Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 3/9/23: Capitol Police's Jan 6th Nonsense Defense, Tucker Trump Texts, Budget Standoff, Gov Demands Elon Contacts, Chomsky ChatGPT, Fauci Lab Leak, CDC Director on Gain of Function, Tucker's Ukraine Test, Stock Buybacks, Ken Roth on Netanyahu Power Grab

Episode Date: March 9, 2023

Krystal and Saagar discuss the Capitol Police's defense of new footage release on Jan 6th showing them escorting the Q-Anon Shaman, texts from Tucker Carloson reveal his hatred for Trump, Biden's Budget hits standoff as the Debt Default looms, Biden Gov demands Elon Musk provide internal communications and Journalist's names, Noam Chomsky delivers a warning about the value of ChatGPT and AI intelligence at large, Fauci is confronted on tv about Lab Leak findings, Former CDC director stuns when asked about Gain of Function, Saagar looks into Tucker testing Trump and Desantis on the Ukraine war, Krystal looks into how stock buybacks ruined the economy, and Ken Roth (@KenRoth) joins us to talk about protests in Israel over Benjamin Netanyahu's power grab.To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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What are you waiting for? Become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Good morning, everybody. Happy Thursday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed, we do. Lots of interesting stories this morning. We have a blowback on Capitol Hill from Republicans about that release of January 6 tapes on Tucker Carlson's show.

We also have some new text messages. Tucker explaining exactly how he feels about Donald Trump in reality. Very different from the picture he puts forward on his show. So we'll break that down for you. New budget battles as the debt ceiling deadline comes closer and closer. Biden putting out his budget plans. House Republicans starting to come coalesce around their package of cuts that they are trying to demand. So we've got all of that for you.

We also have new shots fired between Elon Musk at Twitter and the FTC. They are demanding all sorts of information, including the journalists and information about the journalists he interacted with and what exactly they had access to. Noam Chomsky out with a new op-ed warning about AI and chat GPT. And we also have a look at the House hearings on COVID and what was said there. But Sagar, first, we have a big announcement. Big announcement here that we have been working on

for literally years now at this point. So we will now have the full show video with timestamps on our Spotify Premium podcast. So what that means is our premium subscribers who have connected the full show, their ability to watch it to their Spotify account, you no longer can just listen to it. You can also watch it inside of the Spotify app as you can with many podcasts. So we've been working on that for a long time. Technologically, it was actually, it's far more difficult than it might sound to actually pull

off. Thank you to our friends over at Supercast, at Spotify, and to our team here who has been ground testing it. It looks fantastic. It works fantastic. So enjoy. And now you can also listen at 3.5 speed. Yes, indeed. You can listen at whatever speed you desire. And it looks, I have to say, it looks really great. It looks really nice on the phone.

And Griffin was just showing us this morning, it actually has like the time codes. That's right. So you can easily sort of jump around. And if there are certain segments you want to listen to and other things you want to skip past, it it easy to do that so really excited about that if you aren't a premium subscriber go ahead and become one so that you can have access to that as well because it is very cool feature it's an awesome thing all right let's start with fox news

so we have been covering quite a bit here i know emily did as well the release of the tucker carlson footage from january 6th it's actually kicked up quite a storm here in Washington. A lot of GOP senators actually getting very upset with Fox and Tucker specifically. Editorial coverage of that all converging around the singular idea that the Capitol Police did nothing wrong on January 6th. Mitch McConnell underscoring that. Let's take a listen. ...by Speaker McCarthy to give access to Tucker Carlson on this security program. Let's take a listen. My concern is how it was depicted, which is a different issue. Clearly, the chief of the Capitol Police, in my view, correctly describes what most of us witnessed firsthand on January 6th.

So that's my reaction to it. It was a mistake in my view for Fox News to depict this in a way that's completely at variance with what our chief law enforcement official here at Capitol thinks. This is the interesting thing, Crystal. Everybody's converging around the Capitol Police as if they didn't do anything particularly wrong that day. So let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. The Capitol Police chief letter, I'll read some of it to you in full. He says, quote, a false allegation is that our officers helped the rioters and acted as, quote, tour guides.

This is outrageous and false. The department stands by the officers in the video that was shown last night. I don't have to remind you how outnumbered our officers were on January 6th. Those officers did their best to use de-escalation tactics to try to talk to rioters into getting each other to leave the building. The program conveniently cherry-picked from the calmer moments of the 41,000 hours of the video

and commentary fails to provide context about the chaos and violence. So let's still just have a little bit of a reminder of what exactly that footage showed. It showed Capitol Police officers not, I mean, effectively escorting and just following around the QAnon shaman. And look, Crystal, I think we can sympathize with people who may want to, quote, de-escalate a conflict. That's certainly what I would advise as opposed to violence when you are outnumbered. But there is a fine line between de-escalation and straight up opening doors for someone, including to the floor of the United States Senate. Like that is where I just really have no idea how they can

defend the conduct of these officers for, you could say, hey, you know, one thing, listen, man, you know, it'd be better for you if you just left right now. That's one thing. But there's a whole other thing to literally basically follow somebody around, seven people at one point, one person, crazy person with like a weird sharpened spear. Why would you want to let that person onto the floor of the Senate? And then while they're like, hey, just so you know, like this is a really holy place. And, you know, it was like, what? That's not de-escalation. That's just odd. It's odd behavior. Very odd behavior. If I may be permitted to have a nuanced view on this,

there's two pieces. First of all, you know, a lot of what Tucker showed was like trying to cherry pick the calmest moments from January 6th and present a portrait that is at odds with reality. And so I sympathize with Republican senators and others who are like, this is bullshit. We also, with our own eyes, that parts of this day were extremely violent. A lot of people were injured. There were a lot of scuffles. There was a lot of fighting, all of that stuff. So, you know, don't give us just your sanitized, propaganda-filled version

that accords with the narrative that you have been trying to spin on your program, which, by the way, we'll get to in a moment. You know, he clearly is happy to put lies out on his program that are wildly at odds with what he believes. So that's one piece. The piece, though, that you're honing in on, though, I think the explanation of the Capitol police here, it just makes absolutely no sense.

I mean, de-escalatory tactic. You're leading him around. You're trying to lock doors, like helping him to find the chamber that he wants. How is that a de-escalatory tactic. You're leading him around. You're trying to lock doors, like helping him to find the chamber that he was. How is that a de-escalatory tactic? How is that like talk, trying to talk him out of doing? There is none of that evident on the tape. And right in the wake of January 6th, there was a lot of, I think, very reasonable questions about how the hell this was allowed to happen, about failures of law enforcement on that day, including, by the way, there were media questions, there were political questions, I believe, from both sides of the aisle. And there was an entire investigation

done by the Capitol Police where they put some of their own people on leave because they did not conduct themselves in the way that they would want them to on that day. So even the Capitol Police previously did not agree with this assessment that it was all well and good on that day. And we'll get to some of that in a moment. Let's just put this next piece up on the screen, because this is the part I'm sympathetic to. Here's, they say, GOP senators rebuke Tucker Carlson's narrative that January 6th was largely peaceful. Tillis said it's bullshit. Kramer said just a lie. Graham said I'm not interested in whitewashing January 6th. And Romney said trying to normalize that behavior is dangerous and disgusting. And those pieces I actually am totally sympathetic

to because I do think he overall presented this very like selective whitewashed version of what actually occurred on that day. And I think that's fine. But what I was saying was that, and this is what I put out yesterday, the tell to me in the freakout is that everyone is attacking the editorial position instead of trying to explain the actions of the Capitol Police in escorting the QAnon shaman around the Capitol. And it's like, you can, listen, every, by definition, all editorial coverage of January 6th by any news network is going to be editorial. It is going to be cherry-picked. The Washington Post literally won a Pulitzer Prize by, quote,

cherry-picking the video to be like reconstructing the attack. So did the New York Times. They have these highly produced documentaries. And I think that's fine. So at this point now, it's been over, what, it's been several years. At this point, you can watch any footage to reinforce any narrative that you want to. On this one, let's watch any footage to reinforce any narrative that you want to. On this one, let's take the editorial aside and let's take the footage that we had not seen before and just say, hey, that's pretty weird. What was going on with that? And for some reason, there is just been coalescing around the actions of the Capitol Police when in reality, as you said, in the early days, there was broad recognition that this was a failure of tremendous proportions.

Like I saw Joe Biden staffer or whatever put out a tweet yesterday being like, in my opinion, January 6th was just as bad as 9-11. Let's think about 9-11. Imagine if we did not have the takeaway that the FBI and the CIA had colossally failed at their jobs by allowing 9-11 to happen. You can both venerate first responders and the violence and the victims and also say, hey, structurally, this was a massive screw up. Now, unfortunately, we didn't go full bore in terms of the intelligence community. But in this case, in the very early days, put this up there on the screen, as you alluded to, the Capitol Police suspended six of its officers and investigated dozens more after the Capitol riots.

And as this New York Times report is highlighting, there were several efforts after in the days to talk about how the force was in crisis, about how at one point the gear that they needed, Crystal, was literally on a bus that was somewhere that was locked. They didn't have a rapid response plan. It was one of the greatest intelligence failures of all time. And I think that's why so many people are willing to believe a lot of theories that this was like a full-blown false flag, because you're like, hey, you guys literally had FBI informants planted in the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, probably in the crowd.

At the very least, we know there were some undercover police officers that have been come out and given affidavits in court. How could you possibly not know and have given the Capitol Police a heads up? Secondary, why was there an order given to the Capitol Police a heads up. Secondary, like why was there an order given to the Capitol Police to not necessarily like use the full scope of law enforcement response? And the National Guard, why was the National Guard not on call? Why were they called in, you know, hours later? It was a complete and total mess. Initially, there were actually some questions about this. But then eventually it all came down to, well, they were heroes. You can't question anything.

And oh, by the way, let's give them a ton more money in funding. I mean, the most likely explanation for the failures is incompetence. That's usually the common explanation for things that we have trouble understanding or explaining. I think they just failed in a lot of ways. They failed to prepare. And I'm not just talking about the U.S. Capitol police here are responsible for the response on that day. But I'm talking about, you know, law enforcement, FBI leading up to the events of this day when there was all kinds of intel out there and chatter, public chatter about what they were planning to do on January 6th. I think a very logical explanation is, listen, it's no secret that law enforcement tends to be more right-leaning and they were more sympathetic to the cause.

