 2017, according to emails that Matt uncovered when he

was digging through the Twitter files, Hamilton 68 would not make public, as I reported in The Federalist here, they just would not make public their data. They went to the media and said, trust us. They went to think tanks. They went to elite universities and said, trust us. This data is real. And it shows that Russian bots are pushing all of these fake trends on Twitter and Twitter is allowing it to happen. It was just a total panic. But of course, again, journalists took the bait. They took the bait. Elite universities, my alma mater, Sager's alma mater, GW, NYU, Harvard, and Princeton, they all boosted junk science engineered Hamilton 68's methodology and came up with the full list of alleged Russian bots they said were wreaking havoc on Twitter and were evidence, they used this as evidence of Russia collusion and the hoax, and it was built into, was basically used so much that it was baked into the broader media coverage of the Russia collusion saga, they knew that this was,

most of the people on this list were neither Russian nor bots. They were, for the most part, just regular Americans. There were some accounts like RT and Sputnik that were Russian, but for the most part, it was regular people. And by the way, some anti-establishment leftists got caught up in all this being called Russian bots.

Twitter knew that. Hamilton 68 knew that. And Clint Watts goes out and talks about this on MSNBC and MSNBC lets him, NBC lets him. Every major news network basically had stories on this. It's incredible how much coverage Hamilton 68 got. And it was based on junk science. There was no reason for it to ever get any coverage because it was always dubious. The fact that they wouldn't reveal what the accounts were for the excuse that, well, if they did that, Russia would automatically take the accounts down. Isn't that your goal? Isn't that your goal? They used it as a cudgel against Twitter. They were

trying to attack Twitter and Facebook. And Twitter, by the way, let it go on. They let it go on despite knowing in October of 2017 that they had reverse engineered it. Y'all Ross shared a Google doc. If you look at the emails Matt pulled that reverse engineered it, it showed that it was all BS. Everyone at Twitter, you can see in these emails from Matt's report, knows that it's BS. They're talking about it. They're frustrated that they aren't going public with the information. Y'all, Roth just suggests at one point giving Hamilton 68 an ultimatum, saying either you publish the list or we do, but they never told Hamilton 68 or the media publicly that they had the list. When Dianne Feinstein and Adam Schiff asked Twitter, they sent a letter to Twitter and Facebook saying, you have to start investigating

these Russian bots, this Hamilton 68, they found so much bot activity, you have to start investigating it. Twitter responded in a letter saying, you know, we don't have the list, it's not public, the list isn't public, so we can't do anything about this. That raises questions about whether Twitter was briefing people in private, because the emails show that their communications people were briefing people in private. They said reporters were chafing at the information that they were sharing about Hamilton 68 not being true, but they had to be careful until Twitter said something publicly without revealing the extent of what they really knew, which was that all of this was nonsense. Their employees were internally debating all of that. I mean,

it's just these Russia collusion stories, I always hesitate to continue covering them. Not that I wouldn't, but every time I'm just like, do we have to go through this again? Because they're so convoluted and some of them are really inaccessible. And because it's just like, you have to remember so many different details about this elaborate conspiracy theory. But in this case, it's so simple. They're really following the Hoover playbook, right? Create junk science. And I get he's ex-FBI. But create junk science, tease it to the press, create junk story, a false story, tease it to the press, and just let them go wild with it. And in certain cases in the past, for instance, MLK wiretaps, whether you believe those are real or not, journalists didn't run with them. Whether you, whether you believe those are real or not, journalists

didn't run with them. Whether you believe the results of those are real or not, I should say, obviously we know the wiretaps are real, but what the FBI says they obtained from them, journalists resisted publishing. There was a famous case where it was Howard Hunt, it's in his memoir, American Spy, talks about how Chuck Colson had him forge cables about JFK and Vietnam, and they tried to get them in Life magazine. And Life magazine wouldn't publish it because they couldn't prove that the cables were authentic. Why did no journalist try to prove that the Hamilton 68 data was authentic? They just went and took the word of all of these ex-intelligence people who had access to grind against a political enemy that were completely obvious. And that is completely

