Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 4/12/23: Trump Hints US Blew Up Nordstream on Tucker, Tim Scott Joins Race, Elon Leaks Texts With Taibbi, Inflation, Gov Censor Tools Social Media, Biden's Title IX Rule, Rashida Tlaib Defends Assange, Marianne Williamson TikTok 2024

Episode Date: April 12, 2023

Ryan and Emily discuss the new interview between Trump and Tucker Carlson where they cover topics like his indictment, his meetings with Putin, hints that the US blew up the Nordstream pipeline, America's real enemy being within, and more, Nikki Haley slams Trump, Tim Scott joins the race, Elon leaks texts between him and Matt Taibbi in Substack fight, new numbers come in on Inflation, the government working with social media companies to create new tools for censorship, Biden's new Title IX ruling for athletics, Rashida Tlaib penning a letter demanding freedom for Julian Assange, and we're joined by Marianne Williamson to talk about her campaign gaining traction with the youth on TikTok.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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All right, last night, former President Donald Trump appeared on Tucker Carlson's show, the man who says he absolutely despises him or whatever. Trump complained, apparently, to Tucker, like, how could you say that about me, man? And I can imagine that the exchange from there was like, why don't you come on my show? And it worked. And boom, he's got another interview. So we're going to play some clips for that. Inflation numbers, March inflation numbers are coming out this week. That has a lot of implications for what the Federal Reserve is going to do going forward.

You're going to be talking about Title IX later today. Right. And we have news from Elon Musk and Matt Taibbi's ongoing feud. We'll be covering some big developments in investigations into the collusion between Silicon Valley and our federal government. And you've got some Julian Assange stuff to talk about. Yes. The Squad plus Greg Kassar put out a letter to Merrick Garland asking for the Department of Justice to drop the charges against Julian Assange. We're going to talk about that and some other international efforts to get the extradition effort dropped. And also, as you can see at the bottom of the bar there, we're going to have Marianne Williamson

to talk about her, the Marianne mania that has gripped TikTok. Believe it or not, and I had to be told this because I don't know, she is an absolute phenom on TikTok. And it's showing up in polls, as Crystal mentioned earlier this week. It's showing up in polls. So we're going to talk to her about why that is and what that means. But first, let's roll a little bit of this Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump interview. What I thought was perhaps the most newsworthy element of it was his comments about the Russian role and the U.S. role in the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipelines. Let's play a four here. Who blew up the Nord Stream pipeline?

I don't want to get our country in trouble, so I won't answer it. But I can tell you who it wasn't was Russia. How about when they blamed Russia? They said Russia blew up their own pipeline. You got to kick out of that one too. It wasn't Russia. So first of all, it's not as if he was in the planning if the United States did this of the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipeline, but he is somebody who plausibly has connections to people who would know. He's also not necessarily the most credible source for information, but he did say he was going to get arrested and he did get arrested. That's true. He called that one. He called that one. So he's on a roll. So what do you make of his claim here that basically he's saying the United States did this?

So I want to actually, I just looked this up as you were talking. Biden barred Trump from getting intelligence briefings. That's right. So I had forgotten that little tidbit, which is pretty crucial. First president since the era of the deep state to get cut off by the deep state. And it's a pretty crucial element of how we interpret this right here. Now, as you say, it's entirely plausible that he has, he knows somebody who knows. I mean, he knows a guy. He knows a guy who maybe knows a guy,

but either way, it's entirely plausible that he does have insider information here. He said, I don't want to get our country in trouble. That's a big one. That's a big one, don't you think? Yeah. Yeah. And then very later at the end, he says, he says even more firmly, Russia did not blow up its own pipeline, which everybody kind of understands at this point. There was some U.S. intel that Russia was out shopping for contractors to get estimates to fix this. And it was something like $500 million, like an extraordinary amount of money to patch this up and get it moving again. And so that just further undercut the claim that Russia would have blown it up because if they're finding Russia out privately trying to figure out how to fix it, it just strains to the breaking point of credibility that they would have blown it up in order to then figure out how to fix it.

Yeah. And you're right. I think this was the newsiest bit from the entire interview. Tucker just comes out and asks, who blew up the North Stream? Which was one great way of getting at the question, actually. But he also talked- Why didn't he do who killed Kennedy? Come on. Right. He should have. Next time. Just like, yeah. No, he should have, like John Stossel did to Mike Pompeo recently, which was pretty well done. But he also got Trump to sort of talk about his experience in the courthouse in Manhattan last week. So let's roll A1. Tell us from your perspective what that was like. They were incredible.

When I went to the courthouse, which is also a prison in a sense, they signed me in. And I'll tell you, people were crying. People that work there, professionally work there, that have no problems putting in murderers and they see everybody. It's tough, tough place. And they were crying. They were actually crying. They said, I'm sorry. They were crying. Were they crying? They were actually crying. What do you think? I don't know. It's too hard to say. I mean, anything's possible. Maybe. Anything's possible. Wish we could believe this guy. It'd be so fun to have him as a reliable course of world history, American history, that are very deeply emotionally connected for some very understandable reasons to Donald Trump. Yeah. Believe that he hears them and listens to them.

That we know. That we know for sure. It's not impossible to me that people would be crying. But as you say, not the most credible narrator. And so Trump has been asked before about Putin, the war in Ukraine. This, to me, was slightly different than and a little bit more than we've gotten from him in the past. Let's let's roll a little bit of this on Putin, Putin and Ukraine. Let me ask you, talk to Putin about Ukraine. What did you say to him? I could see that he loved it.

And I said... He loved Ukraine. He considers it to be a part of Russia. Yeah. I said, not when I'm president. We had a very good relationship. He was... I mean, look, I was the worst thing that ever happened to him.

I closed up his pipeline. You never heard the words Nord Stream 2 until I came along. Nord Stream 2 was their pipeline. And I had a great relationship with them, but it was very tough because they had a fake Russia investigation. And I told them, and he told me, he said, it's very hard for us to deal, don't you think? I said, very hard, because we have a fake investigation

that turned out to be a fake for two years that went on. Donald Trump is actually right there. He's completely correct about Nord Stream. He's completely correct about how he handled Ukraine during his own presidency. It's different than how the Biden administration handled Ukraine, and Nord Stream is a part of that. And so he's not off the mark on that point. Again, his relationship with Putin, we've talked about this before. You get to the madman theory of international relations, that if you have somebody like Donald Trump who sees this as transactional in a business relationship, which a lot of countries will BS about, like look at Macron in China this week. He's just completely bullshitting everybody in the way that politicians do diplomacy.

It's not how Donald Trump did diplomacy. He did diplomacy like a businessman, and it had some strange consequences at times. The amendment I would make to that is that his doing diplomacy as business had a knock-on effect of actually ending up arming Ukraine to the teeth in a way that the Obama administration didn't do. And that's a weird history of this, is that you had Ukraine up through the Obama era, particularly after 2014 with the kind of US-supported coup, flipping the government there, and then Russia annexing Crimea. You had Ukraine pushing the Biden administration for all sorts of weapons, javelins, and billions in weapons flows that had not been coming previously. The Obama administration actually said, no, we don't want to antagonize Russia over here. When the Trump administration came in because, and Trump talks about it, because of all this

Trump-Russia stuff, Trump, I think, was more eager to be tougher on Putin as a result. And then he also saw that Ukraine wanted something from him. And this is where the business side comes in. Yes. Ukraine wanted weapons from him. Does Trump care why Ukraine wants weapons or whether Ukraine should have weapons? No, he doesn't care. What he knows, these people want something from me. I want something from them. And that's when he had his perfect phone call with Zelensky, where he's like, look, you guys want these weapons? Here's what I want. I want you going on TV saying that Hunter Biden and Joe Biden are corrupt and the whole thing that led to his impeachment. And so as a result, what comes out of that is Ukraine getting tons of weapons. Right, right. And Russia feeling antagonized.

Well, Russia not moving in until Joe Biden is president, though. Yes. We don't know whether or not he would have moved in when Biden was. But it is a matter of historical record that it ended up being Trump that armed Ukraine in a way that Obama did not, which complicates the whole question. Although, yeah, I still think there's an argument that Zelensky or that Putin doesn't move under Trump because he sees all of the weapons flowing and realizes the United States would probably under Trump have a different approach, which it turned out to be different though, right? Like Trump turned out to be tough in terms of sending the weapons, even while he talked one way about Putin. And then when the war actually kicked into high gear for all kinds of political

reasons, Donald Trump has been one of the people, basically, in the Republican Party, breaking the neocon consensus, interestingly enough. The argument that Trump seems to be making is that he's so crazy that Putin was afraid of him. And I don't think we have this clip queued up, but there's this exchange back and forth where he says, I told Xi, if you go after Taiwan, and I told Putin, if you go after Ukraine, I'm going to do something that's so terrible that we can't even speak about it. And later he calls it the N-word, which he says nuclear. And so he's like, and Xi and Putin, they didn't believe me, but

they believed me 10%. And that 10% was enough to keep them out of Taiwan, to keep them out of Ukraine. So his argument is, reading between the lines, that he threatened to nuke them if they, you know, stepped over the border. And as a result, they stayed back. And that 10% of a question in their mind of, is this guy mad enough to do this, is what held them back. I don't know how sustainable that is as a foreign policy. Right, exactly. And again, not impossible. There's truth to it. And we've talked about it before. We also have one more clip of him talking about he's asked sort of what the biggest threat to the United States is.

Let's roll a three. I often say they said to me the other day, one of your fellow journalists said, who's the biggest problem, sir? Is it China? Could it be Russia? Could it be North Korea? And I I said the biggest problem is from within. It's these sick, radical people from within because we can handle if we're smart, we can handle Russia, China. I did. I took in billions and billions, hundreds of billions of dollars from China. No other president took in anything. And they respected me. He's the same thing. You know, I told him you can't go into

Taiwan. You can't you can't do it. I won him, you can't go into Taiwan. You can't. You can't do it. I won't tell you exactly what I said, but it was something that probably a lot of people wouldn't like if they heard it. But it was very tough. Don't go into Taiwan. If you do, we're going to have problems. Other than that, we're going to be in a great relationship. We're going to have a great relationship.

