Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 2/21/23: Putin Suspends Nuclear Treaty, EPA Corporate Tests in Ohio, Rich McHugh in Ohio, SCOTUS Big Tech, Project Veritas, MTG National Divorce, Fox News Texts, Trump's Primary Strategy, Government vs New Media, Dave Weigel Interview on GOP Primary

Episode Date: February 21, 2023

Krystal and Emily discuss Putin suspending nuclear treaty, Norfolk Southern caught trapping residents in no fault contracts, Rich McHugh (@RichMcHugh) joins us from the scene in East Palestine, Ohio, Major SCOTUS argument could upend big tech, James O'Keefe out at Project Veritas, Marjorie Taylor Greene slammed for National Divorce comments, a lawsuit exposes Fox Hosts text messages, McCarthy gives Tucker Carlson secret January 6th footage, Trump reveals his strategy to vanquish rivals on Ukraine and Social Security, the government's plot to crush New Media, we're joined by Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) to discuss the 2024 GOP primary.To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Good morning, everybody. Happy Tuesday. Emily is back in the house with us. Welcome again, Emily. Thanks for having me. A big shout out to Sagar for getting engaged in London. Big engagement news there, yes. Congratulations, Sagar. Enjoy your time off. And he will be back here on Thursday, though. We have very much enjoyed having Emily sitting in for him. There is a lot going on this morning to get to. Big speech from Putin. It's his, like,

state of the nation thing, so we'll break all of that down for you. Also, some what I consider to be blockbuster news, bombshell news out of Ohio that the water testing that was used to tell residents that the water was safe and clean for them to drink. It was conducted by consultants paid by the railroad company themselves. This is what the EPA is basing their assessment on. I don't know how you can do that. So we'll talk about that. We also have someone on the ground, Rich McHugh, fantastic reporter to tell us what he is seeing there. Big Supreme Court cases, oral arguments being heard this week about the future of tech and the internet.

Project Veritas founder and sort of the figurehead there, James O'Keefe, is officially out. Marjorie Taylor Greene calling for a national divorce. Really going there. Why not? A lot to say about that one. Why not? And then we've got some crazy texts that were revealed from Fox News stars, people like Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham. They kind of reveal how they think about their job, how they think about their audience, how they think about Donald Trump. And we also have news that all of the January 6th video is going to be released to Tucker Carlson. So what does that ultimately mean? First time on the show, we've got Dave Weigel, political reporter for Semaphore.

He's going to break down what he is seeing so far in the GOP primary. But we wanted to start with breaking news this morning. Vladimir Putin delivering his state of the nation address. This is very closely watched. This comes, the context here is that the war this Friday will hit its one year anniversary of when Russia invaded Ukraine. We, of course, covered yesterday President Biden making a surprise trip into the active war zone, meeting with Zelensky himself in Kiev. He is in Poland today. He is expected to give his own address. So the White House trying to go for sort of like a split screen moment here.

In terms of what Putin actually said, most of it was retreading ground that we've heard before. He once again was talking about, you know, if we're sending longer range missiles, that they're going to have to respond in kind. So this sort of like inflammatory rhetoric. There were a few veiled nuclear threats involved in there. But the biggest news, I think, out of this that actually has real world policy implications is Russia is officially withdrawing from the New START arms control treaty. This was like the final remaining arms control treaty that we were still involved with. Now, inspections with regards to that have been paused since the pandemic, but still obviously a negative sign and development that Russia is now officially withdrawing. Was this surprising to you? Not in particular, no. But is it surprising that he rolled it out in the speech at this time?

Also, I don't think it's particularly surprising, but it is an interesting bit of timing. Yeah, to me, I guess I was actually surprised that the speech didn't contain more new rhetoric. Aggressive. Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people, myself included, were kind of watching this closely. Sagar actually, from his time away, was like, you know, he's in a different time zone. So he's up like live texting us like updates on the speech. So this was very closely watched. So the fact that ultimately it was a very kind of status quo speech from Putin in terms of rhetoric that we've heard before. He blames the West for the war, says said something like, you know, we're enforcing the peace with force or something that doesn't make any sense like that.

And he, you know, used the same type of rhetoric about responding in kind if there is escalation. But beyond that, there was no real new ground tread here. He did refer to it as a war, which is kind of, you know, new and different, but not all that shocking either. So I think the other thing to watch will be, of course, today when President Biden gives his speech later today in Poland to see what he announces, if there's additional military aid or any revelations about his conversation with Zelensky, etc. So we'll definitely keep an eye on that. Yeah, super interesting. And on the one-year anniversary, both sides to watch the split screen, as you said, Biden in Poland, Zelensky, as he's been talking about the one-year

anniversary to, just a big week. Yeah. The other news that I saw this morning is you already had a number of voices out of the UK calling for the shipment of fighter jets, which, of course, would be a dramatic escalation far beyond what was contemplated in the early days of this war from the U.S. and NATO allies. Liz Truss, the former prime minister, briefly, very briefly in office, famously did not outlast a head of lettuce. Anyway, she is now adding her voice to those who want fighter jets to be shipped to Ukraine. So there's continued escalatory pressure from voices in the UK, certainly voices in the US. Yesterday, I mentioned Lindsey Graham, Senator Lindsey Graham, who is sort of famously hawkish, has been calling for the same. So those

pressures continue. This comes in the wake of really getting confirmation of how the U.S. acted directly along with their NATO allies early, roughly a year ago, to circumvent any sort of peace process from ultimately unfolding. And so that's where we are now. Russia is started a spring offensive. Zelensky has been traveling around Europe and obviously was here in the U.S. as well, making his case for additional weapons shipment. So we'll see what Biden has to say about all of this today, and we'll certainly keep an eye on it. Yeah, I'm excited to hear what Sager has to say on Thursday. Absolutely. All right. So let's get to some domestic affairs here, because the news out of Ohio with this horrific train derailment just continues to get worse and worse. Let's go and put this up on the screen. This from Steven Donziger tweeted this out, but this is a Huffington Post

article. He says, breaking the EPA claim that water in Ohio is safe to drink is based on only a few tainted lab samples funded by the very rail company that caused the disaster. The EPA apparently never tested the water themselves. He asked, why does the polluter get to do the testing? I think that is something all of us would wonder. If you click through to the piece here, they give a lot of details about exactly how this testing went down and just why this is so troubling, because they've been telling residents, it's all clear, it's all good. You can go back to your homes, you can drink the water, no problem, we've tested it, it's safe, trust us, et cetera. And then the news breaks that they're basing that on rail company paid consultants doing testing. And not only that, it's not only the fact that the source of the

testing is questionable at best, but the actual samples that were taken, there are some indications that they were contaminated and not handled according to EPA standards. So let me go ahead and read a little bit of this article to you guys so you can get a sense of it. So they start with the news that the state used preliminary results from railroad-funded sampling to declare that the drinking water was safe in the wake of the toxic spill. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, who's a Republican on Wednesday afternoon, announced that new testing from five wells that supply the town's municipal drinking water showed no evidence of contamination. With these results, he says, Ohio EPA is confident that the municipal water is safe to drink.

But on its web page about the derailment, the Ohio EPA links only to railroad-funded preliminary test results. That's the basis that they used for this press statement from Mike DeWine that it's all good, the municipal water is safe to drink. The Columbiana County, which is the county that East Palestine is located in, their general health district, they separately sampled East Palestine's public water system last week. But at least as of when this article was written a few days ago, the county's testing results had not been made public. So the only results that have been made public are these railroad-funded water testing results. The lab report on the railroad

funded sampling indicates the samples were not handled in accordance with federal EPA standards. Sam Bickley, who is an aquatic ecologist at Virginia Scientist Community Interface, an advocacy-focused coalition of scientists and engineers, he's the one who alerted HuffPost to these sampling errors. He called the report extremely concerning, quote, their results that claimed there were no contaminants is not a reliable finding. I find this extremely concerning because these results would not be used in most scientific applications because the samples were not preserved properly. And this is the same data they're now relying on to say the drinking water is not contaminated. To be clear, the federal EPA has not done its own

sampling of municipal water in East Palestine. During a press call with reporters Friday and official in the Biden administration said all the sampling that's been done in Ohio has been joint, not Norfolk Southern alone. It's been with the Columbia and a county health department collecting samples along with Norfolk Southern and sending those split samples to do different labs for verification. So that is their defense here. And Emily, this comes as actually the EPA administrator, Michael Regan, is finally in Ohio today to visit with residents. They're long overdue. But this follows a playbook of cover-up that we have seen so many times before. And it's something that, you know, a lot of social media users were actually warning about when you see these sort of catastrophes,

industrial accidents, et cetera. There is a common playbook that plays out where first the company is relied on for analysis of what's going on. The politicians echo whatever the company is saying, and then the media just echoes whatever the politicians are saying. So the whole narrative comes from the person and the group that are most interested in downplaying the severity of what exactly is going on. Right. The media will then repeat claims that have been sort of falsely baked together with just credulity. Like, it's like, don't worry about it. We've looked into this. Now, here's another, I think, extremely disturbing quote from the HuffPost article, which is a great piece of journalism. James Lee, a spokesman for Ohio EPA,

acknowledged the samples were not properly preserved or acidified, but said they were, quote, acceptable due to the next day processing at the laboratory. There is also a spokesperson from Norfolk Southern quoted in the article saying, though the initial data was valid, we wanted to ensure compliance with EPA standards and proactively asked the lab to rerun the samples with the remaining preserved vial from each sample. So again, these are the players who are sort of barely admitting that this is not an ideal set of samples. The Ohio government was not at all upfront about potential problems with these samples, Mike DeWine. I mean, it's incredible. People should know if they're making the decision to drink this water, exactly who tested the results,

who came to the conclusion that said it was okay to do that. I bet a whole lot of people would have made different decisions based on that information. Well, and the question remains, okay, if the county did their own testing, where are those results? Why aren't those being made public? So this is deeply troubling because these residents deserve every level of scrutiny to the situation in order to protect their health, both in the near and the long term. And, you know, the government pretends like, oh, we really know what's going on here. And the media just parrots this line. We were taking a look over the weekend. The New York Times wrote this piece that made me