pathetic. It's just another really sad statement on where we are right now as a country that you have this pan-institutional rot. Academia falls for it. Journalists fall for it. And the intelligence community, because the German Marshall Fund and the Alliance for Securing Democracy are stocked with ex-Intel people, with ex-state department people, with government officials, all of these people who supported this Hamilton 68 work, despite never being able to see these accounts that were implicated. Taibbi, we have a graphic here of all of the media coverage it generated. Look at that. That doesn't even encapsulate the full scope of it. It doesn't encapsulate all the cable news segments. It was so baked into the cake of Russia collusion that

you can't separate the two. It was one of the big pieces of evidence that Russia was hacking our elections. So again, this is not historically, there's some precedent for the intelligence community acting in this completely reprehensible way. Now, we don't know that Watts was consulting for the FBI with any of this. There's no evidence to suggest that. But we know that he is former FBI, a former consultant, a former special agent. This is straight out of a playbook that has happened before. And you'd think, given the shame with which we look back now on that era in American history

and some of what happened during that era in American history, that the media would maybe have some basic journalistic standards and check this shit out with before running it. But, of course, that's not what happened. And, Ryan, the fourth estate, in the absence of a fourth estate that's going to check this stuff out before running with it. The FBI can get away with anything. What's your point today? Some people say that's overly hostile. I think it works.

Yes. I don't really have a point. I'm more just because I was on the road, so I didn't really write anything sophisticated this week. Just got back. But I did want to talk about the situation in Haiti and elevate some really, really incredible reporting done by the Associated Press. If we could put this first one up here. And so let me pull this up since I don't have my glasses on. So the AP sent a reporter around with a guy named Barbecue. If you guys haven't followed this closely, that's Jimmy Chirazier, who is one of the leading gang leaders at this point in Haiti. And just to back people up who haven't been following this, but I think a lot of our viewers have been. The former Haitian president,

Jovenel Moise, was assassinated in what was it, the summer of 2021. And it appears that the current prime minister, Ariel Henry, was involved in that assassination. We know for a fact that Henry had a number of phone calls with people involved with the assassination right around the time of the assassination. We also know that in a power struggle that ensued afterwards, he only became prime minister officially because the United States and five other countries put out a press release saying that we recognize Ariel Henri as the prime minister. That is literally how he became the de facto prime minister. Now, in January,

the final terms of the remaining Haitian senators expired. That was the last, and the Haitian Senate doesn't have a whole lot of power anyway, but that was the last bastion of any body in Haiti that had any connection to the citizenship, to being democratically put into place. So all you have left is Ariel Henry, who was not elected, and who was basically just appointed to this role by the United States, with and after evidence of his complicity in the assassination of the president came about and underneath him kind of a skeleton government. And so what's happening now? And that's where this AP story comes in.

What's happening now is that so-called gangs are taking over basically all of the country and moving into places where that previously had been safe. And I say so-called gangs because they're actually now looking to rebrand themselves. And we have a couple of great quotes that Barbecue, Shiraziye, gave to the Associated Press reporter here. Well, one of them actually comes from one of his body guards who says to kind of a video editor that was going along with the AP reporter, he said to her, we're not the bad, bad guys. We're just the bad guys. So that's how they're easing into this. But here's Chirazier describing himself as a, quote, revolutionary. He says, I'm not a thief. I'm not involved in kidnapping. I'm not a rapist. I'm just carrying out a social

fight. He says, I'm a threat to the system. So what Chirazier did several months ago is that when Ariel Henry, under pressure from the United States and others, removed subsidies from gas prices, jacking up the price of, of gas and everything else on the Haitian Island. Shirazi organized a blockade for two months of, of gas coming into the, uh, in, into the Island. And, and since then has kind of, uh, saying that he was protest protesting and you, and you had genuine, uh, outrage in the streets, people protesting since then he has expanded his control. And what you're seeing now is this kind of, people theoretically talk about state formation as being the gangs who won a monopoly on violence eventually implementing a state. If you talk about statecraft and the

creation of governments, that's this one theory that people kick around. Where do governments come from? Well, they came from people who had power and took power violently and then had a monopoly on that violence. And then they went through and produced some mechanisms by which they would continue to rule with the consent of the government rather than strictly through violence. And so, Henri does not want that process to unfold. Of course, he's asking for the UN to authorize some type of invasion, armed invasion. So far, none of the kind of Western countries have taken up his invitation yet to invade, although there's been, you know, so many invasions of Haiti over the

