Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 4/2/25: Elon Faceplants In Wisconsin, Liberation Day, Luigi Death Penalty, JFK Hearings & MORE!

Episode Date: April 2, 2025

Ryan and Emily discuss Elon faceplants as Dems win Wisconsin, Fox tells 401k holders to accept their fate, Ezra Klein ripped for Jon Stewart interview, Trump pushes death penalty for Luigi Mangione, Rogan shocked by Trump deportations, Booker shatters Senate record in floor speech, CIA called out in JFK hearing.   To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: www.breakingpoints.com   Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. The Culture Creators and Scroll Stoppers. Tina Knows. Lil Nas X. Will we ever see a dating show? My next ex. That's actually cute, though. And Chapel Rome. I was dropped in 2020, working the drive-thru, and here we are now. It's a fake show, you tell Beyonce. I'm going right on the phone and call her. Listen to Outlaws with T.S. Madison on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts, honey. I know a lot of cops. They get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. Listen to Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated, taser incorporated i get right back there and it's bad listen to absolute season one

taser incorporated on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts i'm clayton english i'm greg glad and this is season two of the war on drugs by sure last year a lot of the problems of the drug war this year, a lot of the biggest names in music and sports. This kind of starts that a little bit, man. We met them at their homes. We met them at the recording studios. Stories matter and it brings a face to it. It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, Sagar and Crystal here.

Independent media just played a truly massive role in this election, and we are so excited about what that means for the future of this show. This is the only place where you can find honest perspectives from the left and the right that simply does not exist anywhere else. So if that is something that's important to you, please go to BreakingPoints.com, become a member today, and you'll get access to our full shows, unedited, ad-free, and all put together for you every morning in your inbox. We need your help to build the future of independent news media, and we hope to see you at BreakingPoints.com. All right, good Wednesday morning, and welcome to CounterPoints. Emily is joining us from Waukesha County, Wisconsin, where Elon Musk told us the fate of Western civilization was going to be decided on Tuesday night.

We're now in a post-Western civilization moment. I, for one, am looking forward to it. Emily, how's the mood in the post-West environment? Welcome to the future, Ryan. There's a lot to talk about from the election results last night, just here in Wisconsin, interestingly enough, where I went to a precinct yesterday, turnout was really high. We'll get into why that didn't make up the difference for Elon Musk and the right here in Wisconsin, but also election results that are worth talking about in Florida, in Louisiana. So we have all kinds of good stuff to get through at the top of today's show, Ryan.

Yeah. At four o'clock today, I guess the West is going to try to make a comeback. Donald Trump is going to announce massive tariffs. This is going to be Liberation Day. I see a lot of people joking that it's liberation from your 401k day. We're going to talk to Bharat Ramamurthy, who was the number two, basically, economic official of the Biden administration. He's going to give us his take on Trump's tariffs and also his critique of this abundance agenda that friend of the show, Ezra Klein, has introduced to the United States, along with instantly like seven different think tanks organized around this idea of an abundance agenda. Luigi Mangione, alleged to have done something wrong, is going to get the get death penalty if Pam Bondi gets her way. We'll we'll talk about that.

The deportation scandal has broken through now to Joe Rogan. We're going to play a clip of him asking, wait a minute, why are we, are we sure we're supposed to be sending like gay barbers who have nothing to do with MS-13 to dungeons in El Salvador? Is that really what we signed up for here? And I think it's interesting that this has kind of moved beyond just the kind of inside the beltway conversation. Cory Booker wrapped up his 25-hour record-breaking talk-a-thon on the Senate floor. And Jefferson Morley and Oliver Stone testified yesterday in front of a House panel that was looking into the new releases as it relates to the JFK assassination. And the Democrats embarrassed themselves to a level that I did not think was even previously

achievable. And we'll play some of those clips. Emily, any quick thoughts? Wasn't exactly a shining example of Republican government from the right either at that hearing, because, of course, there was that Oh, so a bunch of elections last night, two critical ones in Florida where Republicans were defending, you know, seats that Trump had carried by 30 plus points. This is Matt Gaetz and also Mike Walz. Both went into the administration. Matt Gaetz never made it all the way in, but decided he didn't want to keep his panhandle seat. So both of those held special elections. But let's start in Wisconsin. This is Susan Crawford, a liberal judge, wins in just a complete landslide. Only a few months after Donald Trump carried the state of Wisconsin, Democrats look poised, or liberals, or whatever you want to call them in this nonpartisan judicial race to win some by something like 11 points. Here's

Susan Crawford, the winner last night. Today, Wisconsinites fended off an unprecedented attack on our democracy. Our fair elections and our Supreme Court. And Wisconsin stood up and said loudly that justice does not have a price. Our courts are not for sale. So Wisconsin voters are getting used to these pivotal Supreme Court elections. With that victory, the liberals, the Democrats, whatever you want to call them, will control the Supreme Court going forward. We had significant lines at the polls. Emily, we can roll this A1VO here, but Emily, what did you see when it came to turnout and enthusiasm in the state for

this off-year election? Yeah, I was out here in Waukesha County yesterday, and turnout was, you know, the poll workers were talking about how high turnout was and you could see it. I mean, it didn't really look like a spring Supreme Court election level turnout. It wasn't quite presidential, but turnout turned out to be very high as the information started coming in. Now, there was a state Supreme Court race, which in Wisconsin, by the way, isn't Republican versus Democrat. It's conservative versus liberal. And people sort of know that the parties are respectively involved, but it's not technically partisan. So there was a race back in 2023 where it was also at the time breaking spending records. Last night's election turned out to be the actual most expensive judicial race in U.S. history. About $100 million poured into this.