And so they, in their own minds, downplayed the potential risks of what could happen on January 6th. And, you know, there were a couple of signs of that. First of all, as we said before, there were, and we'll play this in just a second, you know, right afterwards, videos emerged of some of the Capitol Police officers literally opening, appearing to open the barricades for protesters to go through, which fits then with this video of them like shepherding the QAnon shaman around and showing him exactly where he wants to go. One potential explanation is they were ideologically sympathetic and that was a barrier to them effectively doing their job in the way that we would want them to. And there was actually even one Capitol police officer put this up on the screen who was found guilty of obstruction with regards to January 6th case. Basically, what this guy was doing is the day after the attack, I'm reading from this article here, a Facebook friend of this former Capitol Police officer with whom he'd never

exchanged messages before, posted some images on Facebook of himself inside the Capitol during the attack. So he took it on himself, this dude, then to message this guy who he'd never talked to before, but he was friends with on Facebook. And rather than forwarding that information to the authorities, which you might expect someone in law enforcement to do, he instead sent the rioter a private message with advice about how to avoid being caught. He said, quote, I'm a Capitol police officer who agrees with your political stance. Take down the part about being in the building they're currently investigating and everyone, everyone who was in

the building is going to be charged, he wrote, just looking out. So, you know, there are plenty of signs that potentially one explanation here is that they were ideologically sympathetic. And so they failed to prepare in advance, not just the Capitol Police, but the FBI, who we know had infiltrators within some of these groups. They didn't take it seriously. They were too distracted with their other like elaborate designing plots for Gretchen Whitmer and the agent provocateurs and Black Lives Matter protests and all of those things to actually effectively prepare for what was a very dangerous situation. And then on the day of, as we said before, at the time, people were allowed and the Capitol Police themselves were investigating whether their people actually responded in the way that they were supposed to. Now, the reason that this all turned is because I think there were a couple of things that happened. First of all, you know, this was at a time when Democrats were all freaked out about

what defund the police had done to their standing with voters. So they were skittish about like critiquing law enforcement whatsoever. Republicans usually reliably back up law enforcement kind of no matter what, no matter whether they were good, bad, indifferent, honest, lying, whatever. And Democrats decided that the simple narrative that they wanted to go with on January 6th, because they thought it would be the most sympathetic to the American public, is these people were heroes, the Capitol Police officers in every single instance, and the people on the other side are the clear villains. And so they went with that Disney version of events, which obviously obscured some key reasons why the response failed so devastatingly on that day. Yeah. And I think that's a very

important thing to underscore, which is you can see what's his name? Eugene Goodman. Right. He was one of those who escorted the senators. Sure. Absolutely a heroic act. But at the same time, the famous video, let's go and put it up there on the screen. We have Capitol Police officers here literally shown opening the gates for protesters. I mean, there is literally no zero innocent explanation for this. You could see the guy waving people in from the crowd. How can you possibly claim that that wasn't one of the greatest failures of all? I mean, imagine also if these people had been more violent. They could have burned this thing to the ground like 1812.

It's one of those where you initially had a little bit of criticism. Some Republicans were like, hey, Nancy Pelosi, why did you not call in the National Guard? Because you apparently had some level of chain of command, and then everybody just quashed it, and we decided to move on. And then the Jan 6th Committee,

which was supposed to get to the bottom of this type of stuff, just ignored it completely. And of course, here's the worst part. Put this up there. After everything, because of this narrative, the Capitol Police received $2.1 billion in July of 2021 in, quote, emergency funding to avoid furloughs, to pay for overtime, to pay for training. When in reality, on that day, if you have a hundred more police officers, maybe with the proper riot gear, the entire thing goes completely differently. And we are talking here about billions upon billions that have now been given to this incompetent agency, which clearly failed dramatically. Nobody was ever fired at the very top. There was never any real scrutiny. They didn't even have a real commission. Look, there's

a lot to say about the 9-11 commission, but it did at least recommend some changes to the way that intelligence sharing and the way that the US intelligence community would operate with respect to terrorist threats, because we all acknowledge in a bipartisan fashion you're like this is one of the greatest law enforcement and intelligence failures literally of all time so let's try to make sure that we avoid it and unfortunately we also gave them a ton of money and not enough oversight but in this case we didn't even do the oversight we just gave them more money that doesn't make any sense yeah and the the last thing i want to say about this too is um the q anonaman dude, I think his name is what, Jason Chansley, is that it?

Yes. I mean, they clearly, because he was like the most visible symbol of the day, which he, you know, took upon himself. And listen, he's responsible for his own actions and no one here is saying otherwise. However, I do think it's outrageous that they didn't have access to this footage when he was considering mounting a defense. Now, he pled guilty very quickly. Maybe it wouldn't have made a difference, but it could have potentially made a difference in terms of sentencing. And, you know, I try to stand up for people's rights, regardless of whether I agree with them politically or not. And I think it would be really inconsistent if we didn't do so here and say he deserved to have access to this here and say he deserved to have access to

this footage his defense deserved to have access to this footage and potentially things may have gone somewhat different for him there's a lot of other defendants who actually requested uh who the judge denied access to this footage and sentenced them and did not even allow the jury or even their own attorneys to be able to present any of this to try and strike a different deal as you said i mean there's no way you cannot defend that because if that foot i mean listen what did he end up getting four years i think yes i mean if this comes out you know and it went to trial a northern virginia jury probably would have convicted him anyways uh that said you know you have no idea what it could have gone differently so anyway like you said he pled guilty he is a grown man at the end of the day nobody asked him him to take his shirt off, draw weird pentagrams on it and storm the Capitol.

Parade around the Capitol. I'm not saying the man is innocent, but the whole point of trial and especially in our judicial system is to try and innocent. You're innocent before proven guilty and you're supposed to be able to give him the best possible chance at providing a defense. And I don't think it was fair that they withheld it. Anyway, let's go to the next part here inside of the ongoing $1.6 billion lawsuit for Dominion voting systems versus Fox News, of which Fox has a very serious chance of suffering not only just reputational damage now at this point through the discovery process, but they may have to pay and pay big time. So let's go and put this up there on the screen. Interesting exchange between Tucker Carlson, and I believe it's one of his producers. This is on January 4th. He says, quote, we are very, very close to be able to ignore Trump

most nights. I truly cannot wait. I want nothing more. It feels very close. I imagine things will start around mid-February. That's from an unknown, likely somebody who works on the show. He says, quote, I hate him passionately. I blew up at Peter today, Peter Navarro, in frustration. I actually like Peter, but I can't handle much more of this. Put the next one up there on the screen, which I actually found this one to be funnier. He says, Tucker Carlson, it really explains why the left wins so much. They have Mark Elias and lawyers from every other major law firm. We have Lin Wood and Sidney Powell. That's the last four years. We've got a lot to show for it because admitting what a disaster it's been is too tough to digest. He says,

we're all pretending. We've got a lot to show for it. But yeah, there isn't really an upside to Trump. So that's something that he put. You know, I'm curious, Crystal, because I didn't necessarily read it the same way. I think that while Tucker has always played defense for Trump, he has not necessarily defended him. He has always positioned himself. And look, this is more of a content way that a lot of people on Fox are, which is if you don't have someone that you want to 100% defend, what you do is you just attack all of their enemies and you focus on the enemy specifically. And, you know, in private, I know, you know, based on the reporting and all that, what came out from Syria where he basically convinced Trump not to bomb Iran. He was one of the major forces on that. He also part of the reason why he would reserve his fire, from what I understand, was because he maintained a decent relationship with Trump.

And every once in a while, Trump would actually listen to him. For example, COVID, he was one of those people who traveled to Florida and was like, hey, you need to take this seriously. I am not defending him. I'm just saying like, from what I have understood his position, positionality with Trump is that Trump was like a figure who he didn't necessarily like, didn't necessarily want to defend, and so would attack the enemies instead. Because also that makes good ratings whenever you're dealing with the audience. So I'm curious what you think. I mean, I don't doubt that that's what he tells himself, but it's also Cope.

You know, I mean, ultimately, at the end of the day, your position vis-a-vis the audience, especially as like an analyst, an opinion journalist as he is, is to tell them what you really think. And obviously he was not telling them what he really thought and very much misled the audience, if not outright lied to the audience about his actual views of the situation. In that, I don't think he's unique. I mean, there were, you know, a lot of elite Republicans and journalists who had some similar rationale about like, oh, well, if I work in the administration and I do his dirty work for him, then I'll be able to like influence him a little bit. Or, you know, this is what I have to do in order to keep my job, et cetera, et cetera. You know, Tucker's a wealthy guy. He would be fine if his ratings fell. He'd be fine if he was out of a job at Fox. And so I think it's shameful. Like that's the basic deal you make with your audience, that you're going to be straightforward with them.