so mad about basically trying to frame everybody who was concerned about this ongoing crisis, as you have residents continuing to say, nausea, skin rashes, headaches, dizziness, trying to frame everybody who's concerned about that as a quote unquote right wing conspiracy theorist. And if you read through that article, you know, there was a way to write an article about people who were going way too far, spinning conspiracies where there's no evidence, etc. But they didn't do that. Instead, they just smeared everyone who was concerned of this and they completely regurgitated the government official line about what was going on with zero skepticism about issues exactly like this. Like, where is this journalism in the New York Times? Right. And if you're going to parrot the government line, I mean, you're supposed to be journalists holding power to account. You don't have any questions for

government. Your message to the public is just like, no, accept exactly what they're saying. And if you don't, you're a right-wing conspiracy theorist. Absolute garbage. At the same time, there continue to be a lot of questions. So we just talked about the water. There continue to be a lot of questions about the air quality. There are lawsuits that are being filed left and right here. Let's go ahead and put this up on the screen. The sixth lawsuit claims, quote, controlled chemical release worsened the East Palestine situation. The suit alleges that burning vinyl chloride creates phosgene gas, a chemical warfare agent used in World War I. By the way, this isn't like wild speculation. That is what is created when you burn vital chloride. So the question is, you know, the government claims, oh, it's all dispersed. Everything's fine now. Residents continue to have health impacts and very worried about the future. The details here are that complaint was filed on Wednesday in the U.S. District Court by an injury firm. They alleged

the railroad dumped more than 1.1 million pounds of vinyl chloride into the environment during the incident. They claimed that amount of that emission of the toxic chemical was more than two times the total amount of vinyl chloride that is released by all U.S. industries over an entire year. And they alleged that burning vinyl chloride creates phosgene gas, a chemical warfare agent used in World War I that was banned by the Geneva Convention. Quote from the attorney here, I'm not sure Norfolk Southern could have come up with a worse plan to address this disaster. Residents exposed to vital chloride may already be undergoing DNA mutations that could linger for years or even decades before manifesting as terrible and deadly cancers. The lawsuit alleges that Norfolk Southern made it worse by essentially blasting the town with chemicals

as they focused on restoring train service and protecting their shareholders. Authorities say they undertook what they called a, quote, controlled release of unstable chemicals to prevent a possible explosion at the derailment scene. And, of course, vinyl chloride is a known carcinogen. And as was previously stated, this type of gas was banned by the Geneva Convention because of its toxic nature. Well, and this is something that gets to the water as well. And a lot of people probably remember this with 9-11 first responders and people that were around the crisis scene around Ground Zero on 9-11 and the weeks and months afterwards is that we don't

know. We really don't know the scope of the tragedy until years later. We don't know the scope of the effects of some of these cancer-causing chemicals, of some of the chemicals in general, whether they're in the air or the water. And so for the confidence to be projected by Mike DeWine, the Ohio EPA, Norfolk Southern, which of course their interest in this is obvious, you understand why they would be doing that. But for that confluence between the government and the private company here to be projecting that level of confidence instead of meeting people where they are, which is terrified that they're going to have effects from this down the road years from now that can't even be calculated right now or understood right now. I think it's just on a political level, purely political level, big swing and a miss,

an obvious mistake. But even on a moral level, I mean, we have no idea, truly no idea what's going to happen. Yes, that's exactly right. And I can't imagine being a resident of this town, wondering if you can go back to your home, wondering if it's safe to drink the water and breathe the air. Your pets. Exactly. We played for you guys last week, Jordan Cheriton. They've been on the ground, Status Quo, our partners. And he interviewed a fox keeper who one of his foxes had already died and all the others were sickened. Another one has now passed away. So people and these, you know, you guys know how people feel about their pets. I'm sure you feel the same way about your pets. I mean, these are these are important

parts, parts of your family. And to watch them be killed by this incident and just a hand wave away, oh, it's safe now and don't worry about it. It's just, it's a disgrace. It's an absolute betrayal. And, you know, there's a couple other things to say about this. One is we now with this horrific accident have kind of tracked where the corruption started, you know, back in the Obama administration, at least with regards to this specific tale. Okay. The Obama administration wanted to institute more safety regulations. That was great. But then industry comes in to sort of curtail and undermine what the NTSB had said, what the restriction should ultimately be. So there's a curtailing of the initial ambition under the Obama administration to be more industry friendly. Under the Trump administration, you see that go even further.

They roll back some of the regs that were put in place in the Obama administration. Under the Biden administration, you actually see rail workers really rising up, calling attention to major potential safety issues, not only in terms of their own lives, but in terms of the potential impacts on these communities. And you see a bipartisan effort, but led by Democrats, to crush this movement and silence their warnings and side ultimately with the railroad executives and the shareholders. And you also see they don't do anything to put back in place the regulations that had been curtailed by Obama and rolled back by Trump. So you can see this tale of how industry shaped the landscape to make it friendly for them. But what you realize in looking at this is, God, how many other

instances throughout our country, you know, where this is going on, whether it's big oil or big chemicals or big pharma or big ag or whatever. I mean, this is happening every single day with our government and the people who are supposed to be keeping us safe, who are more interested about, you know, campaign contribution or more interested in what their next job is going to be after they leave the EPA or whatever their agency they're at, instead of making sure that people are kept safe today. And I think for, you know, broader picture, zooming out from Ohio, that's what is so incredibly, incredibly troubling about this story is because you realize that this is really just scratching the surface of the way that the whole system has been rigged to generate profits

for a few over the health and safety of communities across the country. And by the way, final thought on this, that's why the media is, I think, the single biggest problem in American politics, because business, industry, government can't get away with that level of collusion when you have a healthy fourth estate. That's why it's called the fourth estate. And so when people kind of roll their eyes about media bashing, actually without a strong media, you don't get this level of corruption and collusion because the media creates an incentive for the industry and the government partner with the industry not to behave badly. So to your point about where we might not know this is happening, well, we didn't know this was happening for years because the corporate press wasn't covering it.

I mean, seriously, we have no idea how many other places, like you were saying, whether it's Big Ag, Big Pharma, where should media be looking right now to create disincentives for people to behave badly and to give the public the information they need to vote wisely, to shop wisely, all of these different things. When you don't have that, you don't have a functioning system. Yeah. And instead, you have the New York Times literally running cover for the government and saying that anyone who questions them is a whack job. It is outrageous. We want to stay with this story. We've got Rich McHugh. He's a fantastic investigative reporter. He's with News Nation now. He is on the ground in East Palestine. Let's get to it. Rich, it's so great to see you. Welcome. Hey, thanks for having me on. Good to see you. Yeah, our pleasure. So you've been there

on the ground in East Palestine, Ohio. Just give us a sense of how residents are feeling and what you're hearing from them. Residents are angry. You know, they feel like they, the people that I've spoken to at least feel like they've been forgotten they you know here we are we're approaching three weeks and they say help is finally just coming and you know walking around and talking to folks here there's a lot of talk that like fema is here and people are here and like but but that's not we haven't seen that we there's people handing out water and townspeople helping other people in town. But in terms of actual help, it's not everywhere.

It's not like a normal disaster setting where you go in and you see all these stations and people helping. I'm outside of a church right now where they're just opening this morning a health clinic and people are starting to file in nurses and toxicologists. And then apparently there's 20, at least 20 people signed up to come here this morning and get themselves checked out. So it's, you know, the residents I've talked to are angry. They say they're just not getting help. Their homes are not getting tested. They are saying this is Norfolk Southern is handling this the wrong way and they need help. Their homes are not getting tested. They are saying this is, Norfolk Southern is handling this the wrong way and they need help. Well, on that note, Rich, you've been tweeting some really, I think, disturbing images. We have one that we can put up on the screen here, just tracking what people are saying the effects this may have had on their bodies. It's very early

to know exactly the extent of all of that. But can you share with us more examples like this? What are you hearing about people's health? What examples have you encountered of how this might have affected people's health? You know, I went to, there's a church set up where Norfolk Southern is set up to kind of try and reimburse people for hotels and assistance like that. And I went there to interview people on that. And one guy stopped me. He's like, listen, his eyes were bloodshot and red. And like, he's like, my eyes feel like they're going to pop out of my head.

He's like, every time I sneeze, it's like bloody. I'm like, have you gone to the hospital? He's like, I don't have time. We don't have time to do this. So, um, I interviewed this other woman last week. She called me and she said, look, I just went back to my house. They'd been evacuated. Just went back to my house, um, to move something around. And she's like, I was there for 30 minutes and I walked and I went to go take a shower. And that's the picture that you have. Her face and her neck was all covered in rashes. So I went over there and she asked me if I wanted to go into that part of the house where she feels like she was exposed.

I was like, I'm not going in there. Nobody's tested there. Nobody knows what's residing. And it was a low-level part of the house where she was in the direct line of the smoke the night that they kind of did the chemical release. So a lot of these houses have not been tested. Nobody really knows what is actually in them and if their houses are safe. There's just a lot of questions. You had, I think, an important story for News Nation about how East Palestine residents were asked by Norfolk Southern to sign an indemnity form, a hold harmless form. Your lead here, you say, just weeks after a train carrying toxic chemicals derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, some residents say they're being asked to sign contracts they fear could prevent them from suing later on. So basically Norfolk Southern here trying to do a

little CYA and convince residents to sign this contract that could prevent them from suing the company. What is the company's line on this and what are residents saying about it? So the residents say, like we spoke to say, initially they came around, they said, we want to test your house. And they said, well, who is this? And it was like, apparently the EPA was there, but representatives like aligned with New York Folk Southern were there. And so in order to have your house tested, you had to sign this form. And one woman who was, you know, kind of smart legally and said, I'm not signing this form. What is this? Can I have it?