The conservative candidate had a bit of a cash advantage. They both were around, I think Susan Crawford, who ended up winning, was around $45 million. And Brad Schimel was somewhere north of $50 million. On the Crawford side, you had Soros, Pritzker, and I think Reid Hoffman getting involved. And then Musk, Dick Uline, some others were involved on the conservative side. Musk tried to run his Pennsylvania playbook because it worked when Trump's name was at the top of the ballot. And he gave out a couple million dollars to different voters, paid people 100 bucks for signing a petition against activist judges. They put a lot into this race where the margin now is about 10 points for Susan Crawford. She wins. And that's similar to what the margin was for the

liberal candidate back in 2023, which is all very interesting because it tests a couple of things. One, what happens in states like Wisconsin, swing state in a presidential election, but historically a blue state. What happens? Can Elon Musk sort of flip a switch, run the playbook back every time they want to win a crucial election and it's worth X amount of dollars, at least as of last night, the answer to that question is no. If Trump's name is not on the ballot, what does that do? My source, one of my sources had a really interesting reaction last night, said that Republicans slipped or conservatives slipped in rural areas and, quote, only Trump himself truly brings out the working class. So I think that's going to prove to be a really significant challenge for Republicans, conservatives in

states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, in particular, going forward. Yeah, and it was reported Musk had spent $17 million and that was several days with several days still left to go in the elections. So the final total certainly is going to be a lot more than that. And then there were the famous, you know, a hundred bucks if you sign this petition and get other people to sign it, which is sometimes he was careful to, uh, not break, uh, election bribery laws. Other times he was not at all careful. Now the attorney general is kind of looking into whether or not he was, he's breaking the law there. He also did a lottery where he gave out, you know, I think 2 million, you know, million dollar checks to two different

people who participated in this thing. And you're right. It wasn't, it wasn't enough. And so there is a, there's a theory on the left, which I want to get your take on, because I wonder if this is going to be, become something that gets talked about in Trump circles. The theory is, it's a little bit crazy, but it's just a theory. And it's not about an election being stolen, but it's about what Trump thinks about 2024. So there's a theory among some liberals who saw the anecdotes about Musk and Trump spending election night together and Trump being just utterly mystified by Musk's uncanny ability to know ahead of time exactly how the numbers were going to come out in Pennsylvania and Michigan. And Musk very early in the night was like, this is done. Here's why it's done. Here are the numbers that are going to come in. Now he can easily, from my perspective,

have a program that analyzes turnout in different key precincts, compare it to 2020, and then run a projection and just analyze it basically the same way that the New York Times does, but a little bit more sophisticated. I don't think it requires him to have any inside information or to be inside the vote counting machines. The theory on the left is that Trump doesn't understand that and thinks that Musk had something going in Pennsylvania. And that that has something to do with the deference that he has been giving to Musk, which requires some extraordinary explanation. Like just because it's so kind of obviously not great for him necessarily to be co-presidenting with this deeply unpopular guy. So they think it

has something to do with that. They're like that Musk knew something, did something. That doesn't mean he did. It just means that Trump might wonder if he did. Now, watching Elon Musk face plant, like if it was true that Trump thought Musk had some magic up his sleeve, well, there was no rabbit in the hat in Wisconsin. So I wonder if this is going to cool things between Musk and Trump and between Musk and the Republican Party. But, you know, 15 million is that much to him, but roughly 15 million is that much to him. But I think one of the reasons he started pouring money into it is in order to prove a point that he could be a net, starts slipping in the polls, then you're able to go into Wisconsin, flip the switch with the money, with the PAC, with the rallies, with the get out the vote operation that maybe looks like Pennsylvania 2024. And all of a sudden you give Trump more and more incentive to never ditch you. I think there's probably part of that. I mean, there's the Tesla case, but I don't think Elon Musk really that's pending or could be pending before the Wisconsin Supreme Court. I don't think that matters too much to Elon Musk, to be honest.

I don't think that's the business that they would get out of opening Tesla dealerships in Wisconsin. I don't think is going to dramatically change Elon Musk's net worth. But I think it would be a hilarious move to try to take over the country just to open up more Tesla dealerships in Wisconsin. That'd be amazing. Yes. Yeah, that would be something. But yeah, I mean, here in the this is where it was also really interesting. Here in conservative, relatively suburban counties, they were feeling Republicans, conservatives were feeling really good yesterday because of the high turnout. They had the sense that maybe Elon Musk had actually done something very, very impressive with the petitions against quote-unquote activist judges.

And that actually high turnout had conservatives feeling good. But as David Shore recently posited, when you look at the 2024 election results, if those low propensity voters had turned out in higher numbers, if there had been higher turnout in the presidential election, Trump would have won by more. And here in Wisconsin, if there had been higher turnout that was on the level of a presidential, which you're never going to get for a Supreme Court race, you could end up with Republicans narrowing the gap, conservatives narrowing the gap. Right now it's 10 points. You know, it's not to say Wisconsin is, you know, the same thing as Massachusetts. For example, voter ID passed by 62 percent, actually about 63 percent. That's a higher margin than Susan Crawford, interestingly enough. So, you know, it just I think your point is a really interesting one that there was this idea Elon Musk himself could be a singular force,

almost like Trump, who can go into these states and flip the switch. And if Trump thinks that's the case, or if Elon Musk believed that was essential to Trump's view of him, then they're going to need to put a whole lot more work into it because it did not go their way here in Wisconsin. But again, they didn't change the margin from 2023. Maybe narrowed it a little bit when all is said and done, but 10 points. So not much changed, even though there was higher turnout. It just it wasn't enough. And for many decades, Democrats have been the party of working class voters and working class voters are less likely to have their IDs just as a percentage. And, you know, small percentages can change. You know, if you're a college educated

mom in the suburbs, you've got your ducks in a row. If you're not, you're less likely to. And so for many years, Democrats defended the ability of anybody, hey, here's your address, show a utility bill, whatever, just sign your name. If you're registered, you can vote. Now, it's taken Republicans so long to start winning on voter ID, it's going to end up perhaps hurting their voters more. As you said, with the David Shore analysis, that if you have voter suppression of any degree across the board, you're more likely to suppress working class voters. And so anyway, that's just an interesting kind of irony there. And I think it's also why you're finally seeing Democrats kind of roll over

on voter ID. They're like, okay, you know what? Our voters all have ID now. So fine. We'll go ahead and do it. And that's the thing you have to remember. Parties are amoral vehicles for power. Like they don't have any principles on anything. The only principle is they want to win. And so they don't have a principle on what the actual, you know, identification you need. Trump said the way that he wrote his executive order recently around election reform. So if there was a way to read it that would say you could only vote if you had a passport, I think that was poorly written and I don't think that's going to hold up. But if that were the law put into place,