And so, you know, I think there's always a question in people's minds when they're watching cable news, whether it's Fox or other outlets of like, do these people really believe what they're selling the public? And in this instance and in the instance of a lot of Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, based on some of the texts that came out about them too, the answer is plainly no. I think it's actually a sad tale because it's one of those where that is a perfect illustration of how whenever you want to maintain influence inside of the system, many times you really can't say exactly what you think. And the reason, as you said, I mean, there's no question like, look, Fox could fire him tomorrow

and he'd have one of the most popular podcasts of all time. I have no doubt about that whatsoever. I think it would be completely fine in an independent media environment. As you said, I don't think he particularly cares even about money at this point. So what is the point of the game? And I mean, most of them like the influence

that Fox gives them to influence policy, to have their actual opinions, influence the political process, the speaker's race, Ukraine, COVID, I laid out some of those examples. But unfortunately, and one of the reasons that you and I decided to do this, and increasingly, the more that we have done this, have probably the least amount, not even influence, but even contact with the system,

is that when you say what you think, that hurts you inside of the system. Because they don't even appreciate it. They actively punish people. And so it's difficult. It really is. It's like when you're inside of this it is a game in which saying you know i look i all i always try to tell people exactly what i think and it has cost me a lot personal relationships professional relationships and all

that you know with the knowledge i think that obviously you're going to hold me accountable but also you know many people watching this show are they they would i think they would know if you're pulling your punches and i think that's that that's what the unfortunate part of it. Yeah. Well, what you see zooming out from Tucker and looking at the entirety of the Fox text message revelations, which are pretty devastating to them. I mean, any like a reasonable person looking at that would be like, OK, you all are completely manipulative, like just selling us what we want to hear. They they are suffering deeply from audience capture. And, you know, the road to hell is paved with this sort of rationalization of like, well, I got to back

them up on this thing because then I'll maintain my influence. I got to go along with this other thing because I'll maintain my influence. And that's never been more clear than with a figure like Trump, who's just going to keep pushing and pushing and pushing and pushing the envelope until you find yourself like, you know, pretending that January 6th was actually totally fine or pretending like going along with Stop the Steal when you privately are like, Sidney Powell's insane and she's a lunatic and this is all complete nonsense. Like he's just going to keep pushing you to a more and more ridiculous spot. But since you justified all these other steps along the road, you're going

to keep justifying the further steps down the road, even though now you've just gone like wildly away from what you actually think. And to give you an example that, you know, is on like the liberal side of things, it reminds me in a small way of Elizabeth Warren in the last presidential primary where, you know, she came into her political power by a deep critique of Joe Biden on economic issues and specifically on bankruptcy law. But when she was actually up on the stage, rather than saying what she really, at least at one point, believed and had said very clearly and powerfully before, she held her fire. Why? Because she wanted to maintain her influence. Remember, she said, I'm just a player in the game. Yes, that was her whole thing was

like, well, I can't really say what I actually think about this guy because he may well win. I want to be vice president or maybe treasury secretary. I want to get invited to the White House. I want to keep being a player in the game. And so she ultimately really compromised like a key part of what she claimed to believe previously and what she built her entire career on out of a justification of, well, I got to play nice because I need to be a player inside the game. So I think we've seen this play out so many times in Washington. I mean, this is a particularly stark example where the guy that you've been propping up for years behind the scenes, you're not just like, I don't know about this guy. You're like, I hate him passionately. Right.

It's a particularly stark example. the DC ecosystem where people rationalize and justify morally indefensible positions insert because they tell themselves they're so important that they need to maintain their influence. I thought that too. You know, I saw a lot of mainstream media people be like, this is how little Fox thinks of its audience. I was like, yo, are we going to pretend that you don't think just as little of yours? I'm like, yo, let me ask you behind closed doors, behind a glass of whiskey. I'm like, you really believed in Russiagate the whole time? You really think Joe Biden is up there and that he has a stutter that miraculously appeared when he was 79 years old? Give me a break.

So, look, I think it's a systemic problem, all of that. Yeah, anyway, that's what it is. And I've never been happier just to be able to do this show. I'll say what the hell I want. We've already. We've cut those ties. Those bridges have been long burned. Yeah. It's a good thing. We've already, we've cut those ties. That ship has sailed. We're free and it is a good thing.

All right, so let's talk about what is going on with the debt ceiling. There are a couple of things that are converging right at the moment. On the one side, you have Joe Biden putting out his budget. Now this is not directly about the debt ceiling, but it is kind of him positioning himself and creating the messaging he wants about his vision for the country versus the ground that the Republicans are staking out.

So in that way, you can sort of see these as, you know, two separate positions on the debt ceiling, even though that's not quite directly the case. All right, let's put this up on the screen in terms of what Joe Biden is proposing. We have some new details this morning I can share with you as well. This is The New York Times. They say he set to detail $3 trillion in measures to reduce the deficits. This is primarily the deficit reduction. Part of this is primarily about taxes on the wealthy and large corporations. So he, they say, is expected to announce a new tax on households worth more than $100 million, would apply to both their earned income and unrealized gains in the value of their liquid assets like stocks.

So this is kind of a wealth tax. He will also call for the quadrupling of a tax on stock buybacks that was approved as part of a sweeping tax health care and climate bill he signed last year. So I'm actually going to go deep on stock buybacks in my monologue today if you guys are interested in such things. The original tax that he levied, I love the way they phrase this, was 1%. It did absolutely nothing in terms of, like, curtailing stock buybacks. So when they're like, he's quadrupling a tax on stock buybacks from 1% to 4%. So, wow, that's incredible. They should just be banned outright. Moving on. They also said that it will increase an expansion of an investment tax on high earners, which would be directed to the Medicare trust fund. They say that that plus the proposed savings from additional Medicare negotiations on prescription drugs would reduce deficits by about nine hundred billion dollars on net.

And soccer, there's additional reporting this month from The Washington Post. I think Jeff Stein was involved in that, that they're going to, in the budget, propose some of the pieces that were initially in Build Back Better, including the expanded child tax credit, some moves on paid family leave, some moves on child care, and some moves on universal pre-K, along with this set of tax hikes on the wealthy effectively in order to. So that's sort of their proposal is an expanded social safety net, plus these tax cuts or tax hikes on the wealthy in order to pay for it. Right. And I think I know counterpoints covered this yesterday, too, but it bears repeating.

Listen, this budget is totally fake. It's not going to happen. There has not been a it's actual presidential budget that has passed Congress. I want to say since 2000 and not maybe 2007, the last time that the president delivered a budget, they held hearings on the budget and then they passed it in full. Our budgeting system is a gigantic mess, basically been dead since the days of Obama. So I think people should understand this is basically a campaign document. That's exactly it's a messaging document he's staking out his position which is high taxes on the rich expand the social safety net the republican position uh heading into the debt ceiling showdown is quite different let's go ahead and put this up on the screen so uh the this is also the new york times they say house gop prepares to slash federal programs incoming budget budget showdown with Social Security, Medicare

off the table. Conservatives are focusing on a wide range of smaller programs as they clash with Biden and Democrats looms. So they have taken off the table after initially sort of like some of them were flirting with it, but they have now taken off the table Social Security and Medicare. I think Trump was probably very influential on that, as well as honestly, Biden in the State of the Union, who when they all freaked out, oh, of course we don't cut Social Security and Medicare, even though we've been trying to do that for decades and decades and decades, they kind of backed themselves into a corner on that one. So those have been put off the table. And they also don't want to really cut the defense budget other than some minor line

item for a diversity initiative, which basically amounts to next to nothing in terms of the actual amount of money you would save. So since they put those big pieces on the table, off the table, that means that they have to deeply slash basically everything else. What they are talking about here in this article in particular, they say it includes a 45 percent cut to foreign aid, adding work requirements for food stamp and Medicaid beneficiaries, 43 percent cut to housing programs, including phasing out Section 8 altogether, cutting the FBI's counterintelligence budget by nearly half. I think I could probably get behind that piece of it and eliminating Obamacare expansions to Medicaid to save tens of billions of dollars. Nearly 40 states have accepted that Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act.

About 12 million people benefit from that. So what they're proposing here is effectively cutting health care for 12 million Americans, among a lot of other cuts. So that's the position that they found themselves in. And we've been talking about, listen, if you're taking entitlements and defense off the table, like the math doesn't really work out. You basically have to kill the entire rest of the federal budget in order for this to come together with the math that they want. Right. I think it's important for people to understand that, too, which is like if you really do want to get serious about it and you don't want to cut defense, like there's really no way to do it without impacting a lot of American

programs, which are actually broadly popular amongst Republicans. There's a reason that 40, how many states voted for Republicans? A lot more than four or a lot less than 10 or a lot more than 10, 10 that haven't expanded Medicaid. And that's because it's actually very popular, especially in the South with a lot of governors who have quietly kind of used it for expansion. I would just say that. And it does not necessarily fit within the spirit of don't touch Social Security and Medicare, because Medicaid is also used increasingly also by a lot of Republican voters. So that's one that I would know. And it's popular, too, by the way. It's very popular. I mean, look, health care is

popular. I don't know why it's exactly difficult for people to get their minds around that. Broadly, in terms of the budget, too, even with the GOP one, it's the same thing. It's a messaging campaign document. It doesn't mean anything. Much of this is not going to happen. I increasingly, looking at these two documents, I'm curious what you think. I think we're just going right back to sequestration. There is no, for people who don't know what sequestration is, it basically is off the board percentage cuts against, it's like a haircut across the federal government, including with the defense budget. And it's one of the ways that they were able to square it during the Obama years. And it's because there was just no, there was no agreement on anything. All they could agree to fund the

government was basically haircutting theting all of federal spending. And when you do that, it broadly impacts all programs across the board. So I don't see a way that we get through all of this without just going right back towards it. And by the way, sequestration was very unpopular. People in the military hated it. People in domestic programs hated it. Republicans hated it. Democrats hated it.

And that's part of the reason why it was the only compromise. I don't know. I genuinely don't know how it gets resolved. And the deadline is, I mean, it's the summer. So this is not far away. And the Republican caucus, obviously in the House, they have a very small majority. So it's not just getting agreement with the Democrats who, you know, are disgusted with the idea of taking the country's economy hostage to force any spending cuts through. So that's the you know, that's the big barrier. But even within their own caucus, this is an initial sort of like high level plan. But when you actually get to the nitty gritty and people start realizing like, oh,

this is going to hurt this project in my district, This is going to hurt this program in my district. My constituents are going to be furious if they lose their health care and they start blaming me. That becomes very dicey as well. And then you have some hardliners in the Republican caucus who are like, I'm not voting for a death penalty increase, period. Period. End of story. I don't care how many. I'm just not doing it. Period. So I genuinely do not know how this is going to be resolved. And that's why, I'm just not doing it, period. So I genuinely do not know how this is going to be resolved. And that's why we're continuing to focus on it, because it's this thing that's sort of hanging out there as a real threat to the economy and a major political like blow up in the near future. And there is no clear resolution. No, there isn't a clear resolution.