And he said to me when I said we're going to do something, if he goes in, no, no, no, you wouldn't do it. I'll do that. I swear I'll do that. And he didn't believe me, but he believed me 10%. The same thing with Putin. I said I was going to do something really nasty if he goes into Ukraine. He said, no, no, you're not going to do that. I said, I will.

So we did have that clip. I didn't realize it was the same one where he talks about the radical sickos. Yes. But yeah, so is that your read, too, that he basically threatened to nuke them? Is that what he's trying to say? Yeah, no, I think it's absolutely. And again, it's not, I mean, that threat is always looming over diplomacy. That is our threat. Like that's the whole reason we have a nuclear arsenal is to make that threat. It's been the world order for

a hundred years now. Like that's how international relation, it is the single biggest thing that looms over international relations, period. And people don't say it aloud, I think for some defensible reasons. People can correct me in the comments or whatever if I'm wrong but I think China has signed a no first strike pledge and but the United States has not and refuses to. If everybody would sign a no first strike pledge we wouldn't be 100% out of the woods but we'd be much further out of the woods. You sound like be much further out of the woods. You sound like such a hippie.

Well, I mean, I think avoiding nuclear annihilation is pretty rad, man. I just, I don't believe anybody backed into a corner. And again, this is madman theory with, you talk about North Korea, you could talk about all kinds of places. Iran, where nuclear weapons are on the table, in the same way that they might not trust Donald Trump with what he says, but just trust him that 10%, you know, signing a no first strike treaty, getting everyone on board with it, then you're putting a lot of trust in the hands of people we don't necessarily treat as good faith

actors. But it would prevent you at minimum from, I think, making those threats. Right. Like if you said, if you go into Taiwan, we're going to nuke you, be like, you signed a, are you breaking your pledge here? Yeah, I don't disagree with that. Yeah. Anyway, we might get another shot at four years of Trump. He's still climbing in the polls and he's looking good. He's not looking good in the general election, but he's looking good in the primary. In the primary, this is, yeah, absolutely. And Tucker, we should say, this was obviously taped at Mar-a-Lago. It was aired last night on Fox News. He said before tossing to the first commercial break of Trump, for a man who is caricatured as an extremist, we think you'll find what he has to say moderate, sensible, and wise, which the media contrasted with, as you mentioned earlier, Ryan, those text messages where Tucker

just said he despises Trump. He's excited to get- Can't wait to never talk about him again. To never have to talk about Donald Trump again. Again, understandable. Life comes at you fast. Yes. I don't necessarily think those are mutually exclusive things. I think he can say that Trump in this interview sounded moderate, sensible. He's a moderate, sensible madman. Except where he gets to wise. I'm not sure that I would use the word wise in that context. But it's definitely, he sounds, I'll tell you this, wiser than a whole lot of our foreign policy elites who sound like absolute morons when they talk about this stuff and continue to dig us deeper into holes that we're already in. So on that note, at least he's

wiser. I guess everything's relative. And speaking of his own legal jeopardy, news out of the prosecution of Donald Trump, Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan DA, is now suing Jim Jordan to try to block, we put up that first element here, to try, basically to try to keep Jim Jordan out of this case. He went for a temporary restraining order to prevent Jordan from subpoenaing a former prosecutor in his office who Eliza Orleans talked about in our interview. Last week, he's written a book kind of playing up his role as a prosecutor resigning in protest because Bragg wasn't going in the direction he wanted. Jordan's trying to subpoena him. Jordan is otherwise trying to get all sorts of information about roughly $5,000 in federal money that Bragg has spent in the tax part of the investigation so far.

And Bragg is straight up calling this obstruction of justice. Like he said, you're obstructing this investigation. I want the judge to stop it. The judge has rejected the temporary restraining order request, but has said that Jim Jordan needs to reply by, I think, April 15th or 17th for a hearing around April 19th. So this is moving quickly because it raises all sorts of separation of power and questions and also independence of the judiciary. Like, can you subpoena and publicly attack a prosecutor in the middle of a prosecution in a deliberate effort to slow down the prosecution like that to obstruct. They're trying to obstruct. They wouldn't even say they're doing anything other than trying to obstruct the prosecution, right?

Yeah. I mean, so Jim Jordan says, first, they indict a president for no crime. This is what he tweeted yesterday. Then they sue to block congressional oversight when we ask questions about the federal funds they say they used to do it. So, yes, he's using that roughly $5,000 as a—I think you can understand why it falls into the oversight umbrella. He's using it as— You used, yeah. Exactly, $5,000. I don't think he's deeply concerned about the $5,000, but he's using it as his in to then file this.

And I saw experts quoted, I think, in Axios this morning saying, listen, Bragg does not really have a shot here, but his goal is likely to slow it all down, to tie it all up. And I think even John Dean tweeted that it was like a genius move or a brilliant move on behalf of Alvin Bragg to file the suit. Just tangle him up in court rather than having to keep going. Yeah, I guess. Sure. Makes sense. So in related news, the Gang of Eight, which is known as the kind of two heads, and we put up the second element, the two heads of the intelligence committees on both sides of the Capitol and the leaders of the Senate and the House, are now in possession of the classified documents that both Biden and Trump intentionally or unintentionally scrolled away into their garages and their resorts. And so they now know what was missing, what was purloined, what kind of leaked out.

I have always said the way to resolve this is to basically show the public everything, except the stuff I guess that would get somebody killed immediately. Right. And then let people judge. Like, was this, did they take, you know, the CIA's stupidly classified soup of the day menu? Or was this something related to nuclear technology that the UAE was going to pay for? Those are completely different questions about whether or not the public should consider this to be something they care about. Exactly. And we have some indications that the documents at Mar-a-Lago,

we sort of know that some of those are highly classified. We know that some of those because there were pictures that were filed. Obviously, we can sort of make conclusions from that. But still having that lack of information between the Pence documents, the Biden documents and the Trump documents, it's a world apart based on soup of the day, which is a joke, but also not really. No, they really do that. Yeah, they really do that. Between that and between actual nuclear secret stuff. And we've been having this conversation for coming up on what, this was last August. So coming up on a year now, we've been having this conversation about the Trump documents, totally in the dark about exactly how bad they are. Again, we have some indications, but without knowing exactly what that is, and this gets us closer

to that process, obviously, because as senators see things, they say things and just sort of gets the ball rolling. The closer that we get to that, the more we can, as the public, make judgments about this, because it's actually really hard to say, knowing that the documents were moved, knowing that Trump was trying to obstruct the, or seemingly was trying to obstruct the collection of the documents. It makes a world of difference what was in those boxes. And we haven't known for almost a year. This is also a good excuse for me to bring up a beef I have with the way that Congress does this. The idea that you have a gang of eight, that you have eight elected members of Congress

who have this kind of special ability to see intelligence material, that other members of Congress who have also been elected by equal districts around the country or states that are equal in the Constitution, creates a situation that puts Congress in this subservient role to the intelligence community. To me, if you are a member of Congress, the people have invested in you their trust and the power and authority that comes with that trust. Like if you believe in a democratic republic, then you have to, I think, give everyone that the people send to Washington the same access. Otherwise you wind up with this, with this power imbalance where even people who are on the intelligence committee. Republicans. Republicans, even, yeah, in the majority on the

intelligence committee don't have access to some of this stuff. And I think that's important because part of what we're talking about here is that we have indications, not just from those pictures, but via leaks to the media about the Trump files. And we saw that over the course of the Russia collusion investigation. We saw that with the Iraq war. Leaks to the media are often dramatically out of context. The media will contextualize them exactly as their national context, the media will contextualize them

exactly as their national security sources want them to contextualize them. And that could mean that soup of the day is alluded to in media reports as something much more serious than it actually is. And you can come up with a million different ways to do that. You could say, you know, highly classified information about the personal decisions made by national security officials when that is actually just the soup that they ate for lunch. But it's really, really misleading when we play this leak game with national security. And again, we have a million different examples to show us that very clearly at this point. And so that's part of the reason why having not just

the Department of Justice know what's in those documents is so important, even if it is senators from both the Democratic and Republican Party, and that gets it closer to the public having an understanding of it, you then have competing interests that are, they both know what's there, and they can bring us slightly closer to an accurate or balanced perspective of what's there, even if we can't see it ourselves. And I feel like those competing interests should have the legal ability to use their own judgment for what they believe they ought to share with the public. Like, I think it's wild that the Speaker of the House and the leader of the Senate can be told by a bureaucrat who wasn't elected what they can share with the public. And it shows a kind of split between the faith that a lot of Americans,

if you take like an extreme, like libertarian right-wing approach to the market, they'd say, we don't need, you know, we don't need an FAA because if an airplane crashes, then consumers are just going to not fly on that one. And so that people are then incentivized to build safer airplanes. That's the kind of faith that some people will put into a market, but they don't put that same faith in voters. If a Speaker of the House recklessly released classified information that the public felt should not have been released, you can vote them out of office. You can vote their party out of office. So if you believe in the kind of the wisdom of the crowds that make up a market, why not put the same, vest the same authority and dignity into the people

who elect our members of Congress? Well, this is a little bit of a preview of the Title IX segment. But before we get to that, Mediaite also was reporting on a leaked Nikki Haley memo that went after Trump for being indicted, which is an interesting development. This is a memo to donors from Nikki Haley. Donald Trump had a pretty good Q1 if you count being indicted as good. Mediaite continues her campaign also claimed Trump only promised more drama, quote, more drama in the future as his legal woes continue to mount. The other candidate to get mentioned, Mediate says, is DeSantis. It accuses him of making numerous, quote, missteps since unofficially launching his 2024 campaign with a book tour. Here's the quote. Ron DeSantis essentially launched his presidential campaign with a national book tour during this period and made one misstep after another, confirming what

many observers have long suspected. He's not ready for primetime, and it continues to say, and then there are the others. Wait, what others? Just really clever stuff from whoever wrote the donor memo. How is Nikki Haley being received on the right? Not well. No, it's just nothing. Do people think she's running for something else for a future, like to just raise her profile? What's the kind of right, kind of conventional wisdom about what the Nikki Haley campaign is? Yeah, I think it's that she's not being well received by the conservative movement, but Republican voters are a totally different question than that. You know,

your average Republican primary voter is not what is called a movement conservative on the right. That's just not the case. So sort of institutional conservatives, movement conservatives, look at Nikki Haley grassroots and say she's totally behind the curve. She's running a campaign from 2012. I would argue that's close to the truth, in 2022. And at the same time, Nikki Haley is going to say, well, I can connect with suburban women. I can connect with- Your old soccer moms. Yeah, it's a totally different demographic than your grassroots Republican activist or your movement conservative who is pretty averse

to the Nikki Lilley campaign. She's Jeb, but not Jeb. Yeah, and they're tied up obviously in the Trump-DeSantis feud. The conservative movement is very tied up in the Trump-DeSantis feud. Speaking of which, we have polling. This is a new morning council poll. This was published on Tuesday of 3,600 potential Republican primary voters. Almost 60%, according to Mediate, again, said they preferred Trump to DeSantis in a 2024 matchup.