Democrats would win in a landslide, probably. Like Democrats are more likely probably to have valid passports than Republicans at this point, which is a shocking testament to the realignment of the parties that Democrats have more upper class, upper middle class voters than in the past. Speaking of working class districts, there are two in Florida. So let's move there. You put up A4. Randy Fine, deeply unpopular, apparently local election official. It seems like even Republicans don't really like the guy. He ended up winning by 10 points against Josh Wheeler in a race that, you know, went, you know, 30 plus for Trump. So this ended up,

you know, it ended up being close-ish, but it's not like, you know, and Democrats spent, what, tens of millions of dollars on this seat? Like, enormous amounts of money were raised and spent to try to make this a competitive race. And it's much closer than Republicans would like to see. And I know that there were some Republicans in Washington who were actually hoping for a close race so that it would be like a brushback pitch to Musk. They wanted a close race, but they didn't want to lose it. I don't think we have an element for this, but in the panhandle in Matt Gaetz's seat, Democrats actually overperformed the other Florida special election, still lost because it is such a massively Republican district. And one of the theories I saw kicking around last night,

curious for a take on this, is that Democrats should just not even do any advertising during these special elections because if you're a Democrat in an off year, you're locked in. You're Googling and finding when the races are, who's running, and making sure you're ready to vote. And you're

going out and you're going from the Tesla protest right to the ballot and making sure you cast it. And the more salience you increase, the more likely it is Republicans are going to learn about it and come out and vote. Now, this doesn't bode well for four years from now, but it does bode well for Democrats for a midterm. So what do you make of this massive Democratic overperformance in Florida, which is lining up with their overperformance in special elections, not just in Wisconsin, but around the country? And while you're talking, you can put up A5. Over the weekend in Louisiana, the right put up four constitutional amendments, and all four of them were beaten back. And there was a Pennsylvania race that was, what, now two weeks ago?

Yeah, two weeks ago. State Senate race. Yeah, an Amish country in Lancaster. The Democrat actually won in an area that is definitely not a Democratic country. Yeah. I'm looking at this post by Matthew Klein right now, a quick political report, and he suggested last night one reason that Florida's first district might end up relatively better for Democrats than Florida's sixth, despite getting no money and attention. He says, education. Florida one has a bachelor's degree attainment of

33.3 percent in Florida. Six is 27.1 percent. More college education equals more politically engaged and also more democratic. So I think what we're seeing in some of these early results is just that new reality be underscored and actually makes the point that you were just making about voter ID as well. But that's a very, very interesting shift for Republicans to start dealing with in some of these different places. And it looks like, I mean, some of this really does look like 2017, some of those races we were watching back then early to see what would happen in the 2018 midterms that went well for Democrats. So I'm hesitant to read too much into this being like a specific rebuke of Doge and Elon Musk. But it was a failure, at least in Wisconsin. It was absolutely a failure for Elon Musk, particularly because he was like a personality that almost injected himself onto the ballot.

So I think it's a referendum on Trump. I think it shows that, you know, similarly, Democratic voters are very energized. The Democratic base is very energized. I just I guess I just don't think that's totally different than where things were also in 2017 right now. So, you know, I think Musk has a lot to prove for Trump. And I'm not saying that he's like a super popular figure. Um, just that some of this is, there's still a lot of, uh, hostility to Trump, um, in America. There's still a lot of hostility to MAGA Republicanism, um, and to the

agenda. And I'm sure the, the tariff and market volatility aren't helping with that. But I think it's more like culture, the sort of culture war, quote unquote, resistance that a lot of Democrats were mustering back in 2017 around the Russia investigation. Now, I think Doge and Musk are the mobilizing, maybe bait is the right way to put it. Like that's what's getting people into the streets. Yeah. And so let's let's move on to the tariffs. Donald Trump at 4 p.m. today will announce Liberation Day. So we're going to have Bharat Ramamurthy to talk about that.

I know a lot of cops and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company

dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case.

I have never found her, and it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never

gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Michael Kassin, founder and CEO of 3C Ventures and your guide on Good Company, the podcast where I sit down with the boldest innovators shaping what's next. In this episode, I'm joined by Anjali Sood, CEO of Tubi, for a conversation that's anything but ordinary. We dive into the competitive world of streaming, how she's turning so-called niche into mainstream gold, connecting audiences with stories that truly make them feel seen. What others dismiss as niche, we embrace as core. It's this idea that there are so many stories out there, and if you can find a way to curate and help the right person discover the right content, the term that we always hear from our audience is that they feel seen.