That's an important point for everybody to understand too, which is that we could very certainly get to some sort of debt breach. One of the reasons why I don't think it will matter is that, just think about it, you know, eventually what would happen is, and also McCarthy shot himself in the foot with the motion to vacate, all the Democrats would need to do is force a vote onto the floor through some legislative chicanery, and then you could get some moderate Republicans to join the Dems to push through a debt-stealing package. The only question is whether Hakeem Jeffries would let the Democrats do that. But I do think that if we came down to some showdown

and you had only 10 Republicans doing the holdout, I think there are enough Dems who are like, look, we're not going to crash the economy. Let's just pass this thing. So you think there'll be some sort of a, like, what do they call that from Legally Blonde? What's the petition? Oh. Discharge petition. Discharge petition. petition well discharge petition is a little bit different I think discharge petition is through a committee but uh it is similar principle in terms of

given the rules that McCarthy set forward if people don't know the history of the original debt ceiling fight this happened all the time Boehner would go to Pelosi and be like listen I can't pass this thing without you so I'm going to bring it to the floor. You bring you bring some of your people in far left. Yeah, but the problem is, but that's the issue is because they made it so easy to toss McCarthy. If he does make a deal with him, he will know that that's the end of his speaker. It's possible. And that's why it's so that's why the positions are so hardened. And it's so difficult to see the way that they get out of this. The Republicans are clearly going to they're either really actually serious and comfortable with breaching the debt ceiling and whatever fallout may occur from that.

Or they're going to great lengths to bluff in that regard. up on the screen because they have taken what they describe as an early step on preparing for federal default. And basically what they're doing here is something called debt prioritization, where they're taking all of the, however many millions of payments that the federal government puts out, and they're trying to say, all right, well, we'll keep paying these ones if we breach the debt ceiling, but not those ones. And they're trying to come up with, like well, we'll keep paying these ones if we breach the debt ceiling, but not those ones. And they're trying to come up with, like, what does that whole process look like ultimately because they want to either signal, like, we're serious, we're not worried about going,

breaching the debt ceiling, we've got a plan in place, or because they want to bluff and want to, like, convince everybody that they're actually serious and try to force cuts that way. Well, it's one of those where this is a big fight. One of the things that in the previous era they realized is that if you give the executive the authority because they have incoming revenue, they could distribute it the way that they would want to,

this would be a way for Congress to bigfoot the Treasury Department and say, no, if we go into default, you're going to spend money exactly the way that we want to. We won't let you support social programs. You have to only do debt payoffs or whatever, which would actually be a giveaway to Wall Street, which is funny. Yeah, but're going to spend money exactly the way that we want to. We won't let you support social programs. You have to only do like debt payoffs or whatever, which is actually a giveaway to Wall Street, which is funny. Yeah, but huge giveaway to Wall Street. I mean, it would, if they go for it,

it would be huge political, it would be a disaster for the economy and no one should cheer for it. It would be a political gift to Democrats because they can say, oh, you're paying off the like wealthy bondholders, but you're letting kids go hungry and like stripping people's health care. How is that going to look for the Republican Party? So in any case, it's a mess. I don't

know how it's going to be resolved. And everybody's sort of like staking out their positions right now. Yeah. Good luck. OK, have a little bit of Elon Twitter government news, which is is quite interesting, and I'm not 100% sure what to make of all of this. So I'll just put the facts up on the screen for you. Let's go and put this on from the Wall Street Journal. The FTC, that's the Federal Trade Commission led by Lena Kahn. Their Twitter investigation sought Elon Musk's internal communications, including journalists names. Documents obtained by a House panel shed light on the probe into Twitter's compliance

with a settlement. Let me go and read a little bit of this to you. They say they demanded Twitter turn over internal communications related to owner Elon Musk, as well as detailed info about layoffs, citing concerns that staff reductions could compromise the company's ability to protect users, documents viewed by the Wall Street Journal show. They go on to say in 12 letters sent to Twitter and its lawyers, the FTC asked the company to identify all journalists granted access to company records and provide info about the launch of the revamped Twitter blue subscription service. They're also seeking to depose Mr. Musk in connection with the probe. Now, the core of what they say are their concerns here are whether Twitter is holding up their end of the agreement that they have already with the FTC, because there's already a consent order in place with regards to keeping users information private.

I'm somewhat sympathetic to that end, especially given that, I mean, Twitter has been a shit show, like keeps crashing, having problems. Listen, it's easy to forget that Twitter has long had a lot of technical issues, but they have definitely accelerated in the Elon Musk era. So I think it's reasonable for the FTC to be like, you holding up your end of the deal here? Are you actually protecting users' privacy in the way that you're supposed to? However, the part that is very, very troubling from a First Amendment perspective is them demanding the names of journalists who were given access to Twitter information and also, you know, wanting to know the specifics of those communications and exactly what was provided. So that was actually my take. So the more I read into it, I was like, is this a political persecution of Elon? Like what's happening here? It's actually kind of

complicated. So as you alluded to, there is a consent degree. And the reason why is that back in 2011, there was a consent order between FTC and Twitter that barred it from misrepresenting how its individual's contact information would be stored. So they did not disclose that they for years had actually fed information including phone numbers and email addresses. This is before any time that Twitter was taken over by Elon. Those were used ostensibly for account security purposes. So you and I, two-factor authentication, they were using that data without our consent and feeding it into their advertising tools. So linking our phone numbers with stuff that we had signed up before on our iPhone so they could better serve us ads. They actually had to pay $150 million fine.

And between 2013 and 2019, Twitter had told users that it was collecting their information only to enable multi-factor authentication measures on their accounts. According to the DOJ complaint, the company did not notify any users, actually remember this because I never was notified either, that this information would be used to help sell ads. So this is called a deceptive behavior tactic that affected up to 140 million people. And it was directly admitted to by then chief privacy officer over at Twitter. Actually, what this really underscores to me is,

like I said, at first I was like, I feel like this is BS. They're just going after Elon. But when I read into it, this is actually part of the mess that he bought. And I'm not quite sure that he understood that there was this consent decree, which they were operating under, where the DOJ basically has the right with the FTC to come in and slap you with massive fines if you are not abiding by that same system. It also calls into the question with Twitter Blue and some of

the other personal data. He basically is going to have to prove that all of the info that we willingly provide to Twitter is properly disclosed to us how that info is used. And the only reason why I think it's possible he could be in trouble is there's just not a lot of employees working on this stuff. They may not even known when they bought the company that this is kind of the stuff that you have to disclose. And this is the legal nightmare that you walk into

with a lot of these social media companies. And clearly, like, the layoffs have been very aggressive and also very haphazard. There was a whole exchange that unfolded on Twitter

that I'm sure some of you saw where there was a guy who was like, hey, am I still an employer or not? Because I don't know. I didn't get any notification, but I don't have an email. There was a kind of

an ugly back and forth. Ultimately, Elon had to end up apologizing to this guy guy i don't think he should have apologized well i think he was worried about a lawsuit i agree he was 100 worried about a lawsuit because he was you know he was like i don't know whether what he said about this man was true or not but it was very ugly and so he ultimately had to apologize and was like he's considering coming back to work for us so anyway it's just a sign that the layoffs were done in a very brute force-like kind of a way. And so it's not crazy to think that some of the people

who were in charge of overseeing the implementation of this consent decree may no longer be there. Let's return, though, to the journalist question. I think this is probably the single most one. It is not in the, and we've done quite a bit of defense here for Lena Kahn. It is not in the – and we've done quite a bit of defense here for Lena Kahn. It is not in the business of the United States government to say, quote, why the FTC needs to know the identity of journalists who are engaging with Twitter. As their lawyer says, there is no logical reason why the FTC on the basis of user privacy needs to analyze all of Twitter's personnel decisions. And there's no logical reason why they need every single internal Twitter communication about Elon Musk. So this is where a government overstep almost

certainly could be one. And with the journalist one where, I'm sorry, I don't care who you are, what administration, what other good work you have done. It is not in your business to be subpoenaing and looking at the private communications of Twitter and its journalists, because that actually would look like retribution for publishing the Twitter files. There was also, you know, violating a consent degree crystal is one thing. Journalist communications is a whole other business. I 100% agree. And there's another piece here, which is, of course, the media angle, which is, you know, the brave defenders of the First Amendment. Many outlets just left out that part of all of this. Like they just didn't mention that like, oh, and by the way, they asked for all of these details about the journalists they were communicating with. They just left that out.

Not to mention that so many, I mean, basically no mainstream outlets actually covered any of the revelations from the Twitter files anyway. And so, which was disgraceful and insane, given that Twitter is really important. There's a lot of interest in it. What happened there previously is really important. What's happening there currently is really important, especially in terms of like elite shaping of national opinion. So a lot of media failures here. Very clear. And a lot of media hypocrisy here. Very clear. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Put the next one up there, too, please, on the screen, which is that actually that suffered after a basically a shutdown of the website for a while where you basically could not link out to different websites.

Elon said, quote, a small API change had massive ramifications. The code stack is extremely brittle for no good reason. We'll ultimately need a complete rewrite. So he's blaming basically the previous engineers at Twitter. It's actually, I mean, certainly possible. Maybe. From what I have heard, it's not even just Twitter,

but many of the most important systems, remember we found out with the Notam thing, with the FAA, where they're like, a single code change can bring down the entire thing.

People were like, you would be shocked at how many massive corporate, multi-billion dollar corporations have code architecture this way. Where literally just one guy accidentally presses one thing and the entire site can shut down. So, yeah, I mean, who knows whether it has something to do with the layoffs or with the code stack, but that probably does not help.

Because if the code stack is so brittle, if they don't have as many employees who are working on maintaining the databases and the security, that also could lead to problems for you privacy-wise. If you're vulnerable to attack, to some sort of phishing attack or a data breach or anything like that, that would really be a devastating blow to the company. And zooming out from Twitter, remember we used to talk to Gigi Sohn, who actually her nomination just got blown up by Joe Manchin. But anyway, she used to talk to us about how, you know, it's the penalties on companies for like keeping their systems so insecure that people's private private data can be breached all the time. Like it's very low. I am very much in favor of

there being a lot more penalties and a lot more scrutiny over the way that companies protect their data. So in that way, I'm sympathetic. But yeah, on the journalist piece, absolutely not. And it's shameful that the media just ultimately goes along with it and doesn't say anything. One last piece, because I looked this up about the outages on Twitter under Elon. Because as I said before, like Twitter has I think it's probably true that Twitter's technology has always been, in his word, brittle because there have been certainly outages in the past. But they seem to have escalated during the Elon era

when they have had so many layoffs. You had, on January 23rd, Android users couldn't load new tweets or post them. February 8th, error message told users they were over the daily limit for sending tweets for a while. On February 15th, tweets just stopped loading. On February 18th, the timeline broke, replies disappeared. On March 1, the timeline stopped working,

and then you had this configuration change leading to these issues on Monday. Yeah, exactly correct. So anyway, it could be a big problem for Elon. And the top line went on the journalism front is if you actually stand for the First Amendment, this is something you're supposed to speak out against. But of course, because it's Matt Taibbi and Barry Weiss involved, they're like, oh, no, we're not just going to keep our— They're not one of us. We're just going to keep our powder dry. They're not employed by the New York Times,

so they don't count. Bullshit. They would have a five-alarm fire if that ever happened to them. Fair, especially if it happened under the Trump administration, imagine. Okay, so this is really, really fascinating. So an op-ed in the New York Times.