And I wouldn't give it to her. So she took a picture. She gave it to me. And basically it's a hold harmless agreement saying, if you agree to this testing, you'll hold us harmless as we enter your property and for any like basically future litigation we asked uh norfolk southern about this and they said uh no some of those were sent out by mistake uh those should that language indemnity language should not have been included um going forward it was a mistake and so they basically said it was a mistake. And any people who did sign this will have not waived their right to future litigation. So you just touched on something really interesting is this was mistakenly sent out by the state, et cetera, et cetera. And we know the Ohio EPA, as you mentioned earlier, and FEMA,

there are people who are down there at least attempting to look like they're helping out and maybe helping out to some extent. But when you're talking to people, Rich, you mentioned they're frustrated at Norfolk Southern. Are they also frustrated at the government? Are they frustrated at the governor? Are they frustrated at the EPA? What are people's sentiments towards their own government right now? I think they're frustrated at everybody. They're like, you know, one gentleman I interviewed called me this morning and asked me like, where do I go for this health screening? And how do I get tested? There's just, there's not a really centralized kind of blast out to this community. Like, here's where you can go for your health screenings. Here's where you can go

for this. Like, they're having to hunt and gather this information in a way that when you kind of cover other disasters or a tornado rips through a town, it's all centralized and people have access to this information. Here, it doesn't feel like that to me. That's my impression. And people are upset. They're upset at the governor. They're upset at the EPA. They're just like this is totally bungled from the start. And here we are three weeks later and we're kind of in the same scenario. These people are like, look, the only people that have come to my house are the mailman. So it's happening. And finally, Rich, early on in this crisis, one of your colleagues at News Nation was trying to do his job and ended up getting arrested during a press conference that Mike DeWine, governor, was giving at that time.

Have you had any trouble or roadblocks to doing your job as a journalist while you're on the ground there? I can't say that I have. Since that, you know, I'll let the video speak for itself on that with Evan, my colleague. I think he handled himself well. From my experience here in town, no. There's been no hindrances. There's been nothing to say that I can't continue my job, although we have our guard up because of what happened. Yeah, absolutely.

Well, Rich, thank you for spending some time with us today. And most importantly, thank you so much for being there on the ground doing real reporting about exactly what is going on. Thank you. Appreciate you having me on. Our pleasure. Today, Tuesday, the Supreme Court is hearing oral arguments in a major case. It's called Gonzalez v. Gonzalez, and at stake is Section 230 itself. You've probably heard a lot about Section 230 in recent years. It basically shields internet companies from liability for harmful content that gets posted on their platform. Now, here's the Washington Post's quick summary of the case. Quote, in November 2015, three rifle-wielding ISIS gunmen

opened fire at a restaurant in Paris, killing 23-year-old Nohemi Gonzalez, a college exchange student. Almost eight years later, her family is seeking justice for her death, targeting not the gunman, but the tech giant YouTube in a landmark case that could shift the foundations of internet law. Now, Crystal, there is something important about Section 230, I think, to recognize, which is that a lot of these big tech giants at this point, Facebook, for instance, has been running ads like an Axios for a year saying, we're okay with Section 230 reform because they now know that they have the financial resources to kind of handle it. They've had a long time to figure out where to go with it. There's no question it would hurt them. But they're also sort of prepared for

what might happen with Section 230. Now, any regulatory changes happening through a court decision, on the other hand, there's nothing they can do to lobby the Supreme Court. There's really nothing that they can do to predict what might come out of this case, what might come out of the arguments. The arguments today should give us some indication of how this case will unfold. Obviously, it's a pretty business-friendly Supreme Court. So Google has that going for it. But Section 230, Clarence Thomas has come out against, basically, Section 230. He said that maybe we should have a different approach. We should maybe be treating them like

common carriers, these tech giants like common carriers. Google, Facebook, Twitter, they want, in general, to not be considered publishers, even though they do all kinds of publishing, whether it's on the search engine itself, whether it's through YouTube. What they're doing fundamentally is publishing. And Section 230 allows them to do that without the liabilities that news outlets have when they publish harmful information. This is a fascinating, fascinating, fascinating case because we're talking about life and death. Right. Well, we're also, it's also one of these weird, interesting horseshoe issues because there's a critique of Section 230 from the right, and there's a critique of Section 230 from the left. Oftentimes, the right focuses on,

and I think these concerns, by the way, are justified, on the ability of platforms like YouTube or Twitter or Facebook or Google to discriminate against creators and against content based on political ideology. watch to do whatever they want with their recommendation algorithms. And so the critique from a lot of liberals and Democrats is that they aren't doing enough to combat harmful content, misinformation, et cetera, et cetera. And so the context here in terms of when this little provision was originally enacted, this was in the early days of the internet. It was kind of before these companies had become gigantic monopolies. It was before recommendation algorithms began to drive literally everything in terms of content distribution on the web. Really before social media, too. Correct. So this was really more, they were thinking about these message boards, for those of you who are old like me, like this is where you just post and it's there and somebody else posts and it's there.

And so they really were aimed more at a concern that if these companies had total liability as publishers placed on their heads, then it would stifle innovation. I think those concerns, by the way, were justified. And in the wake of this provision being enacted, there was, in fact, an explosion of innovation. But it also then enabled the giant monopolization of the entire tech sector space. And so now you have critics of Section 230 from both the left and the right who are saying this should not have been interpreted as carte blanche. You can do whatever you want. You can manipulate this algorithm however you want and serve up whatever content you want and push whatever content you want

without having any sort of responsibility as a publisher. So the question I think that's in front of the Supreme Court, as I understand it, is are there any limiting principles here? And basically what, you know, what some people who have been thinking about this and proposing reforms, one direction you could go is, okay, there's still an opportunity to be held harmless of the type of content that's posted on your platform. I think that, you know, under certain circumstances, that makes a lot of sense. But you have to meet certain guidelines. You have to be regular. You have to meet certain standards that we want in terms of having a neutral platform that serves as really kind of the, you know, a public utility at

this point in terms of how we communicate with one another. So that's what's at stake here. I've no idea what this court is going to ultimately find if they, you know, curtail this at all, if they send it back to Congress. I really don't know what direction this will ultimately go in, but the implications of it could be hugely profound. Yes, and I'm glad this is going to be. I mean, it's actually hard to overstate how important this is, the oral arguments today, because we're really going to get a glimpse into how justices are grappling with these huge questions. And one thing that our government has struggled with in the past, understandably so,

is that new technologies for older generations, it's harder to sort of be in full contact with and understand exactly how profoundly they have changed human existence if they're not as central to your own existence because you grew up without them and you don't sort of have the level of tech fluency. So I'm really curious about that. But on the other hand,

this is fundamentally about publishing. And that, the insight into how the court is thinking about publishing, Clarence Thomas in particular, not the most vocal questioner, but someone who has said, the public utility point that you made, common carrier, the common carrier framework treating these companies more like phone companies than their own little independent businesses is probably the best way to go. So I would expect to hear that argument fleshed out from who I considered one of the most important legal thinkers. I mean, whether or not you agree with him, he definitely is. So this is a huge day. This is really big implications. And this is more from the Washington Post. They say, the Gonzalez family's lawyers say that applying Section 230 to

algorithmic recommendations incentivizes promoting harmful content and that it denies victims an opportunity to seek redress when they can show those recommendations caused injuries or even death. And that's the publisher point that you're making this argument about how they serve up things with their algorithms. They also put headlines on news stories. They decide which news stories to promote and which stories not to promote. That is a huge job. If people have ever worked in news, even if you haven't, one of the biggest things that people don't see behind the scenes is headline writing. It is a huge part of publishing. Story selection is a huge part of publishing. And from the perspective of journalists, these companies are doing all of that. They just don't have

any of the liabilities that other journalists have. And they act like it's not journalism. So they don't take it seriously. They just serve up the dumbest stuff. And what they serve is whatever is going to keep you agitated and staring at their platform the longest so that they can serve up the ads that are the real core of the business model. It's a slot machine. It is. And so, I mean, if you think about it and you ask yourself, okay, should there be any limiting principle on Section 230? Imagine a theoretical platform where the recommendation algorithm is tuned so that the only stories that get amplified and recommended and serve to people are left-wing stories.

It's only about, you know, whatever is going on. Everything that's on the right is, you know, is sort of hidden. It's not banned or totally censored, although they could do that as well. And right now, the idea is it doesn't matter. You're still not a publisher. You still have no liability. Or imagine it the other direction where your recommendation algorithm is designed so that it only pumps and promotes right wing content about how great Trump is or whatever's going on there, right? Pizzagate or QAnon, whatever's hot at the moment. Can you really look at that with a straight face and say, oh, these are just, you know,

neutral common carrier platforms? No, you can't. You can't. And so then the question becomes, OK, what is the limiting principle? What are the rules you have to follow? What is the business model that you have to engage in in order to get the benefit of what is basically a giant gift and giveaway to these companies? So I think that most people would look at the situation and say, you know, if you think about Fox News versus MSNBC, part of the way that they present their very one-sided views of the world is through the type of commentators they have on, the opinions they express, etc. But a big part of how they do it is through story selection. That's like their own recommendation algorithm. What are they going to promote

as like the biggest problems in the world? What are they just not going to talk about? On Fox, you're going to get a lot of stories about, oh, there's a crime spike. There's an immigrant caravan. There's government spending gone wild, whatever. They're going to have their list. And if you're just consuming their content,

the impression you're getting of the world is, these are the core issues. These are the big things going on in society. If you're watching MSNBC, you're being presented a very different slate of issues to focus on as the biggest threats to society, the most important issues ultimately in the world. That story selection is really, really critical to their propaganda efforts. And so we've basically said that social media companies can do the same thing. They can have these recommendation algorithms that are their own form of story selection that are dramatically,

much more so than cable news at this point, shaping the way people perceive the world, and yet be totally held harmless for any harms that come to pass from those choices that they're ultimately making. And I think most people would look at that and say, that's really, that's ridiculous. Yes, in my opinion, there should be an availability of section 230 where you can avoid liability. I believe in free speech. I believe in people being able to post all kinds of content. But when you get into the manipulation

of what gets seen and what doesn't, that's, I think, where you run into a problem where, okay, now you really are serving as a publisher and not just sort of a neutral platform. Well, and they've also entered the fact-checking space. And that's hugely, hugely important. Again, it's another act of journalism. And they try to outsource it to journalistic outlets, nonsense fact-checking outlets that have so little credibility except for the fact that Facebook contracts with them or whatever. And that's their kind of fig leaf to get away with this. So they're absolutely acting as publishers.