Get a front row seat to where media, marketing, technology, entertainment, and sports collide. And hear how leaders like Anjali are carving out space and shaking things up a bit in the most crowded of markets. Listen to Good Company on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Today is L Day, Liberation Day here in the United States. Liberation from what remains slightly unclear. This Fox News clip suggests that you might need to liberate yourself from your attachment to your 401k. Let's roll this. And those 401k people who are depending, those retirees, all of that, just talking plain speak with them. Look, when this nation used to go to war, people in this country would support the war effort with their materials at home and making

things for weaponry and all of that. We got to do 100% buy-in over this bumpy period. Just communicate. And put a B2, Donald Trump will be speaking precisely at 4 p.m. from the Rose Garden, which is the moment that the bell will be ringing at the New York Stock Exchange. He knows that. He chose that for a reason. He's going to sit back and watch the chaos all day. And even if you don't have money in there, it's going to be a ride. That's for sure. So to talk about this, we're joined by Bharat Ramamurti, who was the deputy director of the NEC at the Biden administration. And I think from the left, as good a person as we could get to be sympathetic to the broad idea behind tariffs and behind rebuilding America's manufacturing class. There was a strong faction, you know, there's a strong faction in the Democratic Party and within

the Biden administration that aligns with that broad idea. Like that, yes, neoliberalism was awful. It hollowed out our country. We need to be able to build things again. So from a sympathetic perspective, I want to get your take on where you see this going. And so the question, the genuine question I have, because I don't know the answer to it, is on the one hand, you've got Robert Lighthizer, who is a pretty well-respected kind of trade policy maker, who was the USTR rep for Trump in the first term and still seems to be his senior advisor on this question. Democrats have always said to me, Lighthizer, this guy knows what he's doing,

and he has the best interests of American workers and manufacturing at heart. On the other hand, you have Trump, who seems to think that tariffs are just a way to rake in a whole lot of money for the Treasury at no cost to anybody. And it seems unclear where this is going. So from people in this policy world, where do you see this going? What's going on here? Who's in control?

Is it Lighthizer or is it Trump's kind of imagination of what it is? Yeah, go ahead, Emily. Brian, can I just jump in to say it's actually a big deal that Trump did not bring Bob Lighthizer back into this administration. He has Navarro around him, but reportedly a lot of- He's sort of advising or no, he's not? He's not formally in the administration and it's kind of a sore spot for the tariff, the protectionists on the quote-unquote new right because he was seen as somebody who could potentially be even in a commerce or treasury secretary role and who wasn't but speaking of commerce secretary

reportedly howard lutnick is driving a lot of trump's very particular strategy here which is interesting so anyway sorry no thank you that's. That's very helpful. I still see Lighthizer a lot commenting on this. But that's a very good amendment. Yes. That he's not in the room. Yeah. Well, first of all, happy Liberation Day. Happy Liberation Day to all who celebrate.

So look, you're right. I think that there is a strategic case, both a national security and economic security case for tariffs. But you have to use them in a certain kind of way for them to make sense. So the entire theory of how tariffs work, right, is that it's a tax on imports is the way to think about it. And so by driving up the cost of importing goods into the United States, it encourages investors and other businesses in the United States to look for domestic options instead. That's the basic theory, right? Because those will be relatively cheaper to what's coming in. But if the goal of all of this is to revive certain domestic industries, which is a goal that I support. Let's say you want to build more washing machines in the United States. And the problem is that you can import really cheap

washing machines from abroad right now, and nobody's going to build them here because of that. Think about this from the perspective of an investor, right? Who's saying, you know what, I have a bunch of money. Should I put it into making it washing machine manufacturing, or should I put it into this other goal or this other goal? Well, washing machine manufacturing, or should I put it into this other goal or this other goal? Well, washing machine manufacturing, maybe there's an opportunity now because the tariff means that the imported goods will be more expensive. That has to be in place for years and years for that, and with certainty, for that investor to make a decision that this is a good use of my money. And the problem with the Trump tariffs is that they're completely unstrategic and there's no plan for how long they're going to be in place and what the triggers are for having them go up or go down or anything like that.

So it doesn't provide any certainty to any investor in the United States about what to do. I mean, there have been instances where Trump says on one day I'm imposing a 20 percent tariff on everything from Canada. And then two days later is saying, actually, the Canada tariffs are off because I had a good conversation with the prime minister or because they decided to do something on fentanyl, completely unrelated to the goal of economic revitalization in the United States. So it's not going to have the intended impact because there's no discipline, there's no certainty, and there's none of the other supports that you would need to actually revive domestic industry in the United States. I want to ask about efforts in the Senate. We can go through some of these next elements. We can start with B3. This is Donald Trump going after Tim Kaine, who has sought to perhaps put legislation together that would undermine the Canada tariffs. And obviously, if people are familiar with the history of tariffs, that is very much an Article One power. So kind of sympathetic to this myself. But Lisa Murkowski, we can put before up on the screen, has said, indicated that she's sympathetic to this. She says, quote, I'm looking at my state's interests and it seems to me

that his resolution makes sense about the Kane resolution. And then finally, if we put B5 up on the screen, Donald Trump has been unloading on Republicans like Rand Paul, Lisa Murkowski on True Social as well, who have indicated

they are not on board with the particulars of the Canada tariff agenda. I'm sure Rand Paul is somebody who very much believes that this is a congressional responsibility and is opposed to tariffs, period. So what do you make of the pushback here on the Canada tariffs in particular?

Because it seems it's easy to push back on the tactic as you just kind of laid out why the unpredictability may be undermining it. But if you were looking at Canada tariffs, would you suggest any sort of walls that should be built around industry with Canada at all? Because most on the left are saying, no, Canada is an ally, leave Canada alone. I think from a sort of Warren-esque position, there's a decent argument for some targeted tariffs here. Yeah, again, two interesting things.