You know, we've been trying to closely follow what's going on with AI, what's going on with chat GPT, Bing, all of that stuff. So Noam Chomsky, in conjunction with two others, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times about their view of these large language models, including Google's BARD and Microsoft's Sydney. Let's go ahead and put this up on the screen from the New York Times. The headline here is Noam Chomsky, the false promise of chat GPT. And their view is essentially, you know, there's a lot of sensationalist headlines about chat GPT and about what all of this means for the future. And people even sort of, you know, insinuating

that they're not sentient, but they're getting close to having that sort of human reasoning and understanding that's much more complex and much more sophisticated than anything we've seen before. And these three are really pumping the brakes on that notion. Now, Noam Chomsky, being a linguist, a language expert, looking at the ways that what ChatGPT is doing is fundamentally different from the way that humans speak and reason and the way that human, you know, even morality works. Let me read you a little bit of this so you can get a sense of it. It's very thought provoking. Honestly, I don't know what I think about all of these things.

So that's why I just want to put all the views on the table as we sort of sort through what is what and what it means for the future. They say open A.I.'s chat GPT, Google's Bard and Microsoft Sydney are marvels of machine learning. Roughly speaking, they take huge amounts of data, search's BARD, and Microsoft Sydney are marvels of machine learning. Roughly speaking, they take huge amounts of data, search for patterns in it, and become increasingly proficient at generating statistically probable outputs such as seemingly human-like language and thought. These programs have been hailed as the first glimmers on the horizon of artificial general

intelligence, that long prophesied moment when mechanical minds surpass human brains, not only quantitatively in terms of processing speed and memory, but also qualitatively in terms of intellectual insight, artistic creativity, and every other distinctively human faculty. And that's the part they really push back on on the piece. They go on, that day may come, but it's done is not yet breaking. Contrary to what can be read in hyperbolic headlines and reckoned by injudicious investments. The is this Borgian? I don't know what that word is. I think I got to look that one up. I believe that's a is a reference to a philosopher.

OK, the American Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. OK, I'm probably saying Borgesian revelation go with, of understanding has not and will not, and we submit cannot occur if machine learning programs like ChatGPT continue to dominate the field of AI. However useful these programs might be in some narrow domains, we know from the science of linguistics and the philosophy of knowledge that they differ profoundly from how humans reason and use language. These differences place significant limitations on what these programs can do, encoding them with ineradicable defects. They talk about a number of areas where they see them as

really deficient and, you know, not even close to approximating what a human mind can do. One of them is on morality. And you can see this in some of the fights over like, you know, they're framed as like, oh, is chat GPT woke or whatever? But the deeper level question is any morality is programmed in by human beings. Exactly. Yeah. And I actually thought there was a really poignant part where he says, quote, the human mind is not like chat GPT and its ilk, a lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data and extrapolating the most likely conversational response. On the contrary, the human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates

with small amounts of information. It seeks not to infer brute correlations amongst data points, but to create explanations. He points to how a young child acquiring a language is developing unconsciously, automatically, and speedily from actually minuscule amounts of data, from grammar and a stupendously sophisticated system of logical principles and parameters. So, I don't know. I'm not sure exactly which of these areas that I fall onto, but one quote I found especially important from Chonsky was this, quote, the human mind is not like chat GPT and its ilk, a lumbering statistical engine or pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data, extrapolating the most likely conversational response

or most probable answer to a scientific question. On the contrary, the human mind is surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates with small amounts of information. It seeks not to infer brute correlations amongst data points, but to create explanations. So I actually thought it was a really interesting piece the way that he lays it out and i'm of two minds on the one hand you know i believe very much in technology very much in the ability for technological innovation to surprise us and sometimes i think it's difficult for people to

even conceive of like what it would look like in the future you You know, the famous Henry Ford quote where he's like, if I'd asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses because they couldn't even conceive of like what a combustible automobile would look like. On the other, we should also have some hubris about like, oh, our human mind, which has evolved over millions of years through selective evolution and, you know, in a very complex process across billions and billions of people that have lived now throughout the world, can be so easily replicated through a statistical pattern recognition regime.

I actually thought he was correct, which is, yeah, I think in some areas like rote data, computer programming, things that are completely linear that don't require as much creativity. Totally. I think he's right. Those are the ones where it will be most effective. But in terms of like a full scale takeover, well, I'm not so sure. On the other hand, you could take a matrix point of view where our humanity and our like, you know, quote unquote, efficiency actually keeps us away from operating at the most efficient level, which would enable us to have takeover. So I really don't know which way I stand on it. Yeah. It's kind of interesting, though.

You know, I was reminded as I was reading this of Derek Thompson, friend of the show, interviewed Kevin Roos of the New York Times, who is the one who had that really bizarre, like, Sydney conversation where the chat GPT Bing Microsoft thing starts professing its love. And everyone's like, oh, my God, what is going on here? So anyway, Derek was interviewing Kevin and he asked him this question, which I thought was a really good one, which is, you know, with the self-driving cars, it has turned out to be very, very, very, very difficult. get the last pieces. You can get it like 95% of the way there, but then there are parts of driving that effectively require in the moment, human judgment of ambiguous situations and novel situations. And so he asked him, do you have kind of a same, similar type problem with chat GPT where you can get like a lot? You can do some things that are really impressive and get a lot of the way there.

But there's this last 10 percent that is just an almost unsolvable problem. And it seems to me that that's kind of what Chomsky is laying out here. And it's not like, OK, if you keep going, you know, what's the new version? Is this going to be like chat GPT-4 or whatever that's coming out? As long as you are using this basic model of just taking in all of this, these inputs, and then using a probability to predict what the next like thing for the chat bot to say would be, there's going to be hard limitations and you will never get all of the way there. There will always be a limit to how far you're able to go, even as you improve it and improve it and improve it. And that seems correct to me. Now, on the other hand, I think that even

with what they've designed here, it could be potentially revolutionary, but you don't have to get all of the way there for it still to be a revolutionary technology. decent job, a 90, 95% decent job of aggregating all of the information about a news story that's out there and putting it on the search results rather than people having to click through, well, that one innovation in and of itself completely upends the business model of journalism. So I guess I see both the limitations, but I also think that even as it exists now, it could be potentially transformational in certain spaces. So I actually think the perfect analogy is self-driving, as you said. So I've been in a Tesla that was going full self-driving and look, I'm going to be honest, like it was a mess. And

the reason why is it was not able to compute. And this is, I'm talking on city streets, not on the highway. So we're talking like it didn't know, for example, that one lane is closed during rush hour. So it goes you into that lane, but people are parked there during this time. And so then it has to wait to move over. And then in terms of turning left, it didn't read properly. But there were a bunch of different lights here in Washington area. We have these ridiculous systems. And so it reads one as a green light, which is beyond the green. Now, look, these are all problems that maybe can be solved. But also what you said was important. That doesn't mean, though, that the car can't still drive itself for hours on the highway. That's pretty nice. That's actually a huge change to the driving experience. So if you're driving five hours and you're driving almost entirely

on a highway, you're only actually driving for, let's say, 10% of that time. That revolutionizes the road trip. That doesn't mean that it changes your daily commute in the city. So that's one of those where you can actually still go very far. The technology is very impressive, but you're not 100% of the way. I no longer have to look at my car type thing, which was the original promise. So I actually, yeah, we probably just more need to calibrate your expectations. Yeah. So one projection in terms of upending the workforce is like lawyers who a lot of what their work is doing

is like taking some previous document that they use for some previous situation, going through it, inserting in just like the new company name or the new language into this already pre-prepared document. An AI could probably do that pretty effectively. But even within that, you're still going to have instances where it's a little complex. You've got to actually rework this paragraph a little.

It doesn't quite make sense because this company was different from this company, and their situation is a little bit different in ways that are nuanced and complicated and that an AI isn't really prepared to be able to handle in the same way that, you know, the self-driving thing falls apart when there's a sign that just got put up that day of like, well, if you drive in this lane, you know, you're going to get a tear or whatever. So I think it will still require a human being to then go in and look at like, okay, well, did they get everything? Did they, does this make sense, et cetera. But even just the simple fact of automating all of that early grunt work, well, that's going to profoundly change the

legal profession because instead of all of those hours that they spend typically going through and like reworking these documents, 90% of that done by the AI. And then you're just coming in after the fact and doing like an edit job. So that, as best as I can figure these things out, that's how I see it right now, but I could be totally wrong about any of this and what it means and where it's going. But that's why it's fun. It's fun to be on the forefront.

That's why it's fascinating, yeah. It feels like it's like 1995, and you're like, hey, the internet. What is internet? Yeah. There's actually some, I recommend people go and watch, there's all these documentaries from the 90s about how people thought the internet was going to be.

And there was this two parallels. There was like web internet and then the information superhighway about how you would use your TV to like stream devices. And they were on to something. But the idea was that the TV would be like hooked up to the dial-up and there would – anyway, it's really fascinating. That's how Bill Gates actually thought that the internet was going to go. So people should go back and watch. As wrong as they were, you could see how it was a reasonable idea at the time. All right, let's go move on.

Dr. Fauci, more lab leak stuff happening, both on Capitol Hill and in terms of the fallout from that new Energy Department report. The first, most importantly, Dr. Fauci in retirement, but of course, going back to his old home over on CNN. Anderson Cooper, to his credit, actually asked Fauci about the Energy Department finding that it almost certainly was a lab leak, I guess with low confidence, but the FBI says it with moderate confidence. And Fauci really tries to wiggle his way out of this one.

