Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 3/20/24: Bibi Defies Biden After Rafah Call, Israeli Spox Suspended, Kushner Says Gaza Waterfront Valuable, Mnuchin Floats Tiktok Purchase, Bernie Spars WIth Fox On 32Hr Work Week, Peter Navarro Prison, SCOTUS Says Texas Can Deport Migrants, NYT Praises Deepstate, Havana Syndrome Proved Fake, Honduras War On Crypto Bros

Episode Date: March 20, 2024

Ryan and Emily discuss Bibi defying Biden on Rafah invasion after call, top Israel spokesman suspended, Kushner says Gaza waterfront valuable, Steve Mnuchin floats buying TikTok, Bernie fights with Fox reporter on 32 hour work week, Peter Navarro reports for prison, SCOTUS says Texas can arrest and deport migrants, NYT praises deepstate, Havana syndrome investigation prove its fake, Honduras goes to war with crypto bros.   To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/ Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Hey guys, Ready or Not 2024 is here and we here at Breaking Points are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that, let's get to the show. All right. Good morning and welcome to CounterPoints. A couple quick programming notes. The most important, obviously, if you want this program emailed to you,

go to breakingpoints.com, become a premium subscriber. You get breaking points, counterpoints in your inbox an hour early, no ads. But the second programming note is if you actually want to receive that email, it sounds like you have to start jumping through some hoops. We've been having technical difficulties. It sounds like Gmail is trying to censor the truth from getting out to people. One thing I've heard working for people is to put us in your contacts. Yeah. Like put that email in your – and then they will identify it as not spam. Lately, it's been winding up in spam, although yesterday fewer went into spam than the day before.

We've also been using MailChimp to send it out to get around that attempted censorship. We're going to overcome, but that's the move, I think. It's like put us in your contacts for now. Nevertheless, we persisted. We did. As Elizabeth Warren. They can slow us down, but they can we persisted. We did. As Elizabeth Warren. They can't, they can't, they can slow us down, but they can't stop us. So true. Well, we have a big show today, as you can

see, we've got a lot of blocks on the screen there. We're going to start talking about Israel, move on to some developments in the TikTok saga, because there's, it looks like Steve Mnuchin wants TikTok pretty badly. Steve Mnuchin. Using Saudi money, yeah. What could go wrong? Yes, exactly. So if we're getting, we're divesting TikTok from China, does it end up in the hands of the Saudis? We shall see. We're going to talk about Bernie Sanders and Sean Fain actually calling for a 32-hour work week. That's going to be really interesting. And from a conservative perspective. We should cut the show early in honor. We should cut it early. From a conservative perspective, We should cut the show early in honor. We should cut it early.

From a conservative perspective, I think there's some interesting arguments to be had there. Trump arrests, that's on your screen, because actually both Peter Navarro and someone who was arrested in the defamation lawsuit against Dominion, she was arrested yesterday. We'll be talking about that. We'll be talking about big updates out of Texas, actually breaking news as the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals put the Supreme Court's decision to allow SB4, maybe you've heard about this, which allows Texas basically to arrest people who are in the country illegally or who are crossed into the country illegally. That put it on blast, basically said you can do this. Then the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals right afterwards said, no, there are oral arguments of this case today. The crazy circuit said you can't do this. And then the deep state, that's, of course, on the screen as well, because the New York

Times had a story that must be seen to be believed. Ryan has some great reporting out of Honduras that we're excited to get to as well. Yeah, that's going to be a fun one. But let's start with Israel. So on Monday afternoon, Benjamin Netanyahu and Joe Biden had their first phone call since February 15th. We can put this element up here. And over the last two days, we've been hearing kind of the fallout from this call. And so what both Biden and Netanyahu have been leaking out to the public and sometimes saying just straight up publicly is that Biden told Netanyahu have been leaking out to the public and sometimes saying just straight up publicly is that Biden told Netanyahu, do not launch an invasion of Rafah, which has now well more than a million people who are taking refuge there. They were pushed out of Gaza City and told to

go down to Khan Yunus. They were then pushed out of Khan Yunus and told to go down to Rafah, which these safe corridors were created where people were sniped and killed along the way. They continue to bomb Rafah. They continue to kind of launch little incursions here and there. But Israel still is holding out the specter of a full-scale invasion into Rafah. And Emily, the case that Israel is making is that there are still about two Hamas battalions that are holed up in Rafah as well as roughly 100 remaining hostages who have yet to be released. And Netanyahu's argument that he made to the Knesset yesterday is that you cannot defeat Hamas without dismantling these final two battalions. The Biden administration has said, and Jake

Sullivan gave a press conference on Monday making this point, he says you can defeat Hamas without going into Rafah. And that the idea that even if you dismantle these remaining two battalions that that means you have ended Hamas is also a fantasy Like they Hamas has already reconstituted in northern Gaza Because there is no political solution that has been put forward by the parties here And so just eliminating a couple battalions does not does not eliminate Hamas So I think that what's clearly going on here is something different, which is like, why would they be going after Rafah, which is,

you know, the city closest to the Egyptian border? If going after Hamas battalions in the past has not actually ended the control of the region by Hamas. But what has it done in northern Gaza and central Gaza? Made it completely uninhabitable. So this to me feels like another move by Israel toward making Gaza completely uninhabitable. Yeah, that's actually an interesting read that we'll get to in a second. We have a clip of Jared Kushner actually kind of getting into that point. But one thing in the NBC News article that was just on the screen, it's interesting.

Netanyahu told lawmakers, quote, he had an argument or we had an argument is how he phrased it with the Americans. And that again, Ryan, we've seen some leaks and I'm curious for your perspective on how you read this because I know a lot of people on the left have read this as the Biden administration is leaking to places like NBC News to show that they are putting room between them and Netanyahu, that there's all of the space between them and Netanyahu. In this case, it actually seems to be legitimate that there actually is some huge daylight between the Biden administration's all of the space between them and Netanyahu. In this case, it actually seems to be legitimate that there actually is some huge daylight between the Biden administration's position,

which is obviously much more reasonable. The difference between defeating Hamas and not defeating Hamas is certainly not two battalions in Rafah. And substantively, where Netanyahu is, that actually seems like, in this case, it is absolutely real and not just the sort of window dressing that they're leaking to the press for the case of perception. And rhetorically it's different, but if the United States is still arming Israel and is refusing to put into place any restrictions on weapons, then is it just cover for the United States? And actually Lloyd Austin was asked about this specific thing this week at a press conference saying,

you have encouraged Israel many times to let in more humanitarian aid and to reduce civilian casualties. They haven't done so. Why not leverage weapons sales, weapons transfers? And Lloyd Austin just simply said, no, we're not going to do that. Israel has a right to defend itself. And Hamas can lay said, no, we're not going to do that. Israel has a right to defend itself. And Hamas can lay down its arms at any moment. So the second that there's any pressure applied to the US position, it completely caves. And so you wind up with mere rhetoric. So Netanyahu, I think, can feel confident coming out of that call with the Biden administration, with Biden himself, saying, you know what, we can move forward on this.

Veenant Patel, State Department spokesperson on Monday, said Israel cannot go into Rafah. And the AP reporter there, Matt Lee, said, you said cannot. What do you mean cannot? He's like, well, you know, it would be very difficult for them just logistically. And Matt Lee says, well, aren't they a sovereign country? And he kind of sort of backed off the use of the word can, because of course they can. But it is an interesting point that Vedant was sort of hinting at, which is, can they? Like, do they have the capacity? What is not talked about much in the U.S. here is that

Israel's not doing well in the ground war. They have effectively been able to turn most of Gaza into rubble, but when they have engaged with Hamas in street battles, they have often lost. We see almost daily videos of Israeli tanks getting blown up, of Israeli soldiers going down, getting evacuated. And so the question is, that's happening in these rubble-strewn areas. How do they physically do that in a densely populated area? A city that was like 300,000 people on October 6th is now like almost one and a half million. How do you even accomplish a street battle there? To that point, 130 hostages, some 130 hostages remain. And that's been Israel's priority for months. And to have that many hostages remaining is obviously not a sign of a successful military operation.

It is a sign of Hamas's continued barbarity. But of a successful military operation, it is not a sign. So they have, yeah, and to your point, Hamas is already reconstituted in northern Gaza. Let's put A2 up on the screen because this investigation from Al Jazeera and the Washington Post. This is from the Washington Post. They did an investigation about what happened to two members of an Al Jazeera crew, and Al Jazeera has presented some more evidence about this as well. Drone footage, this is the headline, raises questions about Israeli justification for deadly strike on Gaza journalists. This was in Han Yunus. Two members of Al Jazeera's crew, a 27-year-old and a 30-year-old, were killed on January 7th along with their driver.

Then two freelance journalists were seriously wounded. They were returning from the scene of an earlier Israeli strike on a building where they had used a drone to capture the aftermath. The Washington Post actually on their website has footage of them operating the drone, the drone footage that they were taking. It's a drone that was being taking. It's a drone that was being used. It's like available at Best Buy. It's basically a commercially available, you know, normal drone that civilians would use. IDF said in a statement the next day that it identified and struck a terrorist who operated an aircraft that posed a threat to IDF troops. Two days later, the IDF said that it had been in response to, quote, an immediate threat in the area because both men belong to militant groups.