There's no question about it. This case is huge, especially because we also, as we mentioned, the Gonzalez family wants opportunities to seek redress. They're saying those opportunities don't exist properly because of Section 230. Tech has come to terms with the fact that maybe they should be lobbying for Section 230 reform because it hurts any potential competitors to the extent that it's even possible to compete with them way more. They can shape what the legislation would look like. They can lobby to make it friendly to them. And they can weather the regulatory burden way better than any potential competitors can, but you can't do that in the court. You can't shape the regulation

that might come out of the Supreme Court. So just a fascinating, fascinating day and a really important one for the future of the internet. And not one that I think many people are paying attention to, but it is unfolding today, Tuesday, here in Washington. Yeah. At the same time, there is some other sort of media news that I think is significant.

I mean, Project Veritas, whatever you think of them, which I have a lot of mixed feelings about them, they've been really important in terms of, you know, political sort of right-leaning or right-wing investigations. They certainly have huge cultural impact. Anytime they drop one of their videos, it's major, major, gets a lot of attention on social media, whether the mainstream news covers it or not. And James O'Keefe is the founder of Project Veritas. He has been their figurehead. He is really, he is this entity. And now he is officially out.

Charlie Kirk actually had the, kind of broke this news a little bit. He got a little bit of the inside scoop on the fact he was stepping down or being forced out as CEO. Let's take a listen to a little bit, though, of what James himself had to say about it. quote, you get a raise if there is a restructure without James O'Keefe at Project Veritas. I have a copy of the text message, and I'll give it to all of you. I redacted the name of the journalist. The board member deleted the message, but not before our journalist took screenshots. So I'm announcing to you all that today on President's Day, I'm packing up my personal belongings. I don't have the answers to why they've been doing this or why board members were going directly to employees to collect grievances. So you'll recall, we reported here and others covered as well that there were some rumors this may ultimately come to pass. There were some, a lot of which you get from this, that little snippet as well. A lot of internal grievances. James O'Keefe, I think, comes off as a very difficult boss, is probably the

diplomatic way to put it. Very difficult person to work for. There were reports that like he was hungry and mad about it. He stole some like eight-month pregnant lady sandwich, things of that nature. A lot of accounts of him, you know, really seeking to humiliate, publicly humiliate his staff members in front of other staffers, some donors very displeased with some of his behavior and choices. And one thing that caught our attention, and I think a lot of people's attention, let's go ahead and put this up on the screen. Apparently, they acknowledged, Project Veritas acknowledged improperly giving James O'Keefe $20,000 in excess benefits to pay for staff members to accompany him to Virginia as he performed also some reports in the Daily Beast here that, you know, people were like, the donors think that this theater stuff is weird and a distraction,

et cetera. So I don't know all the ins and outs of exactly what was going on there, but it seems like a lot of staff member drama. You know, I said at the top, I have mixed feelings about Project Veritas. I mean, I mostly think that they are, they have done themselves a disservice by, you know, they've gotten caught selectively editing things, making people sound like they're saying totally the opposite of what they're saying. And the fact that they're a partisan outfit, that doesn't necessarily bother me because there are plenty of investigations of Democrats that deserve to be done or, you know, left ideas or thinkers or institutions, whatever. Like, that's all fine. I don't have an issue with that. But they really went above and beyond to sort of manipulate these videos to give the most negative impression and at times completely false and misleading impression. In certain instances, they've had, you know, really impactful revelations like Amy Robach on Jeffrey Epstein and the fact that her news outlet

like killed a story on it because they wanted to maintain access to the royal family. Like that was very impactful. It was real journalism. But oftentimes they have gone too far in the direction of just outright manufacturing things and propaganda so that when they put something out, like you can't trust what they're ultimately revealing. So that's my gripe with them. I'm sure James O'Keefe is a difficult person to work with, but it is kind of an end of an era because he really is this organization. I think without him, I can't imagine that they amount to much. I imagine that he will continue doing exactly what he was doing at Project Veritas, just in another format. He's a new organization. Right. Different name. Because to your point, it is him. Like James O'Keefe is Project Veritas.

And so wherever James O'Keefe goes, it'll be Project Veritas, but just with a different name and maybe a different board and different resources. But I think two things can be true. First, it can be absolutely true that he is eccentric and very difficult to work for. And it can also be true that his board used that as an excuse to oust him. For some reason, we don't totally have a good idea about yet. He has invoked the fact that this is all coming to pass right after the big Pfizer revelation video. Do you remember the one where he was? Yeah. So he's kind of invoked it. He said, this is our biggest investigation of all time. So it's not a coincidence that this is happening. This is all

unfolding right now. I want to bring up... Maybe. Maybe. Right. We don't know. We don't know. And I want to bring up a tweet, though, I thought was really interesting from Ben Dominich, who said, James O'Keefe out at Project Veritas is yet another example of how right media and the donor class have a deep intolerance for creative genius. If Andrew Breitbart had lived, they'd have you know, the donor class is different. It's not, you don't have any like Hollywood people in the conservative donor class. You don't have many artistic people in the conservative donor class. And I don't think I would go so far as to say James O'Keefe is a creative genius.

But I do think there is a different level of tolerance for that level of activism. And I, you know, I think journalism can be activism, but I think he leaned way more heavily on the side of activism than journalism. Yeah. I mean, I think I buy that he's creative, you know, but- Just in Oklahoma. Right. I guess, like I said, just to reiterate, I don't think that he did himself any favors by leaning so heavily in the direction of manipulation and propaganda because he could have had a lot more impact with what he put out if they played it a little more straight and didn't edit the videos deceptively and ultimately get caught and things of that nature. So that when you do put out something that is legit and real and deserves news coverage, it becomes very easy for everyone to dismiss it as just more James O'Keefe Project Veritas propaganda. And I feel the same way. I mean, on the Pfizer video, I was very reluctant to cover that because I don't know.

I don't know who this dude is that they interviewed. I don't know how they edited it. I don't know what that don't know who this dude is that they interviewed. I don't know how they edited it. I don't know what that like given his track record. Yeah. It makes me very, very wary of trusting what they're ultimately putting out to the public. And, you know, I'm someone who is very open to, you know, uncomfortable conversations, exposing companies like Pfizer. Like I have no issue with any of that. We try to do that here all the time. But when you've proven yourself to be so untrustworthy so many times, it gives your ideological adversaries very easy grounds to just dismiss out of hand everything you ultimately put out. And the Pfizer investigation is also a really good example of that. In the same way O'Keefe

sees it as an example of sort of the pinnacle of Project Veritas' work, it's also a great example of how easy it was for the media completely to dismiss it and not cover it. And if they did cover it, only cover it to the extent that they're almost like mocking O'Keefe and criticizing O'Keefe. And there is a different world in which that investigation happens and has more credibility because James O'Keefe, you know, in the 13 years since he founded Project Veritas all the way back in the Obama years, 2010, you know, was putting, they do sometimes dump the raw footage out, but not all the time. And we have seen that go wrong in the past. And so there is a world in which they're doing these investigations, just dumping raw video out and

everyone can sort of judge for themselves. And they get Pfizer in an impossible situation where they can't wriggle out of the media coverage because other people take it and run with it. But that's not the world that we live in. It's not the world James O'Keefe created. Yeah, absolutely. I have some more news from that side of the aisle. You want to set this one up, Emily? Yeah, absolutely. Well, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has called for a national divorce using that exact language. She was sort of mocked for this tweet yesterday. This is the quote. We need a national divorce.

We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government. Everyone I talk to says this. It's like Trump, right? Many people are saying. Everyone I talk to says this from the sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats to the Democrats' traitorous America last policies. We are done. We are done. All right. So obviously, somebody with now as much clout in the Republican Party as Marjorie Taylor Greene actually does have, you know, she is in a position right now. I wouldn't have predicted this maybe a couple of years ago, but she is in a position right now where she does genuinely have some clout in the Republican Party. And here she is calling outright for a national divorce.

That's why we're covering it here, because it is worth talking about. There have been on the right, especially some rumblings of this. There always are, by the way, you probably remember this, like going back years, there's always that conversation. There's an interesting, there's an interesting point to be made about the fact that we have sort of come apart to borrow the language from the book coming apart in socioeconomic ways in that people who are at very different ends of the socioeconomic spectrum are basically living in different worlds

within our own country at this point. But that said, Marjorie Taylor Greene's argument falls apart because of her own state. What do you do with Georgia, right? I mean, seriously, a purple state like Georgia. Do you live in a blue state? Exactly, exactly. And are your neighbors who you might get along with fine, and who voted for Warnock or who voted for Ossoff, what do you think of them?

Do you think they should live in a different country? Do you think that they do live in a different country and it's just it hasn't been formally determined at this point? And so I think it's an opportunity, I think, to really consider the impracticality, not just, I don't mean that like logistically, but just like actually philosophically. It makes no sense. It's an incoherent kind of idea. I mean, there's a few things to say about this. To me, it feels like a sort of throwing up of your hands, an abandonment of any idea of a democratic, small d, democratic nation where, okay, you disagree with whatever the Biden administration is doing, there's going to be another election. Like that's the whole idea is, okay, we have this push and pull and yeah, the country has different ideas

about exactly how we should accomplish it. That's why we have a democracy where you appoint representatives and where you elect representatives and where you elect representatives and where you run on a platform and you make your case for your ideas and may the best ideas win. That's the whole idea of what we're doing here. That's number one. Number two is, I mean, part of why I wanted to cover this, because we don't cover the utterances of Marjorie Taylor Greene all that often on this show, is because it's really the polar opposite of the view of the country that we believe in and are trying to promote with this show. I mean, you know, I'm sitting here with you. We have some different ideas about things. So I'm going to have some different ideas about things. And in no

world am I like, this is irreconcilable. We must get a national divorce. And I think that the reason the show, I think, has been successful is because that is much more reflective of how people actually live in their normal lives than this, like, bizarrely fringe, ultra-online take of Marjorie Taylor Greene. It is ultra-online. It's only if you're, like, the only— Okay, she says, like, everybody I talk to says this. Are you only talking to the worst people on Twitter? Because that's what the view of the world you would get is if you spend way too much time down a rabbit hole