years. So as of now, the question is, how long will the rest of the world kind of allow Haitians to actually sort this out themselves? Or are we just going to let it fester and then invade the country? We're joined now by Todd Bensman. His new book out February 21st is called Overrun, How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History. He's also a senior national security fellow at the Conservative Center for Immigration Studies. Todd, thanks so much for joining us. Great to be here. Thank you. Absolutely. You wrote a Newsweek op-ed that I think we can get into, and Ryan might even have some points of debate to bring up last week called, I liked the title of it too, it was

basically, I think it was called Joe Biden's Magic Trick. You write in it, the American public will indeed see sharp declines in the monthly illegal apprehension statistics following Biden's new moves on the border, starting with the January report, which comes out next month. And the Biden administration will tout these as evidence of vastly improved border security, thanks to new, quote, enforcement system that it had just expanded. But this claim of enforcement success is founded on a purposeful accounting cheat. The illusion would impress Harry Houdini. So, Todd, tell us what the accounting cheat is in this case. The Biden administration has really shifted gears on its border policy

in January by creating as the cornerstone, the new cornerstone of its policy, to start diverting people who were going to be crossing illegally into a sort of quasi-legalized system where they are being granted humanitarian parole, which is an authority that doesn't exist the way they're using it, on the Mexican side and south of the border, where thousands and hundreds of thousands of people will be given these permission slips on that side and then transported into the United States across ports of entry by land and also by air, flying from airport to airport, by the hundreds of thousands each year. And what this will do is it will have the effect of reducing the terrible optics of apprehensions, illegal apprehensions at the border,

but it will do nothing to prevent all of these foreign nationals from still entering the country and becoming illegal in about a year or two. So they're all going to still be here. They're just moving them from one accounting column to a different accounting column, which is not even public. And also these people will be moved through ports of entry, which are inside buildings. So you can't fly Fox News drones over it and see thousands and thousands of people. And you won't be able to look it up in the CBP website to see what the numbers are. We still haven't figured out how they're going to produce those statistics of how many people they're letting in this way. So if we can increase the amount of transparency

involved in this process, and if we can write legal guidelines around it through Congress or through whatever other executive means that you would find appropriate, would you then find yourself saying that, okay, this is better than the current system? Well, for one thing, the legal admissions systems that are in place now, the visas, the student visas, the immigration applications, and all of the legal ways to enter the country have been approved duly by Congress. This is an admission program that they've created outside of Congress with no approval whatsoever.

They've kind of cobbled this together without the approval of the American people so that over the next couple of years, you may very well have, you know, a couple million more people enter the country this way outside of an approved system. Now, if Congress came back and approved it, then, you know, who is anybody to complain about it? But Congress has not approved this system, and they're using an authority known as humanitarian parole. Remember that, humanitarian parole. It's going to be important in the next months. Humanitarian parole is in the INA for a case-by-case, somebody's wounded or hurt and climbing up the riverbank or whatever it may be, and we're going to let that one person in to get medical treatment and

then send them back when it's over. And what they're doing is applying this one-off case-by-case thing to hundreds of thousands of people at a time. There's litigation now, 20 different states, most of them are Republican states, have sued saying that you're misusing this authority. And it's probably going to win because they put it in the Fifth Circuit Court, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which is a conservative court. And then it'll go to the Supreme Court at some point. But all of this is outside of any kind of normal admissions program in the United States. And Ryan's point is a good and interesting one, Todd, because Biden has recently started sending, for instance, Cubans back because there are so many Cubans who are fleeing up through Central America and into Mexico. And that is like the asylum system.

If there is a humane asylum system in the United States, my goodness, I mean, some of these people from Cuba and Venezuela should not be getting sent back. But we don't have a humane asylum system. We don't have a logical, sensical, coherent asylum system because the system is clogged up by so many of these different cases. The humanitarian parole while people their asylum cases penned. And one thing I want to ask you about, Todd, is you do you have done a lot of like wrenching, vivid reporting from Central America on things like the Darien Gap and these numbers under Biden are different. You know, we have seen a steady uptick over the course of a really long time, but what we're seeing now just flatly pales. The rest of the stuff pales into comparison to what we're seeing now.