60%. Trump tops the poll with 56% support in the survey. DeSantis is behind him with 23%. That is a 33-point margin. Nikki Haley, Mike Pence and Nikki Haley are following Trump and DeSantis at 7% and 4%. Liz Cheney's in there with 3% and every other option is at 1% or less. Salon is reporting that support for former President Donald Trump fell rapidly after he was- You put B5 up here? Yeah, here's the- That was the good news. Here's the bad news. Here's another poll. 34 felony counts, obviously, from last week. His support in an ABC News Ipsos poll dipped pretty heavily after that. Salon is pointing out that Trump says he thinks the indictment could help him by boosting his support in the election.

The poll found that a majority of Americans, 53%, believe he did something illegal. 11% say he acted wrongly, but not intentionally. 20% believe he was not culpable at all. A CNN poll released last week showed that 62% of independent voters approved of the indictment. That ABC News poll from this week found 50% of people believe that Trump should be charged with a crime. 33% think he should not. Nearly half of respondents said Trump should suspend his campaign in the wake of the indictment. That was up from 43% before the indictment. So as you said, Ryan, a little good news, a little bad news, but this is a perfect contrast between primary and general election.

The poll of Republican primary voters has him up at nearly 60%, with 33 points over DeSantis, who's at 23 points. Whereas when you're looking towards the general election, you have that broader pool, not just of Republican primary voters, saying, eh, this might actually change my mind. What's amazing is that you have Biden's approval rating in here at 34%, and you have him up almost 10 higher than Trump, whose approval rating is sitting at 25%. Now, as Ron Klain famously tweeted, after Macron won with like a 30% approval rating, he was like, he did the eyeball emojis. Look at that. Turns out you can win an election with 30% approval rating. Somebody has to win. Like that, that is the actual way that we do elections. So it's at this point, it looks like it's either going to be somebody with a 25%

approval rating or somebody with a 34% approval rating, unless entering the chat is Tim Scott, South Carolina Senator. I've put up B6 here who just formed an exploratory presidential committee. He's been kind of flirting with the presidential run for years now. Yeah. And kind of, but so I'm curious again, on the right, what's the conventional wisdom about Tim Scott? I think it's the exact same as Nikki Haley, except he panders less, at least overtly, to that sort of soccer mom crowd. There was a lot of cringing over Nikki Haley's response to Don Lemon, where he made that horrible gaffe saying that she was past her prime. It was just bizarre. It wasn't a gaffe either. Don Lemon said he was past her prime?

He said Nikki Haley was past her prime. Oh my gosh, if you missed this, you got to go back and watch the clip because it's absolutely hilarious. But it wasn't a gaffe either. It was just Don Lemon being Don Lemon. And Nikki Haley just responded to it in, I think, a pretty cringey way. And Tim Scott has had less opportunity to do that as of now. I think he's probably ideologically similar. Obviously, they're both South Carolina Republicans, people that would have really excited, I think, the Tea Party wing of the party back in 2012, 2016, but have adapted to the Trump era by not really adapting. Have adapted to the Trump era maybe by changing the way they talk about the media, maybe by changing the way they talk about rural America and forgotten Americans. But policy-wise, really hasn't been a ton of shift from then to now. They say that's good, right? That's the thing that allows them to connect and communicate

with suburban voters, your typical Republican voters, people that Democrats pander to when it comes to certain, like the Gottheimer wing of the Democratic Party, right? Is that a whole wing? Do we have to call that a wing? It's not a whole wing, actually. It's a well-funded wing. It's so well-funded. The Gottheimer Democrats could be Nikki Haley Republicans, right? Or Tim Scott Republicans. Well, yeah, the Problem Solvers Caucus, the No Labels crew, that's their... Yeah, that is... I mean, and we might see it in 2024 with No Labels spending $70 million to get ballot lines everywhere.

Salt deduction voters, yeah. Could it be Manchin Haley? Yeah. Well, and again, there is a—it depends on the economic climate. It depends on the cultural climate. People have good reasons for being interested in different things depending on where they're coming from, depending on what their interests are. And, yeah, that's a—they're betting that you can make the pitch. But when you have Donald Trump up right now, things change. But when you have him up over DeSantis on that level,

I mean, it just looks like 2016 again, where it's Donald Trump and everyone else. And the vote against Donald Trump, this time, maybe it's only 40%. I doubt it stays exactly 60-40. But you're either voting for Trump or you're voting against Trump, just with a different flavor of voting against Trump. And that makes him, it's a glide path for the nomination to him. And y'all couldn't beat Trump in 2016 when you had 60 to 65% of the party against him in primaries. They sure did. Now you have like 40% against him, so. And he's dominating the media because one of the biggest news stories in the world is this indictment of a former president.

So he's going to eat up all the airtime as that will be looming over. There's two other cases, three other cases actually. There's the Documents case, the Georgia case, and there's one that I'm forgetting. But the one that he was indicted on last week I don't even think is going to court until December. So good luck. There you go. Well, let's move on to the brewing Substack and Twitter battle, which goes back to an exchange between Matt Taibbi and Twitter CEO and SpaceX CEO and Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, which Elon Musk bizarrely and for some reason felt wise to share on Twitter and then quickly delete. Screenshots last forever. And so we have some of these here. We can put the first

element. I think the account Halal Flow may have been one of the first to post this. So you can find the full exchanges over at his account and elsewhere. So Matt basically reached out to him and said, hey, he says, you're taking down all of my Twitter files threads because you're mad at me personally for not leaving the company where I was already employed. Really? Elon Musk writes back, no, this shouldn't be happening. We'll be fixed tomorrow. But then he seizes on something in Matt's tweet, text, and he says, you're employed at Substack?

And from there, Taibbi then explains to him, he says, my subscribers there employ me, and I have a great thing going there. I also have loyalty to the company, which did originally hire me. And if I moved to Twitter, it would have been a major optics issue for us both. But this isn't related to the threads being removed, so this is going to be fixed. Musk tells him it's going to be fixed. And then Taibbi explains to him that he was using the word hired loosely. And he says, I was never a Substack employee. I was one of the first Substack Pro contributors, which is a guaranteed return system for the first year. That was known

publicly. Taibbi has been very transparent. Substack was offering deals to all sorts of different writers. It's a contract. Yeah, it's a contract. They offered me one several years ago where it's like, we'll give you, because if you're going to leave your full-time job based on the hope that people are going to, you know, fund your, you know, at five, $6 a month, fund your sub stack, then what they were doing is they were giving a kind of, yes, here's a minimum to make sure you pay your mortgage and entice you to come over.

They don't do that anymore. What they found, I think, is that a lot of people were coasting. Like it worked for some of the biggest names, like Iglesias, Ta andrew sullivan andrew sullivan like did he take one i don't remember if he took one or not uh it it worked for them because they end up bringing in a lot more you know readership than the minimum paid out so it was a gamble like am i gonna get if because if you end up getting if they offer you two hundred

thousand dollars and you make a million like they keep most of that extra yeah, if they offer you $200,000 and you make a million, like they keep most of that extra. Yeah. But if they offer you $200,000 and you only bring in 50, well, now you didn't get evicted. Right. Because you didn't get foreclosed on. So anyway, these sub-stack deals were widely known. Musk then tweeted, if you remember, apparently Matt Taibbi is or was employed by sub by Substack. So he read this full exchange that he had privately with Matt and then publicly tweeted that he was employed, which wasn't true. As though he had inside secret information. Matt had told him he was somehow actually employed.

Like he had some other source. When in fact the source was Matt telling him the truth about how Substack. To me it seems like Musk is having a hard time understanding a company that pays its creators or that has a relationship that sends money to creators rather than one that the relationship goes the other way. Give us your eight dollars a month. Yeah, it might be like that. I mean, I also think he's just has a million pots on the stove right now and is like very transparently working through his different issues on public forums. He tweets this then deletes it, I think. And this is in the broader context of him being

upset that Substack launched a notes feature that he thinks is competitive with Twitter, which is where the whole feud between Musk and Taibbi started. That's because he tweeted that Taibbi was apparently an employee of Substack to undercut Taibbi's points about why he was not going to be on Twitter anymore, was not going to be working on the Twitter files anymore. And so that was where Musk was coming from in tweeting that out. I really just think like, honest to goodness, I think Elon Musk is working on like huge, all of these huge different projects. He's trying to make Twitter, he now says he has it in shape to break even instead of running that like $3 million annual deficit that he said it was running when he took over. And he's just, he's so public in dealing with these different workplace issues. Like he's actually dealt with basically human resources

issues on Twitter. And so when you can see it all playing out in real time for someone who's extremely busy, sort of aggressive and combative, it's just weird. And I think that's where you get to him deleting this, because he's inaccurate. He's interpreting this stuff inaccurately. He probably realized that he shouldn't have tweeted this out. It got members of Congress to say, well, now we know, when Matt Taibbi wouldn't give up his sources, when they were pressing him for sources in that absurd congressional hearing where Democrats just beclowned themselves about a month ago, they were like, well, now we know. Musk is Taibbi's source. It's like, oh, well done. congressional hearing where Democrats just beclowned themselves about a month ago,

they were like, well, now we know. Musk is Taibbi's source. It's like, oh, well done. What tipped you off? Great work, you guys. And since now everybody apparently knows that, Musk seems like he's the only one who didn't know that. His relationship with Taibbi is one as a source to a journalist. And so many sources just don't understand what that is like. So, Jeet here, if you could put up this second element, put up one of my favorite quotes out there. Every journalist who is not too stupid or full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity,

ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust, and betraying them without remorse. That's an iconic quote from the book, The Journalist and the Murderer, by Janet Malcolm. And she goes into the psychology and the psychopathology of the relationship between sources and journalists, and just how amazing it is the way that sources kind of open up to journalists, expect that there's this like two-way relationship when the source is also often a subject and the journalist is going to take what they can and need from that source and pull in from other sources as well and produce journalism that is not necessarily going to be exactly what the source wanted. And the source will then be shocked that the journalist, when the story is over, is like, no, no, no, I'm going to notes.