Number one, they're talking about an across-the-board tariff, right, on every single thing. And, you know, if there's a case to be made on dairy, you know, Canada imposes a tariff on U.S. dairy that's exported to Canada. Maybe we need to put something on our imports from Canada to try to level the playing field there. I'm here in Wisconsin right now. That's a big issue. Is there something about autos and auto parts? Those are sector by sector. And you would want to figure out what is a nuanced tariff that makes sense given what the tariff is that the other country is imposing and the relative cost of the goods. And across the board, 20% tariff that makes sense given what the tariff is that the other country is imposing and the relative cost of the goods. And across the board, 20% tariff, by definition, is unstrategic. It's not based on protecting specific sectors. It's not about evening out the playing field on specific

products that are subject to a higher tariff. The other important thing in that is that the entire basis for the tariffs that Trump is laying out is fentanyl. It's not about protecting domestic industry, growing dairy production in the United States, making sure that domestically sourced auto parts are being used instead of auto parts from Canada. It's about, apparently, fentanyl coming across the border. So again, if you're a domestic producer and saying, should I put more money into dairy or into domestic auto parts, if the basis for the tariff is fentanyl coming across the border, and a week later Trump says, guess what? They've reached an agreement with me on fentanyl

because they've put more Mounties at the border, then what are you going to do? You haven't achieved the economic goal of doing that. So that's the thing. Hour by hour, and I'm not exaggerating, literally hour by hour, the size of the tariff changes, the rationale for the tariff changes, the explanation for what it would take to remove the tariff changes. And there's just no way that any economic actor can respond to those tariffs by trying to make the investments that

are necessary to actually revitalize American manufacturing and production. And now the Biden administration left some of Trump's China tariffs in place. Why was that? And why were those tariffs worth leaving? I mean, look, there are, one of the key purposes of tariffs is to correct a trade imbalance. And if you look at what China is doing, obviously they have much, much lower labor and environmental standards in China. They can manufacture things much more cheaply because they pay people $2 a day and they don't care how much pollution

they put into the water, into the air. The other thing is that they have enormous state subsidies, in many cases state-run companies, but other ones that are getting huge amounts of money from the government, which again makes it much easier for them to produce things at lower cost and then what's called dump them into foreign countries at very low cost to start dominating those markets. In the case of the China tariffs, we want to say there are certain things that we think are

important to have in the United States, steel production, aluminum production. If we have a tariff on China that says imports of those particular products are going to be a little bit more expensive so that we can protect domestic production, that makes both economic sense and national security sense from my perspective. So yeah, it made sense to keep those in place. Though, you know, we did an intensive review of every single tariff in 2021, 2022, when inflation was quite high, and said, do all of these make sense or not? And we decided that a lot of them made sense and protected important interests. But remember, that was on something like 0.8% of imports from China, those tariffs. Trump is talking about 100% of imports

from China, from the EU, from Canada, from Mexico. Those are our largest trading partners. And so basically, it's just a guarantee that costs are going to go up. I mean, one way to think about it is that it's basically a sales tax on every single good that is important to the United States. I know a lot of cops,

and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future Have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them.

From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.

Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. They've never found her. And it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking.

Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never got any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Michael Kassin, founder and CEO of 3C Ventures and your guide on Good Company, the podcast where I sit down with the boldest innovators shaping what's next. In this episode, I'm joined by Anjali Sood, CEO of Tubi, for a conversation that's anything but ordinary. We dive into the competitive world of streaming, how she's turning so-called niche into mainstream gold, connecting audiences with stories that truly make them feel seen. What others dismiss as niche, we embrace as core. It's this idea that there are so many stories out there, and if you can find a way to curate and help the right person discover the right content, the term that we always hear from our audience is that they feel seen. Get a front row seat to where media, marketing, technology, entertainment, and sports collide. And hear how leaders like Anjali are carving out space and shaking things up a bit in the most crowded of markets.

Listen to Good Company on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Leaving those tariffs in place means that they have now been in place for almost, I mean, we're coming up on a decade, not quite a decade, but we're coming up on a decade, the China tariffs. And I'm curious because I've seen some libertarian, or I should maybe just say like anti-protectionist economists, which is just saying economists basically. Yeah. Push back and say, well, the China tariffs haven't worked. There's your case study. China tariffs have been in place for a long time. There hasn't been significant protection of American industry. It hasn't, you know, revitalized American manufacturing,

et cetera. What's your response to that? Are the China tariffs, you know, proof of concept or proof of concept in the other direction against the, I guess, efforts or the ambitions of the tariffs? Yeah, the thing about tariffs and honestly honestly, with all policymaking, is that you have to compare it against a world in which they didn't exist. And it's hard to know exactly what that world looks like. So for those who say, oh, things haven't gotten, haven't improved as much as you would have liked, my question to them is, what would things look like if we hadn't had them in place? How bad would things have gotten without those in place? And so, you know, the folks at the White House and the U.S. trade representative and others who were most involved in all of this, they did a very

careful review and determined that it was worth it overall to keep them in place because, again, they were on a relatively small portion of goods and they're directly related to Chinese activities that they felt like were basically unfair trade practices. So, you know, I think that there's a strong case for keeping them. I think that there are more opportunities. Again, if Trump had come out and said, I want to really focus this on China, which is engaged in all sorts of unfair trade practices that's hurting U.S. manufacturing. And there's one really good example of that, by the way.

There's something called the de minimis exception, which is basically something that allows China to bring goods, to export goods into the United States that are below a certain dollar value. And those things are not subject to any tariff, and they're not subject to any customs inspection. And, you know, all the Timu and all that stuff that comes into the United States, the cheap goods, comes in through that exception. And it's a way that a lot of fent stuff that comes into the United States, the cheap goods, comes in through that exception. And it's a way that a lot of fentanyl comes into the United States.

Because there's no custom. You can mail it right in. Right? Trump initially said, I'm going to do something about this. I'm going to close the dividend. Did it for a day or two or something. And then he pulled it back. One thing that actually would have made a lot of sense,

if you care about fentanyl, if you care about U.S. domestic production, if you care about protecting U.S. consumers. All of that would have made sense, but it's the one thing that he hasn't done when it comes to tariffs. Do you know why? I have no idea. I mean, I know that right after he did it, you started having people complain that the thing that they had ordered wasn't showing up fast enough. Yeah. Was it really that quickly that he felt the pressure, you think? I don't know. Jeff Bezos.