on, like, Twitter or Getter or True Social or whatever your social media of choice happens to be. But if you're actually, existing in the world and living with your neighbors, many of whom may have different ideologies and vote for different politicians than you, like this is not the experience of the country that most people have on a day to day basis. I live in a county that is quite conservative and has been for a long time, voted for Donald Trump. I mean, this is where I was born and raised. And again, at no moment have I been like, this is irreconcilable. We need to give up on democracy and just split at, you know, split at the seams. It's so it's a very, I think it's a very sad and very pessimistic view of the country ultimately. Yeah. And again, it is true

that we are having a hard time agreeing on like very, very, very fundamental questions about, for instance, what is gender? What is truth? What is disinformation? What is democracy? We actually are having a hard time coming to terms with those questions. That is not unprecedented in American history. We have had a very hard time determining the value of human beings. There are people who disagreed on that, perhaps the most fundamental question in human existence in this country. And that's not to say that we've handled it perfectly. It's not to say that everything is just peachy and that the United States is the perfect example of how to sort of work through these questions. But it is to say the whole point of what we do,

as opposed to what other countries have done in human history, is work through these things and use this tool of constitutional democracy to create a more peaceful existence to the best of our ability. Best of our ability is not always going to be perfect. And it is going to be sadly tragic, violent, all of those things. Human existence is tragic and violent and all of those things, but we're working towards a better form of it. And to give up on that. Yeah. That's really sad. Yeah. I mean, there were a lot of people out there who were like, this is treasonous, whatever. She can say what she wants to say. But I do think it's kind of a, I would say that the sentiment

at the core of it is kind of anti-American because of exactly the reasons that you're laying out. It goes against the core of the best notions of what America is supposed to be. Not that we've lived up to it,

not that we live up to it today. But again, I just, I find the comments profoundly sad that you would just sort of like give up on the country in this way. And I wasn't the only one. There were lots of Republicans who were not impressed with what she had to say here. This is Spencer Cox,

who is the governor of Utah, Republican, in case you are surprised by that. In Utah, obviously obviously it's Republican. And what he said in response to this is this rhetoric, we can put this up on the screen for media. It had a kind of roundup of some of the criticism here. They say she was roundly condemned after calling for a national divorce on Twitter. Spencer Cox, the governor of Utah, said this rhetoric is destructive and wrong and honestly

evil. We don't need a divorce. We need marriage counseling and we need elected leaders that don't profit by tearing us apart. We can disagree without hate. Healthy conflict was critical to our nation's founding and survival. He has a little Reagan quote there, but then I liked what he said here. He said that he doesn't mean just civility and kindness, although we definitely need more of that too. I mean, passionate disagreement that does not destroy our souls and our country. Healthy conflict is good and foundational, but we must be Americans first and partisans second or last. And I like the way he

phrased that, because sometimes these things get just like bound up in decorum and civility politics, which I think is silly. There should be fierce debates. It should be raw. It should be passionate. There is nothing wrong with that whatsoever. But, you know, the idea that, oh, we're just going to give up on the other half of the country that disagrees with me, I frankly, I think it's disgusting. No, and that's such an important distinction because the like nonsense respectability theater that our politicians want to drag us into, which is like, you can't, how dare you say anything that's so critical of the American media or the American government, or you can't criticize our institutions because you're going to sow institutional distrust. Well,

first of all, our institutions deserve to be distrusted. And so that's, I think, a distraction, but we should be able to, for instance, I have this longstanding disagreement with most people when they look at the Jon Stewart clip of him laying into Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala on Crossfire. I forget what year it was, like 2004, somewhere around there. Somewhere in there. I don't think that was a great moment because I think what we lose when we take away that sort of public example of debate, heated debate, intense debate, but where you have two representatives, and it's important that they do actually represent both sides of the argument and they do it well, butting heads in public on television. I think that's a cathartic and important thing for

Americans to be able to do and for Americans to be able to see. It's part of why this show works so well and that you and Sagar have always worked so well, because people do need to be able to see. It's part of why this show works so well and that you and Sagar have always worked so well. It's because people do need to be able to see that because we can all do that with each other. And when you lose that and when the corporate press, as they do now, tries to push us away from that and tries to say no purveyors of disinformation or hate or whatever deserve to breathe the same oxygen in our green rooms or get any room in our pages, then you're getting, this is how you set the stage for the national divorce conversation because people no longer think they can talk through these things because they don't see it happening.

Yeah. And it's about, I can't control these other people. So I just have to like, it's an almost totalitarian instinct honestly I on the Jon Stewart point I think what people are reacting to is how inauthentic that particular debate how is just theater cartoonish cartoonish exactly but the core point of having people who disagree and like genuinely going at it and battling it out I think that's the core of what we should all be about um all right on that note yeah on that note we want to talk about a story that's sort of been a slow motion train wreck over the course of the last week. Huge revelations from Dominion's defamation lawsuit against Fox News. We have learned because of some of the disclosures in

this lawsuit that Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingram were on a group text. First of all, big news. Yeah, that's true. Because you never know how these people feel about each other behind the scenes and might hate each other's guts. That's kind of common, actually. Well, in fact, we find out through the revelations in this lawsuit that they were talking about their colleagues. They were talking about not just Sidney Powell, not just Rudy Giuliani, but also other hosts, including Neil Cavuto. They were talking about Jackie Heinrich, who had taken the step. This is probably the revelation from the filings that has gotten the most, I would say, airtime, is that they were concerned when Jackie Heinrich sort of went into a correct fact check of something Donald Trump said about voting machines or something like that. She fact checked him. They were upset because

they were saying privately, our viewers are so furious. They're going to flee to an alternative source like Newsmax. This is in the wake of that Chris Stierwald decision to call Arizona really early that just infuriated many, many Trump supporters, many, many Fox News viewers and did send them actually away from Fox News, at least for a period of time to places like Newsmax. And they were talking behind the scenes and saying basically like, this is killing the network stock. This is a problem. Um, they were also saying some things about Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell. As I've mentioned, this is Laura Ingram quote, Sydney is a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy. Uh, this is from Tucker. Sydney Powell is lying by the way I caught her. It's insane. Um, I think it's really important to note that Tucker actually did have Sidney Powell on and gave her like he gave her a tough interview at the time and was actually pretty publicly skeptical of Sidney Powell. Tucker also texts, our viewers are good

people and they believe it, which is really interesting talking about the lies surrounding the 2020 election. So, Crystal, there's just it's an overwhelming, I think, amount of information, like an info dump that just boggles the mind. But what do you make of it? Well, and this comes in the context of a Dominion lawsuit, which, you know, this is part of the discovery process where they're trying to show like these people knew that this stuff was all garbage and they still promoted it because they have a very high bar to meet in terms of defamation. I have no idea. I'm not a legal analyst, but, you know, oftentimes it's very difficult to meet that bar. But I think the

picture that emerges is of a group of people who unsurprisingly are most concerned about their ratings, the stock price and the business bottom line. Like, that's clearly their priority above and beyond, you know, care and concern for their audience, care and concern for the truth or their own integrity or anything else you might come up with. The bottom line was the bottom line, which, you know, that's not surprising. That's the way that CNN operates. That's the way I'm, that's, that is definitionally what corporate media is all about. Right. And so I think that's one takeaway. And just to underscore that with regards to trying to get this woman fired, I don't know her. Do you know her? Jackie? Not personally, but she's a White House reporter for them.

So I don't know anything about her. But anyway, Carlson told Hannity about Jackie Heinrich, please get her fired. Seriously, what the F? I'm actually shocked. This is with regards to some tweets she sent out fact-checking Trump. It needs to stop immediately like tonight. It's measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke. Tucker added, I just went crazy on Meade over it, Hannity said. He, I don't know who Meade is. He had, quote, already sent to Suzanne with a really, Suzanne Scott being the person who runs Fox News. He then added, I'm three strikes, Wallace shit debate, election night a disaster. Now this BS, nope, not going to fly. Did I mention Cavuto? And they were all very concerned about,

you know, at the time, like Newsmax and what's the other one? OAN. Yeah. They were like willing to go harder into the election conspiracies. And there was a sense of betrayal among some of the Fox News watching audience that they had called Arizona early and that they had called the election for Joe Biden instead of engaging with all of this stuff. And there was also a pivot point that came out with regards to Suzanne Scott, where Rupert Murdoch had initially been trying to tamp down some of the conspiracy indulgence that was happening on the network. He put out in one of his papers like an editorial and made sure that it got widely distributed at the network. That was the day that it gets called for, that the network calls the election officially for Biden. Ratings fall off a cliff. And there's messages from Suzanne Scott to that effect of like, well,

this was terrible and a disaster. And after that, they didn't really try to tamp down any of the speculation. So you also see from the highest levels how these were all business decisions. And again, they don't really care about like what was accurate or what they should be presenting to their audience. They no longer had control of the beast. They were riding the wave of what people already thought. So I think it also shows them as a lot more impotent than they are sometimes portrayed, which becomes relevant as you look at now, the DeSantis-Trump matchup, Fox News and all the Murdoch properties are clearly on Team DeSantis. And they've been doing what they can to promote him, pump him up.

That New York Post interview with Ron DeSantis, that was just like the most embarrassing puff piece I've ever seen from Selena Zito. But how much will that really have an impact when clearly like they're not fully in control of what's going on here. Yeah. And again, like they actually canceled an episode of Jeanine Pirro's show because they're of what the guests were going to say about the election. And so you see that they are trying. They are trying because they're using words like myth there. That's from Rupert Murdoch, actually. Like that's a word that Rupert Murdoch himself used. One of the biggest things I thought actually to come out of this was Rupert Murdoch saying, if we go all in on Arizona coverage, that it might help the network. Or it sounded like even he wanted to kind of help Trump in Arizona coverage. And so that's interesting because you see Rupert Murdoch himself directly weighing in

on editorial decisions at Fox News. That's a good insight into the network's operation, especially on sensitive stories like this. But I think there's a way to look at it in which, to your point, Fox is trying to control the beast. They're trying to control Lou Dobbs. They're trying to control Jeanine Pirro. They're trying to rein in something that, I mean, in some extent, did they help foment? The voting stuff is tough because they obviously didn't agree with Trump or these opinion hosts. We're mostly not talking about news hosts. We're mostly talking about their opinion hosts. They're upset internally with Trump. And that's a huge question, by the way, in the conservative movement in general. It's like, how much is it worth it to rebut everything that comes out of Donald Trump's mouth when the rest of the media exists to do exactly that and is going to spend every breath that they have rebutting everything that

comes out of Trump's mouth. So what is the sort of cost benefit to fact-checking everything Trump said, like the Jackie Heinrich tweet, when all it does is sort of push your audience away and repeat what the rest of the media is doing? That is a huge question that people debate all the time, especially behind the scenes in the conservative movement. And I think that is a fair question to debate. What I don't think is fair to debate, and I know you, I'm sure you know people like this.