Yeah. We're not friends. Well, and it's also, I mean, the vast majority of the Twitter files reporting has been document-based. It hasn't been relying on unnamed sources. There's been some, lots of, there's been reporting, but it doesn't seem like it was going to Musk because Musk wasn't there. Right. At the time, he wouldn't know.

But they did interview a lot of like former vice presidents and former engineers and that sort of thing. Yeah, they've gotten information from them, but I feel like the backbone of everything we've learned from Twitter files is document-based. You see it in everybody's own words. And it's true that Musk gave them access. That's publicly knowledge. We know that Musk gave them access because he talked about how he gave them access. And Matt talked about how he gave them access.

So none of that is shocking. And for people to say this is a dunk on Taibbi, I think is ridiculous. What you see here is some decent source massaging where he says, understandably, if I was at Twitter, it would have been a major optics issue for us both, right? And he's not wrong about that. It would have looked ridiculous. He honestly couldn't have reported that story if he was totally beholden to Twitter as an employee or anything like that. Right, that's not journalism, yeah. No, that's not journalism. So speaking of notes, if we can put up this third one here. So notes

has rolled out. This is Substack's basically version of Twitter. Are you on Substack? No. You're going to get on Substack? So I'm on Substack. I've been on there since like 2017 or something. Yeah, you're an early adopter. Yeah, my newsletter is called Bad News. I think I might change the name back to just Ryan. I love the name. Maybe I'll stick with Bad News. I love the name.

Anyway, go find Bad News on there. I've been doing a newsletter since before Substack. And I've been talking to these guys since the very beginning. I'm really like proud and excited for, you know, what they've been able to build. And I think they've done a really actually good job of creating space for free and open expression without kind of getting pigeonholed as kind of reactionary right wing, like has happened to a lot of other platforms that tried to do that. And I think that's impressive on their front because it is so important. And the value of open expression is not inherently right wing. And so for them to

have been able to swim against that, I think has been impressive. And you can imagine when you look at this Notes app, why Elon Musk is like, hmm, that looks a lot like Twitter. Uh-oh. Yeah, I still don't think it's really a competitor to Twitter, though, because in the same sense that it's hard for us to apply our definition of monopoly to Facebook or Instagram because people will say, well, Twitter is a competitor. And we can put C4 up here if people want to see what it looks like. Yeah, take a look at this if you're watching. Yeah, you can see how it looks similar to Twitter.

I mean, it actually does really look similar to Twitter. It makes sense that Elon Musk would retaliate. That's how business goes. He says, I'm drawing a red line in the sand here. It's weird to pick on Taibbi out of all of that. But that is to say the point of Facebook isn't really a competitor to TikTok. It's a competitor in your time. But you can't, like, the point of Facebook

is that every person is on the same platform. Every person is on the same platform with Twitter. Every person is on the same platform when it comes to TikTok. That's the point of your feed. Your feed is supposed to be all-encompassing. So I don't necessarily know that it's a good apples to apples to say that this is a competitor. But at the same time, I think you're right that what Substack has done is just so impressive as a business. And part of it is a competitor. But at the same time, I think you're right that what Substack has done is just so impressive as a business. And part of it is a good lesson, I think, to other people in C-suites, which is they just draw a red line on content. They say we are not getting involved in content decisions. And I think being upfront about that and being very bold about that,

never, ever wavering on it is so, so important because when you do that, it gives you cover when stuff comes at you from the left, when stuff comes at you from the right. It's a good lesson for Twitter actually too, because I think it's what Elon Musk sort of aspires to be. But Twitter still can't quite do because it gets involved in content moderation more than it should. And what Substack I think is trying to do is what Jack Dorsey suggested in a post that he just put up, I think, last night, if we could put up, I think, the fifth element here, which is basically to say that you should not be able to, you know, take content that a creator created and put on the internet. Nobody else but the creator of it, the author of it,

should be able to take that off the internet. Where the role of the internet and the public comes in is how you moderate and how you amplify those comments. So in other words, it's okay to leave terrible things up. Yeah. The problem comes if you're taking terrible things and just shoving them in everybody's face. And so what Substack tries to do is allow you to curate very carefully what it is that you want to see. Elon Musk did an interview with the BBC last night on Spaces. And it became this big fight between the BBC reporter and Musk where the BBC reporter was saying, my for you tab is just garbage It's like a bunch of trash that I don't want and he said I'm seeing a lot of things that are he used the phrase

Hateful and then musk asked him to define that he was like well They're slightly sexist and slightly racist and musk is like give me some examples And he's like I haven't looked at the for you tab for three weeks because it's just a stream of garbage And musk is like aha you say that there are slightly racist, slightly sexist things in the For You tab, but you can't name a single example of it. But what he's trying to get at is something deeper, which the BBC reporter, which is that he didn't want all this For You stuff. It's Twitter that was like, we think this stuff is for you. Whereas what Substack is saying and what Jack Dorsey is suggesting is give people more of an ability to choose their own algorithmic experience.

He said there should be a G-rated algorithm that you can choose from and then other algorithms where you can transparently decide this is the way that I'd like to have my feed shaped. And these are the people that I want to follow because social media companies, YouTube among them, have gotten away from the idea that if you click subscribe or you click follow, that that means anything. They don't care. They're like, no, we know what you're going to interact with better than you do. And we think engagement is more important than your own conscious choice of what you want. And that's what really pisses me off about the For You tab on Twitter, which you get toggled onto by default. It drives me insane. It's like, get out. Stop.

Right, right, right, right. Because you get pushed way more divisive content. And this is just my interpretation. More divisive, viral, annoying content than what you've curated for yourself, which is the cool thing about Twitter. It's one of the coolest ways to curate news because it's exactly what you're asking for. You can follow all of the different outlets that you really like, that you really trust, whether they're on the left or the right. You can pepper some celebrity content, some Vanderpump Rules content in there. The Bravo content that Ryan lives for. But let me choose it. Yes, right, right, right. And there's no algorithm that's going to do that because it's not me. No matter how much it thinks it's me, it's not. So anyway, and it's all just a great reminder that we are guinea pigs in the real-time process of theorizing how some of this technology is best employed, the sort of capitalistic philosophy behind the ethics of it.

And it's a reminder like what Brandeis, when he's writing about privacy, he's writing about photography, right, the ethics of photography. And that really wasn't all that long ago. So in the same way that people who were suddenly being photographed and immortalized, there were big philosophical privacy questions about that. There still are. That's a lot what we're getting into right now with the content we self-publish online. And real quickly, I'll just read from Jack Dorsey because two interesting things where he weighed in. One, he said, everything that happened to Twitter is my fault. He's like, in 2020, we had an activist investor who came onto the board. If you're watching Succession, you guys know how this works. They didn't like the way that I wanted to approach free expression and the user's relationship to the algorithm. And I gave

up and made my exit strategy. And I left Twitter and I feel terrible about that. So that's part one of what he says. On the Twitter files, he says, I do believe absolute transparency builds trust. As for the files, I wish they were released WikiLeaks style with many more eyes and interpretations to consider. And along with that, commitments of transparency for present and future actions. I'm hopeful all of this will happen. There's nothing to hide, only a lot to learn. The current attacks on my former colleagues could be dangerous. It doesn't solve anything. If you want to blame, direct it at me and my actions or lack thereof.

And his full piece, which you can get up at habla.news, is called A Native Internet Protocol for Social Media, which is laying out the kind of intellectual rationale for his basically new kind of attempt at building a social media company or organization that does what he's talking about. Gives freedom to users to post basically whatever they want, but then gives other protocols the ability to moderate and amplify that in ways that are hopefully creating a better experience for people. Do we have inflation numbers, by the way? We do.

There we go. Okay, so inflation numbers are out. Bob Bassani was a CNBC reporter. He calls it Goldilocks CPI. The markets are very, very excited by these numbers. So he's March core CPI. So core CPI, those are the inflation numbers that do not include kind of volatile fuel and food prices, are up 0.4% month over month, which is in line with expectations. Last month, it was 0.5%. So that's actually a significant drop when you go from 0.5% to 0.4%. That meant that year over year, year over year, inflation was 5.5%. The expectations have been 5.6%. So it's cooling at an even faster rate than people

expected that it would. As a result, the market is rallying on that because they think that that means that the Federal Reserve is then going to ease off on its interest rate cuts. One reason they're easing off on their interest rate cuts, though, ironically, is that the point of an interest rate cut is to restrict lending, restrict credit. And banks have been doing that on their own because they're like, oh, whoops, we're about to get a bank run and collapse. And so functionally, you're getting a lot of the same thing. Basically, my read on this, and I'm curious for you, T take, is that this is just an extraordinary vindication for the basically Keynesian style Bidenomics that rushed out of the gate with the

$1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, with the hundreds of billions in what the CHIPS Act, and you've got the IRA, which was something like $700 billion over a couple years of spending. You had from the kind of Reaganomics, Obamanomics types, Larry Summers types saying, this is going to create runaway inflation. Larry Summers said we're going to have endemic, endless inflation as a result of this and that Biden's American rescue plan and his other spending are going to go down in history as one of the great economic mistakes because they produced way too much demand in the economy. And Biden was saying no. Janet Yellen was saying no. Biden was saying no. We believe this is transitory. And they get mocked a lot for that

because transitory, if the next week it's still going, people are like, you said this was going to be over. It's like, well, we didn't mean it was going to be over in a week. So to be heading this consistently down for about a year now, I think demonstrates that there was a lot more capacity in the economy to be invested in and to produce than people thought. Now separately, and I think it's important to separate this out, housing prices are still killing people.