Yeah, the thing about Trump is that... Well, Bezos would have loved it because it's protectionism for Amazon. Well, they get a lot of... They bring a lot of crap in, too. Yeah, they use it.

Yeah, yeah. You know, the thing is with Trump, and again, there is a case for tariffs if it is done in a thoughtful, disciplined, long-term perspective kind of way.

And all of those things are the opposite of Trump, right, in terms of he'll have a good conversation with a world leader and totally change his policy towards that person. Some event will happen, and they'll capture some fence that will come across the border and say, this is an example of what I'm talking about. The tariffs are going to go up, right? There's no predictability. And I know that sounds boring, but that's really important if you're trying to make business decisions and make investment decisions over a long-term horizon. The counter argument on China would be that it was true for many years that they were, you know, the source of like all cheap labor, et cetera. But now they're so automated and their factories are so efficient that if you want cheap labor, you're going maybe to like Vietnam or somewhere else. Whereas China

now is competing because they've invested so much with our trade imbalance into their manufacturing capacity. There was this crazy video going around of U.S. production of 155 millimeter shells and Chinese production of 155 millimeter shells. The Chinese one, just whipping through with these robots. And in the U.S., it's dudes with the goggles and the spray paint and the gloves. And it's like, whoa, if these countries ever go to war, I don't have much of a doubt which one is going to be able to produce more shells long term. So how true is it still of China that it's really a labor question? Yeah, you're right. A lot of the sort of quote unquote low skill manufacturing has migrated to Southeast Asia in particular.

But it gets to a point about... Those Chinese companies often though, right? Yes. What kind of manufacturing do we want in the United States? Is it important that we literally make every kind of product here for either strategic, economic, or national security purposes? Or is it the case that we, both because they're good jobs and because they're important, we want to really focus on high-end, sophisticated manufacturing? And I think our argument would be we really got to make sure that we're doing that stuff or we have the capacity to do that stuff in the United States. And if you look at one of the big things that we did in the Biden administration was the CHIPS Act, right? We invested a lot of money in having domestic production of chips, microprocessors that go into almost everything these days, cars, appliances, a lot of electronic products.

And we saw during the pandemic that the lack of access to those because a lot of the foreign factories shut down meant that our domestic car manufacturers couldn't make new cars because these cars have dozens and dozens of these chips in them. And what happened to the price of cars? They went up because supply had gone down. We all remember how expensive both new cars and used cars were in 2021 and 2022. So we made a decision.

It's important to have that production in the United States. We put a lot of money into it. And now we have TSMC, the world's biggest chip maker, opening a fab in Arizona. Micron's doing a big thing in Idaho. So we've seen that those kinds of efforts can result in improved manufacturing in the United States. But it has to be a dedicated long-term effort. It's not just doing the tariffs. It's also supporting it with public funds. Any response to that, Emily? I know the right kind of now hates the CHIPS Act.

Is that right? I mean, it has its critics on the left too. Well, yeah, I think a lot of people on the right see the CHIPS Act as something that has ultimately been vindicated because they're China hawks and know how important it is to entshore some of that. But I know we're going to get into this in the abundance discussion, but my response to that would be there were some examples of hurdles that Democrats added to the CHIPS Act that companies pushed back on that were sort of at the time DEI related and added costs and steps that were making the process inefficient for them onshoring some of the tech. I don't know if you have a response to that, but I think the truth is— And I would add to that a bunch of buybacks that the companies did.

Like the companies would get the subsidies and then quickly just basically funnel the money directly to shareholders. How do you balance those two criticisms? Yeah. Well, I would say there were a lot of criticisms when the rules for this CHIPS program were announced because it said, for example, you got to pay workers a certain amount of money and provide certain types of labor protections. The big one that attracted a lot of attention was if you're going to get this money, you have to provide some kind of affordable child care for the people who work there. And actually, Ezra Klein wrote a whole piece in the New York Times called The Problem with Everything Bagel Liberalism, right? You can try to put everything on the bagel. And it slows things down. And this was his example at the federal level.

Well, all of that, I think, has been proven to be misplaced because all of the money in that program has gone out the door. All of the major companies that we wanted to be building in the United States met the requirements and have started building, as I mentioned, TSMC and Micron and Intel are all taking money and building stuff in Columbus and in Arizona and in upstate New York and so on. And they met the requirements. It didn't turn out to be that hard for them to say, oh, you know what, we'll have a daycare center at our factory so that we can actually have a diverse workforce. So I actually think that that's a good example of how this abundance critique has been off the mark. Because when push came to shove,

the attraction of the federal dollars was enough that they were able to meet the requirements. And look, I wish that we had put stronger buyback protections in there. That was a big negotiation during the bill drafting. Who fought that? The Republicans. You know, we don't want to tell corporations how to... I would assume our friends, Manchin and Sinema, were friendly on that. Yeah. The Republicans on that one too. And you know, to her credit, I think Secretary of Commerce Raimondo, who was responsible for administering the program, tried to get some of that into the rules. You know, not the actual statute, but the rules for the program. It probably wasn't as effective as getting a law that said if you take this money, no buybacks for five years, period.

But you're right. Then they won't take the money. Yeah, but, you know, that's the thing. We're not here to build things. We are here to just take money and hand it to our shareholders. But look. You misunderstand the nature of our project. I think that that is, you know, to go to mush this together with the abundance debate.

