Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 3/1/23 CounterPoints: SCOTUS Set to Kill Biden Student Debt Plan, Biden Pushes ESG World Bank, SF Debates Reparations, DeSantis Memo on Protests, Dilbert Creator Cancelled, Biden on Cartels, NSA Spying on US Congressman, Phil Wegmann on Gain of Function

Episode Date: March 1, 2023

Emily and Ryan discuss SCOTUS seeming set to kill Biden's student debt plan, how Biden pushed ESG takeover of the World Bank, San Francisco debating $5 million dollar Reparations, a Desantis memo requiring Protests to "Align with Mission", Dilbert creator Scott Adams cancelled after racist rant, Biden's border giveaway to the Cartels and Big Business, the NSA caught spying on a US congressman, and White House reporter @RealClearNews Philip Wegmann (@PhilipWegmann) joins us in studio to talk about the Biden administration defending Gain of Function research.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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Hey, everyone. Welcome to CounterPoints. Ryan is back from his fish excursion down south. How are you doing, Ryan? Wonderful. I made it back. All's well. It was great.

And you were hanging out with Sagar, and he could probably still smell the weed on you. Yeah, Sagar would have had a great time. I bet he would. By the end. All right. We would have totally turned him out. We have an absolutely packed show today because of breaking news. Last night, Lori Lightfoot has lost in the Chicago mayor's race.

It's now going to a runoff. We're going to talk about huge new reporting from The Intercept that just dropped, I believe, at 6 a.m. We're going to talk about student debt. We're going to talk about changes at the World Bank, reparations in San Francisco as they try to take care of that. We're talking about Ron DeSantis. We're talking about Dilbert. We're talking about 702 and the border crisis. And White House reporter Philip Wegman from RealCorePolitics will be with us to talk about new revelations on this administration's approach towards gain-of-function research. Just huge news across the board this week. Ryan, let's start with Ken's story in The Intercept, just dropped. Tell us what Ken reported. If we can put that tear sheet up there. Basically,

I'll just read from the top. Ken reports the U.S. military allocated spending for secret contingency operations pertaining to an Iran war plan, according to a classified Pentagon budget manual listing emergency and special programs reviewed by The Intercept. The contingency plan, codenamed Support Century, was funded in 2018 and 2019, according to the manual, which was produced for the 2019 fiscal year. So support century is, it is a budget line which proves that at that time, the Pentagon, which would be the Trump administration at the time, had decided that they needed to kind of ramp up their war planning for potential conflict with Iran,

which Ken puts in the context of the later move to put Israel in CENTCOM, which, you know, Israel used to be in the kind of European, considered in the European theater of war. And when it was moved into CENTCOM, it became more central to the U.S. war plans around the Middle East. And so right at January 2020, kind of following this, you have Qasem Soleimani get assassinated by the Trump administration, which ratchets up tensions in a way that people worried would lead to a hot, if short, war. It did not. Then after November 2020, there were, again, tons of reports and now reporting in hindsight that we were extremely close to a strike on Iran at that point. Now with the Biden administration, this has all continued apace

as you have Iran supporting Russia's war against Ukraine. You also have Israel getting increasingly hawkish, if you can believe that, towards Iran. And for the first time—and Ken talks about this in his story—for the first time, you have the United States saying essentially that if Israel does decide to do something offensive against Iran, then that's Israel's call, where in the past, the U.S. would say, you know, we encourage restraint. So all of these pieces are coming together to suggest that we're much closer to a hot war with Iran than people might realize. And, you know, actually, it goes pretty well with something Walter Russell Mead wrote in

The Wall Street Journal just this week, where he said also that we are closer to war in the Middle East than most observers probably realize. And then and that the political establishment here in Washington is at least willing to admit if they don't kind of understand it or talk about it behind closed doors. One question I have is about the transition from the Trump administration to the Biden administration. So as the Biden administration takes over, what did Ken report about how they picked up where the Trump administration left off? I mean, essentially have kept it moving.

Like that, and that's one of the concerns when it comes to foreign policy and aggressive executive action globally is that it ratchets only one direction. And now the one exception that I can think of might be the Biden administration's drawdown of the drone war. That was like, you know, ramped up under, you know, gone under Bush, really ramped up under Obama,

accelerated under Trump, but then without much discussion and without much media commentary, kind of really rolled back. Yeah, it's basically not been used. You hear once in a while about a drone strike in Somalia or somewhere else, but it's every couple months, whereas there were drone strikes flying constantly during the Obama and Trump administrations. But otherwise, you know, once you heat up, it just gets moving. I was thinking about the interesting parallels to kind of the Russian people and the Russian politics and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Because as the world watched Russia, you know,000-plus troops on the Ukrainian border and then launched an actual invasion and then watched the Russian people support that invasion, the world was just stunned. Like, what is going on here? But if you think about the fact that the Russian people had been hit with propaganda for you know, for years about the ne'er-do-wells over in Ukraine. You know, just constant demonization of Ukrainians, that Ukrainians were terrorists, that they were in league with the United States, that they were fueling all kinds of instability in the Donbass, that that was actually, you know ukraine's fault uh that they

basically want death to russia because of some of the laws that ukraine would pass about the russian language or rights for rights for russians and so once it once it ratcheted up to war the the russian public it's like we're behind this and so you could imagine a case where the United States would launch an assault on Iran and the entire world, like, what are you doing? Why are you attacking a sovereign country? And you could see the American people support it. And I think because the American people have been fed a lot of similar propaganda. But all of it also rooted in kernels of truth.

Like none of it's completely untrue. It's just how it's spun and whips through the public imagination. And just my big picture thought on this is it's amazing how accustomed we've become to doing this kind of extreme warmongering behind closed doors, basically, in the last century of American politics that we're learning about this from Ken's report. And this had never been reported before. Right.

We really had no idea, let alone, like, was there public input via congressional action, anything like that? Nope. Nope. Right. And I would expect Congress to be asking some questions about this now that this is public. I think so. Let's move on to Chicago. Yeah. Lori Lightfoot stunned, I think, a lot of political observers by not even making the runoff in last night's Chicago mayoral election. In fact, Lori Lightfoot came in third, which is pretty brutal for somebody

who swept in. I went back and actually looked at the coverage after she won election. It was a lot of press gushing about the first black female openly gay Chicago mayor ever to be elected, had so many problems during the pandemic and then associated problems, potentially associated problems with crime, although some crimes... Some associated with crime, for sure. Although some continues to go up.

Some crime is down. Homicides, for instance, were down last year, but some crimes... I saw carjackings are down. Still a huge problem in Chicago, but down. Right, but theft, robberies, burglary, burglary is still increasing in Chicago. And she had so many different fights, just style of Chicago politics. Lori Lightfoot was getting into all kinds of she had initially another interesting thing that I was reading in some retrospectives on her time in the mayor's office. She had been she had a great quote about how she was offended

when somebody compared her to Rahm Emanuel back in the day, and then when she became mayor, was just as pugnacious, but perhaps not with the same rhyme or reason that Rahm Emanuel or other Chicago politicians were, and just seemed to be picking fights almost arbitrarily left and right. You might remember the really long

Chicago Teachers Union strike. Lori Lightfoot, by the way, came out of a background where she hadn't been in elected office before. She had experience on the police board. Her opponent who won, actually, who came in first, let alone second, the first place opponent of hers was endorsed by the local police union. So, I mean, you have a good take on this and I'm curious to hear it, but just what a fall from grace. Right. And so this is going to set up a general election that pits a guy, Paul Valls, who has the

support of the police and has called himself more a Republican than a Democrat, though he's technically registered as a Democrat. Right. Basically, as right-wing as you can get in Chicago and still be considered viable against what arguably would be the most progressive mayor Chicago's ever had, perhaps going back to Harold Washington, which is an eerily similar situation in which there was a divided field that allowed Harold Washington, who was a DSA member and a powerful member of Congress, to sneak through with less than 50 percent of the vote, make it into the runoff.

And then the Democratic machine and my book actually kind of starts out, my last book actually starts out kind of with this race. The Democratic machine sides with the Republican, who in this case was an actual Republican, not just a sort of Republican. And he only ended up winning by a couple thousand votes, but he did win. And so the question then becomes, you know, who do this? Where do the centrists go? We think we face this question in Los Angeles with the Caruso versus Karen Bass race. Karen Bass is not quite as progressive as Brandon Johnson. Brandon Johnson kind of up and down movement. Progressive comes from comes from a classroom. It comes from the kind of United Working Families, which is the WFP kind of branch out in Chicago, with the support of DSA out in Chicago, which is an under-told story.

Just like DSA and WFP have had a ton of success in New York City, they've had probably even more success in organizing constituencies in Chicago. And this is a direct product of that organizing work. And so the question will be, do the centrists go with the Republican-ish Trump guy? Or do the centrists say, no, we're team blue, and that Brandon Johnson might be too progressive for us, but we'd rather have him than the Republican light. So, you know, it's going to be a real contest. This is not—except Caruso collapsed at the end. So you could have a tight race that totally breaks Johnson's way, or you could have a tight race down to the wire. So there are so many votes on the table. About 17 percent of people cast their ballots for Lori Lightfoot, so that's as opposed to 20% for Brandon Johnson and 33.8, about 34% for Paul Vallis. Now, Chuy Garcia, he's at 13%.