I know people like this. Cyber knows people like this who knew what they were saying was garbage, but they felt like their career and their paycheck depended on saying it. Anyway, I don't think there is any greater contempt that you can show for a group of people and for your audience than to knowingly lie to them. their paycheck, depending on saying it. Anyway, I don't think there is any greater contempt that you can show for a group of people and for your audience than to knowingly lie to them. I think

that is the greatest form of contempt that you can show for somebody, to think that they're dumb enough that you can lie to them and just feed them what you think they want to hear and that that's what your job is. So there were a bunch of other little revelations we can put up here. Go to E3. We can show some of these specific quotes just so you get a sense of a little bit. This is Will Summer, who is with the Daily Beast. Tucker, about Trump, described him as a demonic force, a destroyer, but, quote, he's not going to destroy us. He also said we are not going to follow them. What Trump's good at is destroying things. He's the undisputed world champion of that. He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong. So Tucker's

kind of true feelings about Trump and what he's all about come out there. Let's go ahead and put this next one up on the screen. He also is freaking out after the election, hearing from angry viewers, worrying that Fox calling Arizona for Biden will kill his golden goose. That's the characterization of Will Summer, while also afraid of, quote, effing bitch Sidney Powell has gone too far. He said directly that he told his producer, Sidney Powell is lying, effing bitch. That's the quote there. Let's go and put the next one up on the screen. You've got Fox Brass and Top Host really not impressed with Rudy Giuliani. Hannity called him an insane person. Laura Ingraham said he's such an idiot. Murdoch said really crazy stuff. So you kind of get the sense of the behind the scenes characterization. And they fought hard to, by the way, to keep these messages from coming out. And I think it was a New York Times lawsuit

that ultimately led to them lifting the seal so that we all have access to this. One last piece, put this up on the screen, because this, again, gets to the business model. And I think this is really important. Whatever side of the political spectrum you're on, the business model is the thing driving all of the news and coverage at all three of the cable news networks. They are a business first. And so Lindell had made some negative comments about Fox over on Newsmax. And Lindell is not only like an important guest for Fox, but much more importantly, he spends a lot of money advertising on their network. And so Fox's executives, after he made those comments, they exchanged worried emails about alienating him. And then they sent him a gift along with a handwritten note from Suzanne Scott. And the filing goes on to say that they had a strong motive to welcome him back on air

and avoid any sort of conflicts because of the advertising dollars that he was shipping to the network. Well, and imagine what this does to their relationship now. And imagine what this is doing to a lot of relationships at Fox News right now, as this entire story has unfolded. And the probably most contentious point, or the one that would probably be least popular with other people that I would make is, Tucker, I think, emerges from this looking like somebody who was saying Donald Trump is being disrespectful to his own voters. And he was the one that publicly did grill Sidney Powell, and he was trying. I think

it's interesting that he's ended up getting so much of the heat because he is the top host at Fox that it's like all coming on him. Media hates like few people more than Tucker Carlson. So he's getting a lot of the flack for this. But it is an interesting like that in this broader context at the point you made about like trying to then control the beast is a really, really important one. And we are going to see Fox News continue grappling with that post all of them knowing what each other what they're saying about each other in this really difficult like six month period for them. Yeah. When we have one more Tucker piece of news here that just came out yesterday as well. Big news. Yeah. Forty one thousand hours of January 6 footage was provided to Tucker Carlson by Kevin McCarthy. Democrats like Jamie Raskin are beside themselves with this.

They said it's sort of outrageous that Kevin McCarthy would turn over all of this footage to a, quote, pro-Putin journalist, is what Jamie Raskin said. I think it's incredibly absurd, yeah, to call Tucker Carlson pro-Putin. But 41,000 hours of January 6th footage going to Tucker from Kevin McCarthy, we don't know what's going to happen to it yet. I'm curious. I think the government has been a little bit ridiculous with the January 6th footage because they want to promote a very particular narrative. And there are important facts to get right about January 6th. There are some big facts that people, especially conspiratorial people, get wrong about January 6th. But honestly, the more transparency,

the better. And I know I understand why people don't trust an opinion host to be the best steward of that footage. So I get it. I'm so curious. Listen, the answer to a lack of transparency or a one-sided narrative isn't to hand the footage over to another person who's going to spin a one-sided narrative. No, I agree. If you're interested in transparency, put the whole footage on. Give it to WikiLeaks. I mean, put it all out there and let citizen journalists or, you know, official, whoever sift through it and pull out parts that are new or different or relevant and like do that rather than, all right, they had their partisan turn at this. We're going to have our partisan turn at it that only one side is going to ultimately

pay attention to and listen to. So in that way, I think it's a disservice to accuracy and fact finding. And January 6th has become like basically the ultimate crystallization of how we're doing this on both sides. It's not both sides-ism to say because it's become this weird tit-for-tat just on the congressional level with the committees. So then the reason you end up getting Ilhan Omar booted from her committee and other people booted from their committees is because partially Republicans,

House Republicans that talked to Kevin McCarthy about this, hate the way that Nancy Pelosi treated them after January 6th. And so now they're getting into this back and forth. And then giving the tapes to Tucker after the January 6th committee was so selective about the information that it released. It's again, just the tit for tat. And you can see how it all comes together in January 6th as like the best shining example of how ridiculous our politics are right now. Yeah, I think that's well said. All right, Crystal, what's on your mind today?

Well, the Republican 2024 primary is just getting started and already it's actually way more interesting than I initially expected. What do I mean by that? Well, I assumed Trump would just continue with his 2020 election conspiracies, which had seemed to be an all-consuming focus after his loss. And that strategy, it did

have some logic to it. Trump had pretty successfully made Stop the Steal the key dividing line in GOP primaries for seats up and down the ballot, where you stood on this array of conspiracies defined whether you were a real one or a rhino. And of course, no one would be willing to go as far on the issue as Trump himself would, and that would force the other 2024 contenders to make a choice between preserving some shred of their dignity but signing up for surefire defeat or abandoning their dignity and still probably losing. But of course, as we saw in 2022, while fully embracing all the crazy might have helped candidates to win in a GOP primary, it also turned out to be the best way to get yourself destroyed when it came to the general election. Perhaps Trump actually learned something from the 2022 election results because he certainly still spouts off about

election nonsense, but he's drawn some very different battle lines for the 2024 primary. Trump is launching a GOP civil war right now over two issues, entitlements and U.S. policy on the Ukraine war. Both of these issues have some echoes in 2016. Now, if you'll recall in that election, Trump successfully identified a set of key issues where the Republican base and GOP elites were directly at odds. In fact, his defense of Social Security and Medicare is pulled straight from that 2016 playbook. And his move on Ukraine echoes his stance on the Iraq war. At the time, both were pretty astonishing. After all, the previous nominee was literally Mitt Romney with boy wonder Paul Ryan. Romney and Ryan leaned into ideas to both cut Social Security and Medicare. Ryan's entire rise to

prominence in the party was enabled by elite swooning over his austerity at politics, including voucherizing Medicare. The commentariat just sort of assumed that the GOP base actually wanted a dismantling of both of those programs, but they didn't. Like the rest of America, they liked Medicare and they liked Social Security. And guess what? They still do. This time, Trump is not the only one in the GOP who wants to keep Social Security and Medicare as they are. But the overwhelming majority of party elites are still either actively pushing for cuts or trying desperately to run away from their long track records of embracing Paul Ryan-style cuts. And that overwhelming majority includes every single Republican who's planning to run against

Trump in 2024. Nikki Haley confirmed in her presidential launch week that she is still committed to entitlement cuts. Trump hit her for the stance in his campaign's reaction to her launch, writing that, quote, Haley supported Paul Ryan's plan for entitlement reform, threatening Medicare and Social Security. He also knocked her there for something nice she once said about Hillary Clinton. It's kind of funny. Mike Pence, who's widely expected to run, he has insanely come out for a Social Security privatization scheme similar to the one that George W. Bush tried and utterly failed with. I actually sort of respect the honesty from Pence, even if it is a political death wish. Now, it remains to be seen what Ron DeSantis is going to say on the issue, but he's got a record Trump is already using to attack him. In just one instance, here is DeSantis while he was running

for Congress as a Tea Party Republican, backing Paul Ryan's plan for Medicare while also pushing similar cuts to Social Security by increasing the eligibility age. So I would embrace proposals, you know, like Paul Ryan offered and other people have offered that are going to, you know, provide some market forces in there, more consumer choice and make it so that it's not just basically a system that's going to that's going to be bankrupt when you have new people coming into it. Social Security, I would do the same thing. Social Security is actually not as bad as Medicare in the sense that it had been running surpluses for a long time. Now it's running a deficit.