Yeah. But I don't think that's either fiscal or interest rate. Now you can say it's interest rate related in the sense that it's pushing up asset prices, but if you don't ever build any new housing, then you're just, and the population keeps growing and wages grow, even if they grow in line with inflation, you're going to have runaway housing prices. So that's, I think you have to have a separate housing policy that addresses that. But anyway, so that, so my read on this is that it's a vindication for a kind of progressive economic vision for the economy. What's the – do you have the breakdown of where it's – I'm trying to look for it now.

These numbers are coming out as we're speaking here. It's always interesting to see where CPI is like – it's uneven in some cases and to your point about interest rates. Right. So headline inflation even better, 0.1% in March, practically flat, and 5% year over year, which is, you know, that's not the nine, like that's not the 9% that you can kind of scare people with. Yeah. I think people, now people I think still are feeling a lot of pain because of, basically because of rent and housing prices. So is it the soft landing that was much mocked?

So far, yeah. So far, you do have, and we should get, you know, we could get Stoller back on here. I'm sure he'd like to do a victory lap over, because if you can continue to have wages at the bottom quintile, because that's what people need to, if you look at the data, people say, well, who on earth is better off since Biden became president? Everybody in the bottom 20% has seen like significant wage increases over inflation. Now, if they're facing rent problems, if they didn't have a locked-in lease or they're otherwise screwed when it comes to housing, they're not appreciating those wage increases in the way that they would otherwise. But that's what I'm saying. Those are separate

things in some ways. You have to figure out ways to deal with the housing crisis that are independent of the broader wage fight that we're having. Well, and I was going to say, speaking of unevenness, I'm looking at the breakdown now. Like Ryan said, these were breaking as we're talking, which is why we wanted to cover it live. But grocery prices from the Hill dropped substantially to an 8.4% annual increase from 10.2% last month. Food prices, which are some of the inflation that consumers feel most acutely, they read it as feed most acutely, which is kind of funny, are still running much hotter than inflation overall.

Fruits and vegetables dropped by 1.3% in the month, while meats declined by 1.4%. So obviously, there's still stuff that consumers are going to be feeling pretty badly. And so that's where the Biden administration, their attempts to say, we're handling this, there's a soft landing here, get really tricky. It's not to say there isn't truth to it. It's just to say it's a tough sell politically. Some other context, the headline increase was the smallest since June of 2021, which is when you really saw the kind of the economy reopening and inflation really kicking off.

You also found what they call shelter costs, you know, rent and housing, the smallest gain since November, so a 0.6% increase, but that still resulted in prices rising 8.2% on an annual basis. And so that's where you see this increasingly difficult society to live in. Because if you continue to have shelter costs rising at over 8% and wages rising at less than that, because shelter makes up an increasing amount of your monthly income, the rest of the inflation numbers coming down don't help you as much. Yeah. No, I think that's true. There's also, I mean, there's just so much going on here in this conversation because you can also look at, obviously, we've talked about corporate greed

increasing inflation over the course of the last year or more. And we've also talked about rising wages for the bottom quintile or quartile and quarter. The coffee, by the way, this morning, jet fuel. So I'm only about halfway done of it, halfway done with it. Jacked up. It came out, but not because I don't think I can drink it. It came out looking like hot fudge. But anyway, all that is to say, I hope that some of the rising prices or the price gouging has contributed to rising wages. I hope that that's the case. But there's also a serious case that a lot of Biden's spending put consumers in this position in the first place. And I think a good takeaway from all of that

is our system is way too concentrated in the hands of small groups of powerful, powerful people. And the system is completely perverted because of that. And when they try to reverse engineer the things that in some cases they caused, I mean, inflation isn't great for every person in a C-suite across the country. When they try to reverse engineer it, they find themselves just, they're so hapless. Right. And also when the one tool that they have, raising interest rates, also cools, it cools the housing market in a good way in the sense that it pushes down asset prices. But at the same time, rising asset prices are a signal to builders to build more housing. And so if now interest rates are going up and you're putting kind of a hold on a bunch of

projects, that's the opposite of what you need. Like, you need to figure out a way you can pull asset prices down, but also produce more housing. And if you only rely on those two tools, then you're not gonna be able to do that. But if you say no, as a public, we want to invest in this. Like housing is basically a 100% creation of government policy. Like from the New Deal till now, the 30-year mortgage, all the other regulations, the backing. We developed the suburbs. We developed, all of this was by design. You can't have it without highways.

Right. And we can, so if it's done by design, we can redesign it. And we have to do that because even if wages are rising at the bottom by 5% or 6%, if housing even at this pace is rising by 8%, people are still falling behind. And it hits people very differently. People don't get necessarily an average every month increase in their housing costs. It's like you got your lease for a year, and then when you got to find a new place, now you're paying 20% more than you were before. Well, and this is where I give credit to libertarians because they have an ideologically consistent and I think more credible response, which is it's nonsense to pretend that the free market is what's distorting and creating problems in housing. It's the combination

of this like faux free market with massive subsidies and government design that has things completely jacked up. And so I think your response would be to have more government design, to have, if the government is going to be involved, which it should be, it should make it smart. Like this policy should actually be workable and benefit consumers and benefit voters. I would suggest probably rolling back government intervention in housing because I think it would probably produce better results. But either way, what we can agree on now is, again, you're at the worst of both worlds where you have crony government policy and crony capitalist policy, and it's just terrible.

And we didn't get a chance to talk in today's show about the big news out of Colorado, which is the Biden administration put out a couple of different policy proposals around the Colorado River. One, which would basically say Arizona doesn't exist anymore. Another would say that we're going to be in court with California for the next several decades over their water rights. And so it is funny to think about interest rate policy as our number one tool for prices when you're running, when the Colorado River is running dry and the Hoover Dam is like on the brink of no longer producing hydroelectric power. It's like, there's nothing the Fed can do with interest rate policy or quantitative easing that is going to do anything about that. Like these are problems that our constantly growing economy is going to have to

address as it impacts reality. I can't get over how bad this coffee is. Moving on to big tech, let's put this up on the screen. This is actually a report from The Federalist this week that I think deserves more attention. This is quoting from Margo Cleveland's reporting here. The federal government peddled technology to big tech companies to assist them in censoring American speech on social media in the run-up to the 2020 election. That is according to emails Missouri and Louisiana uncovered in their First Amendment lawsuit against the Biden administration. We've covered that suit. There's some interesting stuff coming out of it, and this is no exception. Margo continues to say, specifically, the State Department marketed the censorship technology through its Global

Engagement Center. If you've been following the Twitter files, you recognize the GEC. If you've been following the State Department for years, you recognize the name of the GEC. In other words, our tax dollars not only funded the development of tools to silence speech that dissented from the regime's narrative, they also paid for government employees to act as sales reps pitching the censorship products to big tech. Now, there's some emails that show in 2020 federal government employees were contacting social media platforms to promote the GEC's DisinfoCloud. And they were promoting it like sales reps for a product, basically. And GEC represented this government product. And it was saying it would give, quote, companies, technology and tools assist with identifying, understanding, and addressing disinformation.

And then it gave some of these private tech companies access to disinfo cloud. That's really similar to how GEC was describing disinfo cloud in congressional testimony recently. And even the State Department's website marketed it as, quote, a one-stop shop to identify and then test tools that counter propaganda and disinformation, which they were relying on NewsGuard ratings partially. I think that's an important part of this report. NewsGuard ratings probably better than some other groups. They're relatively willing at least to engage with different publications, but still downvote publications that promote information that dissents from sort of the official narrative. And when you, again, that's fine as a private

business if NewsGuard wants to do that. But when you end up colluding with the federal government, the State Department in election-related issues, that's where you get into problems, because we know this never just stops. As Lee Fong has reported, I think, really powerfully in The Intercept, it never just stops with actual propaganda what we've seen over the last five ten years longer than that if you you count the years after 9-11 is this lumping in of legitimate American speech with propaganda that they cannot help themselves from doing we have run that experiment we know the results we know that they're not just stopping

with legitimate Russian-Chinese propaganda. It's not happening. They are lumping other legitimate speech into it. So I think this is really concerning, and you couple that with something we can put up on the screen here, a Daily Caller report that found Google, Twitter, Meta, and TikTok's executive ranks

have included over 200 former employees of surveillance government agencies, creating an employment pipeline between the government and big tech companies. That's according to the caller's investigation. They basically scraped LinkedIn and found that those tech companies recruited 248 employees from the DOJ, FBI, CIA, and DHS between 2017 and 2022 for the most part. And they're filling, as the caller says, top director positions with people who spent more than a decade in some of those agencies. Yeah, I'm kind of pessimistic that we're going to ever wind up in any neutral space

when it comes to this. It feels like to me that, and I think that's because, you know, as we have this hyperpolarization, kind of whoever, you know, as you move, even if you move from, you know, big tech into government or government into big tech, if you feel like you're team blue, then you're going to bring that kind of tribal attitude with you. If you feel like you're team red, you're going to bring that attitude with you. But isn't it more team NATSEC? Like, isn't it? That's what I think. Which is increasingly blue, it feels like. Right. Because it's Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. It's Andy McCabe. It's, you know, they may actually vote for George Bush or Jeb Bush, but they're never going to vote for Bernie Sanders. They're never going to vote for Donald Trump. And again, everyone is fine to make those personal decisions for themselves and to vote in their different ways. But when you're carrying that water on behalf of the government and then bringing it into the corporate sector,

the same that we've seen the revolving door be problematic with the FDA and over the course of American history, the last hundred years basically, when you see that happen in these companies that are doing something unprecedented with surveillance capitalism, with data, that is insane. And I think it's worse that it's not strictly team red and team blue. They are, I would say, increasingly team blue, even though in the past they were starkly team red. That is terrifying. And I feel like, and we probably got to get moving to your Title IX thing pretty soon if we're going to get to Marianne and Julian Assange in time. To me, I guess my final take on this would be, if the government is going to participate in this, the only thing they have left to do is be just 100% fully transparent about it.

Yeah. Like, look, you're the DHS, DOJ, whoever, and you have thoughts on what information is flowing around, post it. Yeah. Post it and post your citations. Tell us that you think this person in Kansas who, like, really likes Donald Trump and doesn't care that he's, that press conference with Putin. Tell us why you think they're working for Russia. Say it with your chest, give us some citations, and then let us decide. Rather than doing this back channel thing where you have a portal where you can tell employees at Twitter who then are stuck in the position of either rejecting the most powerful government

on the planet's request or accepting their request and censoring some type of account. Just let go. And then people, if they want, if they trust DHS and DOJ, they can use that information to kind of curate their own information diet. But I think they have lost, if they ever had, the ability to do this with any authority kind of surreptitiously. Well, and again, just to round this out, that's why relying on NewsGuard is such nonsense. Because the corporate press completely botched, got Pulitzer Prizes for botching the Russia collusion investigation, The Federalist, which obviously has way fewer resources and money. So we can't be in Ukraine. We can't be in Moscow. We can't be

everywhere doing all of the sort of international reporting. And we don't have bureaus all over the country. But we got that much, much, much more accurate than the vast majority of corporate media, even though NewsGuard will penalize us in ways that they won't penalize the corporate media. So when the government is relying on NewsGuard in its software and to help tech companies censor propaganda, you see exactly how it's a vicious cycle. And The Times is a big thing. The Times should have put in Ken Vogel's work on Ukraine. Yes. For its Pulitzer. They should have. He was way ahead on that. Yeah, he was.

Title IX, there are new rules out. Yes. And you've got some, you got a breakdown? Yeah, a little bit of a breakdown here. As we were actually prepping counterpoints last week, the Biden administration ruled out its long awaited Title IX rule related to athletics. It's a proposal. It's more than 100 pages long, and it marked a slight departure from what I expected, at least in style, if not in substance. So we took a breath and dug in before going too wild with it. So as a quick reminder, Title IX, as you know, is a Nixon-era law in 1972 that has come to dictate policies on everything from sexual assault to sports. It was just one short part of a larger bill, so we can read the full text here. Here's what it says. No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex,

be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance. For years, Title IX was best known for its controversial effect on men's sports. But in the Obama era, it became a lightning rod when the Education Department issued a series of Dear Colleague letters on sexual assault and gender identity. Essentially, they made federal funding contingent on schools reading sex in Title IX as gender identity and on conforming their sexual assault policies to standards that bipartisan experts eventually denounced as kangaroo courts. Plus, dear colleague letters are anti-democratic expansions of executive power that allow

unelected D.C. bureaucrats to legislate via letter. So on both counts, it was a mess. So much so that when Betsy DeVos walked back the sexual assault policies, even the editorial board of the Washington Post and a lot of other people on the left sided with her. When it comes to sports, I expected the Biden administration to basically revert back to pretty much what Obama did and simply state sex is gender identity. Therefore, there can be no legal distinctions between the two in sports or locker rooms or anywhere else. This is basically what the Bostock decision that Neil Gorsuch wrote the opinion for did with Title VII when it comes to employment. Now, when it comes to sports, that reading is totally backwards.

Title IX is remembered as an achievement of the American women's movement because it gave women greater access to athletics. I've talked to at least three different kids involved in legal battles who all told me the gender identity interpretation is costing girls scholarships as single male athletes can dominate in regional leagues. It can also, of course, put girls in danger when they're forced into contact sports with people who are, at least on average, stronger. But instead of going down the Obama route, Biden's education department

devised what they probably think is a very clever workaround. As you read the proposed rule, you realize they're essentially creating burdens for schools who wish to prevent discrimination on the basis of sex, as Title IX says. This is where I'm glad we waited to cover the rule. Expecting something more along the lines of what Obama did, immediate reactions to the proposal seemed to suggest it marked some kind of compromise. That's really only true on the most superficial level. If gender identity is the exact same thing as sex, then it makes no sense whatsoever to say, hey, schools can discriminate on the basis of sex if they can prove it's actually good. You either believe that gender identity and sex are the same or you don't. And placing the burden on schools who are actually trying to follow the

spirit of the original law by preventing sex discrimination to prove that they should be able to do that is just reinstating the Obama rule with packaging that's meant to be kind of distracting. Here's how the New York Times interpreted the rule. Quote, elementary school students would generally be able to participate on teams matching their identity. But as students get older and go through puberty and as competition increases, schools and athletic organizations would make a multi-pronged assessment of whether or not to restrict transgender athletes from playing on their preferred team. The age of the students, the level of the fairness, and the nature of the sport would be among the considerations. All right, so that sport, the age of the students, all of those things. Let's consider

that phrase the New York Times used, multi-pronged assessment, for just a moment. If the rule remains unchanged after the 30-day comment period we're now in, that's what schools are going to have to undergo to do what feminists in the 70s fought for, the multi-pronged assessment on all of those counts, age, sport, etc. So that shows us clearly it's the exception and not the norm. Theoretically, the Biden administration wants to argue that it's created a pathway for schools to do what they think is best. But in practice, we have no idea how often those, quote, multi-pronged assessments would be approved. Plus, it's absolutely absurd to force schools to ask the Department of Education for permission to discriminate against women. But, of course, even this radical definition of sex as gender identity, except when a school can prove to the federal government it should be otherwise, did not satisfy professional activists.

On Monday, trans lawmakers from around the country sent Biden a letter. Quote, while we understand the administration may have been attempting to provide legal protections and clarity, in actuality, this proposed rule changes will simply provide those who seek to deny us our right, a roadmap for how to do so, the letter read. The decision was criticized by everyone from HRC to AOC. Well, why? I mean, first of all, again, you either believe sex is gender identity or you don't, and the Biden administration hedging on that makes no sense. But if it did, if this rule provides, quote, a roadmap, as that letter argues, you'd really have to squint. Here is exactly what the proposal reads.

The proposed regulation would require that if a recipient adopts or applies sex-related criteria, that it would limit or deny a student's eligibility to participate on a male or female team consistent with their gender identity. Such criteria must, for each sport, level of competition, and grade, or education level, one, be substantially related to the achievement of an important educational objective, and two, minimize harms to students whose opportunity to participate on a male or female team consistent with their gender identity would be limited or denied. The proposed regulation would not affect a recipient's discretion to offer separate male and female athletic teams when selection is based on competitive skill or the activity involved is a contact sport. So not only do you have to meet

all of that criteria, you also then have to minimize harms and meet criteria to do that. If you don't do this to the satisfaction of the education department, you risk losing your federal funding. The incentive for schools to test those limits is remarkably low. It's also absurd that we're so accustomed to federal power grabs right now that executive branch issues aren't even a big part of this conversation. It's worth remembering that the Obama-era Dear Colleague letter on gender identity made decisions for schools everywhere from Brooklyn to rural Kansas, dramatically changing their day-to-day operations in one fell swoop. We have the system of federalism we do in order to avoid precisely this. And what happened in the subsequent years is why this is

key. Rather than allowing communities to sort these different, these extremely difficult questions and issues out on their own democratically and come to the right consensus. Washington did it for the whole country at once. Gender identity is just not as clear-cut a category. It's just not the same thing. And that, by its very definition, and that's by the very definition its proponents advance, one that seeks to radically change the way we understand biology

and psychology. It's crucial to protect children dealing with gender dysphoria and the enormous pains that it can bring with it. Legislating with letters and administrative rules thrusts kids into awful political debates where they become pawns in national partisan games. This will make that problem worse as schools around the country are expected by stakeholders on both sides to push schools into going one way or the other, forcing the education department to settle the fights and putting kids in the middle of all of it. All right, Ryan, I think you have some Assange reflections to share with us this morning. What do you got?

So we have a new letter from Democrats in Congress, actually seven Democrats in Congress, and we can put up this tweet from Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, who led a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland demanding that he end the prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing classified documents and end the ext of Julian Assange for publishing classified documents, and end the extradition attempt. It was signed by the kind of six members of the squad. That's Tlaib, Omar, Jamal Bowman, Cori Bush, Ayanna Pressley. Who did I leave out? I'll say. You have Bowman. Yeah. And Greg Kassar, who is a freshman who represents Austin, Texas. So the only one outside of the squad to jump on was Kassar.

You might have expected maybe Summer Lee, who is kind of also considered to be part of this kind of growing squad. You might have expected maybe Adelio Ramirez. You may have expected Ro Khanna or Pramila Jayapal, both of whom have spoken in favor of this position, that charges should be dropped. But it appears like the Congressional Progressive Caucus probably wanted this to be more of a squad letter than to be a progressive caucus letter. Now, according to Gabriel Shipton, who is Julian Assange's brother, he tells me that there are other letters coming as well. One from Australia, which has 48 members of, what do they have, a parliament there? Whatever they have down under, 48 of those, many times more than the United States. In the UK, 35 members of parliament. Letters also coming from Mexico and Brazil with

combined more than 100 legislators all calling for the end of this prosecution, the protection of a free press, and the dropping of the extradition attempt against Julian Assange. Now, my understanding is that this letter was circulated among Democrats because there is a, A, because we're in a hyper-polarized environment, and B, because the administration that is prosecuting him is Democratic. And so the thinking is that there are more, there's, you know, it's more useful to have Democrats pressuring a Democratic administration than Republicans. So I think that's why there are zero Republicans on this letter, even though some have publicly called for these charges to be dropped. What did you make of, you know, as Shepton put it to me, they're excited that it is a start.