Willie Wilson is at 9.5%. So you add those two up, and that's more votes than Lori Lightfoot, but also more than Brandon Johnson. So it's not even just the simple math of where the Lightfoot votes will go. There are a lot of candidates down ballot, at least these two. And then you end up from the 9.5% that Wilson got to 2.1% for Jamal Green, still significant in a tight race where those votes go. So my theory of the case is basically that Lori Lightfoot, interestingly, was kind of elected as whatever people want to call it, wokeness, cancel culture was starting to peak in this country. She was a little high in her own supply. Felt really good because got lots and lots of media coverage.

And the way she governed was, let's say, I'm trying to think of the right word here, arrogant, maybe. There was a hubris to the way that she decided to govern. Then I think actually even surprised people and caught them off guard. Just the fights that she would pick seemed to have no, like, clear political logic or reasoning behind them, fumbled even on race issues,

and it did not go well for her. It's a tough... Chicago's a really tough city to navigate, obviously, let alone during a pandemic, and there are a lot of national problems that contributed to the tensions and issues she faced in Chicago. Certainly, there's no question about it. But I also don't want to downplay, I think, the spectacular lack of political talent that

Lori Lightfoot ultimately demonstrated. And Representative Chewy Garcia, actually a Howard Washington supporter back in the day. So there's something generational, too, here, because you could have imagined a world where the progressives all coalesced behind Chewy. But instead, Brandon kind of out organized him and out energized him. I suspect almost all of Chewy's support goes to Brandon Johnson. He'll get at least half Wilson, half of Lori Lightfoot. So I think he has the kind of upper hand. It's amazing. And last point, then we'll move to the student debt thing. It's amazing to think about how much of our national politics kind of flows through and originates in Chicago. Like Stephen Douglas, Lincoln, the daily machine, stealing it for John F. Kennedy. Then Harold Washington, Barack Obama, Rahm Emanuel. Like, you know, Chicago gets overlooked a lot in our national politics,

but it probably has more influence on our politics than any other city. So I think that makes this insurgency that we're witnessing much more relevant because we keep being told that now the left is in retreat. It's like, well, what just happened? Brandon Johnson might become the next mayor of Chicago. Especially if all those Garcia votes go to him, that puts him at the same, literally would put him at the exact same 33% as Ballas. Right. Well, student debt at the Supreme Court this week and the oral arguments transpired on Tuesday went pretty much as you would expect, Ryan. Yeah, let's put this first one up there. This is

a challenge. And we talked about this. We previewed this yesterday on the show. This is a challenge to the Biden plan to cancel $10,000 in student debt for everybody making under $125,000, cancel $20,000 for anybody who was getting Pell Grants, which makes you more in need of financial support. How much were you able to listen to? I caught some of the arguments back and forth, went on for a couple hours. It was basically exactly what I expected to hear from the Supreme Court. Some interesting questions from Amy Coney Barrett, who actually asked whether, she seemed to be questioning whether some of the Republican states who brought this challenge to the Biden law had the standing to bring the lawsuit,

which is a huge question at play here. This is the attorneys general of Nebraska and Missouri. They were arguing the law is meant to allow this is the Heroes Act, which is kind of at the center of all of this. The Biden administration argued the Heroes Act allowed them to do the debt forgiveness plan. Republican states are saying that's ridiculous, and it rests on this word necessary. And Republicans are saying to argue that it was necessary in a pandemic emergency to forgive student loan debt actually is absurd on its face, because you could have taken X, Y, and Z other steps to mitigate the problems of student loan debt. So there's a lot hinging on that word necessary.

I did think Amy Coney Barrett was interesting that she questioned the standing issue. John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh seemed to be pretty opposed on the grounds that it was a spectacular use of power or would constitute an expansion of power. Kavanaugh had a great quote where he said some of the biggest mistakes in the court's history were deferring to assertions of executive or emergency power. And I say that's a great quote because whether or not you agree with it, it really crystallizes, I think, where the conservative justices might be coming from on this issue. And I think the White House Solicitor General did a good job of making the counter-argument,

but I'm not sure it's going to matter because this might just come down as a partisan ruling. But her point was, if you read the statute, and you can look at the Higher Education Act, which they could also justify it under, and the way that John Roberts did with ACA and kind of rewrote the justification for it. That's a good point. You could do justify it under. And the way that John Roberts did with ACA and kind of rewrote the justification for it. That's a good point. You could do that. Yes. But she also argued for it under the HEROES Act,

which says, basically, in a national emergency, the executive is given by Congress the authority to modify, waive, cancel, et cetera, these benefit, these particular benefit programs as a result of an emergency. So her point is like this is not executive authority. This is congressional authority. And if you don't allow the administration to do this, then you're actually restricting congressional power because Congress very explicitly wanted to write into the law flexibility for the executive to operate in a time of crisis.

And as she pointed out, precisely as President Trump did at the very beginning of the pandemic, there was a crisis. He implemented a pause, which, as she also rightly pointed out, cost much more money to the federal government than the Biden plan would. That one was hundreds of billions, maybe even a year. And nobody was suggesting that that was unconstitutional. Nobody took it to the Supreme Court. Supreme Court didn't pause it. And so her point is that now that you've done this, as you're coming out of the emergency, you have to find a way to kind of resolve and get back into a state of normal affairs. So the idea that it would be completely legal

and constitutional to pause all student loan payments, but not constitutional and not legal to figure out a way to kind of ease out of that as the crisis ends would be telling Congress that they did that they don't have the power to grant the executive that that flexibility to fix something like that which actually does then hamstring Congress because then Congress had you know has to Congress can't write laws that the executive is able to follow if the Supreme Court can come in and say, well,

this is actually a really big number, because that was the thing that a lot of the justices were harping on. Roberts in particular. Like, this is such a huge number. And as the White House was pointing out, yeah, we're like a $20 trillion economy. When these agencies do something over a 10-year window, it's going to cost in the billions of dollars. And this is what Sonia Sotomayor says. She says, quote, it's an outrageous sum. It's not a question of money.

It's a question of Congress's intent. Now, Ilya Shapiro in City Journal, I think, broke down the argument the government is making. He disagrees with it, obviously, but he sort of walked through the logics. He's saying the government's lawyers now make the following assertions before the Supreme Court. The pandemic is a national emergency. Every federal student loan borrower either lives in a COVID disaster area or has been otherwise financially affected by that emergency. As a result of that emergency, some borrowers will default on their loans once payments finally resume after a multi-year pause, and then forgiving some or all of the borrower's principal balances will ensure their overall risk of default

is no worse than it was before the pandemic. Now, Shapiro, who disagrees with this, Ilya Shapiro writes, that doesn't make a lot of sense because a simpler and more direct method is available. If the government's purpose were truly to reduce the harm of more defaults, it could put borrowers on an income-based repayment plans and even more simply waive some of the legal consequences of missed payments. And I do think that's a very difficult thing for the government to grapple with.

In the same way, I think your point makes a lot of sense. And Ilya writes here about how the Trump administration's plan for border wall construction and the Biden vaccine mandate via the OSHA Act both run into the same problems here. And this court has obviously shown a willingness to flex its muscles on executive power a little bit. The HEROES Act is from 2003, and it was passed after 9-11. And so there's a question as to the sort of level of emergency power that's being utilized here. But I do think it also, here's a good question for you, the West Virginia v. EPA ruling comes into play here as well. Is there something to learn from the Supreme Court's ruling in that case,

which I don't know if Barrett actually was on the court for, but where do you see it if you see a point A to B from West Virginia v. EPA to this? I think it sounds like if a Democratic administration is enacting some type of executive action, then the Supreme Court, this particular Supreme Court, is going to look askance at it, is going to argue that it's not within their power. I do think it's showing the real partisan nature of this system at this point. By the way, we got Randy Weingarten, who was out in front of the Supreme Court yesterday. Let's roll a little bit of her. President Biden said, we are going to deal with that. As we deal with the end of Biden said, we are going to deal with that. As we deal with the end of the pandemic, we're going to deal with that. We're not going to start student debt again

without actually making a down payment of it. And the Secretary of Education has the right to do it. And frankly, and this is what really pisses me off. During the pandemic, we understood that small businesses were hurting and we helped them and it didn't go to the Supreme Court to challenge it. Big businesses were hurting and we helped them and it didn't go to the Supreme Court to challenge it. All of a sudden, when it's about our students, they challenge it. The corporations challenge it.