So as somebody who's been down that sort of the road, the superhighway that goes up through the Darien Gap, through the Panama Canal and into Mexico and then into places like El Paso and Brownsville, what is happening down south, further down south, and then further down south from that, and then further down south from that? What is bringing people up right now in these big numbers? Right.

So when you talk to the immigrants, as I frequently do, you know, and you ask them, you know, why are you coming? What they'll tell you is all of my relatives got let in. When they showed up at the border, all of my friends got in and they sent us the selfies and they're like this. And, you know, when we are seeing all of our friends and neighbors get across, we're borrowing our money, selling everything we own and paying the smugglers to go over to. Why not? They're letting us in. That really is the snowball effect that has led to this avalanche of a historic migration crisis. We've never seen any kind of numbers like this, not even close in the history of the United States. And it's really not a very complicated calculus.

When you talk to them, they're like, everybody I know got in, so we're getting in too. Well, to complicate it just a little bit, you don't see, and back in the 19th century, and also then in the 1960s again, when Democrats did immigration reform, then there was a bipartisan immigration reform, I'm sure you know this story, that they expected that there would then be this flood of immigration from Europe into the United States. And a lot of these kind of racist lawmakers were then frustrated that actually instead, a lot of these quotas were made, were made up by people coming from third world countries over, over to the United States. And so to complicate the point a little bit, people don't, I think, want to uproot their entire lives. You know, people have a sense of connection to place, Place matters to people. Their mother and father

live there. Their grandparents live there. Their great-grandparents live there. You have to be driven to some type of desperation to want to leave from the place where you are from, to go to another place where you don't even speak the language. Now, I suspect you probably would even agree with that, right? Well, yeah, there's really no place like the United States. It's a storied land. It's got a reputation that precedes it as a land of milk and honey. Most of the people that are crossing in are getting immediate you know, immediate assistance. Nobody's starving or going hungry. Everybody's taken care of.

Everybody's getting on the rolls. You know, they're in four-star hotels in New York. So now everybody wants to go to New York and they send that home. And it's true that, you know, a lot of these countries are less livable than the United States. You know, I certainly can empathize with anybody who wants to upgrade their lifestyle. But most of the, for example, Venezuelans who are coming in right now are not living in Venezuela and haven't for many years. They've been living in relative safety and prosperity in 17 different Latin American countries. Colombia has the largest share of them, and they've been there for years and years. And they decided not to go during the Trump

administration because if you lay down $10,000 to cross the U.S. border under Trump, you would end up back in Mexico with no return on your investment. But under the Biden administration, they were happily ensconced in these other countries. And they saw that there was a chance to upgrade, to move up a few notches and live with relatives or just have a better shot at prosperity. And so that's why they came. Most of the Haitians, or it's the same thing with most of the Haitians, none of them were living in Haiti. They were living in Chile. I was just going to say, Todd, you just used a really important phrase, a better shot. I remember in Matamoros talking to a group of Haitians who would freely say, we weren't in necessarily dire straits. The economy had gotten bad in Brazil or Argentina or whatever. They would say that.

But they said, this sticks with me. It was very poignant. They said, they were trying to talk and translate their Spanish, translate their French, I should say, into Spanish and then into English. But I almost filled in their sentence at one point. I was like, you're trying to say the American dream. And they just were like, yes, the American dream. We want the American dream. And on that note, we were talking earlier in the show about the news that four more people have been charged in the assassination attempt against now deceased because he was assassinated, former president of Haiti, Jovenel Moise. And, Todd, Haiti has played a really big role in this recent wave, this mass of human suffering where, as you've reported, people are dying crossing through the Darien Gap. They're being threatened. They're being abused by cartels who are profiting, you know,

to the tune of millions and millions of dollars every single year because of this. What role has Haiti played particularly? The situation in Haiti since 2010, as people have gone to different parts of Latin America. What is unique about the Haitian situation during this last several years as we've seen big peaks? Sure. Haiti is a terrible place to live. I don't blame anybody for trying to flee that country. It's simply unlivable, Haiti. Having said that, the vast majority of the Haitians that managed to leave