Let's take a listen. Are the FBI and Energy Department right about the lab leak? Well, it's very tough to tell that, Anderson, because they're talking about information that they have that we don't have privy to. So we don't really know. They have made opinions on low confidence from the Department of Energy and moderate confidence, I believe, from the FBI. So I don't think there's a really correct and verifiable answer to your question. It's just still remains unknown. How important is it to figure it out? Well, it is, Anderson, because you want to make sure that whichever of those alternatives it is, that we do whatever we can to prevent it from happening in the future, because we

have had outbreaks before. I mean, we had SARS-CoV-1, which was clearly shown to go from a bat to a civet cat to a human. And if there's a possibility, which there is certainly, we haven't ruled it out, of there being lab leak, there are things that you can do to prevent the recurrence of these things. For example, the data showing that it might be a natural occurrence would make you want to be very careful about the animal-human interface and make sure that we have strict regulation of bringing animals into wet markets. If it turns out to be a lab

leak, you want to be very much more stringent in the controls of the experiments that you allow to be done. So it is relevant to understand whether or not we ever will know, Anderson, I'm not sure. Just a complete weasel and still pushing the natural origin hype. That is what drives me mad. I mean, still, the Chinese still are not pushing wet market. He's the last man on earth who believes in the wet market theory. I mean, here's what we have said for a long time. If there is even a possibility that is either of these things, you should be doing the things that he says. Exactly.

Putting in the controls, putting in the regulations, because you know it's possible it came from natural love. And you know it's possible it came from the love. That's really all you need to know. And so for me, the part at the end where he's like, we just may never know. It's like, we won't know because of you. That's the giveaway of like,

he doesn't want anyone to do anything until you have 100 proven that it is you know definitively smoking gun that it came out of a lab and so that's now his dodge because it's now too far down the road where you can't just say no absolutely it was a lab leak etc etc so now he's got to say well we just may never know and if we do find out then of course we should do something, but we probably never know. We had one chance at a smoking gun and it was January of 2020 when he decided to cover up the lab leak. That was it. That's the only chance that we ever had because if he had not used his influence to prompt that investigation and that paper to cover up the lab leak, then the U.S. government might have been

able to get some of the early intelligence coming out of China, done the original research. At this point, the Chinese have totally muddied the waters. They've covered it up. Now they're going after Elon and anybody else who wants to talk about lab leak. And lo and behold, gain of function research is chugging right along here in the United States. We are spending more on gain of function research today as a country, both from private and public sector than we did before the pandemic and not a single new safety mechanism that has been put into place because of the actions of this man. That is why I'm watching that. It's maddening. And also what really pisses me off too is Anderson and the people who happened

to interview him. They, they such a softball way of like, are they right? Are they not? Ask him about the paper. Ask about the email. Ask, ask about that original call. Yes. Like the original call. You said this, then May of 2020, you went on national geographic and said, there's no chance of a lab leak. Now you're saying it's open. What changed Dr. Fauci? That's what an actual interview with this man would look like. They let him skate completely. And a lot of it is actually really coming to the fore because over on the House side, the Republicans have started a new committee. And this is the second part here, but this committee to investigate

the lab leak and the possible origins of COVID-19 already kicking off with a huge bang because they interviewed yesterday Dr. Robert Redfield, the former CDC director under Donald Trump, who was outrageously smeared under the Trump administration and who has maintained that it was a lab leak from the very beginning. And he outlined to the committee the specific problems with gain of function and exactly how he believes that COVID-19 was unleashed upon the world. Let's take a listen to what he said. So one other path of questioning for you, Dr. Redfield. Proponents of this research claim it may result in vaccines or maybe even stop a pandemic. Dr. Redfield, has gain-of-function

created any life-saving vaccines or therapeutics to your knowledge? Not to my knowledge. Has gain-of-function stopped a pandemic in your opinion? No, on the contrary, I think it probably caused the greatest pandemic our world has seen. Do you find any tangible benefits to gain-of-function research at this time? I personally don't, but I do want to stress I think the men and women that support it are people of good faith because they truly believe it's going to lead to a potential benefit. I disagree with that assessment. Where's the headline? Former CDC director says that gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab caused the greatest pandemic that the world has seen in 100 years. This is madness.

And it is completely ignored outside of either right-wing media or people here on the show. You know, I even look back. I forgot how badly that they smeared Redford. They called him an apparatchik, of course, because it was 2020. They decided to call him a racist because apparently black employees at the CDC weren't advancing enough because that's what matters most when they're in the middle of a goddamn pandemic. And it's like, when I look back at how they treated this man and also how his initial response with the Sanjay Gupta interview two years ago now at this point, he says, yeah, I think it came out of the Wuhan lab. Same thing. Racist. He's a Trump apparatchik. He's a legitimate virologist, epidemiologist,

and scientist. I'm not saying he did a great job during the pandemic, but at the very least, he was privy to the intelligence and he has maintained it now from the beginning. And it's like, I read the Washington Post and you get these Joker virologists who come out of nowhere from some random ass university who happened to be funded by the NIH. And they're like, hey, it's still probably natural origin. He was the CDC director. He was literally there. You cannot tell me that he doesn't have more of an authority. Where's his op-ed in any of these papers? When it comes to gain of function, it seems like there is a pretty basic question here, which I literally haven't heard anyone asked until this moment, which is, what are we getting out of this?

Has this stopped anything? What are we getting? Okay. Cost benefit. Let's do the analysis the cost is it potentially caused millions of people to die worldwide and the unleash the worst pandemic you know in the history of modern world or however he phrased it okay that's the cost okay the benefit apparently nothing nothing no benefit nothing provable nothing clear what are we doing here? Like, it's so basic.

And even if you are still like on the fence, oh, maybe it was one, maybe, okay, I think that's fair, given that you have multiple different assessments, different groups that are saying that's fair. But clearly the risk here is absolutely immense. And based on what he's saying, the benefit is a bunch of scientists whose careers have been made by it. That's effectively the benefit. Well, and a ton of money. That's really what it is, is money. There is billions of dollars flowing out of the NIH,

from the NGOs, the Global Virome Project, into labs across this country and across the world that is funding exactly this type of research. And there's no congressional scrutiny. The former CDC director is laughed out of the room. People are going to call this a right-wing hearing. I mean, look, he's literally the goddamn CDC director. No coverage. Where is he on Anderson? Have him on the Anderson Cooper show. Let him and Dr. Fauci appear on a joint panel, two former public health officials. They will never do it. Of course it would. Yeah. Listen, by the way, Dr. Fauci, you're welcome here on the show anytime. I'm sure you'll take us up on that invitation. But this is so important, I think, for people to understand. And it was a very,

very important moment from that hearing. And of course, I didn't see a single, not one scrap of coverage of that from anybody in the mainstream press. And that's the most insane part to me. Amazing. All right, Tiger, what are you looking at? Well, Tucker Carlson has gotten quite a bit of attention recently for his release of previously unseen and bizarre January 6th footage, which shows Capitol Police officers escorting the so-called QAnon shaman around. And while I believe that is an important story, there might be an even more important one that most are ignoring. His new litmus test for candidates in the GOP primary, specifically on Ukraine. Let's take a listen to the questionnaire that he has sent to current and prospective

candidates. We've written a questionnaire for Republicans who may decide to jump into the race for president in 2024. It's a very simple questionnaire. Here are the questions. First, is opposing Russia in Ukraine a vital American national strategic interest? Is it really important or not? And if so, why? Two, what specifically is our objective in Ukraine and how will we know when we've achieved it? What's our goal and how are we going to know when we've won? If we don't know that, we should slow down. Three, what is the limit of funding and materiel, military equipment, you would be willing to send to the government of Ukraine? We're sending fighter jets.

Should we send nukes? Four, should the United States support regime change in Russia? Everyone hates Putin. Should we kill him? Is that a good idea? What happens next? Five, given that Russia's economy and currency are stronger than they were before the war, do you still believe that U.S. sanctions have been effective?

Everyone assumes that sanctions work. Do they? And finally, do you believe the United States faces the risk of nuclear war with Russia? Really simple. What are the stakes here? So we sent these questions to people who have announced or seem like they might announce,

Donald Trump, Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy, Ron DeSantis, Mike Pompeo, Mike Pence, Tim Scott, Glenn Youngkin, Chris Cheney, Christine Ohm, Greg Abbott, Chris Christie, Asa Hutchinson, and John Bolton. We sent these questions with respect. We sincerely want to know. We sincerely believe the public has a right to know their position on the biggest issue in the world right now,

which is will there be a third world war? And we said, we'll give you until Monday to reply. That seemed fair. And at that point, we'll let you know what they say. Okay, so to review. Is opposing Russia and Ukraine to our strategic interest and why? What is our objective in Ukraine? How do we know when we've won?

What is the limit of funding and material of what you're willing to send to Ukraine? Should the United States support regime change in Russia? Do you believe that sanctions have been effective against Russia? And do you believe the United States faces the risk of nuclear war with Russia? Reasonable questions, no matter what you think of Tucker. And important ones. Will we get real answers? Probably not.

And his questions here are important for two obvious reasons. One being that he's probably the most popular commentator on all of Fox, and of any, probably holds the most sway with Republican primary voters. Two, every candidate, either in the race or who looks like they might jump in, has been weaseling their way through answers on Ukraine with no specifics. Trump, for instance, has claimed for nearly a month that he could bring peace in Ukraine in 24 hours. But as he said at CPAC, he cannot tell us how. He said this also in an interview.

Take a listen. Before I even arrive at the Oval Office, I will have the disastrous war between Russia and Ukraine settled. It will be settled quickly. I will get the problem solved and I will get it solved in rapid order. And it will take me no longer than one day. I know exactly what to say to each of them. I got along with very well with them.