The student loan lenders challenge it. That is not right. That is not fair. And that is what we are fighting as well when we say, as all students did, this is about the people, and it is about the people's future, and it is about all of your futures. I mean, it does feel to me like there's so much more nitpicking of Democratic policies. Like, for Shapiro to say, look, there are other ways that the administration could do this that would satisfy us constitutionally, it's like, okay, cool, then you win the presidential election and you do it those other ways. But just because there

might be a way that you prefer to do it doesn't mean that the other way to do it is unconstitutional. And they also might be careful what they wish for because instead now they're just going to go back to a pause for everybody so his his argument is that it's unconstitutional in this case particularly because the word necessary means that there are no other options that what is necessary is to just get away with all the debt and again like i think that's what justices are going to be asking whether or not necessary is the proper—it necessitates, whether that word in and of itself necessitates the action of sort of broadly canceling 10 to 20,000. Right, but that would suggest that if there's any other option, then the option that you chose is not necessary because you could have chosen another option. So he could actually make the same argument even if he had picked Shapiro's idea. What the necessary means is that it's necessary

to do something. Like it's a crisis. You've got trillions of dollars in student debt coming out of this pandemic that was paused. We have a giant crisis that we need, that it's necessary for the administration to do something to fix it. What that something is, is something that then the regulators, they work up a plan. But if just because there are five different ways that you could do it, like he could have done 15,000 or he could have done 5,000. So it wasn't necessary to do 10,000, could have done 15. And so would he then say, well, that's unconstitutional because it wasn't precisely necessary to do $10,000? But yeah, so maybe this ends up actually being good news for all borrowers,

because I find it very difficult to believe that the Biden administration is going to, before the 2024 election, say, OK, Supreme Court, fine, we'll just reinstitute all student loan payments. They'll just continue the pause, which began under Trump, and then dare the Supreme Court to say that, okay, this was fine under Trump, but it's actually illegal under Biden. And then let Republicans run in 2024 on, we're going to re-institute all of your student debt payments by January 2025. Vote for us. Well, I think this is what's a general problem with Biden that would infuriate me if I had student loan debt on the table, because it's a cowardice. It's just this milquetoast,

halfway, third way, maybe I should say, method of approaching student loan debt, where there's no way that the Biden White House didn't think this was... did not realize this was going to get hung up in the courts. And so 25 million people of an estimated 40 million who would be eligible for this had already filled out the applications and signed up before this pause hit. 25 million people...

I think 16 million got approved, even. I mean, it's amazing. You've got the letters that said you're approved. Of an estimated 40 million in the balance, potential 40 million beneficiaries of a law like this. And so, he knew that that was going to happen. And there are other ways to do this. Breonna Joy Gray has laid some of them out.

The Higher Education Act is pretty clear. He knows—yeah, the executive power is on the table. It's the same thing with OSHA. Like, that's why they found—they used an obscure provision in the OSHA Establishing Act to do that. And it's the executive power is on the table. I don't think it should be in many cases, but I think Joe Biden is a coward for doing the halfway route that would politically look good at the expense of all of these people who are now in the squeeze, whose futures are uncertain, and who have tens of thousands of dollars in some cases on the table, just pending in the court system with no idea where that's going to go and no way to plan. Moving on to the World Bank. The World Bank.

So David Malpass, the Trump-appointed head of the World Bank, is out, being replaced by the guy from MasterCard. Who is it? Long-time CEO of MasterCard, Ajay Banga. There he is. I actually think it's an amazing story because if we go to the second element, then you see some people on the right are actually coming out against this. Here's an op-ed from Daniel McCarthy in the New York Post saying, World Bank elites put climate policy over developing nations, prosperity, and security. To your point about Malpas, Ryan, there was a huge amount of backlash among people in the World Bank sort of circles, the political level in the United States, where an American is generally always in charge of the World Bank, that Malpas was not far left enough on climate policy, that he wasn't willing to go far enough on climate policy as head of the World Bank and wasn't willing to steer their vast resources

in that direction. Banga is apparently going to be prepped for that. We can put the next element up, because I think it's so hilarious. I went and looked at the website for his private equity firm. This is his bio. You can see his board affiliations there. He is a co-chair of the Partnership for Central America, which is Kamala Harris's nonsense root causes organization that's supposed to be addressing those, quote, root causes of our immigration crisis.

The International Chamber of Commerce, he is the honorary chair over there, former board member of the Dow Inc., of Kraft, of other really big places, which I just think is so perfect in this case because it's just implicated in all of these different, like, the International Chamber of Commerce, et cetera, et cetera. It's just kind of perfect. And like Daniel McCarthy is arguing, basically, he's making this kind of colonialism from the anti-colonialist argument that the climate progressives are becoming colonizers of third world countries with these kind of debt trap policies. Obviously, I think you can make debt trap arguments about the World Bank going back for a long time before they pivoted to climate. What do you make of this, Ryan? And so the backstory on Malpas is that he was assumed to want a career in Republican politics, a continuing career in Republican politics, whether it's a cabinet position, maybe it's a run for Senate,

something along those lines. And so he was pressed at this forum. He was called a climate denier by Al Gore, and he was pressed at this forum. Do you believe that greenhouse gases are contributing, man-made greenhouse gases are contributing, you know, man-made greenhouse gases are contributing to climate change? Right. And he wouldn't answer the question like three or four times in a row.

And the assumption from the people around him was this is him playing GOP politics at this point because he feels like if he says this on a stage with a bunch of global elites, then he's cooked. He'll be fried by Tucker Carlson and he's done. And on the other hand, at that point, he was done internally, because the idea that climate change exists and is a product of man-made greenhouse gases is no longer controversial. And for him to not be able to say that really freaked a lot of people out and made them really think about, is this guy here for the World Bank

or is he here for some other resume-building purpose? And so basically the writing was on the wall at that point that he was not long for the World Bank world. But you're right that it is fascinating that the World Bank, which can choose between – well, to be the most generous, choose between alleviating poverty and actually pursuing development, which throughout its history has gone hand in hand with corporate profits and has propped up a lot of corruption around the world, corruption that then kind of enriches and buttresses U.S. hegemony. But let's say it's about the case that the world's poor are the ones that are going to be the ones who suffer the most from the effects of climate change. So you can't completely disentangle the pursuit of a climate agenda with the alleviation of poverty and the support for people around the world, because the number one cushion against climate change, the number one mitigation is wealth.

Yeah, and that's why this is such a particularly, like this is an incredibly tough issue because the world's poor historically are also those who benefit the most from industrialization, which is exactly what, and that's not an argument for just blanket industrialization, but it is to say a lot of the climate policies, and this is what the right objects to—would stop and halt industrializing progress in some of these—I shouldn't even use the word progress so flippantly, as has been done throughout history, but the industrialization—or if you're an industrialist, let's use the word progress for the sake of argumentation— some of those countries? And is that fair when it's coming from the World Bank, which built itself on, you know, this is billions and billions of dollars from industrialized countries, basically, who then want to come in and stop other countries from enjoying the fruits of the same technology and infrastructure that they benefited from. They amassed their world power

on the back of industrialization, and now they're turning around and saying no, basically. If it's implemented poorly, in the worst-case scenario, it looks a lot like that. Now, that's not to say there isn't a best-case scenario that should be strived for, but this is extremely—I'm surprised this hasn't gotten as much play in the media, because the World Bank obviously is in charge of billions and billions of dollars of disbursements. This is their active portfolio as of 2021. I'm looking at about $97.6 billion to Africa, $57.5 billion to South Asia. East Asia and the Pacific, $37.5 billion. Latin America and the Caribbean, also around $30 billion.

So obviously, obviously, the new head of the World Bank is in charge of a ton, just a ton of money. And I can see his leadership there becoming something of a lightning rod. Yeah, and it's true that the global poor are generally the beneficiaries of development as, you know, if you bring in more projects and you make accessibility to electricity easier. At the same time, they also always bear the brunt of those projects, whether it was the massive coal plant in India that the World Bank's kind of ombudsman found had been in violation of all of their different compliance recommendations and destroyed fisheries, et cetera, et cetera.

They built this hydroelectric dam, I forget I forget which Latin American country it was in but basically already and it's barely coming online and already it's it's running out of water yeah because they they just completely botched the whole thing destroyed destroyed an ecosystem and don't even they're not even get going to get the electricity out of it so you, you know, it had been proposed that, well, maybe another option for the World Bank is just to shut down. And maybe we'll get there, and maybe it won't be such a bad thing. I started the block by saying it was interesting to see the McCarthy piece in the New York Post, but some segments of the right have been interested in this question about the World Bank for a long time,

but it hasn't really gotten a lot of play. And I actually think that's about to change, especially to your point about Malpass being hesitant to weigh in on climate change. I really want to run—we're running a little long here, but I really want to run this clip of Ron Paul. I think this is from 2007, just laying into the Paul Wolfowitz era of the World Bank. Established and managed by a multitude of national governments, the World Bank promotes managed trade by which politically connected individuals and corporations

enrich themselves at the expense of the poor and the middle class. Western governments tax their citizens to fund the World Bank, lend this money to corrupt third world dictators who abscond with the funds and then demand repayment, which is extracted through taxation from the poor third world citizens rather than from the government officials who are responsible for the embezzlement. It is, in essence, a global transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. So if the right wants to start talking about the problems of elites, if they want to start talking about Davos and the World Economic Forum and the World Bank seriously, you take a

page out of Ron Paul's book here. Yeah, and I first got politicized during the era of anti-globalization, which was protesting the World Bank, IMF, WTO. So Ron Paul, no lies detected there. Moving on to a story that you wanted to cover. San Francisco is debating reparations of $5 million for each black resident with a lot of caveats and requirements that you'd have to meet to get that. I don't think it's anywhere near being accomplished, but it's pretty far along the process, it seems. Yeah, they're debating it right now. This is from the Washington Post.