This was the claim from the IDF. It doesn't appear that was the case. There's some evidence that Israel is pointing to. I think it's like a name in a log that Israel's pointing to that one of them was affiliated with Hamas in some way. But it's pretty unconvincing evidence. I'm curious what you thought of this. It's this weird, I think gaslighting is overused in our current contemporary lexicon, but it really does apply to the coverage of this war. So the Washington

Post writes here, and good for the Washington Post for conducting this investigation. This is not shade on them, but they write that no Israeli soldiers, aircraft, or other military equipment are visible in the footage taken that day, which the Post is publishing in its entirety, raising critical questions about why the journalists were targeted, fellow reporters said they were unaware of troop movements in the area. So what they're saying is there was no reason that they can identify either from witnesses or from drone footage, but there was a security concern going on here. Yet these journalists were struck anyway. It says it kind of raises questions about why the journalists were targeted. In the days after they were targeted,

Israel said publicly they targeted them on purpose because of these claimed links. And so that's where the gaslighting comes in. It's like, raises questions about why they were targeted. Israel's like, no, we hit the journalists on purpose. This is Al Jazeera, Gaza bureau chief's son who was killed in this strike. And they're saying, look, he's a terrorist. There's two freelance journalists that were killed here, too. They're all terrorists. And we hit them on purpose. And so to then use investigative resources to go back

and say, doesn't seem to be any reason why they were struck, when, you know, implying that perhaps maybe they were struck on purpose when Israel has already said they were struck on purpose is kind of crazy making, I think, for an audience who's like, wait a minute, they already admitted why they did this. And they continued to do it day after day after day after day. Right. The first statement said that the aircraft posed a threat to Israeli troops. And again, you can watch the video. It's clearly a drone that you would pick up at Best Buy being operated by. And it would be fair to debunk that claim from the IDF, but the IDF claims always evolve, you know, within,

you know, there's, there's the claim in the immediate aftermath of the attack. Then there's the, then there's a claim six hours later, then there's the claim the next day. And so they eventually moved away from this, oh, the drone was a threat, to, well, we hit them in a car because they're terrorists. And it took them like a week to come up with this claim that they were terrorists, although their allies online were circulating it kind of immediately. Interviews with 14 witnesses, the Post says, to the attack and colleagues of the slain reporters offer the most detailed account yet of the deadly incident. The Post found no indications that either man was operating as

anything other than a journalist that day. Both passed through Israeli checkpoints on their way to the South early in the war. One of them had been approved to leave Gaza, which is rare. You wouldn't give that to someone, as the Post points out, who is a, quote, known militant. The Post asked the IDF a lot of questions about it, and they just replied, quote, we have nothing further to add. Right. And also, you know, setting aside this particular case, in general, Hamas has been the government since 2006 in Gaza. Like a lot of people are going to have affiliations with the government. Barack Ravid, who's done really impressive reporting, like tons of scoops for Axios,

we'll talk about one of his scoops later, was in the reserves in Israel. If Hamas assassinated him, that would not be justified by the fact that he had previously served in the reserves. It's an insane way to think about people. And it's only, I think, made possible by dehumanization. If you don't think about people as the complicated kind of citizens and kind of active members of a community that they are. Israel recently killed, they called it a top Hamas commander, but he was the guy whose job it was to work with the UN and the aid agencies to make sure that there was security around the aid trucks getting into northern Gaza. Israel had previously said that they would not attack the policemen who are trying

to keep security in these areas. Those policemen are all, quote-unquote, Hamas. Because if Hamas is the government, then anybody working for them is Hamas. And so they killed this guy, found him in a hospital and killed him. And then they announced publicly, we just took out a top Hamas commander. So again, Israel is claiming that they put out a statement and linked to a document, the post notes. It was dated to June of 2022. It had the military wing of the PIJ and one of the journalist's names was next to a

line item for $224. They mentioned a second document that named the other journalist as a squad deputy commander of the Hamas Gaza City Brigade, but did not make that document public and did not respond to numerous requests to review it, and the Post was unable to confirm any other evidence that they were acting as anything other than journalists when they were killed. Again, the quote from the IDF was that they were flying an aircraft that posed a threat. It was a civilian drone that you could pick up at Best Buy,

and they had gone through Israeli security checkpoints. So, Brian, it's just... Right, and they deconflict all the time with... The IDF knows where these journalists are because it's extremely dangerous to go anywhere without the IDF knowing where you are. So that's another thing that has raised so many alarms about so many of these killings of journalists that they get cleared ahead of time to go to an area and then get killed. It's frustrating from... I mean, it's frustrating period. But one of the reasons that it's frustrating

from my perspective, like the fog of war is a real thing. And obviously, you know, there are going to be in any war, it's one of the reasons why we should all just generally oppose war, there are going to be civilian casualties and it is awful. But the consistent situations that come up, whether it's, you could go all the way back to Shirin Akhla, you can find many examples of this,

it just is, the pattern of shifting stories in these cases is frustrating because it goes beyond, I think, the fog of war often and becomes a ham-fisted propaganda strategy that is utterly unconvincing. Speaking of the fog makers, ham-fisted fog makers of war. Right. Alon Levy has been suspended as the Israeli government spokesperson. This is a fascinating development. We can even touch on some of the conspiracy theories about why this happened, as well as the actual stated

reason why it happened. So there was an exchange with a UK member of parliament that people can find online. It's really fascinating to see the back and forth. But the gist of it was that Alon Levy was basically just regurgitating talking points that his government has been pushing, you know, for weeks now, basically saying there is no restriction on aid entering into Israel. I mentioned earlier how gaslighting is an overused term, but it's appropriate in the coverage of this war because anybody can see with their eyes that there is a famine going on. The UN is saying a million people are starving and that hundreds of thousands are on the brink of famine and in famine, children are dying of malnutrition and starvation. Those are the facts

on the ground. And then we're told by the IDF, actually, there's no restrictions whatsoever on aid and aid can just flow in completely unrestricted. You're like, what? That's insane. So, but most of us, you know, we're just, you know, we're just suffering through Twitter like everybody else. And we just like watch these lies go through. This member of parliament had just returned from a trip to the region and had seen and had talked to people at the UN, talked to people involved in aid distribution and saw Alon Levy's claim that aid can just flow right into Gaza, no problem at all. And she said, hey, that doesn't seem true. I was just there. But it's interesting what you're saying. Are you saying that more aid can get in? And he's like,

absolutely. Test us. If the UK sends another hundred trucks worth of aid, another hundred trucks can get in. And so what she does is she takes his comments, sends them to Cameron, and says, look what the Israeli government is saying. Which is, it's almost funny because it's taking what the Israeli government spokesperson is saying seriously as the truth, and then trying to apply it as policy, when everybody involved in this knows that this is just kind of propaganda. This is just what people are saying. So she takes this and says, look, look what he says. Then he starts backpedaling and say, well, you know, we can only do 44 trucks an hour at this one crossing. And so she quickly does the math and she's like, okay, well, that's many more trucks that are currently getting in. So we appreciate that you have said, you know, 100 more trucks a day can get in,

which is a 50% increase over the that you have said, you know, 100 more trucks a day can get in, which is a 50% increase over the number you've said. Maybe backpedals more and starts talking about how, well, you know, before October 7th, half the trucks getting in were cement that Hamas was using to make tunnels and gets into this, like, what are you talking about? Like, none of this makes any sense. But what point are you trying to make? We're not trying to send in cement right now. We're trying to send in, you know, food and medicine and maternity kits and like the, you know, the basics that people need for survival. And it became essentially an international incident because he was basically caught lying in public and the people on the

ground had to say, well, no, we're actually not going to let in 50% more trucks. Like, it's not going to happen. So they suspend him. That's what happened. But what a lot of people are wondering is, wait a minute. This is the thing you're going to suspend this guy for? Like, this is the Israeli government's line. Like, they say this to everybody who asks.

The fact that it's not true is not new. Like everybody knew it wasn't true. So why are you coming after him? People have pointed out that Netanyahu's wife, Sarah Netanyahu, who has been convicted of corruption herself in Israel, has always hated this guy, that he's kind of a liberal Zionist who protested against the Supreme Court reforms that were intended basically let the Netanyahu family off, and also that he's getting too popular. At the Knesset meeting, there was the Times of Israel reported

yesterday that Netanyahu said one of the problems with Israeli propaganda globally is that we don't have we being Israel, we don't have people who can string two English sentences together, or two words together, he said. And they're like, what if we give you more money for the Hasbara efforts? He's like, no, it's not just money. Like, we don't have enough English speakers who are able to do this. And Levi has gotten extremely popular around the world. And so the thinking among people watching this closely is that this was a chance to like take him down a notch, that he was getting kind of too good at his job. I know

what's your read on this entire like ridiculous situation? I mean, yeah, it sounds like there are behind the scenes sort of problems, fissures in the Netanyahu relationship with the liberal Zionists that plagues Netanyahu and anyone sort of in the Netanyahu coalition more broadly from his perspective. You know, if you're not quite Ben-Gavir, but you're also not Levi, then yeah, these fissures are real and actually severely hamper Netanyahu's ability to govern as he wishes to govern. On that note, though, Ryan, it was when you were talking about

how Netanyahu was making the point about having people who can string English sentences together, it reminded me that Jared Kushner was- He unfortunately can string sentences together. He was stringing those sentences together in an interview with The Guardian, and there is video of a fascinating exchange between The Guardian and Jared Kushner about Gaza. Let's take a look at that. In Syria, when there's refugees, Turkey took them, Europe took them, Jordan took them. For whatever reason, here in Gaza, there's refugees from the fighting from an offensive attack that was staged from Gaza. Israel's going in to do a long-term deterrence mission.

And it's just unfortunate that nobody's taking the refugees. But also there are real fears on the part of Arabs, and I'm sure you talk to a lot of them, who think once Gazans leave Gaza, Netanyahu's never going to let them back in. Maybe, but I'm not sure there's much left of Gaza at this point. So, you know, if you think about even the construct, like, you know, Gaza, Gaza was not really a historical precedent, right? It was the result of a war, right? You had tribes that were in different places, but then Gaza became a thing. Egypt, you know, used to run it. And then, you know, over time you had different governments that came in different ways. So you have another war, you know, usually when wars

happen, you know, borders are changed historically over time. And so my sense is, I would say, how do we deal with the terror threat that is there so that it cannot be a threat to Israel or to Egypt? I think that both sides are spending a fortune on military. I think neither side really wants to have a terrorist organization enclaved right between them. And Gaza's waterfront property, it could be very valuable to if people would focus on kind of building up livelihoods. You think about all the money that's gone into this tunnel network and into all the munitions, if that would have gone into education or innovation. Biden should recognize the Palestinian authority unilaterally as a state and MBS should go to Jerusalem like Egyptian President Anwar

Sadat did in 1977. And he should say, I'll normalize with Israel. I'll recognize West Jerusalem as your capital. And I'll even pay to rebuild Gaza if you recognize a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital. What do you think? Good idea? No, I don't think that's a good idea. I think that there's certain elements of it that are correct. I think proactively recognizing a Palestinian state would essentially be rewarding an act of terror. Waterfront property, he said, if the money from the tunnels would have been redirected, I think he said towards education and innovation, but it was in the

context actually talking about how you could redevelop Gaza into a, quote, very valuable waterfront property. Ryan, what's your reaction to that? Well, there was also that line he had where he said, for whatever reason, there's refugees. Okay, for whatever reason, interesting. Then he also said that Gaza is a construct. So just Google to make sure. Wikipedia says the known history of Gaza spans 4,000 years. Pompeii took it at one point, Alexander the Great took it at one point, Bedouins lived there for many years. In fact, the IDF has tragically destroyed archaeological sites that are some of the most kind of important to archaeology in the world and have destroyed buildings that are from the 6th and 7th century, just irreplaceable and tragic destruction.