There's, I get frustrated a lot about the various inefficiencies in these types of projects, right? And, you know, what one person will call, you know, produce, you know, providing support for an important domestic industry is another person's corporate welfare, right? And I hate the fact that basically some percentage of these public dollars are going to be wasted in the form of, you know, going into buybacks or higher executive compensation. And we should be doing, I think it is up to us to do our very, very best to make sure that every single dollar is spent as efficiently as possible. And I think that means fighting against some of the process, you know, completely extraneous requirements that come in. It also means fighting against corporate interests who want to use this money in ways that aren't compatible with the public interest. It requires doing both. And I, you know, this whole debate that has emerged about abundance, it seems to me kind of like a false choice, right? But yes, we should all, we should try to pare down

these steps and these requirements to really do the things that we want to focus on. But yes, we should also make sure that we're, we have an understanding of corporate power and how they seek to distort these processes and how they seek to take public dollars and not do public interested things and figure out ways of stopping that too. Yeah. If there are two complaints to choose from, and one of them is a corporation just taking the money and handing it to its shareholders without building anything, and the other complaint is that you're asking them to build a subsidized daycare center, or not even necessarily subsidized, but just a daycare center convenient to the factory,

to get angry at the child care part just feels like reactionary right-wing populism, or not even populism, reactionary just right-wing stuff. And it's weird to see kind of Ezra on that side. Like Emily, right? If those are the two things to complain about, wouldn't the populists complain about the corporate executives who were, like, walking away with the money? Like, I wish that was the thing that landed

more easily with the public. Yeah, I mean, also, I think that's why some on the right look back at chips and say, because there were Republicans at the last minute who had been supportive of the legislation and ultimately voted against it. And populist Republicans, I should say. And they're probably very happy. They may not say this publicly, but they're probably very happy to have the manufacturing, the chips manufacturing come to the United States and probably say in the aggregate, it was the cost benefit analysis works out on the side where the benefits outweighed the costs. Yeah. And we're not China. We can't just do good things. We have to buy off our corporate class to ask them to give us

permission. Yeah. And I would just say one last thing, which is that, again, I'm not defending every single government program as perfectly efficient, but it's not like the private sector does everything perfectly efficiently, right? And so, you know, whenever people will complain to me about, oh, you know, I had to wait in line at the DMV or my IRS refund is taking a week to come to me. It's like, have you ever dealt with Comcast? Have you ever dealt with any of these companies

that had a complaint with them? You know, are they perfect at dealing with your issues? The point is, it's hard to do some of these things. These are complicated things. There's going to be some inefficiency in the process. There's going to be some slippage. It's up to us to minimize that as much as we can, but we should hold ourselves to a reasonable standard that's at least roughly equivalent to what the private sector does. And we should be clear-eyed about the fact that there's a lot of inefficiency there too. Well, let's talk more about this in the next segment where we're going to go deeper into the debate over this abundance agenda.

I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multibillion-dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated, on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder.

I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. They've never found her. And it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case,

bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145.

Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The OGs of uncensored motherhood are back and badder than ever. app, Apple Podcasts,, then this is your tribe. With guests like Corinne Stephens. I've never seen so many women protect predatory men. And then me too happened. And then everybody else wanted to get pissed off because the white said it was okay. Problem. My oldest daughter, her first day in ninth grade, and I called to ask how I was doing.

She was like, oh dad, all they was doing was talking about your thing in class. I ruined my baby's first day of high school. And slumflower. What turns me on is when a man sends me money. Like I feel the moisture between my legs when a man sends me money. I'm like, oh my God, it's go time. You actually sent it? Listen to the Good Moms Bad Choices podcast every Wednesday on the Black Effect Podcast Network, the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you go to find your podcasts. Ezra Klein has been making the media rounds for his new book on abundance and is getting

very little pushback. So we're going to give him a little bit of that here today. The tiniest little poke that he got came from the Pod Save Bros, who characterized some of the criticism that's coming his way from the left. But if you'll notice in this answer, he doesn't really address it. But let's roll this clip here. You mentioned some of the critique from the left. I'm sure you've read all of it or read most of it. I'm sure you've talked about the Zephyr Teachout review of Abundance.

I wanted to get your reaction to one part of that because I think it summarizes a lot of the criticism on the left. I mean, you mentioned the Bernie side. There's also a Warren-esque critique as well. And she writes, I still can't tell after reading Abundance whether Klein and Thompson are seeking something fairly small bore and correct, we need zoning reform, or non-trivial and deeply regressive, we need deregulation, or whether there is room within Abundance for anti-monopoly politics and a more full-throated unleashing of American potential.

Matt Brunig has a similar critique. He says, it would be a huge mistake to sideline whatever focus there is on welfare Chard asked, is there room in abundance for a critique of concentrated economic power and anti-monopoly politics and all that? I'm trying to think about the nicest way to say this. My friends in the whole problem is oligarchy, part of the party. And I believe a good part of our problems are oligarchy. But there are certain kinds of problems they're then willing to see and certain kinds they're not as willing to see. So in housing, I find a lot of them get obsessed with this idea that private investors are buying up a bunch of rental housing. And this is an extremely small part of the market right now. And it's just not the main problem in housing. But because it is the villain they are comfortable having, it is where they want to put their focus.

Kamala Harris, I was very excited when she brought out her big plan to build 3 million units of housing. But her plan never would have achieved anything like it. It did have a big thing about trying to do something about this private investor buying up housing issue, though. So you can really get, I think, taken off the track. A thing I found really interesting in Zephyr's review was that is it something good and small like zoning reform? And like try doing zoning reform if you think it's small, right? Or something bad like deregulation. Okay, interesting, right?