It really has to be done from the office of the president. And you have to get them both in a room. And there are things you can say to each one of them, which I won't reveal now, which will guarantee that this war will end immediately. So basically amounts to, trust me, I'll figure it out, but I can't tell you. Given the fact that Trump actually sent Javelin missiles to Ukraine and escalated the conflict in Afghanistan after he promised to pull out in 2017, hire John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, at this point, that's well-trodden ground. With all things Trump, who knows? You'll find out when you find out. The thing is, Trump at least has rhetorically opposed increased aid to Ukraine. He's called for peace in the conflict, and he's generally

seemed skeptical of the US paying the vast majority of the weapons cost while the Europeans send a fraction. Sadly, he might be the most specific candidate right now on Ukraine. So then let's look at the rest of the field. The obvious and really only real contender against Trump is Ron DeSantis, who recently made waves on Ukraine after Biden's latest visit to Kiev. Let's take a listen to exactly what he said. Well, they have effectively a blank check policy with no clear strategic objective identified. And these things can escalate. And I don't think it's in our interest to be getting into proxy war So, main takeaways. DeSantis says a, quote, blank check policy with no strategic objective identified, and the U.S. has no interest in getting in a proxy war with Russia. By all counts, that is America first type rhetoric.

But he also has an interesting past on Ukraine. As previous journalists have identified, DeSantis wanted to send weapons to Ukraine when he was a congressman, saying of Obama, quote, we in Congress have been urging the president, I've been urging him to provide arms to Ukraine. They want to fight the good fight. They're not asking us to fight it for them. The president has steadfastly refused. I think that's a mistake. He also said in December 2017, he was, quote, of the Reagan school that's tough on Russia while in a Fox and Friends interview. And he said Russia is a third-rate military power, though, now. Now, here's the thing. People can change their minds.

That's completely fine. But DeSantis has also been all over the place on Ukraine, even recently. In a recent interview with the Times of London, DeSantis lost his cool when he was pressed on the actual differences that he would have from Joe Biden on his policy in Ukraine. The interviewer writes, quote,

I ask about Ukraine. He says that there's a critique of Biden. I think I'm sympathetic to it in the sense that it's in our policy just to do whatever Zelensky wants. Or do we have a concrete idea of what we're trying to achieve exactly? He adds, quote, when I ask him how it should be handled differently, he refers to Biden, quote, being weak on the world stage and failing at deterrence. But as that is not answering how it should be handled, I ask again. He does not have anything to add. Perhaps you should cover some other ground.

I think I've said enough. So, no specifics. Apparently very testy at being pressed. I guess fair enough. You're only a governor. You're not even an official candidate. But things need to get specific fast. On the other ones, it's not too hard.

Nikki Haley and Pike Pompeo, they have been trying to have their cake and eat it too. Haley, of course, refuses to criticize Trump. She's not kicking sideways. She's only kicking forward. Probably the dumbest lines I've ever heard. But on Ukraine, her stance is actually pretty unambiguous. She has criticized Biden for not being tough enough on Russia, not expanding Russian sanctions. And in her most recent interview, told Barry Weiss from the Free Press, quote, I think it's up to us to tell people standing with Ukraine is standing for America. Pompe Press, quote, I think it's up to us to tell people standing with Ukraine is standing for America. Pompeo, also who despite serving as Trump's Secretary of State, has decided he somehow can differentiate himself from him, has also been

dropping veiled hints at his differences from Trump on Ukraine. Two days ago, he tweeted, quote, Vladimir Putin should not be underestimated. He wants to do the American people harm, which is why helping Ukraine is in our interest. He failed to mention anything about Ukraine at CPAC, as did Haley, but also has only been criticizing Biden for not sending enough aid to the country. All of this is interesting in how it maps onto the primary and to some extent, whether Tucker Carlson view will prevail in the primary or the GOP establishment view. Almost all polling data that we have available to us tells us the Republican primary electorate in particular is turning fast against aid for Ukraine with independents joining them. Only Democrats remain

steadfast. But as we have learned through the Trump years, rhetoric does not mean anything. Being specific and locking people into answers is what matters. And then whether they actually do any of that matters even more. For now, we're in wait and see mode. So I don't think anybody's going to actually answer this question. And if you want to hear my reaction to Sager's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Crystal, what are you taking a look at? Well, once upon a time, America was a land where it genuinely seemed like a rising tide could lift all boats. When American corporations thrived, they were able to invest in their workforce, creating a stable middle class.

And they were able to invest in innovation, which created dynamism and more thriving in a virtuous circle. In that time, business leaders and politicians, they had healthy debates about exactly who corporations were meant to serve, the nation, the community, their shareholders, their workers. But pretty much no one took the view that they should be run by the executive class for the sole benefit of the executive class. Today, however, this perverse conception of corporations is destroying the health and vitality of our entire economy, creating bubbles based on fakery, robbing employees of fair compensation for their labor. In fact, new numbers underscore just how extreme and radical this modern form of corporation has actually become. Take a look at this. This is from Ralph Nader. He says,

stunning figure. The White House's National Economic Council reports that major corporations are spending about 90 percent of their earnings on stock buybacks and dividends. 90 percent. What's left for investment? Not much, unless these corporations are taking on debt, he says. Now, stock buybacks are exactly what they sound like. It's when a corporation buys back their own stock. It has the predictable impact of at least temporarily goosing that company's stock price. So rather than investing in innovation or expansion or their workforce, our largest companies are all funneling almost all of their cash right now into the pockets of wealthy shareholders and, critically, their own executives who derive most of their compensation

from their stock holdings. It is a blatant CEO money grab. Now, I know the discussion on stock buybacks, it can sound kind of wonky, but it is hard to overstate just what a damaging effect their near takeover of the marketplace has had on our entire nation. First of all, these stock buybacks make the stock market completely fake. In fact, they were deemed illegal market manipulation repeatedly in 1967, in 1970, and again in 1973. It wasn't until the market radicals grabbed power under the Reagan administration that they were even allowed and legalized. Over the past nine years, stock buybacks have come to completely dominate public markets. Corporations plowed an eye-popping $3.8 trillion into buying their own stocks. That was more than any other type of investor combined. Think about that. The

stock market is supposed to theoretically reflect some underlying value. Instead, it increasingly reflects just how much financial rigging corporations are willing to do. Second, stock buybacks reward financial engineering over actual productivity and innovation. Trump's massive corporate tax cuts, they were theoretically supposed to unleash corporate research and productivity enhancements, expansions, jobs, employee pay raises, etc. Instead, they unleashed a flood of stock buybacks. In fact, in 2018, after the massive giveaway went into effect, only 43% of S&P 500 companies recorded any research and development expenses at all. The majority of companies spent not a single penny on new innovation. And you can see why. It's a sick incentive structure. Why take a risk on

building something new when you can just reward yourself and service the stockholders by artificially goosing your own stock price? And a compelling example of exactly this, journalist Rana Foroohar chronicles how Apple stock performed far better in years that stock buybacks were done than in the year that they revolutionized music with the release of the Apple iPod. So if short-term shareholder profits are all that matter, Apple is duty-bound to engage in market manipulation, not to invent new products. Third, stock buybacks and rich executives and wealthy shareholders have the expense of workers fueling world historic inequality.

And the legalization of stock buybacks combined with other Reagan-era radical reforms, things like crushing unions, slashing taxes on the rich, and no-holds-barred free trade, they have combined to create a second, more extreme Gilded Age. If you want to know why it feels like our whole society is coming unglued right now, this is a great place to start the hunt for both the causes and the culprits. Our national understanding of corporations has actually gone through a few different evolutions over the course of our nation's history. In the early days of our republic, the founding fathers had quite a complex relationship with corporations. Now, on the one hand, the early American project was effectively based on for-profit corporations like the Virginia Company. Some of our early experiments in democracy and agitation for revolution, they were actually inspired by rights of representation that were granted not by a constitution, but by

corporate charters. Those govern the colonies. On the other, the founders were, of course, deeply skeptical of concentrations of power. In his book, We the Corporations, How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights, Adam Winkler writes about Sir William Blackstone of England, one of the most influential thinkers on corporations, whose writing on corporations is still cited regularly by our own Supreme Court. Blackstone explained that the entities must serve a dual public and private purpose. They were not, as conceived of now, simply for-profit entities meant to enrich their owners. Instead, they must be, quote, for the advantage of the public or else their charter would be completely denied. Now, our founders, too, believed that corporations must serve some

public interest. According to The Atlantic, too, believed that corporations must serve some public interest. According to The Atlantic, many early stock certificates bore an image, a factory, a car, a canal, representing the purpose of the corporation that issued them. It was a reminder that the financial instrument was being put to productive use. Early corporations were chartered for a specific task, say building a canal. They had charters of limited duration lasting either 10 or 40 years, and they were frequently terminated upon the completion of that specific task that they were chartered for. Now, after the Civil War, corporate advocates, they used the courts to claim greater and greater power for themselves. In fact, in a disgusting turn of events, at the same time that the rights of black people under the 14th Amendment were being stripped away and the Jim Crow regime

architected, corporations were using the 14th Amendment to great effect, grabbing for themselves new and unprecedented rights. Again, per Adam Winkler, quote, between 1868, when the amendment was ratified, and 1912, when a scholar set out to identify every 14th Amendment case heard by the Supreme Court, the justices decided 28 cases dealing with the rights of African Americans and an astonishing 312 cases dealing with the rights of African Americans and an astonishing 312 cases dealing with the rights of corporations. Now, this brave new world of corporate rights led to the first Gilded Age and Robber Baron era, which allowed wealth inequality to skyrocket to previously unimaginable heights before being checked by the fallout of the Great Depression and FDR's New Deal era. The Reagan era would see corporate rule on steroids

as he and all the administrations after him embraced new radical views on the role of corporations, now seen as exclusively meant to increase short-term shareholder value, was under this new extreme philosophy that buybacks would be legalized and come to metastasize into the economy, eating menace that they are today. And in Washington, in spite of these shocking figures cited here by Ralph Nader, there seems to be little interest in change. eating menace that they are today. And in Washington, in spite of the shocking figure cited here by Ralph Nader, there seems to be little interest in change. In a sign of how timid and unequal to the task

our current political leadership is, rather than take the obvious step of just banning stock buybacks altogether, President Biden passed a measly 1% tax on stock buybacks. It's had precisely the impact you would expect, which is absolutely nothing at all. He's now saying that companies which seek CHIPS Act subsidies must forego stock buybacks. It's had precisely the impact you would expect, which is absolutely nothing at all. He's now saying that companies which seek CHIPS Act subsidies must forego stock buybacks for a period of five years, a limited reform impacting a small number of companies. And in his boldest stance, Biden's new budget calls for a still-piddling 4% tax on stock

buybacks, which is also unlikely to do really much of anything at all. Buybacks should be banned, period. End of story. According to Adam Winkler at the founding of the Republic, Thomas Jefferson warned of, quote, the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country. Our government is no longer challenged by moneyed corporations today. On the contrary, they're quite comfortable with rule by corporate power. That 90% number stunned me. And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com.