So the idea that Kushner says Gaza is a construct of the 20th century kind of expulsion of people from their land in what was Palestine is absurd. It is true that many of the current residents of Gaza are refugees from elsewhere in what is now Israel, but the idea that the city itself is like a construct literally ignores 4,000 years of history but what could be more tone deaf than then Jared Kushner a real estate developer talking about the water for the value of the waterfront property who negotiated right who negotiated the Abraham Accords right and was basically Trump's point man on negotiating with Israel here in the Middle East period right if anybody was responsible for the failure of our policy and the entire policy in the region,

it's Jared Kushner, whose bright idea, which, and this is not to blame just Kushner. He was the moron that put it forward, but he had an entire Republican administration apparatus behind him that pushed it forward. And then he had an entire Democratic administration that adopted the framing of it, which was to say, we are going to normalize relations with all of the Arab countries in the region, leading with Saudi Arabia and the UAE. And we're going to do it by pretending the Palestinian question does not exist anymore, just taking it off the table. I mean, it's kind of an interesting, like, third grade kind of approach to it. It's like, it's a really intractable problem. How do you solve this? And he's like, what if we don't? Hear me out. And the region, and that's why I don't

blame him. Like, that's an idiotic thing to say. The real idiots are the ones who are like, this kid's got an idea. Let's just pretend the problem isn't there. And then we'll sign all of these accords. And Hamas has said that it launched its attack because Saudi Arabia was getting so close to normalizing with Israel and pretending that the Palestinians didn't exist. Now, you can obviously, Hamas has agency, did what did, you can condemn that. The U.S. has agency, Saudi Arabia has agency, Israel has agency. It was predicted and predictable, you know, what the consequences would be when you say that, oh, there's this intractable problem and let's just ignore it and it'll go away.

So the other thing Kushner said, quote, I'm sitting in Miami Beach right now and I'm looking at the situation and I'm thinking, what would I do if I was there? So another point just to- If he was in Gaza? If he was in, but he's sitting in Miami Beach, more very valuable water for property. But to the point of the interview, by the way, that was, it's stamped with The Guardian because I think The Guardian was the, they must've been the first report on this. This was actually not an interview with the Guardian. It was an interview with the Harvard Middle East Initiative faculty chair. So it wasn't –

Reported by the Guardian. Reported by the Guardian, right. And they stamped their logo on the video, which is where I got thrown off. But, yes. We'll put our logo on top of theirs. We may already have done that. But, Ryan, you were at another State Department briefing asking questions. I think this was about UNRWA.

Yeah, so this goes to the question of what will Gaza become when and if there is a day after this war. And it goes to the question of UNRWA funding. And actually, I don't know on a uh... spoiler will just role this this back and forth uh... with me and state department spokesperson be a hotel but when when you originally talked about the allegations against the twelve staff you'd said that on red cell was the one that forwarded those allegations along

you found incredible but since then on red cell has said that it's staff credible. But since then, UNRWA itself has said that its staff were tortured by Israel in order to get some of those confessions extracted. Does that change your view of the evidence that was presented by Israel? And if UNRWA was credible enough for you to believe the allegations the first time, is UNRWA credible enough when they make an allegation of torture against its staff? I've not seen that reporting, Ryan, but I will just note that we continue to find the allegations that were laid out a number of months ago to be credible. And we also welcome the swiftness at which UNRWA informed not just the United States,

but others about this, but also the swiftness in which the United Nations launched its own investigation mechanism and its own independent review, and we look forward to seeing those results. And to echo Secretary Blinken, we want these allegations thoroughly investigated so that there is clear accountability and measures put in place so this doesn't happen again. We want all this to happen because we believe very strongly that UNRWA plays a critical role in producing life-saving assistance in the region, not just in Gaza, but the broader Middle East as well. They are vital, vital players when it comes to food, medicine, shelter, and other humanitarian support. Your position, which is in opposition, as they said, to so many allies around the world, has encouraged Congress to move forward with a ban. There's now an agreement between some Democrats and some Republicans to continue the ban, I think, throughout the rest of the year. Is that something that the State Department would support,

tying the State Department's hands, even if the report comes back? You've heard me talk about this before broadly when it comes to the supplemental bill that is being negotiated in Congress. These are active and ongoing things that are happening, so I'm not going to go down a rabbit hole too much. But broadly, we support the contours of this supplemental bill. So he says, we believe that UNRWA plays an important role in relief efforts, but also we're okay with Congress barring us from restarting funding for it.

How do you make that make sense for me? Presidential administrations are often so cool with Congress stepping in and doing things that they care about. Yes, if presidents care about war powers, it's basically so that they want Congress to have more power instead of them, which is obviously completely backwards. They want to prosecute these wars entirely on their own, and now they're using Congress as a crutch, which is funny because they basically are constantly blaming Congress of being overly meddlesome in the business of prosecuting Right, but when it comes to banning the U.S. from funding UNRWA, which they say is a valuable part of the relief effort, eh not going to go down that rabbit hole

they're going to do what they're going to do. Rabbit hole And also, how do you not how are you not familiar with this massive reporting that UNRWA has said that its staff was tortured into making confessions about UNRWA complic said that its staff was tortured into making confessions about

UNRWA complicity with Hamas. That's a rather important element if you actually are serious about getting to the bottom of this. Yeah, and I'm sure that they enjoy answering your questions in the briefing. I don't know how much longer I can keep going. It's increasingly pointless. It's exhausting. I got to do some self-care after each one of those. The rabbit hole quote was pretty interesting in that one. Let's talk about TikTok. Let's talk about TikTok. So we have a video here of Steve Mnuchin. Steve Mnuchin is involved right now in putting together some investors who would buy TikTok in the case that the bill that passed through the House and right now in putting together some investors who would buy TikTok in the case that the bill that passed through the House and is now in the hands of the Senate is passed,

signed by President Biden, and TikTok is, ByteDance is forced to divest TikTok, its U.S. portfolio. Essentially, there are different ways that they could go about divesting that operation, maybe just split off the entire U.S., but the forced divestment, say it happens, Steve Mnuchin, he's going to be there, arms open wide, ready with investors to buy TikTok. And there's some interesting questions about where Steve Mnuchin may get that money. Let's start by rolling this clip of Steve Mnuchin talking about the potential deal. I think the legislation should pass, and I think it should be sold. I understand the technology. It's a great business and I'm going to put together a group to buy TikTok. You're trying to buy TikTok. I am because this should be owned by U.S. businesses. There's no way that

the Chinese would ever let a U.S. company own something like this in China. You say, have you already put a group together? No, I'm working on it. I've spoken to a bunch of people, but who would be part of your group? I can't tell that to you now, but it would be a combination of investors. So there would be no one investor that controlled this. And the issue is all about the technology. This needs to be controlled by U.S. Let me ask you a very practical question. So that was Becky Quick and Andrew Ross Sorkin talking to Steve Mnuchin on CNBC. He said he would not get into who's involved, but it would not be any one investor. Let's put this next hair sheet, B2, up on the screen.

Seema For had a good piece on Ron Wyden kind of blowing the whistle here on who Steve Mnuchin may be getting his funding from. Reading from the article, they say Senator Ron Wyden, the chair of the powerful Senate Finance Committee, sharply criticized former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and his ties to money from the Middle East in his effort to buy TikTok from its Chinese owner. Mnuchin told CNBC last week that he's assembling a group of investors to buy the platform after the House overwhelmingly passed a bill forcing it to either be sold within six months or banned from app stores. The White House has urged the Senate, where the bill has powerful backers and opponents in both parties, to move quickly. Mnuchin gave few details on who might

be part of his bidding group, except to say that he was working in a combination of investors. But much of the $2.5 billion investment funds he raised after leaving office came from governments in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states where Mnuchin was a frequent visitor during his time in government. Saudi investments not unfamiliar to former members of the Trump administration whatsoever. So actually this point that Ron Wyden is making and Seymour is making is a really important one because it seems almost impossible that all of that money would be coming entirely from domestic sources given the the Steve Mnuchin and honestly just the way finance works in this country right now one point I did want to make we can put b3 up in the screen

just really quickly there there's a very important argument about how this bill is crony capitalism and that you have a Steve Mnuchin sweeping in, going to make billions off the deal with his investors. They'll all be sitting back laughing. And it's because they lobbied Congress for this bill to pass. And in the meantime, it gives the deep state access to TikTok. So I agree that it's crony capitalism. I do just want to point out, though, this is up on the screen, quoting from a Wall Street Journal article, actually quoting from a TikTok spokesperson in a Wall Street Journal article. Over the past year, they say, we took the unprecedented step

of granting Oracle full access to our source code and our algorithm. That's not news. It's been known that this one and a half billion dollar Project Texas initiative, TikTok, embarked upon after being pushed by the Trump administration, actually at the time. This was basically a big PR push that ultimately went beyond PR and actually, as they got more and more pressure, ended up with them giving Oracle cloud access, storing their U.S. data in the Oracle cloud. Oracle is a defense contractor.

So one point just in this big conversation about how the US deep state is going to get access to TikTok data, they want it. That's why suddenly they're sweeping through this bill. Well, I mean, they're sweeping through this bill because they do want it, but they do likely already have access via Oracle to data that they want. Right. It's not just the data they want. They want to control at the root. And so you talked about the Gulf states that have contributed to Mnuchin's fund. There's a Gulf adjacent state that has been in talks with Mnuchin's fund at minimum that's also relevant here. And that's literally Israel. So we talked earlier about some good reporting that Barack Ravida did.