So there's nothing left in Social Security. Guys like me pay into it, and then people who are on Social Security, the check immediately goes out to them. We're now taking in less than the checks are going out. And so that problem is going to get worse. But I think for people in my generation, you know, my life expectancy, and again, I wouldn't change it for people who are on it now. But my life expectancy is, I mean, it's improved. I was born in 78. And, I mean, it's probably. I was born in 78. And I mean, it's probably improved five or six years just on average. That tends to annoy people when I tell them I'm going to be around

for a few more years longer. But it's true. And so, you know, me getting Social Security at 65 or 67, if I'm going to live, you know, for into my 80s, it's probably not sustainable. Now, Trump has issued a series of truths this week about the man he swears he definitely does not call meatball Ron. Every one of his comments goes after DeSantis for wanting to cut Social Security and wanting to cut Medicare. Here's a little taste of some of those. He said, Ron DeSanctimonious wants to cut your Social Security and Medicare, close at Florida and speeches, loves rhinos, Paul Ryan, Jeb Bush, and Karl Rove. Disaster's all, is backed by globalist club for no growth, Lincoln pervert project, and quote, uninspired coke,

and it only gets worse from there. He is a rhino in disguise whose poll numbers are dropping like a rock. Good luck, Ron. In another one, he writes, support for DeSantis cools in latest GOP poll from the Washington Times. Of course it cools. He wants to cut social security and Medicare, loves throw them over the cliff, Paul Ryan, who is destroying Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, piglet Karl Rove, and Jeb. You get the point. There's a lot like this. Does DeSantis stick with his previous position, even though it's politically toxic? Or does he flip-flop in the face of the attacks and potentially look weak? It's not an easy one for him ultimately to navigate. We're getting a first glimpse, though, of how he is going to handle the other issue Trump is making central to his 2024 pitch.

And that is limiting support for Ukraine or cutting aid altogether to push them for a deal. DeSantis was on Fox and Friends yesterday, sounding much more like the Ukraine skeptical side of the GOP. Things first on the president's unannounced visit. Is this a good move? Well, you know, Brian, I'm reminded of when he was vice president, Obama and Biden opposed providing lethal aid to Ukraine during those years. And then I'm also reminded that I don't think any of this would have happened but for the weakness that the president showed during his first year in office, culminating, of course, in the disastrous withdrawal in Afghanistan. So I think while he's over there, I think I and many Americans are thinking to ourselves, OK, he's very concerned about those borders halfway around the world. He's not done anything to secure our own border here at home. We've had millions and millions of people pour in, tens of thousands of Americans dead because of fentanyl.

And then, of course, we just suffered a national humiliation of having China fly a spy balloon clear across the continental United States. So we have a lot of problems accumulating here in our own country that he is neglecting. So DeSantis has a good can line there for the GOP base about why does Biden care so much about Ukrainian borders when he's not doing enough for our own borders. It allows him to virtue signal to the Ukraine skeptics without actually saying whether he would really do anything differently. But one wonders what ground he will actually stake out when head to head against a guy and Donald Trump who's willing to come out and say things very directly like this. First come the tanks, then come the nukes. Get this crazy war ended now. So easy to do. Now, the politics on Ukraine with the GOP base, they've actually become pretty clear cut. Skepticism of further aid is already the majority position, and it only seems to be growing. But Trump is not out of step with the broader public either. Take a look at this. 57% of Americans, including majorities of

Democrats and Republicans, would like to see diplomatic negotiations, even if they lead to Ukrainian concessions. And only 32% oppose those sorts of negotiations. Now, the remainder say they're not sure. This is from September, too, and all indications are that support for the endless blank check has only deteriorated from there across the board. Now, Trump has been all over the place on his views on the Ukraine war since Russia first invaded. At times, he's pushed for a more hawkish approach, but he seems to sniff down the position he now believes will be a political winner, and everyone else is being forced to react. DeSantis is hoping that the cultural ground he has staked down on issues like trans kids, CRT, tech, he's hoping those will be the driving factors of the GOP primary.

And listen, after Trump thoroughly abandoned many of his populist economic positions as president, there is a good chance a Republican base has been trained to respond more viscerally to these type of cultural fights that DeSantis has engaged in. It has certainly served him well as governor thus far. But it appears to me that Trump is already doing what he does best, shaping the battlefield, forcing everyone else to fight on the terrain of his choosing with the issues that he wants to focus on. It's Trump's world, and for better or worse, we are all still living in it. I have been surprised by the— All right, Emily, what are you looking at? All right, well, on Monday, the National Endowment for Democracy announced it was parting ways with the Global Disinformation Index. Most Americans have never heard of those two groups, but they've surely felt their influence. The NED is actually mostly funded by the State Department. The GDI is a British organization that purports to police disinfo. It has recently received hundreds of thousands of American taxpayer dollars from the NED and other entities,

and that's all according to a deep investigation published last week in the Washington Examiner. Now, I want to give a quick shout out to my former intern, Gabe Kaminsky, for this deeply reported series over at the Examiner, without which the power brokers involved here would have continued with their quiet grift. Gabe's series resulted in Microsoft and the NED both severing ties with the GDI, the Global Disinformation Index. Amid pressure to de-platform alleged disinformation, Microsoft's Zander and the State Department funded the GDI. In turn, the GDI developed a blacklist of anti-establishment conservative websites that, to quote the examiner, were fed to advertisers. GDI's list of the top 10 most and least risky news outlets is still on its website. On the left, literally, you can see all the liberal

sites. And on the right, literally, you can see all of the conservative sites, including, of course, my employer, The Federalist. Now, former State Department official Mike Benz explained to The Examiner why that GDI exclusion list matters. It's devastating, he said. The implementation of ad revenue crushing sentinels like NewsGuard, Global Disinformation Index, and the like have completely crippled the potential of alternative news sources to compete on an even economic playing field with approved media outlets like CNN and the New York Times. That's absolutely

true. No publication is perfect, but much of conservative media correctly reported on major stories that corporate media, with all of their resources, utterly botched in recent years. Sometimes they lied. Other times they lacked the objectivity to CBN ideology, but they were often wrong. And honestly, we were often right. More importantly, their errors all served the political establishment, while our accuracies all challenged the political establishment. We'll get fact-checked and then suppressed like crazy for reporting completely accurate information about, say, Pete Buttigieg., while the New York Times gets Pulitzer Prizes for reporting inaccurate information. That's just how it works. So you can understand why the

State Department and a powerful corporation like Microsoft might turn to a group like GDI. Basically taxpayer money was used to misinform taxpayers and disempower critics of the government. This helped major corporations feel better about their advertisements and effectively defunded anti-establishment conservatives who, like it or not, were reporting information much closer to the truth on several major stories. Remember, the disinformation label is not and will not only be used to silence the right. Matt Taibbi's reporting on Hamilton 68 showed clearly that powerful people were happy to categorize leftist journalism as the product of Russian influence operations,

so long as it threatened elites. People are largely familiar with the corporate media's failures on 2016, Hunter Biden, Russiagate, and much more. Many understand our elites are eagerly flinging charges of disinformation at their opponents to shut them down. But it's important we realize they are laundering the credibility of our government and using public money to undermine the free press. They are intentionally using your money to empower journalists who are lying to you. And GDI is not alone. Other groups are engaged in similar efforts and other corporations are taking the bait. The entire

operation is complex and tangled. It's full of these alphabet soup organizations, powerful boards, and long money trails. But the bottom line is that the serious issue of disinformation, and it is a serious issue, is being weaponized to silence critics of corrupt elites. And it's happening right under our noses. Wow. That list. National political reporter Dave Weigel has been on the ground in a lot of the early primary states tracking in particular the Republican primary field. And he joins us now from Semaphore.

Welcome, Dave. Good to be here. Thank you for having me. Yeah, absolutely. So we covered last week, and I know you've been live in person with Nikki Haley, one of the first to jump into the race against Donald Trump. Let's go ahead and put your piece up on the screen so people can get a sense of what you're writing over there. You say Nikki Haley's pitch, conservative policies minus the Trumpy chaos, which in a sense, it's kind of impressive that you're able to define Nikki Haley's pitch

because I'm not sure she has done that well, defining her own pitch in multiple media appearances. Yeah, it was a matter of listening to the public-facing part of her campaign, the interviews she selected to do. She didn't do gaggles as much. She kind of pulled aside local media. And the speeches she gave, the town hall questions she took, she had this format.

Starting in Charleston, she had a longer speech that laid out everything. This is where she introduced, I'd say, is it fair to say, the best-known part of her campaign so far is this idea of making every politician over 75 take a mental acuity test, right? That was where she launched that, that got applause in New Hampshire. The rest of it was sort of a rundown of things that are wrong with America and how with young new generation leadership, we can fix it. Fairly light on detail, especially the most interesting back and forth I saw was in New Hampshire, where a teacher who was pretty skeptical, Haley, to start with, asked what she would do to end the harassment of teachers, the context being Florida, DeSantis,

all that. And Haley's answer was, well, people don't hate teachers, they hate your school board. And then she kind of gave a boilerplate answer about that and started talking about school choice. So, so far, she has not been pushed off this box of issues that she prepared to run on, which is a skill. I mean, sometimes, remember Joe Biden in 2007, his very first interview as a candidate with my colleague Ben Smith, that's where he calls Obama articulate. She didn't do that. She didn't make a mistake the first week, but she didn't lay a lot of substance out about how she would govern. Well, yeah, and just zooming in on the headline itself, just those two words, conservative policies. And as you mentioned, Dave, that box of issues Nikki Haley is planning to run on, that in and of itself is a huge question. You know, Nikki Haley pivoting to school choice, which is a sort of old conservative issue and an old conservative favorite, a very sweet spot, a comfort spot for so many conservatives. So can you just tell us more about what that box of issues looks like? Haley herself has come out

and disagreed with a lot of populist economic policies Republicans like J.D. Vance or Donald Trump themselves have proposed. Is she being aggressive in rebutting those policies off the bat, or is she more just trying to present the issues that she does want to run on? Basically, what does that box look like? I'd say where she's distinguished herself most from the field, and the field at this point is her, Donald Trump, and a couple other people who are not very well known, is being very supportive of U.S. support for the war in Ukraine, for Ukraine's defense against Russian invasion. She brought that up kind of unbidden. She said that we didn't need a blank check, but we need to support them.