were living in all of these other countries for years in relative prosperity, just like you said. They had a shot briefly in 2021 at national elections. They were going to have, they were scheduled for November 7th, the first round. They were finally going to be able to elect a parliament. They haven't had a parliament in years. And then they were going to get a chance to elect a president. And then we had the Haitian encampment crisis in Del Rio under the bridge, 15,000 Haitians down there. And it gets a little bit complicated here. But what happened was the Biden administration felt like it had to shut down that camp. It was really too big of an eyesore. And they set about deporting people from that camp, not back to Chile, where they've been living happily for years,

but to actual Haiti itself. They rioted. But when the Biden administration did that, they needed a leader they bestowed dictatorship on this guy, Ariel, and robbed Haiti completely of its democracy. It's one shot of democracy, canceled both elections. And that guy's still running the country to this day and as Ryan has to get rid of a camp that was a political problem for the midterms right and the Envoy to Haiti resigned in protest uh over that over that very decision so then what would be so wrong with if implement instead going back and implementing this new policy, this humanitarian relief? You

got this big camp. Okay. Sit down, interview people, process them, move them through the system. If Congress could agree on it. Well, that's the thing. Congress isn't going to agree on it. So the three of us can try to agree on something here. I mean, let's take a look at it from a broader perspective. Since 1950 or so, right, the U.S. birth rate has been on a very steady decline. And I think the 21st century is really going to be marked by, eventually, when people get around to it, a competition for immigrants, a competition for people. In the West? I think all over the world, all over the world, because you're seeing declining birth rates, you know, essentially everywhere,

everywhere that starts to develop, even a little bit you start to see birth rates decline. And if you're gonna have, you know, and I'm biased here, I'm gonna be old pretty soon, and if you have a top heavy elderly population without enough young people to grow that economy, to do the work that the old people can no longer do, countries collapse. So why shouldn't we be worried about that? Why shouldn't we look back at what's happened throughout American

history and seeing the contributions that immigrants have made and say, you know what? All right, if the Biden administration is figuring out a better system that's shutting out the cartels, let's do that. Well, I think you make a good point, and I think that there's a definite – those issues that you raise about our declining birth rate, those are perfectly debatable. They're worthy of debate as a matter of public policy. The issue that I and a lot of people have with it is that the current laws require the president to stop, block, deter, detain, and deport immediately anybody who illegally crosses the border. And as last I checked, the law as it stands, the INA that requires those things are still in place. Like we haven't treated, we haven't dismissed the INA like we've dismissed the federal marijuana law. We may be moving in the direction of dismissing the INA like we have the federal marijuana law, but the law requires that everybody who

illegally enters the border without permission is to be detained and deported. Even if they apply for asylum, they still have to remain in detention for the duration of their asylum claim until it's adjudicated. What the administration is doing is they created a new kind of extra legal process that's based on an interpretation of a piece of the law that most minds greater than mine, legal minds anyway, say it is not legal. You can't just go outside of Congress and create a thing where anybody in the world who wants to come across the border can come across the border. What you're talking about is a legal system that is debatable and then has to be implemented by Congress with an executive signing the law, and then we go from there. But to just create extra channels that, you know, just, oh, let's do this with this and that, and get as many people in as want to come in, that's not the intent of Congress,

and that's the problem with what you're talking about. This issue seems to have a lot of extra legal stuff going on. If you remember, Donald Trump shut down the government in order to kind of pressure Congress to give him money for his wall. He failed. He caved. Congress refused. And he's like, you know what, I'm going to build a wall anyway. And there was the Doug Ducey situation where the shipping containers. Yeah. And so, yes, it's a lot of that. But I think that's, to Todd's point, like a problem with the absence of legal congressional activity on this issue is that it ends up becoming ad hoc. And the victims of that are humans who don't have a clear path. And because of that, cartels prey on

them and say, we'll smuggle you across the border. We'll turn you into humanitarian parole. And then you can have this existence that DACA kids have had for such a long time where they're just in legal limbo because Congress can't agree on a damn thing. Todd Bentsman, thank you so much for joining us, for being willing to have this discussion. We appreciate it so much. Happy to be here. Thank you. Of course. We'll continue to obviously cover the situation at our southern border and the humanitarian crisis that's absolutely unfolding there as developments unfold. All right.

Have a great Wednesday, everybody. This is an iHeart Podcast.