Yeah, they're trying to figure out how much San Francisco, where, by the way, slavery was never actually legal, should pay black residents for decades of discrimination. So there's a panel that was appointed by the government. They're trying to come up with... They're not looking at like a mathematical formula, as The Washington Post puts it, but they're just trying to come up with something that makes sense. Fifteen members of that panel, they've been doing this for about a year and a half. Here's an example from The Post also going back to the 60s in San Francisco.

They say, city leaders demolished part of the Fillmore District, a neighborhood once known as the Harlem of the West displacing 883 businesses and 20,000 people most of them black decades later thousands of people remain displaced and the neighborhood has turned into a predominantly white enclave of multi-million dollar homes that much is definitely true which doesn't that point at the actual solution the homes are there but the people who are run out of the neighborhood move into those homes. Right, redistribute the homes. There we go.

Let's just see how Nancy Pelosi feels about that. She's got other homes. That's true. The proposed, this is more from the Post-Reparations Program, is not a recompense for slavery, which was never legal in San Francisco, but instead the committee's report says, this is what we were just talking about, quote, for the public policies explicitly

created to subjugate black people in San Francisco by upholding and expanding the intent and legacy of chattel slavery. They say that black residents in the city of San Francisco have a median income of about $44,000. That compares with $85,000 for Latinos, $105,000 for Asians, and $113,000 for white residents, according to 2021 census data. So lest you think that this is sort of a redistribution from other minorities to black residents, the argument here is they actually have a median income that is much lower than other minorities in the city of San Francisco. So there's some justification to be found there. I think this is an incredibly difficult question because it's not a federal program of reparations for slavery.

It's then expanding the definition of what constitutes reparation-worthy policies. There's no doubt, there's no question that there's a history in just about every major American city of policies that were not explicitly racist but were intentionally racist. And I think, you know, there's a really obvious question of how we deal with that when it's still having effects that, to borrow a phrase, trickle down into the community. But it's a, I mean, this, the precedent that San Francisco can set here is pretty big.

And speaking of trickle down, the problem that a lot of reparations advocates, you know, have with this type of approach is that they will say, and I agree with them, that if you don't fix the systemic abuses and the systemic racism that are producing the need to do this and to talk about this, then it's pointless. What it is is basically filling a bucket

with a hole still on the bottom of it. It's like AI. When you feed into it, you get out of it. Right, and so you would give out $5 million, but if you didn't kind of reorient your system into a social democracy in which everyone has

opportunity, then 10, 15, 20 years from now, you're going to be back in the same place. And so in some ways, I think talking about reparations gets elite support because it doesn't touch the more kind of fundamental structures. And also, they're pretty sure that it's not going to happen. And I think this article is important. And this debate in San Francisco is important to understand in the context of this next story. If we could put up C2, which is from NBC News, where companies achieve an ethnically balanced workforce after George Floyd's murder in 2020 are being phased out. Surveys indicate leaving experts in the field concerned that executives, many of them are white

because those were the folks that got in there first. Because we do have the problems that people are pointing out. Why on earth would you have so many white diversity executives if we didn't have a structural fundamental problem with racism and diversity in this country. There's no better example of it than that. And so as a result, it's the first in, first out kind of first in, last out situation, last in, first out. If you're the last diversity officer in, as soon as times get tough and nobody's watching you as closely anymore, and you've sort of suppressed a lot

of your slack uprisings and you're not as concerned about the staff revolts anymore. You have more freedom to maneuver. Then you're like, you know what, this line item, getting rid of this. And so now they're laying off a bunch of diversity officers without necessarily, you know, solving the problem that they were brought in to solve. Right. And it's kind of going to be interesting to see what those— this is a good experiment in what those diversity officers were bringing to the table in the first place, because if they go, I'm really curious as to how that plays out. Is there any noticeable difference in workplace culture for the better or the worse?

We're about to find that out in a fairly big way. And one of the problems, I think, in general with this conversation, and that's one thing that the San Francisco policy discussion is testing, is how we define what is the sort of consensus definition of racism. And obviously, that has been a problem throughout American history. There were plenty of people who were just open, overt racists. There were other people that acted like open, overt racists that did not see themselves as racists. Now, so that's not to say this is a new thing

that's just suddenly happening, but in the last two decades or so, what we've kind of come to understand is obviously racial discrimination, is obviously acting on this belief that people are inferior based on the color of their skin, and to quote Martin Luther King, not the content of their character,

then you get into a situation where we're asking whether certain policies, some of these in San Francisco, for instance, the ones that the Washington Post cited, obviously had racist consequences, there's no question about it. If you set a precedent that reparations are in order for policies that were not explicitly racist

but had racist consequences, um, man, is that gonna open up the door and open up the floodgates to a really big conversation about where public money is going. I-I just think that's, you know, especially, we're gonna talk later in the show about Angela Davis, who discovered she was related distantly to people who came over on the Mayflower. I think that kind of makes our ability to deal with some difficult realities very hard. And this reminds me of a recent article in The Intercept by Alicia Sperry that uncovered that a top diversity executive saw this at this Quaker organization was actually white and was claiming to be, I think, a combination of Arab and Latina.

It's an amazing story. Which apparently shouldn't have to do, though, because according to this NBC News stat, it says another survey showed that black employees represent only 3.8 percent of chief diversity officers overall, while white people, with white people making up 76 percent of the roles. Those of Hispanic or Latino ethnicity make up 7.8 percent, and those of Asian ethnicity make up 7.7%. So three quarters of the diversity executives in this country are white. Yeah. Let's just sit with that. And they're now firing their black and brown deputies. Yeah, of course they are. And there's no surprise to that.

But it is a good reminder to your point about how even reparations, let alone DEI, can be used as a cop out or a smokescreen. That's what a lot of this is. And a lot of these conversations are the most divisive and politically charged among everything that we talk about. They're the ones that have people at each other's throats. They're the ones that tear people apart and definitely don't bring them together. And they're the ones that ultimately are basically like the little shiny things that powerful people want to dangle in front of the conversation rather than making structural changes or making real concessions in that because it's just easier for them and they don't suffer the consequences necessarily. Right. And to me, the only the only real answer is a is a coalition of white, black and brown working class people who overthrow those white diversity officers and like and recreate a social a social democracy based on their their shared interests. Seize the means of diversity.

There you go. There you go. All right. Well, let's talk. Speaking of DEI issues, let's talk about another story involving Governor Ron DeSantis down in Florida. We can put up the first element for this one. as it is its business and its responsibility to organize and oversee events at the Florida State Capitol is requiring those events, quote, align with its mission. That can mean a lot of different things. That can mean a lot, a lot of different things. I'm reading from Politico here. They say, one material change to the rule is that events must align with state agency missions and applications must come from an agency sponsor. This is according to a Department of Management Services letter

that Politico got from multiple groups that were trying to plan events at the Capitol. Then once a sponsorship has been obtained, according to this letter, the state agency shall submit the required application to DMS on behalf of the requester. There's a couple of interesting things in this story. I'm going to give DeSantis' response.

He was asked at a press conference here. He said, We've been very supportive of people being able to speak their mind. It's their right. They should do it. But we've also said, you know, you don't have a right to hijack and do, like, a heckler's veto and stop the functioning of government. And so I think that's probably what it is, but our folks can follow up with you about more.