So we have been tracking mass protests that have swept across the nation of Israel in response to current Prime Minister Netanyahu's attacks on the independent judiciary there. It's a fairly complex situation, so we wanted to get in an expert who has been following this closely to break down exactly what is happening. So we're happy to welcome back to the show Ken Roth. He is the former executive director of Human Rights Watch. Great to see you, Ken. Good to see you, sir. Good to be back. Thank you. So just to set up a little bit of the context here, guys, let's go ahead and put this element up on the screen to give you a sense of how widespread these protests have become. Axios reporting that they have actually spread to the Israeli military,

which is in my is quite extraordinary. So can you just start with the basics here, Ken, of what Netanyahu is trying to do and why there has been such resistance to it. Okay, well, Crystal, maybe a good place to begin is to explain, you know, this may be too basic, but, you know, why do you care about an independent judiciary? And, you know, I think there's a temptation in a democracy to think, oh, democracy means elections, democracy means majority rule. And obviously that's an essential element of democracy, but that's not sufficient. Democracy also means that the majority is limited by your rights. You know, the government can't do anything.

They can't censor you. They can't throw you in prison. There's certain things it can't do. And we depend on an independent judiciary to uphold those rights. We also depend on an independent judiciary to make sure that government officials are subject to the law. That means the rule of law. So you can't have, you know, a president or a prime minister steal or, you know, commit crimes. They, too, are subject to the law.

So these are essential elements of democracy. And that's why people are so exercised about what Netanyahu is now trying to do. He, you know, he leads a very far right coalition, including, you know, people who were considered, you know, just beyond the pale a few months ago, and now are ministers. So this is, you know, an extreme government. Netanyahu was desperate to put it together because he himself was trying to avoid corruption charges, and he thought the best way to do that would be to become prime minister again. That meant he had to have a majority in the Knesset, and he now has a majority of 64 seats in the 120-member Knesset. So that's the backdrop. Now, he is proposing in this bill

to take two important steps that would undermine the ability of the judiciary to ensure that the government respects rights and abides by the rule of law. One is that he's proposing that the Knesset, the parliament in Israel, could simply overturn any court rule by a simple one vote majority. And so you can imagine, you know, courts saying, no, you can't pass this law because that would be undermining freedom of expression, or you can't pass that law because that would be undermining freedom of expression, or you can't pass that law because that would be discrimination. And the Knesset would say, tough, we're just going to vote, you know, it could be 61 to 59, and we're going to overturn your ruling. So that, you know, is basically destroying the concept of judicial review. It's saying that the Supreme Court does

not have the power to enforce rights or to uphold the rule of law. And then on top of that, Netanyahu is trying to change the way that judges are selected for the Supreme Court. Currently, there's a committee of nine that proposes appointments, and five of those nine people are not members of the government. So there's a good degree of independence here. They're either judges or members of bar associations, and this is a way to, again, you know, ensure that the government just doesn't stack the court with people who are

going to then vote in favor of the government. Netanyahu wants to change that. He wants to have his appointees make up a majority of this appointing committee so that he can gradually change the composition of the court to one that would be more attuned to what he's trying to do. Yep. So, Ken, how does this map on to U.S. relations? I understand that it has disrupted the visit of Secretary Austin. How is the Biden administration reacting to this? And how is this

going to change the foreign political situation vis-a-vis our relationships and the world's relationship with Israel? What everybody is worried about is that, you know, if in fact you have this far-right Netanyahu government unfettered by the rule of law, unscrutinized by an independent Supreme Court, it can do whatever it wants. And so, you know, the things that people are worried about within Israel proper, they're worried that, you know, an increasingly religious government is going to start imposing its views on what still is a significantly secular Jewish population in Israel, people who don't want to abide by the strict requirements of ultra-Orthodoxy. And they're worried that this somehow might be imposed.

And so you can imagine what this would mean, say, for same-sex marriage, where the court currently has been, you know, very positive on that. It has said, for example, there was a law on surrogacy, and it was originally passed so only single women could be surrogates. And they said, you know, no, it could be a single man who wants to bring in a, who wants to have a child that could be a same-sex couple. You know, this is an example of how the court is upholding, you know, kind of basic rights. And they've been very good about upholding freedom of expression, freedom of the media. Suddenly, that could all be out the window. You would have, you know, a government that could

censor the media, that could start, you know, undercutting basic rights for Israelis. Now, the big fear is what happens in the occupied territories. Right we've already seen elements of this extreme government. They have declared nine illegal outposts suddenly legal. These are settlements that are not even authorized by the Israeli government. And it's worth noting that settlements themselves are illegal. They violate what is known as Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits an occupying power from transferring its population to occupied territory. So the settlements are clearly illegal. They're basically war crimes. The government is going ahead and legalizing, declaring that it approves of more of these. Now, even the existing Supreme

Court has not been willing to sort of address the issue. It's trying to duck the issue. So it's never declared whether they're legal or illegal because, frankly, to do that, it would have to declare them illegal if it was at all honest. So it just ducks the issue. But the fear is that Netanyahu now could try to annex broad parts of the West Bank. It could just kind of expand Israel's boundaries into the occupied territory, and that there'd be no court to stop that. So these are the kinds of things that would have a dramatic impact on Israel's standing in the world, and certainly on U.S.-Israeli relations, where the United States, in fact, just recently, Antony Blinken,

Secretary of State, tried to negotiate a six-month pause in these kinds of actions. And within days, Netanyahu had flouted it by proceeding with this plan with respect to these nine outposts. So, you know, this is a government that needs to be scrutinized. You need an independent Supreme Court. And if that is gone, who knows where it's going to go. We're already seeing that American Jews are increasingly unhappy with this government. And I anticipate that the U.S. government as a whole is going to be increasingly unhappy if it continues in this direction. Well, there has also been fallout in the U.S.-Israel relationship over comments that were made by the Israeli finance minister. He called for a

Palestinian village in the West Bank to be, quote, wiped out. Can you talk to explain that situation and explain what the U.S. response has been and what you think that it should be? Yes, the finance minister is a man by the name of Bezalel Smotrich. And he was talking about the Palestinian village of Huwara. And this was the site initially of a place where Palestinian gunmen murdered two Israeli brothers from a nearby settlement who were driving through this Palestinian town. In revenge, settlers rampaged through this town of Hawara, you know, set buildings on fire, destroyed large parts of the town.

And the finance minister, when asked about this, you know, rather than condemning the violence, saying, you know, yes, the initial killings were wrong, but so is this rampage by settlers, which I should say this rampage happened, you know, under the watchful eyes of the Israeli military, which did nothing to stop the settlers. But the finance minister, rather than say, this is horrible, we don't take the law into our own hands, he said they should have wiped out the village. So, you know, this is a minister advocating lawlessness. Now, you know, under pressure, Netanyahu is kind of, you know, repudiated that a little bit. But this finance minister is supposed to be coming to the United States to sell Israeli bonds.

And it's not clear at this point whether the U.S. government is going to give him a visa, whether he's going to be allowed to come. He's already clear that he's not going to get any official meetings. But this is the kind of extremism that now populates the senior positions in the Netanyahu government. And it highlights all the more why we need an independent Israeli Supreme Court if these people are just not going to run rampant. You know, another person who is like this is a guy by the name of Itamar Ben-Gavir, who leads what's known as the Jewish Power Party. This is a member of Netanyahu's coalition. It's part of the government. And he's already been convicted, criminally convicted, of supporting a terrorist group and of racist incitement. And now he's in the government.

He's got a seat in the Knesset as part of Netanyahu's majority. So this is what we're dealing with. And, you know, what this is, you know, frankly, many people think this is really about behind the scenes is Netanyahu trying to avoid prison. Because, you know, as I mentioned,

Netanyahu is facing criminal charges for corruption. The case is proceeding. And one thing that people fear if he pushes through this, you know, this undermining of the Supreme Court's independence is that he could then get his majority in the Knesset to pass a law saying, for example, you can't convict a sitting prime minister or a sitting prime minister can't be removed from office or something like that. The existing Supreme Court would probably say no way that that's wrong and might overturn it. But if the Supreme Court has been eviscerated, if the Knesset can just overturn the Supreme Court's ruling by one vote, none of this means anything. Netanyahu then has his get out of jail card forever.

Lastly, just to sort of circle back to where we started this, where we're talking about how these protests have even rocked the Israeli military, which is quite extraordinary. How widespread is your sense that these protests actually are? Where is the population of Israel with regards to what Netanyahu is trying to do with regards to judiciary? And does he care? I mean, will that pressure cause him to change course? Well, there have been huge demonstrations, hundreds of thousands of people, which in a small country like Israel, I saw a calculation that said that would be as if 8 million people took to the streets of the United States. So these are really big demonstrations. Now, does Netanyahu care?

You know, if somehow these demonstrations, you know, forced a member of his coalition to step down and he suddenly lost power, yes, he would care about that. But this is a really far-right coalition. You know, they seem to determine to go ahead. And it's not clear what domestically can stop this. That's where pressure from the United States matters so much. And the U.S. government has a terrible record of criticizing Israel.

I mean, just recently, the U.N. Security Council was considering a resolution condemning the illegal settlements, and the U.S. State Department negotiated so that it could be turned into a mere presidential statement, which is non-binding, because they just always try to soften criticism of Israel and didn't want to have to, you know, veto the embarrassment of vetoing a resolution of the Security Council. So, I mean, the Biden administration has been horrible about criticizing Israel. Now, they're becoming a bit more outspoken about this effort to undermine the judiciary. But this is, you know, really just the tip of the iceberg because, you know, of course, what goes on day to day is very severe repression in the West Bank,

East Jerusalem, and Gaza. And that barely gets mentioned from the Biden administration. Yeah, I think that's all really well said. Thank you so much for taking some time to lay all of this out for us because it's extraordinarily important. Thank you so much, Ken. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. Yeah, our pleasure. Man, really good segment.

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