He and Jonathan Swan in 2021 had a scoop for Axios. The headline, Israeli spy chief in talks to join Mnuchin's investment fund. So the head of Mossad, before he retired from his Mossad position, was in talks with Mnuchin to become an investor in Mnuchin's fund. We don't know where was that money coming from? Did that money enter into Mnuchin's fund? So the idea that for national security reasons, we're going to seize TikTok and hand it over to a fund that has Qatar, Saudi, Emirati money, and maybe Israeli money, Israeli government money, does not make a whole lot of sense just on its own terms from a national security perspective, despite Mnuchin's claims that, well, no single investor is going to have control here. If

Saudi Arabia has given him a billion dollars and is the biggest leveraged and is the biggest fund in Mnuchin's fund, they have a lot of power there, regardless of what kind of contract you write up about who has what say when it comes to TikTok. Yeah, that's an interesting point. And you know, in general, my takeaway on this is we are such an oligarchy because it gets back to the binary choice of Trump versus Biden. There's really no good choice in this situation. I mean, I actually think the situation with Chinese control over TikTok has been concerning for a really long time. I think TikTok absolutely should be banned. I think though the bill that passed the House of Representatives was that section B in the bill

that, you know, doesn't just narrow this to TikTok is genuinely very problematic. You know, there's a way to do this bill that literally writes out this just applies to TikTok and ByteDance. The decision to broaden it beyond just TikTok and ByteDance obviously, obviously stems from ulterior motives that don't, I mean, it's in the text. That is as blatantly of an ulterior motive as you could possibly put into the bill is by saying, well, maybe this will apply, uh, in different cases as well. And, you know, instead of just actually doing this, um, as the problem crops up, we can put this next. Although just one point on that, this is where the Supreme court's bizarre libertarian

interpretation of corporation as people comes into play because if corporations are people, then a bill that targets a, an individual corporation is a bill of attainder, which is, you can control F the constitution for that one, banned in the constitution. You can't, basically what, you know, what, what England used to do, which we fought against was, you know, they'd try somebody for treason and the jury would be like, eh, we don't, we don't think you made your case here and then Parliament would be like This person must be executed and they chop his head off. Mm-hmm and And so that was a bill of attainder which is like going after an individual and so right there and the Constitution says Congress can't do that to individuals

Congress never meant that a company was an individual. But the Supreme Court has rethought humanity to include corporations in its definition of people, which would then require them to say, you can't do this. Anyway, go ahead. Yeah, and so if we put the next element up on the screen here, you can see, so that section that

we were just talking about where it involves companies that have at least 20% a foreign, a hostile foreign that have at least 20%, a foreign, a hostile foreign country has at least 20%, enemy country has at least 20% stake in an app. Actually, a lot of apps have international headquarters as Axios points out here. These numbers actually really surprised me, Ryan.

So this is from Axios. In 2024, not only are a greater number of apps from China and Hong Kong, but more apps from that region have made it to the top 10 most downloaded apps in the U.S. so far compared, this year, compared to just one in 2021. So Timu, really popular, starting to get really popular. CapCut, that's another app by ByteDance. Sheen, obviously, they're an e-commerce app. They're, I mean, a lot of people think of them as a website, but Timu and Sheen have apps. And so we're increasingly getting into a situation where, yeah, I mean, this is a real problem. Josh Hawley has been making a really good point about how American creators, American consumers shouldn't have to be responsive to China at this point, that TikTok is an American industry. As ByteDance insists,

TikTok is truly just an American company. It's based in America. It's for Americans. Ultimately, though, what we know from great reporting in Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, and other places is that even with Project Texas, the people who are involved in Project Texas, this big effort to make TikTok more domestic here in the States, they're still getting plenty of requests for the data from Beijing. So I think there's a real point to be made. I think also the latent threat of TikTok, because we are aware that the hawks are beating the war drums with China. So whether or not you agree with them, the threat of a hot war, a hot conflict over Taiwan is real.

Whether or not we like that, that is real. And so the latent threat of a potential hostile enemy in a hot war controlling a huge source of news, the primary source of news, in fact, for young people in this country, that actually can put the lives of American men and women on the line. I think the latent threat of TikTok if a hot war erupts is worse than, in this case, meta Instagram. And I think those threats of censorship and propaganda are huge with those other giants. But the hot war question is a really, really big one. But that just brings us back to this oligarchy. Like your options suck either way. It's cronyism if TikTok wins. It's cronyism if TikTok loses. And my solution to the hot war question would be, all right, Oracle already controls their data and their kind of algorithm or has like direct access to it. And therefore, if there is a national security crisis or some kind of war,

then your defense contractor already has it. So you don't need to turn it over to Steve Mnuchin, Mohammed bin Salman, and Mossad in the meantime. It's such a perfect, I mean, if there are Saudi investors ultimately involved, even indirectly in the Mnuchin deal. Which, of course, they have to be. It's hard to believe.

They have a big piece of Twitter. Like, they love all this stuff. Your reporting on Twitter and Saudis has been also wildly undercovered by the rest of the media. Right, where they bribed engineers to get them to out the names of dissidents who they then killed. And Ron Wyden mentions in this report, he's like, maybe a country that put spyware on the wife of a Washington Post journalist's phone then lured him into a consulate and chopped him into pieces is not the company that we want to force a sale of a social media app to. Soccer's friend Hass Hasan Minhaj was censored on Netflix and Saudi Arabia for yes

Like if we're if we're going to talk censorship good lord freaked out. Yes. It's the same thing with Yes, the the neoconservative Position on Saudi Arabia has put them in so many binds over the years that they just laugh and smile their way through On CNBC hits. And here we are. Should we talk Bernie? Let's talk Bernie, because this is such an interesting topic, Ryan. Bernie Sanders and Sean Fain, Bernie Sanders in particular has actually introduced legislation, but Bernie Sanders and Sean Fain wrote a joint op-ed calling for the 32-hour workweek. And Bernie's bill is focused on the 32-hour workweek. Tell us what he's proposing. Yeah, and Bernie's staff are

saying, I saw some of them last night, that they have not gotten a reaction this positive to legislation that they've put out in years, that the kind of outpouring of support for it has been extraordinarily heartening. But essentially, all this bill does is take current law as it applies to overtime, which currently sits at 40 hours and ratchets that down to 32 hours and says, if you work over 32 hours, then you start getting paid overtime. It doesn't mean you can't work 40 hours. It just means if, if it, what it does is it incentivizes, you know, companies and people to try to increase productivity and, and, and basically, you know, work less and, and move, and move toward a

place where we have kind of a more just and decent society. One of the counter arguments, of course, is, well, now you're going to force people into working more jobs, and companies are going to try to automate away hours and try to shrink down the number of hours that people have. The response to that is, what, are you an idiot? You think that that's not what corporations are doing? Like the number one goal of corporations today is adopting AI and automation to try to minimize labor costs. Like they're already doing that. So what this is, is a response to that crisis.

And what it says is that, okay, you're trying to reduce people's hours anyway. What we're requiring is that you pay people a little bit more on the way there. Mm-hmm. And so I personally don't support a federal mandate, but one of my predictions for the next 30 years, maybe even the next 10 years, actually probably close to the next 10 years, is that a 32-hour workweek will become normalized in corporate culture. Now, that's very optimistic. But there's a reason I say that. And Bernie Sanders' op-ed with Sean Fain in The Washington Post touched on it in a really, really interesting way. They talk about how the Fair Labor Standards Act was signed into law in 1940.

Then they write, unbelievably, 84 years later, despite massive growth in technology and worker productivity, nothing has changed. Let that sink in for a moment. In a 1974 office, there were no computers, email, cell phones, conference calling, or Zoom. In factories and warehouses, there were no robots or sophisticated machinery, no cloud computing. In grocery stores and shops of all kind, there were no checkout counters using barcodes. Think about all the incredible advancements in technology, computers, robotics, artificial intelligence, and the huge increase in worker productivity that has been achieved. What have been the results of these changes for working people? Almost all the economic games

have gone straight to the top, while wages for workers are stagnant or worse. And it's a really, really important point about technology. Think about when you wake up in the morning, if you are a white collar, if you're a blue collar, you have to check your phone for professional reasons. Maybe your shift got changed. Maybe you got an email from your boss changing a meeting time and you had to drop your kid off at 3 p.m., thought you could get out, but now you can't.

You're constantly changed to your phone, even if it's 8 a.m., even if it's 7 a.m., and you're working out, that now you can't. You're constantly changed to your phone, even if it's 8 a.m., even if it's 7 a.m., and you're working out. That's not leisure time, because you are always working. You're sending work emails, sending work texts. You are constantly thinking about, or in communication, and thinking about via smartphones and email apps on your smartphones, about work in general. And again, it could just be, it could be shifts getting changed around that make it hard for you just to put your phone down and actually be without your phone because your phone is a work device. And so we just have,

we haven't shifted the way we think about work. We haven't shifted the way we think about even just smartphones, period. And this is a shout out to producer Mac, who is not giving me my leisure time right now because he's texting us as we're talking about smartphones. But in all seriousness, I really think conservatives are way behind the curve in talking about work. And that Bernie Sanders and Sean Fain are actually onto something that's way less radical than it sounds to a lot of people on the right who are like, what are you talking about? 32 hour work week. This is America. So this is a very different work culture than it was just 15 years ago. I also think of this show as my leisure time. There's a, there's a famous example that Adam Smith, basically the father of modern economics has, where he talks about a pin factory, like a needle factory.

He basically says, imagine that you've got, it takes 100 people a week to make 100 pins at this factory. And now all of a sudden, and it's profitable, it's doing well. Now all of a sudden, an innovation comes along. Somebody figures out a way that it takes only half a week to make that many pins. He says, in a rational and a just society, those hundred people would work 20 hours a week, and the rest of the time would be spent with their family, with their church group, with their community, playing softball, just enjoying life.

We'd have just as many pins. The capitalists would make just as much profit. And the world would just be a better place. Instead, because of the power embedded in the political economy, everybody works the same amount, gets paid the same amount, but all of that surplus value that was created by that innovation gets just seized by the person that owns the factory. And for Smith, who is much more lefty than people give him credit for because they haven't

actually read The Wealth of Nations, he was like, that's wrong. Like the workers should, and society should take the advantage of that of that innovation, not the capitalist class that is just going to then, you know, produce inequality, you know, fritter it away and, you know, create's a really interesting point, too, that Bernie Sanders makes. We have a clip of Bernie Sanders. Let me actually table the point, and we'll get to the sot here, because Bernie's explosive exchange with a reporter. It is really vintage Bernie. Is it a Fox News reporter? I think so. It's absolutely vintage Bernie, though. Let's roll this clip.

Senator Sanders, can I talk to you about the 32-hour work week? It seems like— Fox Business. It seems like Democrats want businesses to be taxed more, pay their workers. Really? Is that what you think? Excuse me. I didn't get to ask the question. Okay, thank you. Senator, you want to hold it? Okay. We held a hearing on a 32 hour work week because what we have seen is that over the last 50 years, despite a huge increase in worker productivity, almost all of the new wealth has gone to the top 1%,

while 60% of the people are living paycheck to paycheck. Many of our people are exhausted. We work the longest hours of any people in the industrialized world. I think it's time for a shortened work week. Can I ask you a question about that? It seems like Democrats want businesses to be taxed more, pay their workers more, lower prices, and now pay people not to work. You know what I would like to see? How are businesses going to survive that?

That's the question. How can businesses survive all of those proposals? When Mr. Bezos pays an effective tax rate lower than the average worker. I think we have a real problem in our tax system. I think that billionaires have got to stop paying their fair share of taxes. He's all up in her grill, Ryan. So if you were just listening to that clip, Bernie Sanders is just gesturing wildly. Looks like it's going to turn violent. Yes, he's about to fight her.

Class war in the hallway. In the hallway, yes. But really, that's classic Bernie. It is. Yeah, I mean, like, he doesn't want to hear the nonsense from the Fox Business crowd. But, yeah. And he turned straight to the camera. That was my other favorite part.

When she said Fox Business, he rolled his eyes super exasperated and just addressed the camera straight down the lens. And people like overtime. Like, overtime is, you know, overtime is the thing that gives you a little bit of breathing room when the company is forced to give you overtime. They don't want to give you overtime. They try to figure out ways to either cheat you out of it or to have enough people on staff that they don't need to get there. So what this does is it would make it easier for workers

to get the overtime that they don't need to get there. So what this does is it would make it easier for workers to get the overtime that they deserve. And if a company can't figure out a way to get everything done that it needs done with its workforce working 32 hours a week, then, all right, you've got to pay them overtime. Well, you just said something interesting, which is what they deserve. And that's where I think actually just we'll be surprised by how quickly, and I could totally be proven wrong on this, it's happened before, but how quickly different corporations adapt after people like Bernie Sanders kind of move the Overton window on this question.

They quote in the Washington Post, they say, studies have shown that workers are either equally or more productive during a four-day work week. One study found that worker productivity rose, with 55% saying their ability at work increased after companies adopted this new schedule. I think that's the important point. There's been a ton of pilot programs of this, and everywhere it's been implemented, the company's been happy and the workers have been happy. So give it a shot. Now, we also wanted to play this fun CNBC clip since we've

already got Fox Business in there. We can't neglect their ally in the class war. Great clip recently from CNBC talking about the presidential election. Let's roll this one. We often say, you know, when you look at between the policies that Biden or Trump would take in that rematch, it's not like we have a Bernie Sanders socialist running. I mean, you don't have some of the worst case scenarios where they're really anti-capitalist. Even Biden, who is favorable higher taxes, is still pro-business generally. He's not trying to say you shouldn't have any business opportunity. So there's definitely pros and cons of each of them. You have Trump Trump who could actually bring a much more tariff-oriented mindset to certainly to China, but you worry about what do you bring tariffs against everything. We're talking about the Fed. Trump has made it very

clear he's anti-palatable. The question is, who would he put in? Some of those people have been actually quite hawkish that he's rumored to talk about. So we'll see how that impacts things. But in general, we'd say it's not going to be a major difference one or the other, despite all the noise. I'm very happy for the squawk box. They are getting the presidential election that they wanted. I like that we had classic Bernie and then classic squawk box, which is that they can't quite decide if Biden is a socialist or a capitalist. It's the same thing with Elizabeth Warren. Whenever Bernie does something like a 32 hour work week, they're reminded that, oh yeah, it could be worse. You always see that play.

Well, let's move on to the Trump arrests that we've been teasing at the bottom of the screen. Yesterday was unfortunate for several people sort of in the broader Trump orbit, one of whom is Peter Navarro. So maybe a familiar face to some folks. We can put this first element up on the screen. This is CNN headline. Ex-Trump aide Peter Navarro begins serving prison sentence after historic contempt prosecution. He is the first former White House official actually to be imprisoned for a contempt of Congress conviction. A lot of people may think immediately of Steve Bannon in that case because he was actually prosecuted and convicted on a pretty similar charge, also from noncompliance in a January

6th committee subpoena. He wasn't in the White House during the period that the House committee was subpoenaing in regards to, but that judge has let Bannon delay serving the four-month prison sentence that he was actually given while his appeals are continuing to play out. While Peter Navarro actually did report to that federal prison in Miami, he spoke for 30 minutes at a gas station yesterday and called it, quote, unprecedented assault on the constitutional separation of powers. The other quote, he said, I am pissed. That is what I am feeling right now. Kind of an interesting case, actually, Ryan. He was subpoenaed for documents and testimony, as CNN says, related to efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

He rebuffed the demands, claiming that Trump had asserted privilege over the requests and arguing the House committee must negotiate with Trump directly to sort out that dispute. Then he was charged in June 2022 with two counts of contempt and was then found guilty on both counts, as people may remember, last September. So that gets to the separation of powers question he's raising. He was saying that Congress had to work that out with Trump, who had asserted power over the documents. Let's put up D2. Now, a lawyer was, this is in a separate case, this was a pro-Trump Michigan attorney, as the Associated Press headline says, who was arrested after a hearing in D.C. over the leaking of Dominion documents. Stephanie Lambert, they write, was arrested by U.S. Marshals after a hearing over possible sanctions against her for disseminating confidential emails from Dominion

voting systems. Lambert obtained the Dominion emails by representing Patrick Byrne, who is, as the AP says, a prominent funder of election conspiracy theorists, being sued by Dominion emails by representing Patrick Byrne, who is, as the AP says, a prominent funder of election conspiracy theorists, being sued by Dominion for defamation. The U.S. Marshals said that Lambert was arrested in, quote, local charges. A Michigan judge earlier this month issued a bench warrant for Lambert after she missed a hearing in her case. She's charged with four felonies for accessing voting machines in a search for evidence of a conspiracy theory against Trump. She acknowledged passing on the documents or passing on the records from Dominion to, quote, law enforcement and attached an affidavit that

included some of the leaked emails, was signed by a county sheriff in southwestern Michigan who's investigated false claims of widespread election fraud from the 2020 election. Goodness, Ryan. Peter Navarro, let's start with him. Interesting case because it's definitely unprecedented, overused word, but actually he is the first former White House official, as we mentioned, to be charged in a case like this one. A breach of what, until Trump,

would have been considered Washington norms to actually jail Peter Navarro over his noncompliance with the subpoena. Especially because the committee that he was subpoenaed to testify in front of no longer is in operation. They've done the report. They put it out there. I'm kind of conflicted. I'm torn on this one because, on the one hand, you look at other countries that are constantly jailing each other's political opponents. And it might be satisfying to the partisans on each side, but I never look at those countries with envy. Like, gee, I wish that that basket case of a system was the basket case of a system that we had. There's something about allowing people to lose with grace that allows for the peaceful transfer of power, which is one reason that I think the Democrats should have immediately come down harder on Trump rather than waiting four years

because he attacked the foundation of democracy, which is the peaceful transfer of power. People take for granted how important and beneficial an innovation that is to humanity. For millennia, the way that power was transferred created wars between rival factions that thousands or millions of people would get caught up in and killed in. Over just who got to have power is something that most of the peasants who were getting killed as a result of this, they weren't going to see any benefit one way or the other. It's just they were just getting caught up in this stuff. On the other hand, you do want Congress to be able to have investigative power. And you do want when somebody is subpoenaed to come. Like if you don't want to testify to me, just plead the Fifth Amendment.

Like that's why the Fifth Amendment exists. But showing actual contempt, and that's what it is. It's like, you've got a subpoena. I'm not showing up. I think it's illegitimate. I have contempt for this subpoena. Undermines the ability of Congress to then investigate. So I'd say to, you know, people who are, you know, the megatypes out there, like, what, you know, what if you want to investigate Hunter Biden? And Hunter Biden just says, no. Yeah, I'm not showing up. Like, should that be okay? Is that fine? Or ought you to respect subpoenas? The Stephanie Lambert case is interesting in this context, too, because we're in this one-up doom spiral of norm breaking. And I think that's

really relevant in the January 6th stuff. But the January 6th committee stuff, one of the reasons Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon ignored these subpoenas because they always saw the January 6th committee as illegitimate from the beginning. Nancy Pelosi refused to seek Kevin McCarthy's choices for committee members and then proceeded to tout the committee as a bipartisan one because Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger were on it. And the media basically gave her a pass to do that as well and continuously referred to it as a bipartisan committee. It's true it's bipartisan, although technically true it was bipartisan, although again, she refused to seat, as is the

norm, the picks by the Speaker or by Kevin McCarthy at the time, not the Speaker of the House yet, I don't believe. But that's why Bannon and Navarro refused. And the January 6th committee's hearings were, again, produced by a former ABC guy and very much not designed to obtain the truth, but to obtain what one side of the narrative determines is the truth. There weren't a lot of cross-examinations of people like Cassidy Hutchinson, who now appears very clearly to have spewed mistruths. Right, they were making a cool documentary. Exactly. True crime. Exactly. It was true crime, and almost explicitly, intentionally true crime made for TV

documentary. So that's where this comes from. And we're about to have the same thing happen with elections. I don't know if you saw this. Katie Porter apologized to the pod bros, the pods of America bros for using the word. Yeah, rigged. But then she argued that because it took away from her point, which is that it is rigged, which was not and not not rigged in the sense that election officials aren't counting the votes accurately. That's what she was saying. Right. And AOC recently talked about essentially how corporations buy elections and the contention.

And Trump did not make this point elegantly. He did not make this point well at all. And he made different points. He flirted way too much with the Dominion voting stuff. But Trump allies have been very clearly making the point that Mark Zuckerberg basically bought the 2020 election. Mark Zuckerberg and some other billionaires basically bought the 2020 election per Molly Ball's Time article about how a cabal of well-funded elites. How they subsidized like some absentee voting and stuff like that. Right. So they poured a bunch of money into Dem districts.

And again, that's not the definition of rigged that everybody uses. A lot of people use the definition to mean dominion stuff, which is absolutely a conspiracy theory and insane, ridiculous nonsense, and it is not true. But it is kind of getting to this point where it's terrifying, as you said before, when you look at other countries

that are constantly jailing political opponents and constantly having elections that people aren't comfortable with, that people question and don't have faith in. We took that for granted for a really long time. And we're in a doomsday right now where public faith in elections, I only see it eroding over time, not going back in a better direction. Stephanie Lambert's defense is kind of funny. She argues, so she basically is getting locked up for getting access to Dominion emails under an NDA and under the secrecy of a lawsuit that she's involved in. And then leaking those, you know, breaking the NDA and leaking those. What she says is that she discovered evidence of a crime that Dominion committed. And her argument was, if she found a severed head in discovery, that of course,

she would have to then call the authorities and say, hey, there's a severed head here in this evidence box and doesn't appear that anybody has told anybody about it. So, okay. You know what? Fair enough. I think that that particular example would, in fact, require her to go to law enforcement and break her NDA. Absolutely. So her claim and her analogy then rests on whether she can prove that what the emails that she discovered related to Dominion prove a crime. And it has been established at this point that it did not, that that's not, that that's not where the quote unquote rigging would have happened. Yeah, absolutely. Let's move on to Texas. Big news. Actually, in a story that was big news yesterday,

there was continuous big news when the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals weighed in. So let's start with E1. This is a tear sheet from NBC News. Supreme Court allows Texas to enforce immigration law. That law in question is SB4, which stands for Senate Bill 4. It allows Texas, basically, this is a new law. it gives local police the power to arrest migrants. The three liberal justices dissented in this case. They rejected an emergency request by the Biden administration that said states do not have authority to legislate on immigration. It is solely a federal government issue. That's also what was actually at issue in a case that we talked about just a few weeks ago of the enforcement of border laws. Texas is trying to put up different types of barriers

in the Rio Grande, in sections of the border. That is really similar. It's basically a clash over federalism and state versus federal powers. This is really similar. The law, as NBC News said in that first tear sheet, can go into effect while litigation continues in lower courts. It could still be blocked at a later date. Well, funny enough, Ryan, after Ken Paxton, we can put E2 up on the screen. He's the attorney general of Texas. He said, huge win. Texas has defeated the Biden administration in ACLU's emergency motions at the Supreme Court. Our immigration law, SB4, is now in effect. As always, it's my honor to defend Texas and its sovereignty and to lead us to victory in court.

Well, that victory was short-lived. We could put the next tear sheet up on the screen. This is E3, because then the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals weighed in to put that immigration law back on hold. There are arguments in court on this law actually today, Ryan. So it's an evolving situation and reminds me a lot of what happened in Arizona with then Governor Jan Brewer when she passed, I think it was called SB 1070. I think this was back around like 2011 during the Obama administration. These questions over state powers, federal powers, when it comes to enforcing immigration laws at the time of the Obama-Biden administration and now the Biden-Harris administration maintains basically that states cannot take these actions to crack down on illegal immigration. And that's again at issue here in the SB4 controversy.

Yeah. And so Mexico responded to this ruling from the Supreme Court yesterday by saying that they're going to enter a friend of the court memo. And they also said publicly, we're not dealing with Texas as a sovereign government. Like, Texas is not negotiating with Mexico as a country like just like Mexican states would not be able to negotiate with the United States and so they said they will not coordinate with Texas on deportations and and otherwise they're like get out of here like our partner and Mexico said our partner that we deal with is the United States of America. We're not doing immigration with every individual state.

It raises questions over like how Texas plans to enforce this, how Texas is going to go about figuring out who it believes is in the country legally or illegally? Is Texas going to create its own laws around this issue? Are they going to actually respect American laws? Like if somebody has a deferral of prosecution from some type of parole situation with the federal government, does Texas honor that? Does Texas say that anybody with a green card doesn't count? Does Texas only allow for full-on citizens to count? Or what if Texas decides that actually naturalized citizens don't count and only kind of native-born citizens count? What would stop Texas from passing laws to that effect

if they can just do their own immigration policy? And those are the reasons, for instance, that the three liberal Supreme Court justices said that this would just create complete and total chaos if it was allowed to take effect, and which is why they argued that it should be stayed on an emergency basis. The fact that the Fifth Circuit, which is made up of strong conservatives, as you would generously call them, kooks as I would call them, also said that this has to be stayed

pending, these arguments, goes to how huge a kind of break that this would represent. Because what if New York decides to start doing its own immigration law as well? Sanctuary cities are exactly this. Well, sanctuary cities are the opposite, which are saying, we're not touching immigration law. Well, it's saying that we're not allowing you to enforce it, right? Well, I mean, that we're not allowing you to enforce it, right? Well, I mean, if they can't stop, they cannot actually stop like a raid from happening in their city. What they can do is they can say, if we arrest somebody, we are not doing your immigration work for you.

We're not going to check their immigration status and we're not going to turn them over if we discover. But it doesn't actually stop immigration authorities from like going into, say, Philadelphia. Sure, but if illegal immigration is a crime, they're not enforcing laws against the crime. That's part of the sanctuaries. Right, but states generally enforce state laws and not federal laws. Sure, sure, sure, sure. But I mean, there are plenty of state statutes that are violated by people, whatever it is, fake Social Security cards, whatever. And the sanctuary says we're not complying with immigration authorities.

And I think it's interesting because actually to this point, the Constitution is not clear on this question. And Ken Paxton, in his statement after the Supreme Court initially ruled, said the Constitution is clear. Texas has the sovereign authority to defend its borders from cartels, etc. And this is where Texas Republicans and Republicans in general favor the invasion language because they think that makes the constitutional powers to enforce immigration more clear. Now, I don't blame Texas for doing what it did at all. We probably disagree on that. We definitely disagree on that. But at the same time, I actually do not think the Constitution is clear on this question

whatsoever, which is why you have this ping-ponging back and forth in the court. And the other thing that's probably worth mentioning is this flood of people that have come into the country over the course of the Biden administration is not the same as what's happened before, where you have people who are actually illegally crossing the Rio Grande and then sneaking into different parts of America. That's still happening. But I don't know how much this law even affects what's happened over the last couple of years, because so many people right now are here on temporary humanitarian parole. And that's basically Republicans and my own entire objection to what Joe Biden has done is that it's created the system of mass humanitarian parole in the hundreds and hundreds of thousands a year. And so if you're here on humanitarian parole, you're not getting deported by Texas police or anyone. So what Texas would have to do is then go find people who've actually been in Texas for like 10 years but are undocumented and don't have that paperwork protection.

And then they wrote into the law that you can't arrest people, what, in hospitals, schools, and churches, but they can go everywhere else and try to. And then how do they guess? Like are they just papeles? They're just asking people for papers like on the streets of San Antonio or Austin? You set up, and then you- And that was Arizona. It was at traffic stops, if you remember.

Right, yeah, right. So then, exactly, yes. And so then do you have Texas Rangers setting up checkpoints like in cities throughout Texas so that everyone who's walking down this particular street has to go through this checkpoint. So all the people who are like cheering this, like you're potentially opening the door

for a papers please society. And okay, now they're asking for immigration papers. If I really want to pander to the right, what if they start asking for vaccine passports? Vaccine papers, right. Blue versus red states, right. Yeah. Does that sound cool? Like checkpoints where you have to not just have your immigration papers in order, but all your other papers. You have to be up to date on all of their, you know, you can't have any back taxes paid, no liens against your house because, your house because you didn't pay your water bill. Gun permits.

Yeah, pat you down. Do you have a gun? Do you have a gun permit? Yeah, no, I mean, I think it goes back to what we were talking about in the block about Trump arrests being on the cusp of careening down the slippery slope, oligarchical doom spiral, where everyone in power is just constantly one-upping each other in response to what they perceive as a norm breach. Well, we're going to just keep breaching norms until we get to that point. Now, I genuinely, again, I don't think the Constitution is clear. I think Texas is in a very real dilemma where the Biden

administration's policy has radically transformed Texas, has created in those border cities serious safety concerns, serious public health concerns, serious welfare concerns. And like, I mean, the literal welfare of these communities, like El Paso, where you have people in tragic circumstances, sleeping on the streets in dirty conditions, not enough to eat, you know, these uncertain futures. And it's a real problem for Texas. And Texas should be able to try to take steps to disincentivize people from coming into the state, if that's the will of the voters and the Republican representatives. I mean, small R Republican representatives. I do think it is, there's a substantive question here. I think the Constitution doesn't have an obvious

solution, which is why this stuff ping pongs through the courts and why, again, basically, you can't do anything in Congress because we are an oligarchy. There's no way to get around the fact that Congress should be acting in these cases. And there's just no way for, you know, you have the bill, H.R. 2, that Republicans got to give at some point, though, right? You'd think, although under Biden, we're up to several millions, just conservative estimates around four million people. And if that's not what's going to give, I mean, I'm still shocked that Republicans didn't take all of the authorities that Democrats were ready to hand to the executive when it came to immigration, which then a Stephen

Miller type in the Trump administration could have ripped wide open and done extraordinary amounts of damage if he wanted to. But for political reasons, they said no, because it's not enough and they didn't want to give Democrats a win. Well, Trump was willing to negotiate with Pelosi on DACA. I mean, that's one of the... Back in the day. Yeah, back in the day. He was, and obviously that got stopped, because probably people like Stephen Miller were so upset that Trump even flirted with that, but yeah. Yeah. So, want to talk deep state? so when talk deep state let's start deep say so New York Times has deep state trending by with it with a very

interestingly chosen really bizarre kind of decision to make this like a six or seven minute opinion video by the opinion page there's not so it's not the reporters over at the Times would want me to reiterate over and over that this was the opinion side of the New York Times that did this, not the kind of news reporting side, because I'm sure they're like, oh my goodness, what is this? So we're not going to play the video. This is their copyrighted material. We'll let you go over and check it out over at the New York Times. But essentially, it flirts with being satirical at times. It comes in with this heavy tone that they're going to investigate the Trump administration's claims

that a deep state has really kind of taken over the government and they go to the EPA and talk to somebody who is in charge of water quality. They go to somebody in NASA. We can move off the element now if you want. They go to somebody who created basically this program that showed that you can kind of hit an asteroid or a meteor and send it off course, which anybody who has seen Don't Look Up can say, you know what? Forget the metaphor about climate change.

If we don't want to get hit by an actual comet it'd be nice to study how to like deflect a comet rather than like don't look up spoilers like leave it to the the tech guys you're you're talking about how great sdi was in the 1980s and how much you supported star wars there you go yeah i mean gotta gotta work those gotta work out those lasers so you can target the meteors and save a planet from extinction so basically they talk to a bunch of bureaucrats who are doing like genuinely good work and saying like we have uncovered the deep state. So there's a lot to unpack about this argument. I guess we can just roll through this first. Elon Musk bringing the nuance. They are the mouthpiece of the state, helping to get this thing trending. Though it probably didn't need much help because of how kind of absurd the whole thing was. So we can take it piece by piece.

By the way, that is a man who has how many billions in state subsidies? Who is more deep state than this guy? Yes. He is the deep state. Yes. Elon Musk is the deep state. So it is kind of interesting. That is getting, but although he's starting to surface, like he's so, you know, he's gotten so powerful. He's not even a deep state anymore. So two things. One, to me, the, the deep state that Trump is often referring to is like the CIA

and the national security apparatus that, you know, that he believes correctly kind of tried to undermine his presidency. Like that's really what he means. What his, and I'm curious if you agree with me on this, what his more ideological right-wing allies mean by deep state is actually the EPA and the broader administrative states. That's such an interesting point. That that's the deep state they want to dismantle. I bet if you said to Trump, they're saying the EPA is the deep state,

you'd be like, what are you talking about? I'm sure he's annoyed by the EPA when they get in his way around development projects. But when he's talking deep state, he's talking Russiagate and spying on his campaign and all of those types of things. Right? Like those are like... I think that's a really interesting point.

I was thinking about this yesterday, but I think you put it, I wasn't thinking about it in the way that you put it, which I think was really well done because there's the deep state that is sort of the Schedule F targets. People like Ron DeSantis, Schedule F would basically allow the president, but I love this proposal. I love Schedule F. I allow the president, but I love this proposal. I love Schedule F. I think it's great. And it's in the New York Times video. They warn about Schedule F, which would, what, allow, basically allow the administration to root out a bunch of civil servants without kind of the kind of worker protections that have been built up over time.

And the idea in conservative circles is that basically at vast bureaucratic institutions, like the EPA, for example, any given president really doesn't have control over his own executive agencies like the EPA actually thanks to Richard Nixon falls under executive powers meaning you are the one the president is the one who's technically in charge of these bureaus they say with the vast growth that some of these organizations Department of Labor, they are not really under the president's executive purview, constitutional purview, because they're so powerful on their own. This is being litigated in the Chevron case that's going through the Supreme Court right now,

which will be huge news when it's decided around June. But basically, executive powers is the question of Schedule F. And so yes, when some people say deep state, I think they do really mean things like the EPA, whatever. When I say it, I typically only mean the national security apparatus. But I think the word, to your point, has been used interchangeably, which allowed the New York Times to sort of construct this giant straw man about how, gosh, what is the quote from this video that's so good? There's one quote that I particularly love from the video about how, you're right, it is kind of like, it's kind of tongue-in-cheek and then also kind of not tongue-in-cheek. You know, like they tried to, they tried to like sort of be very clever about it. While you're looking for it, I'll make the point that I think that what a lot of Trump's allies are doing

is weaponizing his and his supporters' hostility to the national security deep state in their unrelated attack on the rest of the government. Their real goal is to get rid of the EPA and the NLRB and Department of Labor, Department of Education. They want to get rid of it. They've always wanted to get rid of all this CFPB. Whereas most of, I think, Trump's base, like the CFPB, like if you tell them what the CFPB does, it's like the place that you can go to complain if you get ripped off by a corporation.

And they're going to like, they've paid back billions of dollars to Americans and go after fraud, you know, engaged in by corporations. Or the FTC breaking up monopolies and stopping mergers that would be harmful to consumers, workers, environment, et cetera. Like most of Trump's base, I bet it's like, no, that's a good thing. Jelliclee and other kind of MAGA senators. New right people. New right folks are totally into that element. But the kind of corporate wing is not at all into what Lena Kahn is up to and would love to kind of make her collateral damage of an attack on the deep state.

Yeah, it's interesting. Quote, unquote, deep state in the national security sense. Yeah, I mean, again, like I'm hardly a libertarian or part of the corporate wing of the conservative sphere, but I think there's this argument, I actually wrote a piece a couple years ago called something like the war on energy is part of the culture war, something like that that i don't remember exactly what the headline was but

basically from a conservative perspective the epa uh various regulations that come out of the epa which is actually what's on the docket in the chevron case what's at issue in the chevron case that's going through the supreme courts right now about how these agencies can act on their own versus uh you know, through various other exercises of constitutional power, whether it's from Congress or the President of the United States. That's sort of what you have is unelected people in Washington, D.C. through some of these agencies making decisions that should be made on a state or local level or should

be made by the president themselves or under the authority of the president themselves. And technically or at the under the authority of the president themselves and technically they are acting under the authority of the president themselves but the the question of whether that power has become overly broad is a very real one and it does you know the there are corporations that really love these executive agencies because they feel like they have the revolving door power and can bend them to their will and so if you disempower the consolidate some of them, like I wouldn't fully get rid of the Department of Education, which has been a goal of the conservative movement for many, many years. But dramatically shrink it down. I think that would give teachers unions less power.

It certainly would give teachers unions less power, but it would empower them more on the local level. So anyway, all that is to say, the conflation is a real problem for the right because there are obviously consensus points between people like you and me on the national security deep state. Those are not consensus points at all on the broader executive power question. And there's an interesting unchallenged assumption in the New York Times video

where they keep saying that these government people are doing this good work for you. Trump wants them to work for him. Yeah. But the unchallenged assumption there is that the president doesn't work for the people. Like, you actually, don't you want the bureaucrats to work for the president? Right. Now, for the New York Times, they don't if the president is Trump. And during, you know, 2017, you had all of these cases of bureaucrats, and I cheered them on.

Yeah. Undermining Trump and, like, pursuing, because that's a political struggle. 100%. But, you know, you'd have these social media accounts that would like go rogue against the Trump administration. But if you think about it from a shoe on the other foot perspective, let's say a Bernie Sanders, you know, pre-Gaza gets elected president and he has an agenda, radical agenda that he wants to accomplish. And a bunch of the bureaucrats don't like his agenda and work to sabotage it, I would be outraged. Like, no, I didn't elect you. I elected Bernie to implement this agenda, implement his agenda. So the Times has an interesting kind of contradiction there that

they need to work out. Yeah, their quote is, when we hear deep state, instead of recoiling, we should rally. We should think about the workers otherwise known as our public servants, that everyday superheroes who wake up ready to dedicate their careers and their lives to serving us. These are the Americans we employ. Even though their work is often invisible, it makes their lives better. But if Donald Trump is reelected in an act scheduled F, that could change. He would have the power to eviscerate the so-called deep state and replace our public servants with people who work for him, us, of course from the perspective of like the real left

Yes, the revolving door at the EPA between ExxonMobil is a very real thing Do they really work for us or do they work for ExxonMobil their future employees now something like some of these agencies? Are are you know doing great work like that like the FTC that we mentioned. But if I had one criticism editorially, kind of stylistically of the Times video, it mocks the entire idea. And so you're never going, like it was clearly intended for people that already agree with them to buck up their take. And look how ridiculous these people are that don't understand that NASA does great work and the EPA does great work. And the Department of Labor, that's the other one they mentioned, Department of Labor, rescuing 13-year-olds from working in slaughterhouses.

Although it's not doing a great job of that either all right which means that we need to fund them more not do more not do less or it means we need to cut down the revolving door problem of industry lobbying the Department of Labor behind closed doors but it's it's there's there's no persuasion attempt in the video at all it just it just mocks the the entire notion. And so, which, okay, that's their editorial choice if they don't want to try to persuade. And maybe the Times has just given up on trying to reach an alternative audience that doesn't already agree with them. But that would be a shame because of how hegemonic they are, at least over mainstream media.

Well, Brian, you have a great story that you reported out over at The Intercept about Honduras. Oh, this is a fun one. Tell us what the hell is going on. So we can put this one up on the screen here. So the story went up last night over at The Intercept. And it's a complicated but not that complicated story. So if you're just listening, the headline on this one is Honduras ratchets up battle with crypto libertarian investors,

rejects World Bank court. The sub headline, after the Honduran president repealed a law granting unfettered authority to outside investors, Crypto Quistadors took the dispute to a World Bank arbitration court. I'm pleased with myself for CryptoKistadors took the dispute to a World Bank arbitration court. I'm pleased with myself for CryptoKistadors. I love it. I think that's a good one. Let's start with the initial irony that these are crypto libertarians who are using

basically one of the biggest examples of a globalist institution, which would be the World Bank. They're supposed to hate the World Bank. Instead, they're using the World Bank. Ron Paul raged against the World Bank for years. And now these crypto bros are trying to use the World Bank to force Honduras to do fill-in-the-blank. I'll explain what they're doing here. So for this, you have to back up to 2009 you could start.

So Manuel Zelaya is the president at the time of Honduras, the left-leaning president who starts to try to reform the Constitution or try to challenge the limits on running for another term. The military overthrows him in a coup, which was supported by the United States. It does not appear that it was orchestrated by the United States. Maybe we'll learn more. There are a lot of ties between the coup plotters and United States officials. Regardless, Hillary Clinton, a State Department, like immediately is pleased by the coup and supports kind of a new person taking power after Zelaya is ousted.

There are then kind of bogus, rough elections that are held that see Porfirio Lobo Sosa, right-wing president, take power in Honduras. He immediately moves to undo all of the worker protections and the land reform and the other kind of left-wing social policy that Zelaya was putting into place. At the same time, the head of the National Congress, Juan Orlando Hernandez, puts forward legislation that will carve out up to a third of Honduras for this radical libertarian idea, which is that you can just have this. Like this American corporation, you can have this territory, and it's called a ZEED, and you can create your own laws.

You will be a sovereign government. You can create a city. You can pretend that you are an actual government and that we will honor you as a government. And they do all sorts of like insane things like based on the amount of property you own is how many votes you get in the election. It's like how libertarian, you know, you can get rid of pedophilia laws. Like it's like a libertarian kind of fever dream. They take Bitcoin as kind of legal tender in these areas. Did you watch Anarchapulco, by the way, on HBO? It was a great documentary about an attempt at basically a version of the CIA. They're trying to do this all over the world, but Honduras is one place that they picked on. It did not end well, by the way, in Anarchapulco.

I'm surprised. I'm surprised it didn't end well. And so the Supreme Court of Honduras at the time says, you can't do this. This is unconstitutional. Hernandez, as the president of Congress, sacks a bunch of Supreme Court justices, puts in new Supreme Court justices, and amends the Constitution and says, and the new justices are like, actually, oh, this is totally fine. You can do this. Hernandez then takes power after Lobososa implements these Z-laws. Why are we talking about Hernandez and Lobososa? His brother, Tony Hernandez, who's a congressman, was a well-known narco-trafficker, like who prosecutors, US federal prosecutors later said was moving monumental amounts of cocaine.

And also that he was funding the campaigns of the past two presidents, his brother and the one before him. Now remember that Zelaya was overthrown in 2009, ostensibly because he was trying to extend to a second term. Well, lo and behold, all of a sudden, the new Supreme Court that Hernandez put into place doesn't have problems with new terms anymore. And so in 2017, he runs for re-election, funded by narco-traffickers, again, through incredible irregularities, just ridiculous, ridiculously fraudulent election, he claims victory and the Trump administration quickly recognizes him and says, this is our man. Hernandez is president, going to continue to be. This is while America

knows that he's deeply tied at the hip with drug traffickers. So he finally leaves office in 2021. And by then he's lost usefulness to the United States. So along with his brother, the president is himself arrested and indicted. And earlier this month, convicted of being a narco trafficker. So the Hernandez brothers are currently sitting in American prisons. Meanwhile, Xiomara Castro, who is the wife of Zelaya, wins in the 2021 presidential election legitimately on kind of a left-wing platform that she's going to fight back against this narco-corruption. She's going to roll

back these kind of right-wing policies, and she's going to bring in Zelaya's agenda of land reform, of worker rights. And she promises that she's going to kick these crypto bros out of the country, that this is obscene. We're not turning our country over to these guys. So she very quickly passes through the National Congress a repeal of these laws. If there was sovereignty and democracy in Honduras, if that's what we respected, that would be the end of it. Be like, hey, yeah, your coup government handed over a bunch of the country to you, but now your coup government is in prison, a federal prison in the U.S., so you lose. Pack up and go home. No, of course that's not how it goes. set up this obscure court that is part of this theme that developed over the last few

decades called basically investor settlement dispute resolutions. So that you take sovereignty out of the question and you have like the World Bank or the WTO or some other global financial institution sets up an arbitration court, and if a corporation has a problem with a government, they take it to that court rather than having to go through, you know, Honduran courts. The idea being that these governments are so corrupt they can't be trusted, but the actual idea being that the corporations can corrupt the global financial institutions and win judgments there, that they can then get an American court to enforce, and then they can start seizing Honduran property all over the world. So the response from Xiomara

Castro was, you know what? We're leaving this World Bank court. We're not playing this game. We're out of here. And so she did that last week. I spoke to the commissioner that she has appointed to oppose these crypto bros. He said that the World Bank court has acceded to its request to leave. I reached out to the crypto folks for comment. They said it's unconstitutional. She can't just walk away from this court. The Honduran government tells me, no, that's not at all what the policy is. You know, it takes Congress to reach a treaty, but you can walk away from this court. Like,

the treaty allows a mechanism for you to walk away. What I think will still happen is they'll continue this case. It might even win an arbitration ruling, you know, in absentia. And then they'll start enforcing This judgment against Honduran assets all over the world Exacerbating the problem for you know, the economic problems for Honduras the crypto dudes are suing for 11 billion dollars I think that you can google this but in a Honduran national government's annual budget is something like 7 billion The GDP of Honduras is like $30 billion. The context, of course, is that this has led to a surge in migrants coming to the northern border as the narco-traffickers took control in the wake of this kind of U.S.-supported coup

and attempt to turn it into some libertarian paradise. This is such an incredible story. The narcos, by the way, that have been tried in court by the U.S., part of their defense has been that they were on really friendly terms with the U.S. government. This is one of the paragraphs I love in your story. The U.S. had no evident problem with that freewheeling narco state while Hernandez was in office and remained useful. Yet once Castro took power in a backlash to the U.S.-fueled corruption, the United States suddenly rediscovered its respect for the rule of law and the sanctity of contracts with U.S. investors. Unfortunately, probably going to see something similar play out in Haiti in the days and weeks to come. This is a very interesting story in the ongoing saga of the

marriage between crypto and power. It's similar to kind of how the internet started, not even how the internet started, but how the internet kind of took off in the 90s and the aughts as, you know, the sort of jungle, the wild, wild west in a great way. A lot of Americans saw this as like the frontier, and then quickly it was captured by powerful interests. Silicon Valley used to see themselves as the cowboys, and some of them still do, like Jeff Bezos in his dumb cowboy hat. But you have seen the marriage between people like Elon Musk, as we were talking about earlier,

talking about how the New York Times is the mouthpiece of the state, when Elon Musk is tied at the hip to the state. Right, right. It's happening with crypto. Freedom requires an authoritarian government, it turns out. So now crypto, and again, Ron Paul. Like, unaccountable. Ron Paul was right about the World Bank, by the way.

I think we've talked about that before. But the marriage of crypto and power, the marriage of crypto and the World Bank, that seems to be a pretty interesting statement on the direction of crypto. It sure is. And I can wrap by saying that going to comment for this company, Prospera, which is the one that is suing for $11 billion, was one of the more interesting kind of exchanges I've had. So I reached out to the communications department for the company, and they wrote back, and I can send these to producers and we can put them up. They wrote back and said, you'll be hearing from the office of the technical secretary. And I'm like, oh, so they're really going with this whole we're a government thing. And so then I hear from Jorge Colindres.

And his signature says, technical secretary, Republic of Honduras. But then under it, it says. Republic of Honduras. Yeah, Republic of Honduras. But then under it, it says... Republic of Honduras. Yeah, Republic of Honduras. Then underneath it says manager, general service provider. Like this interesting blend of public and private. And he says, you know, dear Ryan Attach, you will find my office's statement on the unconstitutional withdrawal from ICSID by the Honduran government and then attaches this letter which has, I'll give this to producers too, it's got seals on it,

it's got like government signatures, it really like is saying that it is a government and they say in the beginning of the statement, Prospera Z is a local government and special economic zone of the Republic of Honduras. It is governed by the technical secretary, a Honduran citizen by birth, appointed by the government of Honduras and empowered by Article 329 of the Honduran Constitution and the Z organic law to oversee the implementation of new policies and rules designed to foster economic development, facilitate job creation, attract national and foreign direct investment, and safeguard the fundamental rights of the workers and residents

of this special jurisdiction. So like they're all in on the idea that like they are an actual government that has been created by the Honduran government and that the Honduran government cannot undo the creation of that government. You know what special economic zone sounds like to me is like United Fruit owning the railroads. Yeah, it's so dystopian. The echoes are really, really strong here and then you have the United States suddenly rediscovering the rule of law because they want to protect corporate interests if that's what ends up happening um and that it it's echoes of the past are are very strong in this case special economic

zone what's funny though is then i also got a second reply um so the the comms comms folks sent me off to the government quote government but then somebody else from the corporation also because i sent it to a big channel, somebody else got it and they're like, I'm busy, I can't respond now, but, and sent like a 500 word response, which was basically saying, Honduras is basically in league with like,

Cuba and Venezuela and we're fighting for freedom. So we got, yeah. I mean, that's also just all of these echoes of the past in this case study where it's like I don't want to sneer at people, whether they're in America or Honduras or people who really love Bukele who had a failed crypto experiment. But there are good reasons that people sort of, and they probably would find common ground with the two of us on a lot of issues like hardcore libertarians that really believe in The vision of crypto and the the mission of crypto. I don't want to come across as sneering about that and similar in the past

I mean there are people who yeah, and this is controversial stuff within the crypto world Like a lot of crypto people are like this is this is crazy like you Tried to do your floating cities and realized that that wasn't going to work. So now you're just going to like third world countries and trying to just take territory there. Yep. And a lot of like really great visions

get derailed by billionaires, derailed by billionaires and captured by their interests. And they end up ruining people with good intentions lives in the process. All right. I just sent Mac the emails. Perfect. So if you're watching this, you probably saw them. I haven't seen them yet. I look forward. I'll have to watch to see the emails.

Ryan, this has been another fun edition of CounterPoints. Always a good time here. We got to talk about Honduras. We got to watch you at the State Department. Yeah. And there's a hearing this afternoon or this morning that I'm headed to now where the Assistant Secretary Don Lew is going to be solo testifying at the House. He's the State Department official who basically nudged Imran Khan out of power back in 2022. So it'll be interesting to see if he gets questions about that or the U.S.'s non-response to the brazenly stolen election of February 8th. And just a reminder to everybody that if this is going near spam or to prevent it from going near spam inbox, add us to your contacts. That way you are going to get the email every day.

That's actually happened to me before. I am a premium subscriber. Sometimes it hits the spam inbox and you can prevent that by just adding us to your contacts. Go to BreakingPoints.com to become a premium subscriber. You get the whole show right to your inbox. And I will say, Ryan, I think we can officially tease that we're getting really close

to a Friday show. But only if you guys do a couple more subscriptions. Yeah. Flood us with subscriptions today. Then we'll do a Friday show. Then we'll take them to Crystal and Sager and say, look, the people are clamoring for Counterpoint Friday. But not yet. So for now, we'll see you next Wednesday. Sounds good. See you guys next Wednesday. This is an iHeart Podcast.