Very quickly, my take on this, the Politico article says that this has been in effect for a few months. There's no evidence that this was used to ban or discriminate against anyone in those few months. And also, on top of that, there's this idea that, as DeSantis is saying, if it aligns with the mission, that can just be the sort of general mission of the state to host events and politics, et cetera, et cetera. So I don't know. I mean, it's possible that this can be used in nefarious ways. There's no question about it that a line word is obviously important here. At the same time, there's just no evidence that this has been used in nefarious ways yet. So, I mean, it's just an open question. And it does, I guess, it seems to fit a

pattern of DeSantis really wanting, you know, control over so many aspects of Florida life, you know, from the classroom to Disney to the villages to what goes on, you know, who's allowed to have a luncheon at the Capitol. Like, it does seem like this is a real driving focus for him, which should at least on the surface cut against his, like, kind of free speech warrior thing. There's a... I can see how a culture in the governor's office, this is actually kind of interesting,

could evolve from this idea that Republicans now need to be more aggressive about seizing government power and using it for their own ideological ends, because that's what the left has done for decades and decades, as many conservatives feel acutely. And Ron DeSantis is really the poster boy of somebody who's finally, after decades, conservatives say, acting on that, using government power to advance his own ideological ends, not just remaining sort of neutral and saying, we'll let the marketplace of ideas sort this all out, saying, no, we have

government power to advance this ideology. The left owns all of these different cultural institutions. So if you have the power, use the power. So I can see how something would develop from that. I highly doubt Ron DeSantis, even if this was nefarious, had nefarious intentions behind this rule, I doubt Ron DeSantis would have been involved in discussions about it. Maybe he would have. But you can see, and this is a general fear, I think, on the right, that there's something really dark that evolves

from that kind of cultural shift about how we use government power i do want to say though i don't have any like in this case i think it's just an open question if there were evidence that it had been used problematically i'd be all about it um i had a problem with his like stop woke act um even though i sort of generally like the thrust of it i'd not you know have no problem speaking out against desantis when I think he goes too far. But this is, to me, a giant open question. It doesn't seem like there's a problem yet. And the Politico article is quoting lobbyists. So it sounds like lobbyists fed this article to Politico. Politico didn't have any reason or examples of problems. But it's perfectly newsworthy in the respect

there could be problems down the line. Does DeSantis ever back down, or does he have kind of a bunker circle the wagons campaign mentality? Because I could see a case where there might not actually be anything nefarious going on here, but if the lamestream media or the fake news media is accusing him of doing something, then he's going to dig in and just keep doing it. Even if he's like, yeah, actually, I wouldn't have done it that way. But now that you've called me on it, I'm doing it that way. That's always a huge problem and one that I think gets overlooked. I don't know.

I don't think I've really seen that happen with DeSantis because everything that sort of sparked debate, he's kind of doubled down on. I haven't really, But not in that sense. Like, he's just said he hasn't budged in either direction. He hasn't pushed it further or hasn't, you know, gone closer towards the center. We should put up the second element here.

He's making appearances in some interesting states. Davenport and Des Moines, Nevada, Manchester, New Hampshire, an appearance in South Carolina is also being discussed, according to the New York Times. Coincidence. He likes the weather there. Yeah, loves the weather in Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. Yeah, just lovely places this time of year. So obviously he hasn't announced anything. Donald Trump is announced. Nikki Haley is announced. There are other people exploring bids, potentially Tim Scott, potentially Mike Pompeo. It looks like definitely Mike Pompeo. But nothing has been formally announced. It seems like the writing is pretty much on the wall for DeSantis, although it's possible. There was a poll the other day

showing him down like 15 percent to Donald Trump. It's possible he's sort of savvy enough. And I think he is obviously very savvy whether or not you like him. He's made himself really popular on the right, coming from a position really of obscurity while he was here in the House. He was a Freedom Caucus member. Well, Donald Trump made him, so.

Donald Trump, I mean, there's some truth to that. But yeah, so he's a talented politician at the very least. And that could be a reason he sees the writing on the wall, maybe backs out of a potential race if he sees Donald Trump has pretty much consolidated everything. I doubt that that will be the case, but I think we'll probably find out sooner rather than later. Yeah, and last question for you. Is he too short to run for president? How dare you? He's spoken as a man in the six-foot range.

Yeah, I mean, we haven't elected a short president basically like ever. Do we know how short he is? What is he, like 5'7"? No, he's got to be taller. What do you think? Does he have taller vibes? I don't know. I would guess he's probably more like 5'10".

We'll have to investigate this. Yeah, we're on top of this. We'll get on top of this. We will get an update and bring it to you shortly. Let's move on to the continuing fallout for Scott Adams. Big news in Dilbert world. Are you a Dilbert fan? I used to read it like in high school or whatever when it was in the comics.

Sure. I read it. Yeah, it's fine. I read, yeah, it's fine. I'm not, I've never understood the appeal of Dilbert, honestly, but Scott Like, bosses suck, office life sucks, it's funny, like, that

make funny jokes in the office, like, I haven't I really haven't, since high school, I don't think I've actually read it with any consistency. Yeah. Well, that's big news, though, because he does. Scott Adams does have a lot of he had a lot of money on the table. He had a lot of deals.

And obviously it is true that some of those had already gone away before this most recent Carfawful. But he did say he was reacting to a poll and this is what Just kicked off this most recent round of controversy that saw Andrews MacNeil Universal. That's his syndication company. They syndicate Dilbert Totally cut ties with publishers dumping his book publishers dumping his book and newspapers around the country dumping the strip He basically said that black Americans were, quote, a hate group and that white people should, quote, get the hell away from them. And we can keep moving through the elements here because he was reacting to a Rasmussen poll, basically.

And Elon Musk weighed in on this and said, basically, the media is racist because they dropped, yeah, you can see that tweet there. He was responding to the whole thing about the media weighing in on Scott Adams and said the media is racist. So he doesn't say whether or not he thinks what Scott Adams said was racist

but says, you know, the people here that are casting the stones. It's a clever way to signal support for Scott Adams without actually supporting him. Maybe or maybe. That's how I read that from Musk. Maybe he's saying you shouldn't be casting stones from a glass house if you're also. Right. And we don't know. But that's a totally fair read on it, too. But if we put up the Rasmussen tear sheets here, Adams was responding to this poll. And one thing I think is interesting,

look on the right of your screen there. I'm going to read it for people listening. Rasmussen tweeted, the Anti-Defamation League has labeled, quote, it's OK to be white as hate speech. But a majority of all Americans agree with the statement, including 53 percent of black adults and 69 percent of Democrats. Only 26 percent of black adults disagree. So what Adams was saying is that chunk of black adults that disagree. So see where Rasmussen frames it as glass half full, right, that most Americans don't disagree with the statement, even though the ADL says that's hate speech. It's OK to be white. Most Americans agree it's okay to be white. Glass half

full. Scott Adams comes in and makes his comments, which he sort of tried to soft pedal after the whole cancellation thing, but then said, I want nothing to do with my cancelers, blah, blah, blah. He has a fairly popular podcast. He was saying that chunk of black Americans that disagrees it's okay to be white is a hate group and you shouldn't live by them if you're white which is just a toxic and just toxic and ridiculous thing to say but I do think that context got lost in the media conversation about it he was talking about the specific poll right but then he did broaden it out he's and the most the articles have included his quote so he said it says if nearly half of all blacks are not OK with white people, according to this poll, not according to me, according to this poll, that's a hate group.

I don't want to have anything to do with them. So, OK, he's still talking about the group there. And then he says, and I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from black people. Just get the F away because there is no fixing this. So he very quickly jumps to just, quote, get the hell away from black people. And this one is, you know, as somebody who's kind of skeptical of the cancel culture impulse. I also do believe that people have a fundamental right to be offended by someone and not wanna spend money on them. And if companies believe that there are going to be

millions of people who feel that way, they do have a right to say, look, I'm done with your book. We're not gonna distribute your cartoon. This is disgusting. And also, it's going to be bad for business. So I think the arguments about cancel culture in general aren't really ever about the general idea. I think everybody agrees with the idea that culture is created by setting boundaries around what is acceptable and not acceptable.

And that's gone on for thousands of years. That's how we produce humanity and society. And so what we're really always debating is whether or not people are being too sensitive and this thing is on this side of the line or this should be on this side of the line. But everybody pretty much agrees that there's a line. And there should be. And there should be, but it's a question of where you draw the line or this should be on this side of the line but everybody pretty much agrees that there's that there's a line it's it's and there should be and there should be but it's all it's a question where you draw the line and basically for this one close no close no gotta be 95 plus percent of the country's like yeah that's way that's not even close to the line can't even see

the line from there yeah and you're right he goes from making the semantic argument about what constitutes a quote hate group um and saying you, if you have 26 percent of black Americans thinking that, does that make black Americans a hate group? First of all, no. If 26 percent of people think something, it doesn't make the 100 percent categorically a hate group. And you can say, hey, that 26 percent really hurts my feelings. Go ahead and say that.

Or there's some problem in our culture that is, you know, engendering this or making this increase. You know, if there's if you're seeing an increase in that number, then yeah, that's not a good thing. But for him to make that jump, I think is a real, obviously, a real problem. And to your point about cancel culture, yeah, we've always had sort of consensus.

And sometimes in the wrong direction. If we're thinking about, like, academia during the McCarthy era, there's sometimes been a consensus in the wrong direction. If we're thinking about academia during the McCarthy era, there's sometimes been a consensus in the wrong direction about where those boundaries are. There has generally, even the most free speech absolutists

generally draw the line at incitement or actual calls to violence, anything like that. So yes, I think we all do agree on that and this is a good case study. I will say, if what Elon Musk is saying is that the media and the left are in no position to be casting stones because they're in a glass house, if that was his argument, which I don't know, it's sort of a charitable reading of what he said, but if that's the case, I am 100% on board with that,

because it is very true that the media will latch on to these case studies that are objectionably and sort of we can come to consensus, as you were saying, like this is obviously objectionable. Then again, the media is constantly promoting very divisive takes on race. And so is the left through some of these DEI programs that Ron DeSantis, for instance, responds to. And people may not agree with their responses, but there are a whole lot of parents, whether they're black or white or brown, that have a problem with what is being taught about race and what is being taught from DEI departments, managers in corporate America. And a lot of that was promoted by the left and by the media. And so it is always rich to me when we talk about a situation like this much much more than we talk about the negatives of situations like those. That was today's episode of two white people talking about another white guy's race.

Race point. You've got an immigration point to make. What's your point today? Yeah that's right. Well there's important but underappreciated reasons the media thinks completely the wrong way when it comes to immigration. They take the narrative of the Chamber of Commerce and far-left Democrats in Interesting Marriage as gospel. This is really great for businesses and cartels. It is terrible for migrants.

Why are journalists and Democrats not in absolute uproar over this video of HHS Secretary Javier Becerra comparing migrant children to car parts? If Henry Ford had seen this in his plans, he would have never become famous and rich. This is not the way you do an assembly line. And kids aren't widgets, I get it. But we could do far better than this. It's not the way you do an assembly line. Well, it's true this video from last summer was leaked to the New York Times, a media outlet, and published as part of an excellent expose.

The paper ran on migrant children working in violation of labor laws by major corporations. But if Becerra worked for Trump, that quote would be blanketing the airwaves. It has not, to say the least. I think it got one question at a White House press briefing. And that is wrong, because even the most charitable reading of Becerra's quote exposes the most fundamental problem with this administration's immigration policy. If we're being charitable, Becerra is arguing that kids need to be moved out of detention facilities efficiently for their own safety. This is already a dubious argument, though, because that efficiency, as the Times story shows, is making children less safe. As Hannah Dreyer reported, quote,

While HHS checks on all minors by calling them a month after they began living with their sponsors, data obtained by the Times showed that over the last two years, the agency could not reach more than 85,000 children. Overall, the agency lost immediate contact with a third of migrant children. Dreyer added, quote, the federal government hires child welfare agencies to track some minors who are deemed to be at high risk, but caseworkers at those agencies said that HHS

regularly ignored obvious signs of labor exploitation. That's a characterization the agency disputed. According to Dreyer, children calling an HHS hotline to report labor violations were never getting responses from the agency. Of course, there's plenty of blame to go around. Hearthside, a company that supplied contract manufacturers for major food companies, conceded to the Times that it didn't verify worker ages through a national Social Security check

at just this Grand Rapids plant implicated in child labor in the Times story. But think about that. The two biggest beneficiaries of HHS's policy are major American corporations in need of cheap labor and cartels in Mexico. Well, why the cartels? As The Times reported, the children, quote,

send cash back to their families while often being in debt to their sponsors for smuggling fees, rent, and then living expenses. Every single unaccompanied minor that crosses our border pays a cartel smuggling fee. This is really, really simple. More migration leads to more money for cartels. In most cases, they aren't

sneaking kids across the border either. They're trafficking them up through Central America and Mexico, where they turn themselves into authorities and begin the legal asylum process. So legalizing this migration would not automatically solve the problem because migrants from Central America would still need to travel through cartel-controlled Mexico unless they could afford flights, and even if they could, you can bet cartels would try to make them pay for access to those, too. This is now human trafficking as big business, and cartels will not give it up easily. The Times story is also clear that most of the 250,000 unaccompanied minors we know have crossed in the last two years are economic migrants.

Central American politics were not magically more stable under Donald Trump. The surge in economic migration, as Todd Bentsman says, is like a faucet. The water is always there, but it doesn't flow from the tap until you turn it on. Joe Biden's policies turned it on. This is what the media misses. Biden has incrementally expanded humanitarian parole, most recently via the CBP One app, to reduce the bad optics of illegal crossing numbers. So, Bensman estimates about 35% of 150 monthly parolees get sent back. Those odds are strong enough to draw economic migrants up to our border in staggering numbers. That's why we're seeing increases. We believe that CBP One

has encouraged migration. That is a quote from a Tijuana migration official to Telemundo in February. Quote, it looks easier to have an appointment. Yes, we have seen people who arrive with that expectation. There you go. Shelters report being flooded. And as they will say, it's not just because of the pandemic economy in these countries. It's because of this administration. So it's no wonder HHS is completely incapable of handling these kids safely. These are impossible numbers for any country to handle with respect and dignity both to the migrants and to their own citizens. We do need immigration for economic reasons. We should absolutely offer as much political asylum as we safely can

for moral reasons. And yes, the U.S. historically destabilized Central America and Mexico with drugs and coups. We should help these countries, and we should help their people. But what's happening now is a moral disaster fueled by the cowardice of American politicians and the ignorance of American media. They are the useful idiots of big business and cartels.

Thousands of kids every single month are being abused on their journeys north, some of them dying, then entering a country where their legal future is completely uncertain and unstable. Also, Democrats can claim some faux moral high ground the ignorant media is more than happy to give them. Our policies need to be clear, lawful, and uniform. Asylum needs to be enforced, not preemptively assumed for people whose claims are obviously dubious, at the expense of those who are real. That's the only way to reduce the wave of economic migration that's fueling cartel power, hurting desperate people, and devastating our bureaucracy's ability to handle this with humanity and fairness.

Ryan, what is your point today? So I wanted to talk a little bit about this Section 702 controversy that I hope people have been following, because the 702, as people may or may not know, is referred to as kind of the crown jewel of the surveillance state. It is the authority that gives the NSA what they call a legal rationale to do their most intensive spying and surveillance. But it is supposed to bar them from spying on Americans, essentially. And so there was a big report in Wired, and we could put this up. This is a post from Warren Davidson, a Republican congressman who's been very good on this issue, sharing this Wired report that found that according to a declassified audit of the Section 702 authority execution, the government had searched the name of a U.S. congressman attempting to find some type of connection to foreign influence.

This is within the kind of surveillance world, an explosive revelation because it goes beyond just an example of them actually searching and surveilling an American citizen, but actually an American congressman. We don't know who that congressman is. We don't know what the context is. But the

FBI, the Department of Justice, has finally responded. So yesterday the Assistant Attorney General, Matthew Olson, spoke at the Brookings Institution and he addressed this. So I'll just read this and do this for the podcast people, too, if they can't read it on screen. So he said every compliance incident matters, of course, but incidents involving U.S. person information are especially damaging to public trust. Congress authorized the government to collect foreign intelligence under Section 702 without obtaining individual court orders because 702 targets non-U.S. persons who are outside the United States.

While the intelligence community has collected the foreign intelligence information because of the need to protect national security, we still need strong guardrails when the intelligence community searches this data for information about Americans. He goes on, To be clear, it is critically important that the government is able to do exactly that. When we examine 702 information using query terms associated with U.S. persons, we are often trying to identify U.S. person victims of foreign hacking or spying.

That's what lets us warn and protect them. If we are to keep protecting Americans from escalating cyber and espionage threats, we need to maintain the capacity to conduct U.S. person queries. This is especially true for the FBI, which is responsible for protecting the homeland from national security threats emanating from overseas. So what Olson is suggesting to the public here is that they were actually spying on this member of Congress for their own good, to protect them. If that were the case, you would expect that they would have—you would expect perhaps they would have leaked this to the media because they're always, you know, looking for, you know, positive coverage of this surveillance authority

so that when it comes back up for reauthorization, they can point at, hey, look what we were able to do. There was this spying operation. They were even coming after this hapless member of Congress, and we busted it up. We let them know we solved this problem. Or they would have at least briefed Congress and said, hey, look, just so you're not, you know, freaked out here, like, we ran a query on a member of Congress, but here is exactly why we did it. Like, here is the spy ring. Here's the country that we suspected was spying on them. Here is what they were trying to get out of them.

And we uncovered it. This was the result of it. But we just wanted to be transparent about it because it did involve not just a U.S. person, but a U.S. member of Congress. No evidence that they carried out that briefing. Instead, it got found in this audit, wound up in this report, which was declassified, which Wired uncovered and wrote about. And so now we know about it. And now after the fact, they're saying, well, oh, actually, that was for the round good. While acknowledging in the report, they say, OK, this was actually illegal.

And they claim it was based on a, quote, misunderstanding of the law. So there's nothing wrong with the law. They just kind of misunderstood it in all of their good intentions to try to help this member of Congress. I can't imagine that there's anybody listening that finds any of any of that explanation credible. You know, at least they're feeling enough pressure that they've had to go to Brookings and talk about it. But this is this is going to heat up over the next several months, you know, as this authority expires. Because if it expires, it then throws into question the NSA's entire surveillance program. And then it requires the NSA to come back to Congress, which they often do, and say, well, we actually have these other authorities.

We can continue our spying legally without 702. And then you're like, I'm not so sure about that. Let's show me those authorities. Let's examine those too. So what do you think of the potential for this to have some genuine policy implications when it comes to surveillance? Or I also sometimes get the feeling that the public has just kind of moved on. They're just listening to everything all the time. And who cares? Yeah. Although at the same time, I think people are hyper aware of the kind of expansion of government post-COVID.

But to your point about policy implications, you can see when this is affecting a member of Congress who sort of had that that nanny state approach from the from the surveillance for their own good, how members of Congress might then get freaked out. And I'm sure they assume, or they should assume if they're not stupid, that their communication is basically all compromised, whether by a foreign government or by our own government. That's probably a safe assumption. Whether or not it's true in every case, you should probably assume it because you're just so vulnerable in that situation. But to see the government citing it in the way that you framed it, or in the way that they framed it and you point out, is powerful, because that's going to make members of Congress feel undermined.

I have absolutely no optimism that they'll fail to reauthorize 702, because you mentioned they love to trot out. Anytime it's in jeopardy, they trot out all of these case studies. They say without 702, we never could have stopped this. It was the Times Square bombing is one that they point to, I think. We've never... And they all fall apart under scrutiny. Yeah. Like you peel them back a little bit. You're like, no, actually, none of this is true. And if you couldn't prevent it through other means, develop other means, find other means, be better instead of just taking the shortcut of creating the 702 database, which is basically like if I'm not mistaken, they tap into servers like Google and like to create this massive, massive database that's encrypted until they search it basically.

I mean, it's just the most obscene and they say it's not mass collection because it's not collection until they search. Right, right. It's outrageous. Right, plugging into underground cables. Exactly. Like that sort of thing, yeah. Yeah, like the literal wires. Yeah.

Yeah. So I'm not optimistic at all that they'll decline to reauthorize it because even if a situation like this comes up that I think does probably incense members of Congress, I can't see them building momentum to end Section 702 when you're going to have a full court press from the intelligence community that has all of its buddies at The New York Times and MSNBC doing their bidding that's going to say there's no way we can get rid of this. Everyone is going to be at immediate risk for a terrorist attack if we do. Good for Warren Davidson and other, both Democrats and Republicans who are pushing on this. It's one of the rare kind of bipartisan efforts,

but it's still a minority of the House. But up next, we've got friend of the show, Philip Wegman, is that right? That's right, friend of the show, Philip Philip Wegman to talk about gain-of-function research and Pretty big new discussion out of the White House this week. He asked a question to them We're gonna ask him about the question. He asked the White House coming up next The corporate press doesn't want to talk very much about gain-of-function research

But we will not stop covering it here especially on the heels of the Department of Energy's determination that there's a good probability the pandemic originated from a lab leak. Now, Philip Wegman joins us. He is the White House reporter for RealClearPolitics, and he actually pressed the White House on that question this week and wrote about it for RealClearPolitics. We can put the story up on the screen. This is our first element. The White House told Philip that the Biden administration supports, quote, safe and secure gain-of-function research. Ryan over at The Intercept has been covering extensively whether gain-of-function research can ever be done safely and securely.

Let's play the clip of Phil pushing the White House on this question. Without weighing in one way or the other on the origin of the virus, you've made clear that there's no consensus. Does the president believe, though, that the reward outweighs the risk when it comes to gain-of-function research? Does the reward outweigh the risk when it comes to gain-of-function research?

I have a history degree. You're going to have to say that again? Does the president believe that this type of gain of function research is proven? He believes that it's important to help prevent future pandemics, which means he understands that there has to be legitimate scientific research into the sources or potential sources of pandemics so that we understand it, so that we can prevent them and we can prevent them from happening, obviously. But he also believes, and this is why he wants the

whole of government effort here to understand it, that that research has to be done, must be done in a safe and secure manner and as transparent as possible to the rest of the world so people know what's going on. All right, Philip, you also reported this out with interviews. You got quotes from Marco Rubio. We can put the third element up. You got quotes from Rand Paul. You've been talking to the White House about safe and secure gain-of-function research. What does that mean for how this could be affecting where money goes, where money is steered in this administration? So even as there's more evidence coming out from the U.S. Energy Department and also the FBI that points in the direction of a potential lab leak scenario, the White House is

agnostic on the origins of COVID. They say that there's no consensus, but meanwhile, they still believe that in some cases, gain-of-function research can be prudent. And the reason why I found this answer from Kirby so interesting is because it comes at a moment when the National Science Advisory Board has actually put forward new rules and regulations for how gain-of-function would be handled here in the United States. And essentially, those rules and regulations, they're sitting on the president's desk.

We haven't heard from him yet, and Kirby's answer gives us the answer. Biden thinks that on occasion occasion it could be worthwhile. And so it sounds like that means the new guidelines will probably be passed through and then money will be steered in that direction. Yeah, we'll see what the new rules actually entail. There's new regulations in terms of which type of labs can handle this sort of thing. There's reporting regulations. Currently, though, what's alarming is that there's generally a patchwork of regulations in this country when it comes to how labs handle this type of research. And that's one of the reasons why in 2014, the Obama administration,

because of some concerns over avian flu, said, wait a minute, we're just going to have a moratorium on taxpayer funding for this sort of thing. Three years later, it's the Trump administration that lifts that moratorium on taxpayer funding for this sort of thing. Three years later, it's the Trump administration that lifts that moratorium. Yeah, I wanted to ask you about that 2014 ban, because that pause was implemented in the face of stiff opposition from Dr. Anthony Fauci, who argued publicly and privately that the pause was inappropriate and it would, you know, harm future pandemic prevention efforts. It's then lifted. Fauci was able to, you know, harm future pandemic prevention efforts. It was that it's then it's then lifted. Fauci was able to move money to this lab and to other gain of function research. So you have an entire set of officials, many of whom were there in 2014 when that, I think, correct decision was made. So do you ever talk

to them about why it was the right decision in 2014 to pause gain-of-function research, and now it's the right decision to allow it? And in the interim, at minimum, we may have had a gain-of-function-related pandemic produced by a lab doing that kind of work. So what's fascinating about this is that you see a lot of the same names and organizations pop up again and again. In 2017, when Francis Collins, who is the acting director of NIH, lifts the moratorium, who does he thank? The National Science Advisory Board, who is putting together the new rules and regulations that are currently in the White House Office of Science and Technology. Oh, it's the same folks. And now that the moratorium, you know, looks like it's going to be lifted, looks like there's going to be more money steered in this direction. Even then, with increased rules and regulations that it seems the White House has

signaled they're on board with, you still have some of these scientists saying, wait a minute, this is going to stand in the way of free inquiry. This is going to hurt our research efforts. We need this so that we can prevent the next outbreak. But the fundamental question here is how much risk are we willing to take when it comes to this? Is it 10% chance, 5% chance of a once in a century global pandemic, a 1% chance of killing more than a million Americans if things get out of hand. And the answer that we got from the administration is that they think that this can be done safely, it can be done securely

here in the United States. Of course, though, that's the United States. Our moves create an impetus for other nations with more lax regulation to go forward with their own. And I think that's one of the most stunning revelations from the pandemic and looking into the origins of it is how Byzantine the system of U.S. dollar allocation is in other countries. As you say, it's a patchwork, but it's a patchwork in our country, let alone other countries. And so giving an OK to gain a function from the Biden administration, we like to say here, you have not earned reprieve from another pandemic. We have not earned time off from pandemics. This could happen again at any time. If the lab leak theory is correct, as the Department of Energy recently said was likely the case, and they're in conjunction with the FBI, which we're going to get to in just a second,

if you have that, that means that you haven't earned any time off from pandemics. This could potentially be happening any day, even though we feel like we've earned the time off from it. So what did Republican senators say when you took this question to them after getting that response from the administration? Their critique is much of what you said.

They are of the opinion that the White House doesn't earn any authority to sign off on new rules and regulations until they actually give a reason to count for where the pandemic came from. Senator Marco Rubio tells me that the White House would have a lot more credibility on the question of regulation. We can put Marco Rubio's quote up there. If, you know, they had been more forthright about, you know, where this came from. Obviously, Republicans, they've made an assessment in their mind. And more or less at this point, Senate Republicans are saying that they want a complete and total moratorium on any funding to a university or institution that does this type of research. To go back to the point that Kirby's making about the need to prevent future pandemics, because I think that's the most powerful argument on the other side of the question. But it always strikes me that the case of Wuhan, because let's imagine that we were, the NIH is funding research in Wuhan in order to

detect a pandemic early so that it could stop the spread of that pandemic. A pandemic can start anywhere in the world. It happened to start within just a few miles of this lab. And if they did not accidentally produce this pandemic, it happened right underneath their noses, walking distance from their lab, and they weren't able to prevent it. So if even in that scenario, that funding doesn't prevent a pandemic, how is it going to stop a pandemic if there's some natural origin somewhere else? And so I'm curious, when you're in the White House press room with other White House reporters, whether or not they see that contradiction

and they're concerned about whether or not the White House is kind of slow walking into another one. Ryan's getting a call from EcoHealth Alliance right now. Peter Daja just called Ryan. First of all, Ryan, I mean, it sounds a lot to me like you're questioning science, and that's not something that you should do. No, in all seriousness, look, one would expect that there would be more of a broad conversation about the prudence of doing this type of research. And that's why I actually really appreciate the straight answer