We need to win that war. It was a fight for freedom. I thought that that was interesting because part of the reason Haley is relevant is that there are people running for president. There are people who want to run for president who don't have great donor access. She has terrific access to donors that she's built up for years, especially since leaving the UN in 2019. I mean, Murie Middleton is a fan. Like the conservative donor network

that doesn't like Donald Trump and that maybe has a couple of questions about the stance of selectability, they love her. And so she's very in line with that sort of, that wing of the Republican Party, the peace through strength, but also occasionally war,

peace through proxy wars. That part of the party Party, the peace through strength, but also occasionally war, peace through proxy wars. That part of the party she's very comfortable with. And the rest of the issues, I'm not trying to diminish what she's running on. It's just when you listen to it, there are candidates talking about specific ways to, you know, example, cut the budget or get to a balanced budget, get to a deficit. She has, she talked a little bit about how we need to end wasteful spending, but not what. And I found a list of a lot of Republicans. You know, the stimulus bills happened under Trump, under Biden. It's very easy to say Washington's been spending too much. Well, I mean, we saw Washington spend a lot, but it's not doing that anymore. We're not seeing more stimulus spending now. You didn't get very in the weeds about what it was going to do. It really was a lot about changing the person.

It reminds me of something that Obama said when he was running in 2008. He'd be asked, why is the world going to look at this differently if you're president? He said, well, I represent the change. He didn't even say, look at me. But that's what he meant. I'd be the first black president. A lot of this is, I am a Generation X woman of color who would be president, who wins every fight that she's in. So you could just give me the ball and let me run with it. Trust me. It's a lot more of, I have the character and the experience for the job, less I'm going to pick an issue and distinguish myself with the exception of Ukraine, where, you know, she's not doing any of what Trump's doing and saying that we should have peace negotiations right now or anything like that. Yeah, I noted that on Ukraine in terms of

a core difference. And the other issue that Trump seems to want to make central to the campaign is a defense of Social Security and who's on what side with that. And Haley has also come out and said she still believes we should take a look at entitlements. I mean, basically every other Republican... For people who don't have it yet, yeah. Yeah, exactly. For the future generations, yeah. You know, that's always their line, Dave.

That's always... It still means cuts, ultimately. You need to strengthen it. And basically every Republican who Trump is going to be up against either is currently like Nikki Haley or like Mike Pence, who still says like we should privatize it out on the record saying there should be cuts or they have like Ron DeSantis, a long track record of backing, for example, Paul Ryan's

plan on Medicare and other cuts to Social Security, who are going to have to navigate where they stand on those issues today with Nikki Haley. I mean, it is funny because, like you said, a lot of what she's leaning into here is bio. It's like born in a small town and immigrant experience and her age. We can all debate whether she's quote unquote prime age. Let's not do that. That doesn't go well for shows with one guy on a panel. You're an independent media. You're good, Dave. But it is funny because conservatives do love their identity politics ultimately here as well, even as she insists, like, oh, I hate identity politics, but here's 10 pieces of my bio that are the reason that you should vote for me.

Yeah, I think I was circling that point, but that's how she starts every set of remarks. She talks about a family that was neither black nor white, that you can't tell her this is a racist country when she was elected the first non-white female governor of the state in 2010. That's a big part of the appeal, too. And the campaign's actually done less than I thought it could have because every time a non-white Republican gets ahead of steam, you start to see this panicky criticism from people, liberals I'd say more than on the left, that are just annoyed that she is saying conservative things but she should be on our team. So you saw this, I think, you saw it less offensively from some of the AAPI groups that exist that are mostly Democratic. You saw it from pundits that have said silly things about her. She's not made that a huge part of her campaign. She's definitely kind of dunked on people when she's had the chance to. But she's not, you made the point about Social Security. Yeah, Pence has been stuck out much further on that issue than he has. He has actually talked specifically about going back to

what he voted for as a congressman, or he supported because it didn't go to a vote uh of the kind of bush design private accounts uh so reform of social security he's hinted at that but not gotten specific i honestly just as a not as a theater critic as somebody who's covered this a lot not just engaging performances it makes sense for me at the moment because you have in polling in early states and nationally donald trump at 40 or so a little bit higher a little bit lower um it it is not bad to be the republican who a lot of Republicans consider a strong second choice or a strong potential vice president. That hasn't happened yet, we had that conversation. But she's not saying anything that offends any faction of the party with the exception of Ukraine stuff, where she is, I wouldn't say out on a limb, but if you look at the Pew polling,

look at the, no, it was AP, sorry ap ap polling most recently that said most republicans just want to stop the funding they don't want this apart from that it is there is no faction the party that she's she's willing to offend it's even at one one thing my colleague shelby talk had noticed and i noticed it and i asked her double check what's happening in iowa she never talks about the confederate flag takedown 2015 uh she talks very generally about the uh at Mother Emanuel Church. These are events, had she run for president in 2020 or 2016, had she decided to run off that, those would have been, I think, much more central in the campaign. She doesn't talk about them now. I think she's still kind of finding her way into how do we discuss race and gun violence and things that do not bring up

this moment where some conservatives, I don't think most, would say, did she buckle to left-wing pressure? She just hasn't, by the conversation I was struck, she got a question in New Hampshire about the Second Amendment. I thought, you know, I'm not writing her speeches for her. Some politicians would have said, well, actually, as governor, I presided over this shooting that you heard about. Tim Kaine does it. Like a lot of governors who have shootings in their backyards do this. He didn't mention it at all. He kind of went back generally to why she supports the Second Amendment.

So it's interesting that probably the most famous thing about her before she started running for president, not really part of the mix when she's giving speeches. And, Dave, you also have a piece up about New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu. Let's put that up on the screen. You say he could carry the moderate banner in 2024. First of all, this is a guy who's very popular in New Hampshire. And obviously, New Hampshire is an important early state. I think he maybe doesn't have as much national name recognition. But ultimately, do you think that, not to ask this in like a mean way, but do you think that anybody in this race really matters other than Donald Trump and Nikki Haley? I think Ron DeSantis will matter.

And everyone else. Sorry, I meant Ron DeSantis. That does not mean Nikki Haley. Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis. Tell me about the question because you're the only two running right now. I think DeSantis matters. I think that the rest of the field at the moment, like I was saying with Haley, it's good for her to be a popular second choice or Republican to go in the booth and say, well, Biden was this for a lot of Democrats in 2019. Like, well, he's my second or third choice, but I like Obama. I like him. Fine. Whatever. I think no one else in the field has enough support from

rank-and-file Republican voters to be relevant yet, and they are. If you look at Quinnipiac's polling this week, it's a pretty good illustration of this. Trump leads DeSantis by six points if you ask people about everyone who might run. It's two points if you ask about just them, Pence, and

Haley, and everyone who's not a Trump voter in the Republican Party wants somebody else, wants maybe DeSantis. That's also why I was struck in that poll. Moderates, moderate Republicans prefer DeSantis, which tells you I think the way we in the media kind of compartmentalize people, it's usually accurate. But DeSantis is getting momentum by doing things that the party's, I think, hardest right faction wants to do, really taking on the left's marks of the institutions in academia, business, in the media, all of that. But for moderates, it's just, well, he's not Trump and he's not going to do silly things and lose his election.

It's more of an aesthetic and a vibe than about the policy. Yeah, I'm not seeing what I saw in 2019, which is frankly a lot of fun to cover, which is a lot of Democrats really thinking, one, the election was a shoo-in, whoever they nominated. Which, I mean, by the end they didn't think that. But at the start of the campaign, they thought, surely anyone can beat Trump. And they also had policy asks. They were, who are you going to take this stance on Medicare for all? Are you going to take this stance on a jobs guarantee? That's not really happened in this race yet. And so Sununu, when I talked to him, he talked to a lot of people, he doesn't use the phrase moderate.

He just thinks there's a different version of the Republican Party that doesn't care about culture war stuff. I'm not trying to, that's more him dismissing it than me. And that what people want is a competent government that's smaller, that cuts spending, that's responsive to them, stay away from the fights with Disney, things like that. But not a huge difference in – talking to him, I didn't imagine he'd appoint radically different people to the undersecretaries of education than Ron DeSantis would. I think he just, he's less, not knock on Sununu, but kind of the rep that Sununu has is he's just a naturally talented politician who doesn't get very deep into the details, doesn't try to dig in and have the party, he doesn't try to dismantle democratic power the way that DeSantis does. So if you're paying close attention, the DeSantis model is working terrifically.

I mean, it's probably the most progress a governor has made in undermining the opposition party since Scott Walker, probably more than that. That's not the Sununu way. Sununu is just in a very George H.W. Bush way. I'm a competent guy who you can get along with, and I'd run the government efficiently, unlike these goofy Democrats. That's more than a policy difference. That has been the dispute inside the party. Will we lose some voters if we come off as kind of mean and we're kind of obsessed with Fox News things? We all agree that we can just run as like Biden screwed things up. There's a lot more, I think, concord and agreement inside this public conversation than you'd think from how many people are just trashing Trump whenever they get a mic

in front of them. Interesting. Yeah. I mean, to me, the biggest relevance for Sununu is the fact that he does have high popularity in New Hampshire. He'll probably do well there if he does run in a primary. And that could serve as a block to someone like DeSantis or another Republican who's trying to gain some early momentum in some of those early states. Dave, great to have you. Welcome. And thank you so much. Congrats on the new job over at Semaphore. It's a lot of fun. Independent media. Let's go. Let's do it. And thank you guys for watching. Thank you to the wonderful Emily for sitting in for soccer. Just a reminder, no counterpoints this week because Ryan is also out. Do you want to know where Ryan is, viewers? He's in Mexico at a four-day Phish concert.

What? I didn't even know that's hilarious. Yeah, it's peak Ryan group. There's a lot of layers to this, man. Anyway, Saga will be back here on Thursday. At least that is the plan. So I will see you then. Over the years of making my true crime podcast, Helen Gone, I've learned no town is too small for murder. I'm Catherine Townsend. I've heard from hundreds of people across the country with an unsolved murder in their community. I was calling about the murder of my husband. The murderer is still

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Girl, the way she about to yank my bank account. Correct. And one thing I really love about this is that she's celebrating her daughter. Oh, I know. Girl, the way she about to yank my bank account. Correct. And one thing I really love about this is that she's celebrating her daughter. Oh, I know. Listen to High Key on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I've seen a lot of stuff over 30 years, you know, some very despicable crime and things that are kind of tough to wrap your head around. And this ranks right up there in the pantheon of Rhode Island fraudsters.

I've always been told I'm a really good listener, right? And I maximized that while I was lying. Listen to Deep Cover, The Truth About Sarah on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast.