Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 4/19/23: Fox News Settles Dominion Lawsuit, Market Apocalypse Looms On Debt Ceiling, Elon Warns AI Dangerous, Oklahoma Officials Leaked Audio, Jeff Jackson On Sensationalism, Congressional Stock Ban, Sununu Disses MAGA Fringe, Is Trump Anti-Imperialist?

Episode Date: April 19, 2023

Ryan and Emily discuss FOX News settling with Dominion for over $787 million dollars, a market "apocalypse" looms as fights continue over the Debt Ceiling, Elon Musk warns of the "Civilizational Destruction" from AI in Tucker Carlson interview, Oklahoma officials were caught on leaked audio with racist comments and potential hiring of a hitman, Rep Jeff Jackson calls out sensationalism on both sides of the aisle, the Democrats introduce a new bill to ban congressional stock trading, an interview between Kellyanne Conway and Gov Sununu where the Governor lashes out at MAGA fringe types for hurting Republican's electoral chances, and we're joined by Christian Parenti from Compact Magazine to debate whether Trump is really an anti-imperialist. Correction: In a segment on Rep Jeff Jackson we incorrectly reported his party affiliation as Republican however he is a registered Democratic Congressman.To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hey, guys. Ready or not, 2024 is here, and we here at Breaking Points are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that. Let's get to the show. Welcome to CounterPoints. Happy Wednesday. Spring is in the air. Ryan, how you doing? I'm great. How about you? I'm good. We've got a big show.

We're going to start talking about the surprise settlement that came up yesterday afternoon in the Fox News case over defamation with Dominion. We're then going to talk about debt ceiling negotiations, which continue to be impossible. We're going to talk about Elon Musk's interview with Tucker Carlson. We're going to talk about a crazy story out of Oklahoma. We have some audio you're not going to want to miss. We're going to talk about Representative Jeff Jackson, who is all over TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, Republican, who has quite a social media presence. I'm going to talk about... He almost seems not real. It's interesting.

I have to always check, like, okay, this is not a... It's a deep fake. This is not a deep fake of what you want a congressman to talk like. It actually is a congressman. Is that right? Apparently. I'm going to talk about some developments in a stock ban that's now on the table in the Senate and the House. And Ryan, you've got some interesting audio for us as well. Yes. Chris Sununu didn't realize the tape was running. And so we got some candid comments from him, the Republican New Hampshire governor. We'll play that. Lauren Winsrow, the undercurrent kind of secret audio specialist. CHRISTOPHER SUNUNU, Yes.

DAVID BROOKS JR.: And so we will play some of that later. And we will hear from Christian Parenti, who wrote a kind of buzzy piece from a left perspective arguing that Trump is actually an anti-imperialist, infuriated a lot of people on the left. We're going to have him respond to some of the critiques of his piece since it has come out. But yes, the big news, the surprise settlement, and it's impossible to think about how Fox came to this decision without thinking it in kind of the Logan Roy voice as he's instructing

Jerry to just sign the thing. Logan Roy himself would have done better probably, right? So what do they agree to? I think $787 billion plus... A million, almost a billion. Sorry, a million. $787 million plus basically an admission that, and we can put this first element up,

an admission that some of the things that they said about Dominion were false, along with a couple of other acknowledgements. Yeah, they say, we acknowledge the court's rulings, finding certain claims about Dominion to be false. The settlement reflects Fox's continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards. That's their statement when the settlement came out. And reporters had flocked to Wilmington where the suit was set to be heard. It was delayed. Then it was delayed a couple of hours. Everyone's wondering what the heck is going on. It seemed like the only possible answer there would be a settlement or the plausible

answer would be a settlement. And indeed, that's what happened around 4 p.m. yesterday. You have all of these reporters in Wilmington so eager. Brian Stelter actually had gotten a special contract with Vanity Fair to cover this trial, if that's any indication of how hot this was in the media. There was a $1.6 billion defamation suit that ends up getting settled for $787 billion. No surprise. Million again. Million. We keep doing this. That would be a lot of money. I like how I cracked it the first time, I did the exact same thing. A source has also confirmed to Axios that Fox will not be required to give any apologies or retractions as part of that settlement deal. So if we can put up the second element here. This is much of their statement.

They said, quote, we are pleased to have reached a settlement of our dispute with Dominion Voting Systems. We acknowledge the court's rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false." And you're right, that acknowledge is a key word there. Like, okay, the court did say this. We acknowledge that. "...This settlement reflects Fox's continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards. We are hopeful that our decision to resolve this dispute with Dominion amicably instead

of the acrimony of a divisive trial allows the country to move forward from these issues. How sweet of them, isn't it? You can see A3 if we put that up on the screen. If you're watching, you can see there what that looks like. Now, there's a really interesting development because when this settlement is announced, there's a fascinating announcement that comes from Smartmatic. Did you see this? Let's put up A4 here.

This is a big deal. So Fox is not just being sued by Dominion. This is a statement that came out after the settlement from Smartmatic's lawyer. They're another voting software company, another voting booth company. Dominion's litigation exposed some of the misconduct and damage caused by Fox's disinformation campaign. Smartmatic will expose the rest. Smartmatic remains committed to clearing its name, recouping the significant damage done to the company, and holding Fox accountable for undermining democracy." Alright, that's huge. And Slate says that this case, quote, they're quoting an analyst who says it, quote, appears

to be the more dangerous of the two major cases against Fox. The other interesting thing is that this case is not super far along. So as Slate notes, all of that discovery that came out in the Dominion trial, there's more discovery to come in the Smartmatic trial, most likely. So that's something to pay attention to because that means there could be more emails, more communications, more text messages. And that's partially why Fox settles in the Dominion case as to at least, you know, this is a good explanation for why they would decide to settle is they don't want their executives taking the stand in an extremely public setting. And for all the people who are sad that this trial is not going to go to trial, that this

lawsuit is not going to go to trial and are now hopeful that the Smartmatics one will go to trial and that Fox will finally get its public comeuppance in the courtroom, I would caution people to remember that these are businesses, these are companies. And so you are investing your hope in the salvation of democracy into a business. And the business, I would say, is playing off of your sensitivities on this question. In their quote, when they say, you know, Smartmatic remains committed to holding Fox accountable for undermining democracy. They know exactly who they're talking to. They're riling up the public to get them to support this clause, this claim, which then puts more pressure on Fox to then offer a

settlement that's as big as the one that they gave to Dominion. And in the end, these are businesses. And so if Fox comes with hundreds of millions of dollars, which is, you know, $800 million is multiples of what Dominion is even worth. And so for an executive to get that kind of offer, they're just not gonna take that to court. Like, they cannot be your saviors. They cannot be your champions. Now, I do think people are misunderstanding and underestimating how big of

a settlement this is. This is one of the biggest defamation settlements. It is. It is the biggest. In American history, the other one was $177 million. So we're talking about $787 million. There's an incredible picture from Alex Wong at Getty Images of the Dominion attorneys walking out of the courthouse in Wilmington with the biggest smiles on their faces you have ever seen. It's like, because- Doing the math. What's a third of $787? Right. To your point, I mean, this is like huge. And again, to your point, there's no company that can afford $2 billion. Let's say they end up settling in a similar situation with Smartmatic. There's no company that is going to be able to comfortably afford $2 billion of defamation lawsuits.

Like that is a chunk of Fox News' business. We're talking billions. But they can uncomfortably afford it. Yes, of course. They will survive. They I think they'll survive. I think there was some hope among some out there on the left that this would bury Fox News, that it would end Fox News. But you have to remember they had that hacking and wiretapping scandal in the UK about 10 years ago. Remember where a bunch of their tabloid journalists were basically like

wiretapping? News Corp. Yeah, News Corp. They had to put billions aside to prepare for ultimate verdicts and fines and other penalties. Putting billions aside for wrongdoing is a cost of doing business for global corporations. Yes. Like if anybody's seen Succession, they wouldn't be surprised that this is how you push ahead. You kind of ask for, you push ahead, you ask for forgiveness later and if the forgiveness costs you a couple billion dollars, you pay that. But you're right, it's a lot of money. Yeah. Like it matters to them. Absolutely. I mean, two billion, well, one billion now, roughly, $787 million. So I'm rounding up to a billion.

But then if you add in a Smartmatic suit, it's going to be really hard for them, basically, to skirt this precedent. And I think that's one of the big things that comes out of yesterday, is that if you're settling for $787 million in this case, you have another case that may be as serious, if not more serious, coming ahead. Did you just set a major precedent by settling that A, could invite more suits in the future, and B, makes it really hard to finagle out of the Spartmatic suit? And what's been the response in the kind of Fox world, as far as you understand it? Like, do they feel like, all right, we really kind of screwed up in the way that we allowed these wildly inaccurate things to be said about these companies in service of trying to kind of drain viewership away from Newsmax and OAN and these others. Or does Fox feel like, you know what, we were on the ropes.

This was a fight for share of the viewership on the right. We had to do what we did, and we did it, and we don't regret it. It's unfortunate it's going to cost a couple billion dollars, but that's better than kind of getting gobbled up by these kind of neo-MAGA outlets. Well, I think they were always overestimating the risk of getting gobbled up by the neo-MAGA outlets. I will say, though, that you see it in the text messages. You see it in the email communications with Fox corporate. And one thing I think some people don't fully see out in public is the tension between, although it does spill into, like, reports sometimes,

the tension between corporate Fox and the opinion side. The news side, I think, is generally on the same page, at least it seems to me, with the corporate side. But the opinion side and the corporate side, there should probably always be tension between journalists and the business people at any news outlet. But I think that tension has always existed and will probably continue to exist. You can imagine that Manhattan executives, even the most capitalistic ones, are not super happy to have to answer for the things that, like the subjects that Tucker Carlson covers when they go to their cocktail parties.

Are there going to be any changes? Like does this present an opportunity for a reckoning? Is there anybody who is responsible for defamation to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars getting onto their air? I mean, I don't know, because this is mostly from hosts. I mean, they're talking about Jean Puro. So I don't know. And by the way, it would have been interesting as this case progressed, and maybe the Smartmatic one will be as well. I think it should be more uncomfortable for the rest of the media than it was because defamation charges do set really dangerous precedents. I'm not nearly on the same page as a lot of conservatives who want to lower the threshold for what constitutes

defamation. I hate defamation lawsuits because that's a great tool to wield against journalists. And so I think this case actually had some interesting ramifications had it gone forward that the media would have had to grapple with. Right. As a journalist, you don't really like to see defamation suits, period. On the other hand, if you have certain folks in journalism just destroying the credibility of journalism, you do want some level of accountability without it being then weaponized against actual journalists who are just trying to get the truth out there. I have complicated feelings about it.

Let's move on, speaking of complications, to the debt ceiling negotiations that continue to puzzle the Republican Party. Right now, actually, in fact, this is from CNN. Yesterday, he made a plea to House Republicans during a closed-door meeting to back his debt ceiling plan. He's telling Republicans that although it doesn't have to include everything they want, it will help get him to the negotiating table with President Joe Biden. Now, again, from CNN, House Republicans are insisting that any increase in the debt limit must be paired with spending cuts. And the White House is saying that the debt limit should be raised without any conditions whatsoever. So after that meeting, you have—we can put this next element up.

Chip Roy goes on Glenn Beck's show, and Olivia Beavers tweeted this out. Chip Roy says, McCarthy has done a good job laying out the floor for debt ceiling talks, but also that Republicans, quote, better damn well fight for things that are not currently included in that debt ceiling plan, like undoing the damage of the Inflation Reduction Act and the damage of the IRS proposal. Chip Roy said McCarthy has, quote, a hard job, but there are still some things we need to address. McCarthy said wants to get a bill out by next week and get it to pressure Joe Biden. That seems incredibly unlikely. What is your sense? And for people not in the Capitol bubble, who is Chip Roy in the ecosystem of the House,

House Republicans and the right? For a lot of people, Chip Roy probably first got on their radar during the speakership contest earlier this year when Kevin McCarthy was just fighting vote after vote after vote, because Chip Roy has become a leader in the Freedom Caucus sort of circle. And he's endorsed Ron DeSantis for president. He was Ted Cruz's chief of staff. He's sort of a, you know, Tea Party kind of conservative populist who really knows the hill and really knows procedure and has definitely become a leader in those circles. So it's significant that he's saying this needs to address it because it sounds like he still wants a concession from McCarthy that if they punt, this reminds me of actually what Democrats were going through with the Inflation Reduction Act. If they punt, they need to promise other things or he's saying there's going to be no punting at all.

What is your sense of whether the White House would give an inch on any of that? I don't think they proposal is that it raises a lot of revenue, something like $200 billion over the course of the next 10 years because you have more resources to the IRS who can go over the tax returns and say, actually, you pencil whipped this one here. That's wrong. You had $700 in your Venmo account last year. So pay up. So it brings money in. So if they want to repeal the IRS, then all of a sudden, they have to find another couple hundred billion dollars somewhere else. And they've ruled out Pentagon. They've ruled out Social Security, Medicare. So they're looking under every couch cushion for every penny.

They can't afford to be then also playing this IRS game. So maybe the Freedom Caucus will like fold on that one. But you're right, they want much bigger concessions from McCarthy, which then moves the legislation, A, farther away from getting 218 among all of Republicans, and B, farther away from anything serious. Because if it becomes something that is so clearly just kind of a fantastical wish list of the right, then it's not a legitimate negotiating position. And that's what's hard for McCarthy to suss out right now, because to make matters even worse for him, there's a handful of members, Republican members, who don't want to, who will not do any debt ceiling negotiations, who are not voting to raise the debt ceiling, period.

And so you have this combination of people who are saying, we don't want to do it, but we will do it if you give us this. And they're mixed in in the negotiations with people who are saying, we're not doing it, period. And so to cobble together, especially when you have such a thin margin as speaker, the coalition to get something like that done is incredibly difficult. So it seems like the odds are against him getting anything through the House, period, through his own conference. What do you think? Do you think he, because if he doesn't, then he's really back to square one. What's your guess as to whether he can get the Nancy Maces, the kind of moderate-ish Republicans on the one hand, and the Chip Roy's and all the others who

are demanding bigger concessions, all to agree on a single package. I think this is the moment that it either all implodes or that McCarthy keeps walking a tightrope. And he has been adept at walking that tightrope, surprisingly so. I think some people, Politico ran a story last year like, is Kevin McCarthy dumb? What's the headline? You might remember it. But he's been, for someone that has sort of gotten dismissed by the Washington press corps as like bumbling,

he's been pretty adept at walking that tightrope within his own conference and keeping Republicans, even though he had to go through, what, 20 votes to get the speakership, he got it. And he's generally had the support going forward. There haven't been a lot of a lot of this hasn't boiled over and bubbled to the surface. And so to do that, I know it's only been a few months. It's actually pretty crazy if you look at what the Republican conference is like right now. So he could continue to walk that tightrope. I wouldn't bet against him. At the same time, it's just so hard when you have people who are not voting at all for a debt ceiling and people who are saying, eh. So I mean, I wouldn't bet against him. Because he's been giving so much when it comes to these hearings, when it comes to these investigations, they're more willing to give him a little slack. So then let's game it out from there,

because anybody who's watching this or listening on the podcast who has a 401k is deeply concerned about whether or not we're going to have a repeat of 2011, which was a debt downgrade. And I think the stock market lost like 20, 25% of its value before they came back. So basically what happened, what Boehner did in order to get his conference to agree to a debt ceiling increase back then was crash the car. You're in a game of chicken, and you just have to crash the car. Just to prove to the people in the back seat that we'll do it, and also it's going to hurt. Buckle up.

And so whether he passes something through the House or not, in order to get to a place where both Biden is scared enough to maybe come a little bit towards House Republicans, but more importantly, that the Freedom Caucus realizes that, you know, they've fought as hard as they can. They've taken it as far as they can go. And that if they take it any further, they're not going to win and they're going to blow the car up rather than just kind of mangle it on the side of the road, which means that he is, I don't see another route for him personally to get the debt ceiling done other than crash the car.

I could see a route where it gets done where he gets ousted. You can vacate the chair and put somebody else in who then does it. And then you have another speaker fight after that to see maybe he even comes back after that. But for him to personally get it done as speaker, I feel like he has to take 20% off the stock market or something before people are like, all right, fine. We did everything we could. There's a lot of pain. I'm getting yelled at by every business owner in my district. Okay, fine. Let's do the debt ceiling. What do you think? Yeah, I totally see how that's, I mean, it's the option that Boehner went with, except the difference between Boehner and McCarthy is that McCarthy prides himself

on being a unifier, whereas Boehner had gotten to the end of his rope with those kind of people who would come in in that wave and were anti-Obama and the Tea Party era Republicans. He just said, screw it. It's hard for me to see Kevin McCarthy doing the same thing. That said, tactically, it's not the end of the world, because if you are an establishment Republican, you pin the blame on the crazies, the cuckoo birds, to quote a senator at the time—that might have been 2014—but you can blame it on the crazies. And that's why the White House has the upper hand in all of this.

They don't need to give an inch, because politically, they know that it'll all come back on Republicans. The media will help them frame this as a totally the fault of Republicans. The fiscal responsibility of the country in general will fall on Republicans. Currency downgrades everything is going to fall on Republicans because they're gonna look obstructionist. And that's a huge, the White House just simply does not need to, that's policy question aside, at least on the political strategic messaging front, that's why they have the upper hand. So yeah, we're going to crash.

We might crash. Although, I mean, remember, Kevin McCarthy charmed Jim Jordan of all people. And because he has been willing to give so much, he does have some slack. There are some things that he can give them to make it work. And he's done before. So if you remember it took him what four or five days. It took him a long time. That's a long time in terms of a market crash. Right. I don't see this happening by next week. There's no way.

Right. We'll see. We'll see. Maybe I shouldn't say there's no way. He might over the weekend they might work on something. Who knows. And for fun the other point I would add is that when Republicans are kind of forced to then put their own ideas forward, one reason Democrats feel like they're in a good position is because you start to get stuff like Buddy Carter.

Did you see his suggestion recently? Let's see it. All right, let's throw Buddy Carter here. We will be able to capture that underground economy, if you will. As distasteful as it may be, the pimps, the prostitutes, they're going to be paying taxes because they consume. They go out and they buy groceries. They go out and they buy stuff. And that's where you're going to be paying the taxes on. So that's Buddy Carter making his argument for basically a 30 percent flat sales tax to just hit everybody, the pimps and the prostitutes.

And get all the taxes out of the way. There you go. But I think a lot of people, aside from kind of how funny it is to hear Buddy Carter talking about how he's going to tax the pimps and the prostitutes, people are going to wait, 30%? So all working people, middle classclass people everybody's gonna pay 30% sales tax on their on all of their consumption while Which is going to be extremely regressive

And so I just feel like when they when you get into these debates the Democratic view of let's fund Good things education health care, you know climate climate spending and let's fund it and let's fund good things, education, healthcare, climate spending, and let's fund it and let's tax billionaires and millionaires to do that. That position is just more popular than let's put a 30% sales tax on everything or let's do a flat tax or let's cut this so that we can do you know tax cuts for the rich down the road it's way more palatable to say we're going to you know not upset the apple cart in the near term it's very hard and Macron is learning this right now a lot of lessons for Republicans over in France you can

obviously there are arguments that you need to do things to secure a safe and healthy future along the lines of what Macron is making. That said, there are ways to do it and there are ways not to do it. And it's always going to be harder to do it than to not. So it's no easy fight for Republicans going forward. There is a chunk of the country that won't be super pleased if Biden is just like, screw it, we're just going to keep raising the debt ceiling, blah, blah, blah. I'm not going to make any cuts. There's a chunk of the country that will be irritated by that, but it's not going to compare to. Yeah, it's no contrast there or clear contrast, I should say. And so, meanwhile, Tucker Carlson continues to land some pretty big interviews. He spoke with Elon Musk yesterday.

Let's roll a little bit of his interview with him. You were shocked to find out that various intel agencies were affecting its operations? The degree to which various government agencies had effectively had full access to everything that was going on on Twitter blew my mind. I was not aware of that. Would that include people's DMs? Yes. So he also addressed, that's one part of what he talked about, the combination of the government, the security state, and Twitter. He also got into generative AI. So let's play the second clip, and then we'll break it all down. Non-trivial, it has the potential of civilizational destruction. There's movies like Terminator, but it wouldn't quite happen like Terminator because the intelligence would be in the data centers.

Right. The robot's just the end effector. But I think perhaps what you may be alluding to here is that regulations are really only put into effect after something terrible has happened. That's correct. If that's the case for AI and we only put in regulations after something terrible has happened, it may be too late to actually put the regulations in place. The AI may be in control at that point. So Musk then said in this interview that he was preparing to launch TruthGPT. We can put C3 up. He's trying to launch a truth-focused competitor to chat GPT that may seem naive, that may

seem funny to people. And I think there are all kinds of obvious difficulties that come with trying to direct AI towards truth in the age where nobody agrees on what constitutes truth or what the value of truth actually even is in the beginning. But he said, quote, I'm going to start something which I'll call Truth GPT, a maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe. I think this might be the best path to safety in the sense that an AI that cares about understanding the universe is unlikely to annihilate humans because we are an interesting part of the

universe. Unlikely to annihilate, not great odds, I would say, in terms of civilization. But he has actually incorporated a company back last month called X.AI. This is according to Gizmodo. And some reports say he's been reaching out to AI folks, trying to sign them on to his new gig, onto that new AI venture. He did sign that big letter last month. I actually also signed it. I'm not on the high-profile side of that, because it was like Steve Nozniak, Elon Musk, and all of those other, like, tech giants saying that we need to pause open-source public

AI, generative AI, that is, until we can wield it responsibly, which is, I think, an important point to make. So he was instrumental in the founding of ChatGPT, of OpenAI, and has been disillusioned, soured on the project. Now Steve Bannon clapped back to all of this. We put C4 up. He had some words to say. He called Elon Musk a snake oil salesman and said, quote, you're a fool if you trust him. A lot to unpack, Ryan, as they say. Well, so we've got a couple motivations to unpack here. I've been really gratified to see Elon Musk's kind of jihad against AI because this stuff does scare me. And the point that

you only regulate after something bad happens is something that liberals, progressives, and the left have all been saying for years. And so we ought to get ahead of it. And so I'm in complete agreement with it. You also see a lot of people who say that Musk is actually just cynically saying this stuff because he's behind when it comes to the AI race. So that's why he wants this pause. And so to have him come out with his own AI thing, but good AI, it's like, oh, God. Okay, so maybe that is where this comes, whatever. It takes different bedfellows to build a coalition.

So if there are some people who are cynically opposing the explosive growth of AI at this point, while others are like genuinely, earnestly opposing it, whatever, it's all opposition and whatever we can do of growth of AI at this point while others are like genuinely earnestly opposing it, whatever. It's all opposition and whatever we can do to kind of get a handle on this before it gets a handle on us, I think is a good thing. When it comes to Bannon's motivation, yeah, he's banned from Twitter and he's salty that he can't get back on.

Musk refuses to unban Steve Bannon, which is something I forgot about until I read that article. I was like, really, this is what we're doing. But he also says that Musk is on the wrong side of China, and I think that's a pretty good point. We've covered that before. He opened that big factory literally in Xinjiang. And didn't Bannon get arrested on some Chinese mogul's yacht?

Yes. Yes. So all of this is, none of this is clean, pure intellectual kind of jousting. No. There's a lot going on I do think this gets to the sort of musk Taibbi versus Mehdi Hassan debate, you know in a sense in that and we went back to that first clip where must says the degree to which Various government agencies had effectively full access to everything that was going on on Twitter blew my mind

Effectively full access to everything that was going on on Twitter. Some of those early revelations from the Twitter files, um, that wouldn't have happened without him were that constant meetings with the FBI, constant communications with government agencies about potential censorship and actual censorship. Um, whether you're, uh, you think the degree of the censorship was warranted, the Hunter Biden pictures, or it was limited or not, it was happening. Bottom line, we know that because of the censorship was warranted, the Hunter Biden pictures, or it was limited or not, it was happening, bottom line. We know that because of the Twitter files. We know those sort of contours of what was happening because of the Twitter files. And it was interesting on the right that a lot of people came to see Donald Trump as like a blunt force object and a net

good. All of these different problems, obviously, all of these different competing motivations. Is he trying to, you know, get his brand back in shape, make money, whatever it is. But then even people who accepted all of that said, well, he's useful as a blunt force object. There's probably a parallel going on with Elon Musk in that I think there are clearly a million different problems. But I also feel like there are a lot of things we wouldn't know if not for Elon Musk. And this AI debate actually is changing because of Elon Musk in a better direction, whether or not that's because of pure motivations. And it's not just U.S. intelligence agencies that had access to DMs. We also know that Saudi Arabia, which continues to be a significant owner in Twitter,

was running an entire intelligence operation in which they were bribing engineers in order to get them, to give them information on dissident DMs and locations as well. And there was even a trial about this. Like, this is a conspiracy, but it is one that was rolled up. But it's not one that had any consequences for people above the engineers, basically. That's why you and I, when we were talking about this initial sale, were saying that the one thing, the one major thing he could do to show everybody that he's taking these concerns seriously

and is operating in good faith is to encrypt direct messages in a way that makes it so that Twitter itself does not have access to the messages. So that you can come with bribes, you can come with a warrant, it doesn't matter, it's out of our hands, we don't have it. Like you gotta get it some other way like when somebody screenshots it and posts it to Twitter, like Twitter,

like Musk did with his signal messages with Taibbi. If you wanna get messages, it's gonna have to be old fashioned way. You're not gonna be able to, there's gonna be no back door for you. Get out a Polaroid and take a picture of the screen. Yeah, that's it. That's what you gotta do.

So until he does that, I'm gonna take everything he says on these questions with a grain of salt. Hopefully he does though. I am, as a journalist, always nervous when people are DMing me through Twitter if they're trying to stay secure. And a best practice is really to then immediately delete. Like move them over to Signal,

and then delete the exchange. Sometimes they can go back and find it, but you're always much better off if it's just not there. Because if you do get hacked, oftentimes what hackers can find, or if, say, an engineer comes in the back end, what they're going to see is what's there, and it takes them an extra couple layers

to go back and find things that have been deleted. But yes, it's something that people should be aware of that you do not necessarily have privacy in your private messages. Oh, no, absolutely not. So you're right. There are a lot of things that need to happen. I think, you know, obviously, both of us would always take him with a grain of salt, because he's a powerful billionaire who's in charge of like what i don't know 20 of the world at this point it's impossible to quantify but a lot so always take that stuff with a grain of salt of course um publicly funded billionaire we should add yeah yes funded by all of us it's beautiful really when you think about it it is it is it takes a village. It sure does. It takes a village.

All right, moving on to a crazy story out of Oklahoma. One of the strangest things unfolding in the news cycle right now. We can put the first element up on the screen. This is from the Washington Post. Oklahoma Republican Governor Kevin Stitt has called on a group of officials to resign after what he calls, quote, horrid audio has emerged. We actually have some of that audio. It's officials in McCurtain County, Oklahoma.

They, this is a recording that was obtained by News 9, actually from another reporter who left his phone in a room. And we'll get into all of this but as the meeting was going on the public had been dismissed from a meeting these officials in McCurtain County Oklahoma kept talking the audio made its way to News 9 in Oklahoma you'll hear some interesting things about hitmen that come out of left field but let's go ahead and roll that. Yeah, but the thing of it is, you know.

We actually cut the curtain. I've known two or three hitmen that were very quiet guys. Yeah. And would cut no fucking mercy. Yeah. In Louisiana, because it was all Moffitt around Louisiana. Oh, yeah. Yeah, but here's the reality.

If the hair on his wife's head, Chris Booneheim's head, or any of those people that really were behind all that, if the hair on their head got touched by anybody, who would be the bad guys? Yeah. So that's Sheriff Kevin Clardy, Commissioners Mark Jennings and Robert Beck, and Alicia Manning with the Sheriff's Department. And the Sheriff's Department is claiming this audio may have been altered, and obviously they're making the claim that it was illegally obtained, which we can talk about a little bit. But the Sheriff's Office is saying, according to News 9, the audio does not match the quote, transcription, which is pretty— I'm sure it doesn't. That's quite interesting.

And none of these folks have resigned, as of right now at least. So the governor calls on you to resign. I think they were actually expelled from, like, the Sheriff's Association, or one of them was. But they still have not resigned, which leads me to believe they think there's some reason they can weather this. If they're coming out and straight up saying the audio has been doctored and altered, that tells me they think they have something that still hasn't been made public. Maybe they do or maybe they don't. I don't know that there's any context that makes talking about hiring a hitman and where you could hide a reporter's body better.

I'm not sure there's any context here that's going to make that better for these public officials. It is interesting, though, because we still haven't heard anything about that. And it's been a couple of days. And even worse in some of the audio, they get to a place where they're talking about, it sounds like they're talking about some black citizens in Oklahoma that they have a problem with. And they come back with, you know, back in the old days, basically the thrust of what they're saying is basically in the old days you could just lynch them. Can't do that anymore. And they're kind of lamenting that it's unfair that now, you know, their hands are really tied in the way that they can, you know, suppress opposition to them from the African-American community. And so it doesn't sound like it's faked. We are in a world of deep

fakes, but we have to, you know, that we're in a world of potential deep fakes, but we have to, we're in a world of potential deep fakes, but we also have to use our own powers of deduction. What are the chances that the story that was told is accurate, which is the phone left on record and these people talking like this, or the other one that there's some sophisticated deep fake operation aimed at these fairly random and obscure officials in Oklahoma. Who and why would be responsible for that?

Yeah. Although, yeah, no, I agree with that. I mean, if they have evidence, they have had time to come forward with the evidence. This broke last week, and so it's been several days. If they have evidence that says it doesn't match a transcription, that the audio was doctored, I would think that by now we would have—if it's good evidence, that it would have been there. If they're trying to just bury the story, hope it goes away, and not force these folks to resign or have much blowback continue—this is in national news, obviously. We just showed you the Washington Post headline covering this story from McCurtain County, Oklahoma, then that leads me to think that the path

they're following now suggests the evidence may exist, but it's not good. That it may just be something they can point to to say, we can't verify this. You know, at the end of the day, we just got to go with our gut. We got to trust our guys. And we don't think they would say anything like this in this context, et cetera, et cetera. So maybe they have something they can point to like that. I think if they had really good, solid, clear evidence, we would have seen it way sooner than now. Right. And if their answer is, well, we didn't transcribe anything about our pining for the days of lynchings and our Talking about hitmen. So if we didn't transcribe it, we certainly couldn't have said it like that's that's not the most persuasive

Argument, but like you said if they've got evidence, let's see Here we are like you reach out to counterpoints DM Ryan Graham and he'll delete it right away and move to signal So the other thing I would mention is that the reporter left his recorder in the room because he was trying to prove, he says, that the officials were having secret meetings. And that's where the reporter gets, that's where the recorder gets left in there. Now, Oklahoma, I think it's a one party, or you have to have two parties consent to recordings. so you can't just technically leave a recorder. The local news—News 9 quotes someone saying there were multiple public officials sitting in this public space having a conversation.

The sheriff is not going to be able to make a case for illegal wiring, taping or improper recording based on those facts. That's according to Ed Blau, who's quoted in the News 9 story. I don't know. I obviously am not super familiar with the laws in Oklahoma. If you do need two people to consent to a recording, it may be different, though, if you're in a public space and you're public officials. It looks like Oklahoma's a one-party consent. Oh, well then, geez. But the problem here is that the one party who consented left the room. So you no longer have any of the parties consenting. Then the question becomes, did these officials have a legitimate expectation of privacy?

And if they did, then it would be illegal wiretapping. But if they did not have an expectation of privacy and that you could argue, and I think this is the case that they're trying to make, said, no, this is a public meeting or it should be a public meeting because you have denied that you hold private meetings. So therefore, either you lied about having a private meeting

or this is a public meeting. If it's a public meeting, you have no expectation of privacy and recording is just fine because I can walk into a city council meeting and hit record. There's nothing illegal about that. So either way, it's out. This is secondary. Like Linda Tripp, she did get charged, but we still got the whole scandal. Right. Yeah. Yes. Yes, yes, we sure did. Let's talk about Jeff Jackson.

He's a representative out of North Carolina, a Republican. And he has been, since he took office, he's a fascinating guy. Super interesting. He's got a sub stack. He's got a TikTok, a Twitter. And before we get into all of that, let's roll his most recent video, which is going really viral right now. I'm still brand new to Congress. I've only been there 100 days. And I don't know if I'm not supposed to say this out loud, but it's true and important. And if you don't know this, you need to. It's really clear from working there for just a few months that most of the really angry voices in Congress are totally faking it. These people who have built their brands around being perpetually

outraged, it's an act. I've seen a bunch of examples. Here's one. I've been in committee meetings that are open to the press and committee meetings that are closed. The same people who act like maniacs during the open meetings are suddenly calm and rational during the closed ones. Why? Because there aren't any cameras in the closed meetings, so their incentives are different. What I've seen is that members of Congress are surrounded by negative incentives. There are rewards for bad behavior.

You know what the big one is? Being able to reach you. The big thing that modern media and modern politicians have learned is that if they can keep you angry, they'll hold your attention, and they both want your attention. So if you're a politician and you show certain media outlets that you can help them keep their audience angry, they'll give you their audience. So that I checked on Twitter as of last night had 1.4 million views. I don't have a TikTok, so I couldn't see how many views it got on TikTok, but he has 1.7 million TikTok followers and 150,000 Twitter followers. So millions of people have seen that video by now. Yeah, there's a real hunger for people to just speak plainly to them.

And there's a massive amount of distrust and the angry voices that that he's talking about and he doesn't specify uh who they are but we can you know take some educated guesses those angry voices are exploiting that same lack of trust so he's now saying no actually the people that are trying to yeah tell you that they're the ones that can be trusted because they sense that you don't trust washington they're all they're lying to that can be trusted because they sense that you don't trust Washington They're all they're lying to you too, right and I loved his last point where he says the next time You hear something crazy from somebody and you think how is it possible that they could actually believe this ask yourself do they actually believe this or are they just telling you that and

You know, it's it's both the attention economy But the actual and also the actual fundraising economy. Because every time, in order to raise small dollars, you have to stand out from the pack. In order to stand out, it's a ratchet effect. You have to continue to shock greater than you shocked before, because we have this capacity to quote unquote know, quote unquote, normalize behavior

that we've seen recently. So, yeah, the only way is to just be even more abnormal. Yeah. So he says the same people who act like maniacs during the open meetings are suddenly calm and rational during the closed ones. And you might wonder why nothing gets done in Washington if people are actually able to function behind closed doors. But it's because what happens outside of those closed doors still trumps what happens behind

those closed doors, because he makes a really good point. He uses the word incentives. That's exactly right, because the incentive system that's set up now is not for reconciliation, literally or metaphorically. It's not for reconciling left and right and getting work done. It's not for really serving the public. And we'll talk about that actually in the next segment. The incentives are for media attention and fundraising. And he's not wrong about that at all. One of the things that I think is really interesting that he does is some of his early videos especially really peeled back the curtain on how Congress actually functions. There's a great documentary on HBO it's called The Swamp and it started as a Facebook series that followed

members of the Freedom Caucus like Thomas Massey and they it gets into lobbying it gets into like who who is in it there's there's some people on the left in it too but it's it gets into it, who was in it? There's some people on the left in it too. But it gets into it, like exactly how you get that committee seat you want, exactly how close the RNC is to Capitol Hill Club. So where the lobbyists are and where the members are and how close both of those things are to the Capitol. I think he should do more of that. If he gets into like being sanctimonious about other people being angry, I'm going to find that annoying. Because people have good reason to be

angry, even if their representatives are cynical. Right. If I were going to play devil's advocate or Marjorie Taylor Greene's advocate, I would say that whether it's cynical or not, she is tapping into something real. Yes. And so even if she... And so is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Right. So whether or not that comes from a genuine belief in lasers or whatever, space, whatever that thing is

that she always gets made fun of for, isn't the point. The point is that it's a democracy and she's channeling something real. In a representative democracy, you got to have everybody represented and all different passions represented from AOC all the way to MTG. So in that sense, I would say that, yeah, okay, it probably is, some of it probably is fake, but the function of it is what those people want. They want the system to be shaken up.

And then, yes, it becomes a self-perpetuating cycle so that people who do want that, you end up never getting anything done because in order to keep fundraising and keep the media attention on you, you have to not give people what they want but tell them what they want is always more. You always want more, and it's never good enough because you're trying to keep the media attention on yourself. And so I do think it's like a vicious cycle. I think that gets to the incentives point that Jeff Jackson is making, which is a very good one. That said, Steve Kornacki did a super interesting look back at Newt Gingrich's rise to power on a podcast earlier this year. It was really good. And one of the interesting things about Gingrich's rise is how he used the early days of C-SPAN. He saw C-SPAN cameras and he realized that if you went out there when nobody else was on the floor and made these grand speeches that served no purpose because nobody's listening to them in Washington, D.C.

Now with a C-SPAN camera, you can get media attention, you can generate all kinds of interest and intrigue by talking in these C-SPAN cameras. And a lot of people would point back to that and say that was a cynicism, that was a really cynical moment in politics that took us down a different course. People who were here before Newt Gingrich will say that he really came in and splintered everything. Nobody was able to get along after any of that. To that I would say, and Kornacki gets into this, Democrats had the House for, what, 40 years before Gingrich and company came in and shook it up. And I get it.

I know that it's frustrating when we can't get anything done. I think that is a completely legitimate point. But that total sense of compromise and cooperation in Washington, D.C. is not good either, unless it's rooted in something else, unless we change the incentive system. It's not good when you see everybody in Washington, D.C. glad-handing and back-slapping. Right, everybody laments that the era of the dinner party is over where all the two parties get together and they're so friendly without realizing that what that was also doing was basically draining democracy out of elections, that it didn't matter who you sent to Washington. They're going to basically work together to do the same thing.

Yeah. I'm sorry that Newt Gingrich came along and made it harder for Ted Kennedy. And who else was it to have the waitress sandwich? Remember that? It was Chris Dodd. It was Chris Dodd, I think. Yeah. I'm so sorry he upset that. I'm so sorry he drew attention to all of that. Again, you can think his motives are cynical, but there's something obviously real being tapped into. The question that Jeff Jackson raises, which is a good one, is that our incentive system sets it up so that it's never reconciled, that it's never fixed, because you keep having to pit people against each other. Right. And the advent of social media adds an element of it that we do need to be cautious

about. Agree completely. It's just the same thing that cable news did. Yeah. Speaking of bad incentives in Washington, D.C., and how you can never bring left and right together to actually solve a problem, I want to talk about some news that just hasn't gotten enough coverage this week. There's a new bill that was unveiled by Senate Democrats. It's called the Ethics Act on stock bans, on stock trading bans in Congress. This is from F1 here. Yeah. Here's from the Washington Examiner, which got the scoop ahead

of the announcement. Senate Democrats are set to unveil a sweeping proposal to ban members of Congress from trading in the stock market. The bill, dubbed the Ending Trading and Holdings in Congressional Stocks Act, there's a nice little acronym, would immediately prohibit lawmakers from buying or selling stocks. It would also require them and their spouses and dependents to divest from certain assets or place holdings into a qualified blind trust, a proposal that wouldn't apply to lawmakers who were only recently elected this Congress until their next election. That's pretty key. The other key part of this, and the examiner continues to note it, lawmakers are going to be subject to civil penalties if they don't comply.

That could be equal to one month's pay or, quote, an amount equal to 10% of the value of each covered investment that was not divested or placed into a qualified blind trust. Interestingly enough, Merkley, Jeff Merkley tried to get Josh Hawley support for the ethics act. Hawley actually introduced his own legislation called the Pelosi act. But this is different. So as Merkley is trying to get Hawley in to cooperate with his bill, because they'll probably need good Republican support on this, Hawley says it should absolutely make it so

that—this is him saying—that sitting senators and their spouses should have to divest their holdings before reelection. And he's saying that the Ethics Act allows them to not do that, which, so that's every six years. If someone was just elected back in, back in 2022, they can basically amass their fortune and play with that money for the rest of their lives. I think that's a good point from Hawley's perspective. If that's the only sticking point that he has, it's not worth not supporting this bill over. But Politico did a roundup of some folks' reaction to it. Ron Wyden is, as you can imagine, pretty skeptical that Republicans are going on board. He said,

quote, we'll have to see. Mike Crapo of Idaho, he's a Republican and he's the committee's ranking member here. He says, quote, we've already got a rule that any trades have to be recorded or sales have to be recorded. And I think that's an appropriate approach. Bernie Sanders had a great quote to Politico. He said, to be honest with you, it's not an issue that's really on my mind right now. He is a sponsor of this bill. He's a sponsor of the Ethics Act. So just like a classic funny Bernie quote. Hawley told Politico, this looks Obamacare, where they write a law and every member of Congress is exempt from it. Remember the Stock Act was passed in 2012.

That required members, and actually was in response to some serious allegations against the Pelosi's. The Stock Act required reporting within 45 days of trade. So basically more transparency about what was being traded. And I think it's a good example of what Holly was talking about, in that nobody complies with it. And when they do comply with it, it's like, OK, you can have the great work that Unusual

Wills does, but, eh, you know, they'll just keep getting rich, and unless it's going to be a key issue in their district when people are voting on whether or not they can have healthcare, whether or not they can feed their families, and inflation and all of that, we'll just keep getting rich and screwing you over. So I think it's a good point. And any time you see legislation like this, it has good support among Democrats. The House version of it is sponsored by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. So obviously some Democrats are rallying around it.

I think there's always reason to be skeptical. I think the point that Hawley makes is one of those reasons to be skeptical. Again, I don't think it's a sticking point that's worth holding up the bill over. Whether that ever even gets to the floor, that would be up to Chuck Schumer. And then you would obviously need McCarthy and it'd be an interesting question on the House side too. And it would need to be signed by Joe Biden, who to some extent, I guess, has already made his money—and that's another interesting area of inquiry right now, of course—by Republicans. So if we're trying to talk about how people are exploiting their positions of power and exploiting public service to get extremely wealthy in ways that are not available to

members of the average public, to average members of the public, as Republicans are in the Biden case. You know, and as they have been when it comes to Pelosi, for years, a lot of the reporting on Pelosi was done by Peter Schweitzer, who's a great reporter. Then this is something that they should, frankly, get behind if they can solve this loophole problem. But anytime you see legislation like this coming, assume there is a loophole, because it is too good to be true.

If you see a big group of members of Congress rallying behind something that will actually significantly cut into their own interests and their own ability to make money, there's always a way around it somewhere in the bill. Maybe that's not the case. But if anything is getting passed, like the Stock Act actually did get passed in 2012, you have to expect it to be completely watered down. And I know that's incredibly cynical,

but that's where we are in Congress right now, and for a lot of different reasons. But people are able to come in and make a bunch of money, and it's not technically insider trading. And Sagar and Crystal have covered this a lot, and Ryan and I have covered it too. We all sort of know how it works. It doesn't have to technically be insider trading to just hear the whispers of lobbyists and of people on your committees and kind of know what the right move is.

So blind trust, that's also, there's loopholes in blind trusts. And maybe, Ryan, that's a, there's loopholes in blind trusts. And maybe, Ryan, that's a great place to toss it to you on. This is an interesting bill. It does have a lot of support among Democrats, like I think almost 20 co-sponsors. It's got a lot of support. Ryan, you have some crazy audio. We've already played some crazy audio, but you have more crazy audio to share with us. What have you got? So Lauren Windsor, a reporter over at The Undercurrent, obtained some audio of a, basically it's a Chris Sununu fundraiser. So Sununu is a very popular New Hampshire Republican governor who wins re-election. They have elections every two years up in New Hampshire, he wins them consistently despite the fact that all of the members of the House from New Hampshire

are Democrats, the senators are now Democrats. And so Kellyanne Conway gets the mic at this donor retreat. You'll hear him start to panic, kind of fake panic, but maybe a little bit real, like, oh, God, here comes a tough question. The question she puts to him is, good for you that you keep winning, but it kind of sucks that you're winning while Maggie Hassan was just reelected comfortably, that they're all Democrats, and that they just picked up a bunch of – Democrats picked up a bunch of state legislative seats. In other words, she's kind of asking, what are you doing wrong that is allowing this to happen? And I think his answer is instructive. He turns it back around on hers.

Let's play a little bit of this first. I have the mic. Oh, hey. Uh-oh. Kellyanne Conway has the microphone. Thank you, guys. This has been great. I know she's going to give you the toughest question.

I love it. Let's see it. I am, actually, because we're friends, and I'm thrilled that you're governor of New Hampshire and you're a leader in our party. But I do want to ask you why you're the only Republican in the state. So you didn't run for Senate against Maggie Haslam so we'll have to suffer her for six more years. And why didn't you do that so we can have majority control? Why did the Democrats win 21 state legislatures? So basically she's saying,

you know, why are you winning but the rest are losing? He gives a very long and instructive answer that you can find if you check out her Twitter account or elsewhere. But here's the essence of it. Let's roll this from Sununu. At the end of the day, I haven't had the right candidates. And unfortunately, the national issues of where we drive on those races are always tied to more of a national issue. It's been it doesn't play well in a reddish purple state like New Hampshire. It just doesn't. So when you have a weak candidate, they say, well, I'm just going to defer to whatever they're saying out of Washington. Look, General Don Bullard is a U.S..s senate candidate i'm sorry the guy was freaking insane he was a great man that served this country a great man that started talking about mental illness in the military before anybody else was doing that

or when it came to being a political candidate my god and part of the back story there of course emily as you recall is that democrats did what they could to make sure that the freaking insane bald duke was Uh the republican nominee, but that doesn't totally absolve Uh republicans for making him and you know for him ending up with the nomination and so i'm curious for your take on his general point, which is that This basically this maggot stuff that's coming out of washington Plays well to the base But but in swing states like New Hampshire, it's toxic.

And to me, that is kind of the best articulation I've heard from a kind of moderate Republican of the dilemma that the party faces, that in order to be a national figure, you have to believe X, Y, and Z, and you have to behave in X, Y, and Z ways. But that is going to undermine you in places like New Hampshire, which you need to win to control the Senate and to win presidential elections as well. If Chris Sununu were sitting right here,

I would look him in the eye and say, stop giving them reasons to want Bull Duke. All right, we are joined now by author, journalist and professor Christian Parenti to talk about his, what Vox called a buzzy new piece. The headline, it's in Compact Magazine. It's the headline is Trump's, and put this up here, Trump's real crime is opposing empire. It has produced a couple of

responses. The one I mentioned in Fox, another one in foreign policy by the kind of former Bernie Sanders foreign policy guy, Matt Duss. So Christian, let's talk through some of the points that you made here. So what is the, how would you lay out your general thrust of the piece here? Well, I argue that Donald Trump is hated because of his foreign policy, that if you look at what he did in office, there was a lot that benefited the 1%. So this is a critique from the left. And, you know, if you look at Trump from the left, well, he passed massive tax cuts and the rich like that, and he pushed deregulation very aggressively. 85% of it was blocked through the courts. But he pushed a right-wing agenda on political, on the economic front domestically.

So why do they hate him? Why does the establishment hate this guy so much? If you look at his foreign policy, it starts to make sense. Because in the realm of foreign policy, his actions were anti-imperialist. He didn't have some sort of left-wing anti-imperialist sensibility, but what he did was very threatening to America's informal empire as established after World War II. He consistently talked about wanting to leave and that is to say destroy NATO. He ordered the withdrawal of about a third of the troops in Germany. And Germany is a central hub for a whole region-wide network of U.S. influence.

AFRICOM is run out of Germany. There's 150 nukes in Germany. There's 40 different bases that have American personnel in Germany, and they project power into 104 different countries. So he's attacking NATO, which was the centerpiece of American empire. He refused to start any new wars. Yes, he had some drone strikes and some missile strikes, but he refused to escalate in Libya. He refused to escalate and try and overthrow Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and he actually drew down troops and moved them over to where the oil is famously. But there's not that much oil in Syria.

And Syria doesn't export oil. It's like they produce like 300 barrels a day, 300,000 barrels a day for domestic consumption. He withdrew troops from Iraq and from Afghanistan. He negotiated the end to the Afghan war, even if the dirty work of actually ending that war fell to Biden. That process of withdrawal was prevented all the way along, sabotaged by the Pentagon itself, and thus it was delayed.

He discussed withdrawing troops from South Korea. He floated the idea of withdrawing about a quarter of the 28,000 troops that were there. Maybe not a quarter. He talked about withdrawing 4,000 of the 28,000 troops that were stationed in South Korea. He demanded that Korea pay cost plus 50%. And then that became his thing. He wanted every country that was housing US troops to pay cost plus 50%. He saw American empire as a poorly run security business in which the US was being ripped off. He didn't see any of the benefits that come to American capitalism, particularly, maybe

not American capitalism, that implies all the workers and consumers as well, but to the American ruling class, the American 1% reaps many of the benefits of American empire. He didn't see that and took a hammer to the whole thing. He canceled the Trans-Pacific Partnership. He wanted to unilaterally scrap NAFTA, but he had one of his top economic advisors

stole the document off his desk by which he was going to do that. He then successfully renegotiated NAFTA. I mean, if you just add it all up, the guy was a vandal. He acted as a vandal towards the informal structure of American empire. It's interesting because if we cut to the criticism from Zach Beauchamp over at Vox, he tweets, in just two countries, Iraq and Syria, Trump's drone war killed three times as many civilians as the Gulf War, Kosovo intervention, and Libya wars combined.

And I think your argument is more interesting than that. Your argument is that if you weigh Trump's vandalism against Trump's hawkishness, it comes out on the side of the vandalism, that his sort of vandalistic instincts were a net, in the aggregate, they were more powerful than the- They were a threat. They were- Yeah, no, if you could just flesh out how you weigh both of those and come out on the side of the point that you raised in the article, which I agree with, because that seems like what you're doing, because you acknowledge that in the article.

You say there were, there was drownings. You don't dispute that, but that it weighs on one side more strongly for the benefit of a better foreign policy. Yeah, I mean, his actions add up to destabilization of this very elaborate architecture of base deployments, military assets, treaties, relationships with individual countries through diplomacy, formal and informal. I mean, the entire, you know, the business relationships that the U.S. government and U.S. corporations have around the world, this entire structure has to be reproduced carefully. And he was doing the opposite. He wasn't consciously, systematically dismantling it. He wasn't a peacenik who was like, we're not going to kill anyone. The blood stopped.

The bloodshed stops now. No, he was a crassly transactional ADD vandal. He wanted to close all the embassies in Africa. Partly, he put it in the context of his other comments because he seems quite racist, right? I mean, he referred to Africa and Haiti, countries in Africa and Haiti in really derogatory ways. But you close all the embassies in Africa, the embassies are a major source of institutional footprint for the CIA.

You know, he just didn't get it. And so I tried to imagine what it would be like to be a foreign policy elite or really any kind of elite in D.C. with this guy in power, it would be very frightening. It would be infuriating and you would want to get rid of him. So that's the argument. It's not that Trump's foreign policy was ultra-specific and that he was guided by high and noble ideas and that he had a plan for a new, totally coherent, different kind of foreign policy.

I think he was reacting kind of episodically based on this crash transactional sensibility. We're getting ripped off, enough of that. We want to get paid properly. But it added up to the most powerful player in the US government vandalizing US empireS. empire. And that, I think, alienated a whole class of quite powerful politicians, diplomats and military and intelligence-connected bureaucrats. And that that helps explain why there is this campaign against him and his followers. And it

is not because he was in other ways attacking the class interests of the American elite. It was specifically in this realm. Yeah, and a lot of the progressive kind of critics of this essay that listed a lot of his kind of militarist aggression overseas. But I don't, to me, and I want to list some of those for you to get you to respond, but to me, that doesn't necessarily undermine the point you're making. It might somewhat complicate it, but it makes you think kind of a little bit more deeply about, well, what is the empire and what part of it is dispensable and what part of it is kind of essential to its operation and its power

expression. But just like to run, let's run through some of the things that people would flag as, you know, Trump kind of even one-upping, say, Obama or Biden. You know, 2017 and 2018, you know, he orders strikes on Syria, like you mentioned, deploying some of the troops to the oil fields. But like you said, these are actually tiny oil fields, which Trump probably didn't even realize. He just thought they're over in the Middle East. They must have a lot of oil. He ripped up the Iran deal, which the kind of national security establishment had been really hostile in a lot of ways to the Iran deal. He then kills Qasem Soleimani in, what was that, January of 2020, while he's also ordering the Pentagon to come up with war games about,

as we now know from Ken Klippenstein's recent reporting, toward, you know, to war game a war with Iran. There's reporting that he got very close to ordering airstrikes on Iran right after the election, if not for January 6th. There may have been, you know, he may have launched another, you know, set of airstrikes against Iran. He may have, but he didn't. You know, the thing is, he didn't. Yeah, right. What else? The coup, he backed the coup. But here, and and let's start like he tried to back the coup in Venezuela until it started going bad. And then he didn't. Then he started talking about Maduro's good looking generals. He referred to Juan Gua, not in an interview, but, you know, according to sources, that he said, oh, yeah, I use Bolton.

Bolton makes me look crazy. You know, and Trump has said that more recently. Right. It's like, you know, the mad dog theory. You got you got to they got to think you're crazy enough to to go there. Right. I think you guys have discussed this on the show. I was talking about, like, you know, in his interview with Tucker Carlson, I would use the, you know, making these threats about the N-word going atomic, right?

So yeah, he played up that sort of stuff, which is probably somewhere lodged in his mind. Like that's what Nixon did, you know? Yeah, so I just don't think that those things add up. I don't think those things negate everything I lay out in this article. It's like the guy said stuff like again and again he was serious about maybe we should scrap NATO. That's like maybe we should take the engine out of the car and see how it runs.

It's like that would be a massive blow to American empire. But I kind of interrupted you. Yeah, I know. But what's fascinating is that if you get the end of the Vox article, you actually end up seeing the writer agree with you. He writes toward the end of the piece, this recklessness, and by this recklessness, he's referring to Trump's asking for war plans for invading Mexico and like all these other things that he's doing. He writes, this recklessness is actually part of why the foreign policy establishment is so implacably hostile to the former president. He has challenged the plans of the post-World War II international order, like NATO and free trade, which they believe ensure global stability. And his alternative is a foreign policy based on America's unrestrained violent id except for that last passage and actually maybe even including that last passage that passage could have come out of your piece it's

it feels like it's almost like they just don't want to give Trump what you gave him even if it's accurate I don't't know. It's almost like an attitude. Which is, I think, a serious mistake for people on the left. Because another thing about Trump's foreign policy is that he's very intuitive. He's a very intuitive politician. He's like the idiot savant of American politics. He's like the jazz musician who can't read music, but knows exactly what notes to play. And a lot of people in this country are anti-war, even as they're like patriotic and kind of machista in their kind of pro-military sensibility. They're also anti-war. You know, they like love the military, but don't really want their cousin to go off to some country and possibly get killed and have all this money go

over there. And people don't have to have a particularly sophisticated understanding of American foreign policy to not like a lot of it, right? Just be like, well, I don't really know where Ukraine is. I don't understand this. But I see that there's a lot of regular people being killed. And I mean, I just I don't like this. I don't I don't understand it. I don't like it.

And I know it's expensive. And there are needs right here at home which are being underfunded. Right. At that level, a lot of a lot of people have a pro-peace position. They don't like the empire, even as they love the military. Right. And love the flag. And Trump taps into that and he plays to that.

And that, I think, was very important in his initial election. I wrote an article for Nonsite years ago, right after the election, about Trump's rallies. I watched a whole bunch of them on C-SPAN. The whole anti-war, end the forever wars, bring the troops home, have a peaceful foreign policy, that was a very big part of his message, much bigger than xenophobic, racist, anti-immigrant talking points were part of his message, which were, I mean, they were clearly part of his message. But he talked about it constantly on the campaign trail. Those who are so hostile to the idea that Trump gains traction with voters because of

his foreign policy, I think you're making a mistake because I think the Democrats should be more peaceful and that politicians on the left, progressives, the squad, that they made a big mistake by supporting war credits for Ukraine and all that. They should be much more, from Bernie on down to the rest of them, they should be much more hostile to American empire, not only because it's the right thing to do, but I actually think it would have traction with voters. I don't think most Americans are into the American empire. Yeah, I think that's well said and a good lesson because the left's, I think, resistance to what you outlined shows that they haven't absorbed some of the political lessons, let

alone the moral ones, but the political lessons, let alone the moral ones, but the political lessons of Trump's rise. Yeah. And just so people, I want to read this one more time from Vox. Trump has challenged the pillars of the post-World War II international order like NATO and free trade, which they believe ensure global stability. That is agreeing with your piece in an essay that says that they're disagreeing with it. Which I think is so instructive about the kind of confusion of this time that we're living in. And some of it deliberate confusion and some of it earnest. Agree. Yeah.

So Christian, go ahead. I mean, there's also, you know, there are the 1%, let's not forget this. I mean, they gain, they benefit tremendously from the role of American empire. Part of why there's all this flight capital that props up real estate markets, props up asset values, is rooted in the fact that the U.S. projects power globally. And that's part of what draws money in that benefits the 1% and the speculator class, but not the regular people.

And so there's that element in this resentment towards Trump as well. Yeah, and you mentioned cheap raw materials and cheap labor as well. And when you get to those, then you see the 1% and the middle class kind of in direct conflict when it comes to the value of American empire. Because, yes, the middle class is going to get cheaper stuff that boosts the kind of consumer economy. But they're also getting entire industries hollowed out and no longer able to support families with wages.

Yep. no longer able to support families with wages. Deindustrialization is part of the blowback that comes from this global project of domination by subjugating the world, making it safe for foreign investment. Well, that means U.S. direct investment. That means those are the conditions, the preconditions for the departure of American industries. And that's why it's married with elite politics and the fashionable politics of the elite because you see that in their aversion to this argument, even though they will walk through it logically and be like, well, basically it's right, but it's icky. Right. And also, yeah, he's not nonviolent.

Yeah. And I think we can all agree with that. He's not. No, I think that's true. Yes. Well, Christian, thanks so much for joining us. This is a fascinating piece. Yeah. And, you know, I think we're all kind of groping in the dark in this new politics.

Yeah. And folks can check it out in Compact. All right. Thank you very much for having me on and good luck with the show. Thanks so much. Appreciate it. Before we started recording, we were even trying to define the politics of Compact,

which will publish like Zizek, and it'll publish, you know, Sourabh Amari obviously is a big part of Compact, so it's a fascinating publication. I definitely recommend people check it out, and that essay is a great example of why. Yeah, and I saw somebody on Twitter saying, oh, well, this is BS.

People don't know that Parenti actually supported the Iraq war. I was like, you know, I've known Christian for more than 20 years. And I was like, I actually marched with him in 2002 against the Iraq war. So I can personally testify that he was not supportive of that war. Christian actually is, in many ways, is the reason I got into journalism I got fired from this Job as a pot lobbyist and he was like come down to Bolivia And and cover this uprising with me best back in 2005 And so I went down and there was an uprising Morales ends up, you up taking power as a result of it. I think

the next year he and I went to Iraq, covering the war over there at the time. And so we've covered the blowback and the impact of American empire ourselves. So it would not be the case to say that he's supportive of the Iraq war or like American empire or something like that. Yeah. Interesting piece. And I like the idea that what the left could draw from this is not that Trump is good or not that Trump is nonviolent and not that Trump even has some coherent kind of foreign policy that the left ought to adopt, but that there are grains of public sentiment that can be gleaned from this and that the left does have permission to be much more anti-war and much more anti-imperialist than it has been and would be rewarded by

voters for doing the right thing as a result. And what they could do is, contra Trump, actually put out a coherent American foreign policy that benefits the working class, the middle class, rather than, then you have a choice between a chaotic one where you're like, is this guy going to get us nuked in the process of doing this kind of vandalism? Or can we, do we have a progressive vision of a rollback of American Empire that isn't going to get us nuked? And so much of it is, yes, the the capitalistic part of it is important, but it's also just so wrapped up in elite signaling. If you look at MSNBC during the Iraq war versus MSNBC now, it is all warmongering.

Like you are it would be very rare to hear an argument like the one that Christian just made on MSNBC today, as opposed to MSNBC in 2007, 2006. And part of it is, I think, because it's become very in vogue to just completely pretend that the Iraq war didn't happen, right? That like we didn't learn any of those lessons and to cozy up literally to build crystal in some like very obvious ways. And Nicole Wallace. And Nicole Wallace. Spokesperson for the Iraq war. Yeah. So it's a, they're not reading the room.

No. Even though it's right there. It's on a silver platter. It's right there. It's right there. Well, that does it for us this week on CounterPoints. We hope everybody has a great rest of their week. We will see you back here next Wednesday.

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