to a straightforward question that Kirby gave me. He's laid out the administration's argument on that. And, you know, because of that, people on both sides of this can either agree or disagree. But other than some of the really emotionally charged arguments that we've seen during the pandemic, no one has said, all right, you know, let's actually take a moment and show why this does matter. Going back to that fundamental question of how much risk are we willing to accept? You know, if this, in fact, did come from, you know, that lab in Wuhan, then it would seem, all right, show me the counterfactual, show me the pandemics that perhaps you stopped or the illnesses that you somehow lessened. And I think that as a result of, you know, first the FBI analysis, now the Department of Energy, there is more of a willingness

by the press to take these questions seriously. And frankly, you know, your show has the receipts on this. A number of corporate media outlets, they said, all right, you know, we have our narrative here. We're not straying from it. And, you know, I think that that's a tremendous disservice because some of the things that we've seen come out of reporting of The Intercept and BuzzFeed is that a lot of these scientists who said, you know, this is naturally occurring in private, you know, the authors of the Nature magazine letter, they were saying, well, it's a 50 50 chance whether or not it was the product of a of a lab. And they were getting taxpayer dollars for making that discrepancy in public and private, which is just shameful in and of itself. Let's move on to a new interview that Brett Baer conducted with FBI Director Christopher Wray, where

this came up. We can play the clip now. … of energy study that says it's likely to have come from a lab leak, although the confidence low. It cites the FBI. What is the determination by the FBI? So, as you note, Bret, the FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan. That aired on Tuesday night. between the FBI and the White House, which is continuing to use this line that there is no consensus, which is true.

There is no consensus that it was a lab leak, despite the fact that, you know, there does seem to be a fact pattern in one direction. Is there tension between the White House and the FBI, the Department of Energy this week on this question, or are they sort of working together and dealing with it? Yeah, I'm not certain why the Department of Energy decided to leak that report to The Wall Street Journal at this moment. Later during that same interview,

Ray says flat out, though, that the Chinese are being less than helpful, less than forthright in their analysis of the initial situation. They're not helping investigators get to the bottom of this. And I think that that is hugely significant because the administration has said, you know, we're not going to be able to really have a clear sense of where this started until the Chinese began cooperating. And when you used to press them on this question of, you know, did the president actually bring this up personally with Xi? Did he press him to be more transparent? They wouldn't answer. What we heard from the White House last, you know, just this week, though, is that Kirby said that President Biden actually

pressed Xi personally when they were in Bali to be more transparent, to cooperate more. I think the fact of the matter is, though, we have a good sense of what the Chinese motivation is here, and they're probably not going to cooperate. And so I think that as the question remains open, I think that tension will also remain within the administration. As many of the researchers will tell you, too, that the U.S. is still not being completely transparent about it. There are still things that the NIH is holding and other research laboratories are holding that could shed some light on it. So blaming China at this point does strike me as related to the timing.

I mean, do you think that this is just, all right, well, this whole balloon thing was embarrassing. And we're annoyed at the way that the Chinese did this. Egg all over our face. We can't even find their balloons after we shot them down. In the depths of Lake Huron. Let the energy department put their thing out there. It was in CNN, which it was a CNN report that the energy department, right? I think pretty sure they had the scoop on that one. I believe the Wall Street Journal is the one that got all of this. So the journal got it first.

I mean, the journal got it first in what I've seen. But you're right. I mean, the political motivations here are obvious. Republicans are always going to want to tie bad things around the neck of Beijing. And the Biden administration, after they were humiliated with Balloongate, I think that they also, you know, perhaps face the same temptation. We've seen a confluence of both Republican and Democratic concerns when it comes to China. And perhaps that's one of the reasons why

what was verboten just a couple of years ago to talk about is now seen as, you know, a very real possibility. Well, and if there is a lab leak, if that, let's just say that that's true, we're implicated in that. And the gain of function is implicated in that. And so it sounded to me like John Kirby didn't really want to answer the question that you asked. He did, though, to your point, he did ultimately give that answer. He said, you know, basically it's a fancy way of saying, yes, we believe that gain of function can

be done safely and securely. But they don't seem to really want to confront that head on. Yeah, even before the pandemic, this was massively controversial among scientists and academics. Right. That this is going to be even more charged now that you have a million Americans dead as a result. I mean, that goes without saying.

And Chris Wray talked about that. And what's troublesome is how quickly the nonsense propaganda works its way into this and moving away from a genuine kind of intellectual exploration of how this happens, that we can prevent it from happening again. Chris Wray goes on to say in that clip, he says, and, you know, there was a Chinese military operation with the, and it and it ended up killing millions of Americans, as is the intent of that kind of an operation, some quote along those lines. So immediately going in this uber hawkish direction without asking the question of, okay, well, you're saying that this lab was a Chinese military operation with the intent of killing millions of Americans. Why was the U.S. funding it? That'd be kind of a basic follow-up question. Was it our intent then to kill millions of Americans?

Right. And even as more information has been released as a result of FOIAs, and we've been able to review some of these leaked emails. Dr. Anthony Fauci continues to stand by what he told lawmakers, which is the NIH has not ever funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Certainly, you know, there's a lot of new information that counters that. Because he's fudging the definition. Yeah, it's a definitional thing. The definition, there's been a lot of games that have been played in the last couple of months and years. But I think that even before we get to the question of intent, of whether or not this was some science experiment that, you know, was designed to harm people, I think that, you know, we should be able to have a more basic

conversation, which is even in the best case scenario, is this prudent? And that's why, you know, I'm fascinated to see the answer that the Biden administration comes up with. Go ahead. Yeah. And the problem with kind of lying about this and and suppressing an honest investigation into it is because then it does open the door for other people to then push it even further because now if you say Now if you say well the FBI Department of Energy There's other intelligence agencies say it actually may have come from this lab Then you're gonna have people even further out who are like, okay Well, then I think it was actually intentional. This was a bioweapons program and it released

It was released intentionally and then and then the you know, people don't have a authority to come in and say well no Okay, we were wrong the last two or three years about what we were saying. But now believe us when we tell you that we believe this was an accident, which is my belief. I believe it was released accidentally. I don't see any evidence that it was done purposefully. But when there's no credibility left, it opens the door for people to believe that and then might move us closer to some type of hostility with China. And how many times do we have to relive this episode that we have during the pandemic, right? Obviously, all of our bias is towards more transparency.

But when you are not forthright with the American public and if you hedge, whether it's a noble lie or it's an insidious one, that creates space for individuals to assume the worst case scenario, to pump things up to more than they actually are. And that is the enemy of reasonable discourse, and it doesn't serve anyone well. That's why I think that if you give a straight answer, even to a controversial question, that provides the framework for an honest discussion rather than something that gets taken away by both the left and the right. My last question is just in terms of the funding, whether it's domestically or internationally, because this is a point you made earlier to pick up on, the safe and secure designation that Kirby says we're able to make and do this safely and securely, gain a function of research, but do it in a contained and responsible way, would any of that involve foreign funding still, you know, diverting in this Byzantine way money to this grantee that then

subcontracts this lab overseas? Are there safeguards for where this work can be done? In the Biden administration's opinion, does that involve keeping this domestic or banning foreign funding in any way? So the new recommendations that are in front of the White House Office of Science and Technology, we're going to see which ones they actually sign off on and what makes the final cut.

I'm absolutely interested to see whether or not there are any prohibitions on domestic versus international funding. Certainly, you know that Republicans are going to raise a stink over this based off of what we've been learning about eco-health potentially being used as an intermediary for some of this type of research. But I think that at the end of the day, there's going to be a strong incentive for the administration not to do anything that at all looks like it could contribute, again, to a potential once-in-a-century pandemic. I think that they are going to be much more cautious, not only when it comes to research here in this country, but certainly cautious about sending American dollars elsewhere.

At least that's what I would hope. Well, you can read Philip's story in RealClearPolitics. You can follow his work there as well. Philip Wegman, White House reporter for RCP. Thank you so much for joining CounterPoints. Thank you for having me. Thanks for coming by. See you in the White House press room. I haven't been there a while. I'm going to start coming back. There are buds in the press room. Well, that does it for today's edition of CounterPoints. We're on the super fun two-shot here in the tight camera. There you go. Ryan, that does it for today's edition of CounterPoints. We're on the super fun two-shot here in the tight camera. There you go.

Ryan, you still have a little bit of a fish hangover, I imagine, but I hope the rest of your week... No, I feel great. I hope the rest of your week goes well. Never felt better.

I believe that, actually. We'll be back next Wednesday with more CounterPoints. Thanks so much for tuning in. All right, see you guys then. We got a lot of things to get into. We're going to gush about the random stuff we can't Listen to High Key, a new weekly podcast hosted by Ben O'Keefe, Ryan Mitchell, and Evie Audley. We got a lot of things to get into. We're going to gush about the random stuff we can't stop thinking about. I am high key going to lose my mind over all things Cowboy Carter.

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