From the outside, people might say it's frustrating that there are only seven Democrats who are willing to stand up for this issue. But your interpretation is more that they kind of wanted to keep it to the squad. I don't think the squad did. I think the rest of the caucus doesn't, just simply Democratic caucus, doesn't want to be associated with Julian Assange. So this is interesting because it reminds me of what we were talking about earlier in the show in the context of the national security state being Team Red or Team Blue

or actually just being team NatSac, being team blob. And I think this is a good example of how they're team blob, where you have the Obama administration resist going after Assange in the same way that the Trump administration did. The Trump administration figures out that they don't really care about the so-called New York Times problem that the Obama administration identified. And the Biden administration now is overseeing the case against Assange.

And it shows you, I think, even when, you know, in this evolution post-Obama, when Assange kind of fell out of the news in the same, he's definitely out of the news in, not in the same way that he was in the news in the Obama administration, the early Trump administration, 2016, Russia collusion, WikiLeaks type time. Now that he's fallen out of the news, Democrats are like, we can be team blob. We can, you know, it's sort of in the same, it's a reverse of how Donald Trump had this weird patchwork of people that were team blob, but also like team populist, isolationist almost. You have like John Bolton working alongside random other Trump people who seem to side more with Donald Trump and Rand Paul on foreign policy. It's like the reverse of that, where you have the strange leftist, some people in the Biden administration being kind of leftist,

but the security establishment being the security establishment. And they're in control now. They're firmly in control. And that's who I think Democrats ultimately listen to. They don't want to go against them on those big questions because then you face the media pressure that Obama faced during the initial Assange era. Right. And the specific charges relate to the leaks by Chelsea Manning, including the kind of collateral murder video, if people remember that, which showed video evidence of U.S. troops massacring civilians and a Reuters photographer. The only people charged in connection with that mass murder have been Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning. Also the State Department cables and some other things that Manning leaked. So those are the charges from that period of time. But it is really his 2016 reporting.

Yeah. And publishing John Podesta emails and the Hillary Clinton speeches that were embedded in the John Podesta emails, you know, and the Hillary Clinton speeches that were embedded in the John Podesta emails, that really is the thing, I think, that has Democrats in the anti-Assange camp. Like, they still blame him for electing Trump. And Assange was privately supportive of Trump. And he thought that it would be better for the rest of the world if Trump were president. They thought that Democrat, his reasoning was that Democrats would be so reflexively anti Trump that they would constrain his imperialistic tendencies and so US Empire would be constrained by that kind of push and pull between the two

parties. That kind of frankly reasonable-ish take. And he's entitled to his take. It's not a crime for a journalist to have a position in an election one way or the other. And he was asked, why didn't you kind of leak Trump's emails? He's like, nobody gave me Trump's emails. Well, that's the thing. If somebody leaked him Trump's emails, Trump doesn't use email, but let's say Donald Trump Jr.'s emails, he'd have dumped them. We can be very confident of that.

That's what he does. But I think it's that stigma associated with Trump that has Democrats unwilling to go anywhere near him because then they're going to face all kinds of blowback from their kind of their democratic voter base, who is also very hostile to Assange. So I wonder how it would shape out if it was just the blob, just the CIA. Yeah. Yeah. And I don't totally know. Well, and maybe like that's the thing. Like, is it potentially true that some agents of Russia leaked this information to WikiLeaks? Sure. Could be. That's not the point. I've published information that was allegedly leaked or hacked by other foreign governments, not Russia, but other governments. If it's true and we can authenticate it, it's still journalism.

It's newsworthy. And that's a complete distinction that gets glossed over. And that's where this case is so frustrating. Oh, I also published plenty of stuff off the WikiLeaks cables, which, according to them, came from Russia. So I have done that. So you also get accused of working for the CIA. That's true, yes. Someone just needs to get their story straight about who you work for, whether you work for Russia or the CIA. The CIA or the Kremlin.

Is it the same thing? There's something much bigger going on here. It's a Davos dude. Yeah, you work for Klaus Schwab. No, I think that's what's so frustrating about this is that if you have evidence that Julian Assange stole state secrets by all means. But their evidence for that is such bullshit that it actually does endanger other journalists. It's a ridiculous case. And again, if you have that case, make it. But they don't. They've already devised their genius way of getting Julian Assange, and it's not a slam dunk case. It's a ridiculous case that implicates other journalists. That's the problem. You can think what Julian Assange did was wrong. You can think that he shouldn't have published what looks like it's possibly propaganda to destabilize the United

States. That's not a question of journalism and news. That's a separate question. But what he published was obviously newsworthy. Yeah, no question about it. No question about it whatsoever. It wouldn't have been news all over the world if it wasn't. Yeah, nope, nope. So there you have it. Next up, we're going to be joined by Marianne Williamson to talk about the TikTok Marianne mania that has gripped the nation. Yes, looking forward to that coming up right next. Well, if the presidential election were held today on what is one of the biggest social media company platforms in the country, in fact, the biggest certainly under people among 50 years old, the winner of that prize would be none other than Marianne Williamson.

That's right. Wouldn't even be close. Absolute landslide blowout victory. So we're joined by the president-elect of TikTok now. Herself, Marianne Williamson joins us now. Marianne, thank you so much for joining us. Oh, thank you so much for having me. And so what do you make of this Marianne mania that has been gripping TikTok? And how did you learn, actually, that you've become such a kind of cultural phenomenon on this app? Well, you know, part of my decision making about whether or not to run had to do with taking a college tour. I spoke at eight colleges and universities

because I wanted to get a sense of where younger people were and whether they would see me and whether I would see them and whether there would be any connection in terms of what I wanted to do as a candidate and hopefully one day as a president. And so I'm, I feel, I understand the alignment between what I have to say and younger people. You know, Gen Z, they're not even 20th century people. Most of these kids in college today weren't even born in the 20th century, or if they were, they just hung out there for a few years as babies. And so they have a visceral sense that they are living their lives at the effect of bad ideas left over from the 20th century. Every generation wants to individuate. Every person does.

But this generation is individuating from a century and from a millennium. They want to build on what worked and they want to cut the cord and start over again with a lot of things. And that's my that's my agenda. And they hear me. And the fact that their their pain is recognized by my campaign. They don't want to hear this BS about how the economy is doing well. You know, last night I spoke to Yale at Yale University. I said something at Yale that I also said at Stanford. And I saw all these kids nod their head. I said, even with a degree from one of these schools, you know, you're not going to be able to afford the house that your parents had. You know that it's going to all of this neoliberal trickle down economic theory that so holds down the majority of people on some level, it will hold you down too. And even if the system says to you,

oh, we'll let you in because it needs the best and the brightest to perpetuate itself. Don't allow yourself to be seduced because it's not okay for you to live your life where everything's okay at the expense of pain and suffering for the majority of people. Young people hear that, and I'm glad that they do. And there are a bunch of different types of clips of yours that have gone viral. Some are kind of speeches of yours from the 1980s and 90s. Some are clips from the 2020, your 2020 presidential campaign. I want to play one here, though, that this is from the current presidential campaign, been viewed, you know, millions, many millions of times. Let's

play that one here. What are you going to do when you first get there? First thing I'm going to do is cancel the Willow Project. I'm also going to cancel all student debt. I'm going to declassify marijuana from my Schedule I drug in addition to auditing the Pentagon. Also, I want to cancel, we're going to immediately cancel all government contracts with union busting companies. And we're going to really bolster the NLRB and we're going to really bolster everything involved with supporting unions. One of the first things I'll do is put together a conference where I hear from the best experts in this country on everything related to childhood. You know, John Kennedy said, in 10 years, we'll land a man on the moon. You know what I'm going to say to you? Within 10 years, every public school, this is my vision, that every public school in the United States would be a palace of learning and culture and the arts. And what struck me about

that clip is that it kind of combines cultural critique and cultural issues with class war, with corruption, and with a pro-worker agenda. You don't see a lot of candidates talking about NLRB or getting into the weeds on the way that the federal government could cancel contracts with union busting or non-union firms. So is that, are you finding that the combination of those is resonating or is one of them kind of hotter than another to your audience? You know, my political campaigning is no different than my writing. I say what I believe needs to be said. You know, many years ago, I read a quote by a man named Arnold Patton. He said, if you genuinely have something you need to say,

there's someone out there who genuinely needs to hear it. I'm not filtering myself. Well, do they want to hear that? Will they like it if I say that? Will there be a demographic who hears that? I'm saying what I believe needs to be said in order to repair the country, which I also believe is what needs to be said in order to win the presidency in 2024. Yes, I think that a lot of people on the left, on the right, everybody's in these silos. And I think this goes back to Gen Z. I think Gen Z are among millions of Americans who, can we break out of the silos, please? Can we realize that in many issues, it's both and. It's political and it's cultural. It's

policy change and it's personal change. I think that's what the 21st century demands. This thinking that's sort of the stale thinking, well, if you talk about the NLRB, you're not also going to be talking about cultural issues with children. Well, actually, maybe you will. And I think that that's where people are ready to be. I was going to say totally unshackled by that binary, that it's either politics or it's personal. It's either left or it's right. And on that note, what I like about that clip is, you know, it's one of the same things I like about looking back at Ronald Reagan's rhetoric is that it's kind of soaring and optimistic.

When you look back at how Americans talked about the future in the 1980s or successful American politicians talked about it in the 1980s, they were seeing something on the horizon or in the 1980s, there was seeing something on the horizon or in the 1960s, Kennedy, like you said. And I want to ask, you know, in some sense, it seems to me really that this stuff resonates because Gen Z is in a lot of pain because they want, they're desperate for something to be optimistic about because they're just sort of drowning in pessimism because they are in a lot of personal pain for both political and cultural reasons. But I wonder if that's your take on this too, that they really are in pain. And so part of

why your message resonates with them is sadly because of that. Absolutely. They've been sold a bill of goods that success means making it within what is ultimately a meaningless universe. I mean, if all the system can offer is a way to have success within a hyper-capitalist system that will have you, you know, like just every single day trying to struggle to make it more, And at the expense sometimes of the things that matter most in life, they understand that something's wrong with that. I think millions of Americans understand that something's wrong with that. People understand that this country has swerved away from very essential things. And even people, you know, one of the things we were

talking about last night, because a lot of these kids are into economics, you know, and political theory. And I pointed out that Adam Smith himself, the primary architect of free market capitalism, said it cannot exist outside an ethical universe. So the country, whether you're on the left or the right, knows that there's a soullessness at the center of how we're operating. There's a lack of ethics. I mean, look at what's happening in this country. I don't care what your politics are. Something's wrong at the heart of things. And I believe that it is time for a president who is willing to name that and speak to it in a meaningful way, not just as a slogan, but actually connecting the dots between the way we operate politically and economically with the suffering of so many human beings, both those who are making it and those who are not.

And piggybacking on what Emily said, I want to play one other clip that's been circulating on TikTok. Let's roll that one. People these days talk about how traumatized they are by the Trump phenomenon. I'm just so traumatized by it. Do you think the people who walked across the bridge at Soma were not traumatized? Everybody's saying, oh, I'm so anxious. It's just, this whole thing has me so anxious, really.

What about those women standing up in Iran right now? We need to toughen up, buttercups. Everybody in this room, however pushed down we are, it is nothing compared to how pushed down the Iranians are right now, and they are showing up. So I think we have gotten to a point where we're coddling our neuroses a little too

much right now. We need to say, meditate, take a shower, pray in the morning and kick ass in the afternoon. This is not to minimize the pain. Sometimes you call your girlfriends, you call the people in your life, can I share my pain? And then that call is over and the person who loves you on that call says, promise me you're going to get out there this afternoon and show them what you got. You and I were talking the other day for an article I'm working on for The Intercept on this same phenomenon. And I put to you a kind of controversial idea that, and I want to get your take on it here too, which is that I see some parallels with early Jordan Peterson, like that you couldn't, you couldn't end up filling the same void that Jordan Peterson, before he drifted off into what

he's doing now, filled for a lot of young people in this country. And I thought in that clip, you saw some of the closest parallels, both inspirational, but also not pandering and not taking responsibility away from people, you know, to, you know, go out there and kick ass in the afternoon. So what's your take on that kind of out there comparison that there could be some overlap there? Well, I think the significant word is early. You know, early Jordan Peterson, I thought, oh, this is good. He's really telling people to stop being such precious, entitled, you know, but where he has gone with it is very, very, very different, complete opposite from where I would go. You must, as you become more

mature, become more compassionate, more humble, and you must see your politics that way as well. And he's become very, very different than anything I would ever, any direction I would ever take at who he is now. And it's an interesting question because, yeah, early Jordan Pearson was telling people basically, make your bed, take control of your life. And what I like about what you were saying in that clip, Marianne, is it's not denying that people are in pain. It's not denying that there's some suffering, but it's putting it in perspective and empowering people to deal with it differently. And on that note, I would be remiss if I didn't ask. I mean, I think TikTok is part of some of the mental health crises that people are having.

They just spend too much time on TikTok. So on that note, what would you say to some of the Zoomers who this is really resonating with on TikTok? What would you say to them about their strategy for balancing political activism on TikTok and political activism in the real world? Support for someone like you on TikTok versus support for someone like you also in Iowa, in New Hampshire, in South Carolina. What do you think the right balance should be there? Well, I think young people, as well as the rest of us, are reading all the articles. We are understanding the very deleterious effects mentally and emotionally, psychologically, on too much social media use. I mean, everybody gets that. But to me, the fact that somebody is on TikTok doesn't of itself logically mean that they're on it many, many

hours a day. I think we're all recognizing now the addictive qualities of social media and the damage that it does to our lives if we're on those tablets too long every single day. But the fact that younger people are looking for different ways to share information, to get information, is a separate issue from surveillance capitalism for whether it has to do with TikTok or an American company. And a lot of that, this is where they are. This is what they're going to be doing. Regardless of what we think about social media, it's here to stay. This is an example where the answer is not only government regulations. Obviously, there's some serious questions going on there and serious

issues to balance about free speech versus all of those things. But a lot of it does have to do with personal change. All of us, whether it has to do with TikTok or our phone or anything, I mean, mature, conscious people are saying, I've got to put that thing down. I should not be spending so many hours on that. We're recognizing the addictive qualities, and I trust America's young people to recognize it as well. And, you know, as your campaign picks up steam, you're going to start coming under more scrutiny to the extent that you have gotten any coverage from the mainstream corporate press that has been critical of your previous treatment of staff. So I'm curious, one, if you've heard that from people that have come up to you on the campaign trail,

if they've asked you about those claims from past staff, and two, how do you respond to those, I guess it was Politico or maybe another article from former staff saying that you were a rough boss to work for? A lot of people have worked for me for years and think I'm a nice person. I think that if, you know, I wish I could speak always in those zen, calm, loving tones of all the men who run Washington. I'll try to be more like them. Look, I've raised my voice at times and I'm sorry. And if anybody has ever experienced me as less than respectful to them, then I am sorry. And if 10% of that is true, it's something to look at within myself. And I think that's true. But those stories are so overblown, planted, smear, hit. I've never thrown a phone or anything like that.

So have I lost my temper a few times in the office? Absolutely. But the picture of me that has been painted is beyond mischaracterization. And I think most people know it. Most importantly, even people who've read the articles, what I find out in those states you were talking about are people who want health care. They want child care. They want paid family leave. They want a livable wage. They want to be able to send their kids to college, could afford a yearly vacation, could afford a home, could afford these things that are now like some past middle class that used to exist almost in some fairy tale.

That's what people want to talk about, not the games of how the DNC is going to plant stories about me because I'm inconvenient to the system. People see beyond that. I know that people who actually are meeting me in these other states are beyond that. But of course, the DNC is having their, you know, they're having their desired effect, throwing a lot of fairy dust in a lot of people's eyes, almost blackout in certain media outlets. But that's why these young people and such as yourselves, independent media, giving me a chance so that the American people can see what does this person offer me? What would this person do as president? And for that, I just want to add one thing. I have witnessed a sitting president get upset, no more upset than

I've gotten. And you know what my thought about it was at the time? Well, I have a reason to be angry. Sorry, guys. Anybody who thinks that, anyway, I think I made my point. And last question, is the TikTok phenomenon translating into kind of small dollar donations into the campaign? I don't see a lot of ways on TikTok, like the way that you would see on, say, Twitter or YouTube or Facebook in the past to channel that into the campaign. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I don't have a way of knowing. I see a lot of $5 donations come in. I see a lot of $10 donations come in. I see a lot of $3 donations come in. But whether they came from TikTok or not, you know, I was watching an article on TV last night, a segment on television last night, about the 2022 elections and how the accepted wisdom has been that young people don't vote.

This generation of young people sure as heck does vote. And they proved that in 2022. And they proved that in Wisconsin the other day, as well as Chicago, obviously, because they know that their Wisconsin the other day, as well as Chicago, obviously, because they know that their lives are on the line for this younger generation, whether or not they have health care, whether or not they can get rid of these college loan debts, whether or not they can go to college, whether or not they're going to have a habitable planet. They are recognizing the importance of politics. And they say, why should somebody who's only going to be here for maybe 10, 15, maybe 20 years longer, get to have such an undue influence on what happens 40 years from now? And they are getting

that. So we know that their interest is translating into voting. Whether or not it's translating into financial giving, I don't know. I hope that they will understand that their $5, certainly in a campaign like mine, obviously not corporate backed, run on small dollar donations. I can only hope that they're recognizing. I didn't say it last night, but what I was thinking is, if each of you kids gave me $3, it would be a good day in fundraising. Well, there you go. Marianne, thanks so much for joining us. Really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. It's always nice to be with you guys. Thank you. You got it. And Emily, is there, is there a conservative parallel? Any, any, any kind of right-wing politician

who's lighting up TikTok in the way that, that Marianne Mania has gripped it? I don't go on TikTok because as you know, I'm now in my thirts as of last month. So I'm too old for TikTok. Yeah. No, I mean, I actually don't go on TikTok, but I think the Jordan Peterson comparison is a really interesting one because— And also one thing that it makes me think of is—I've said it for a long time. It honestly puzzles me why there hasn't been kind of a Ralph Nader running on issues with sort of like technology and alienation. And you really like there hasn't been a candidate like that in a really long time. And I think Marianne sort of is someone who's prepared to talk like that about alienation,

about psychological problems that the country is facing en masse, health problems that the country is facing en masse. But on the right, I just, I hear way too little of that. So no, I don't think there's anything like that. And I do want to see that on the debate stage really badly. I can imagine Nader doing well on TikTok. Nader would do great on TikTok. He almost has the Bernie-esque quality, right? Like, he's kind of curmudgeonly. I sold Ralph Nader t-shirts in 2000 at his Madison Square Garden rally. Of course you did. Of course you did.

He also was supposed to sell t-shirts at Woodstock 99. I'm not making this up, weren't you? No, you were supposed to be part of the like volunteer staff. That's right. I was going to sell t-shirt, kindness t-shirts at Woodstock 99. I backed out at the last minute. I eagerly await the Ryan Grimm memoir. Glad I didn't. Would they have burned down the kindness t-shirt stand? That's the question. Didn't they? I think he didn't go because I didn't go. Oh. Yeah. They probably would have. I actually later made a t-shirt where I had a friend draw Ralph Nader's

face on that iconic Shea portrait. It's a great t-shirt oh my gosh it's funny oh well that's a great place to leave it there you go for the week thanks everybody make sure to tune in

next Wednesday for more bizarre stories from the life and times of Ryan Crane alright we'll talk to you later take it easy

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