Deregulation is a word that I think shuts liberals down a bit. And it shouldn't. A lot of what we're pointing out in the book is that the player that is often most regulated is not the market. It's the government itself. If you want to understand why the government can't build public housing effectively, I mean, in many ways, the federal government building public housing is now functionally illegal. It's been regulated out of possibility. If you want to know why we didn't build California high-speed rail, if you want to know why it's so expensive to build affordable

housing in a lot of liberal jurisdictions when you trigger public money, it is because of the regulations we put on government. Now, one of the key arguments in Ezra's book is that liberals have kind of wrapped the government, tied the government up with too much regulation, and that's keeping it from allowing the abundance to flow. And one of the tentpole case studies that he uses in the book is the billions that were appropriated by Congress to lay out rural broadband and the lack of any rural broadband resulting from that. There was a viral John Stewart clip where he kind of lays out

this Byzantine and ridiculous process. When we come out of this clip, we're going to talk to the Biden administration official who was probably the most intimately involved in this project to get kind of the other side of the story of what happened here. But first, let's roll some of this clip from the Jon Stewart interview. And if you haven't seen this, the whole thing's kind of funny and worth watching, even though there's a glaring hole in it. Go ahead. So for rural broadband, for instance, what you end up having is a 14-stage process. Like there's a period where the Commerce Department needs to draw up a map of which parts of the country don't have the right amount of broadband. And then there's a challenge period on the map and da-da-da-da and da-da-da-da.

And 56 states and jurisdictions try to apply for this money. And again, this passes at the end of 2021. They have time. By the end of 2024, three have gotten to the end of the process. They were trying. Three of these 56. Yes. End of the process, meaning they've actioned it, they've built it, or they've now they've got- No, no, no. Of course not. I didn't mean they've built it, Sean. Sorry. I was so confused. Oh, dear God.

They just got to the point where, in theory, they could get the money to build it. They had been approved for the money. Yes. Yes, basically. Okay, so we have a running kind of series on this program where we try to treat our viewers like adults, and so we're going to do that today. And so we're joined by Bharat Ramamurti, who was a top Biden administration economic policy official, deputy director of NED, is that NEC? NEC, yep. NEC. And to contextualize you in the spectrum, kind of a Warrenite, like former Elizabeth Warren person. And one of the people that Wall Street would be angry at

Biden for saying, you know, you're ruining what should be a glorious administration by bringing in all these people who are so skeptical of corporate power and being so rude to us. And so Ezra goes on now at length in that interview and in his book, laying out really what is an outrageous and absurd process. Like people who want rural broadband would like Congress to appropriate money and would like broadband to be built so that they can plug their laptop in, work from home in a nice wooded area.

Or they can, you know, if you live there, you can stream. People want the damn broadband. Then they didn't get it. So what is being left out of this question? Why did they do something so dumb? Yeah. Well, I would say a couple of things.

Number one, if you look at both the answer that Ezra gave on Podsafe and his answer there, the clear implication is silly liberals. They design this complicated 14-step process all by themselves because they're obsessed with making sure that every single group in the United States has an opportunity to weigh in. And they don't prioritize actually building things. As somebody who was directly involved in both negotiating this and then ultimately trying to implement it, a lot of those steps, almost all of them came from Republicans. Now, remember, this came out of the bipartisan infrastructure law. You needed 60 votes in the Senate to get that through. So you needed to work with Republicans in order to get the bill passed. And because Manchin and Sinema insisted on pulling it out of reconciliation. Exactly. For those who remember that whole process.

Right. So reconciliation would have meant 50 votes. Democrats do it on their own. Manchin and Sinema insist on pulling it out. Now you need Republicans. Okay, go ahead. come from. For example, Ezra pointed out, you needed to complete this map, not actually the Commerce Department. The FCC had to complete a map which says, here's where broadband is and is in the entire United States of America. We told them, look, it's going to take at least 18 months for the FCC to complete this map. It's a complicated process to literally figure out whether every location in the United States has broadband or not. But Republicans insisted that that map be completed before we even allocated a single dollar to a state to build this stuff. And the challenge process, you brought that up too. Who pushed for the challenge process? The big incumbent internet providers. Why did they push for that?

Because the thing that they are most afraid of is the federal government spending money to build new broadband that would directly challenge and compete with the broadband that they're already offering in certain places. So they said, we got to make absolutely sure that not a dollar of federal money is spent to build infrastructure where we already provide some broadband service. And so we need a lengthy challenge process to make sure that we can say, this household, you say, doesn't have internet access. Actually, we provide it with internet access. So, of course, that takes a lot.

Or we plan to? Or we even plan to. Right. We have an expansion plan such that in the next year, we will be providing service to it. So, a lot of these steps came from the industry working through this set of negotiating Republicans to put these hurdles into place. And now, so, the next question, not to anticipate what you're saying, but the next question is probably, why did we agree to do it if we thought this was

such a silly process? Two reasons. Number one, we already had $10 billion through an earlier bill that we passed that was moving much more quickly because it was a Democratic-only bill operating through the Treasury Department that was providing internet service. And that bill has already provided connections to hundreds of thousands of households that really needed it. So we said, we have this bridge, basically, a program that's providing internet in the short term. We can afford to do a longer term process. And if you look, we weren't out there saying, this is a shovels in the ground tomorrow type program. From the very beginning, we said, this is about connecting households by 2030 and doing it in a thoughtful step-by-step way. If it were up to me, we would have done it faster.

But the point is, number one, Republicans were the ones who put those barriers into place. And number two, it's still, this isn't an example of government waste. It's not like we've spent $40 billion and nothing has happened. The money is just sitting there in the treasury waiting to be deployed until we have completed these steps. Go ahead. Yeah. Emily. Oh, right. I was just going to jump in because I could maybe channel Ezra and Derek Thompson here and say, you know, they look at the red states versus the blue states. The book focuses on, you know, what's the difference between California and Texas? And my question based on that would just be to what extent did Democrats or did the, I guess, lefts push for more regulation, which I think is being

defended by some people as abundance comes out for totally reasonable justifications, meaning, you know, OK, so which regulations do you want to get rid of? And in this process, you want to get rid of in this process? Do you want to get rid of some of these good regulations? So what, from your perspective, did the left, like what culpability does the left have in the broadband case more specifically for extending the process, if anything, or was it really, I mean, many such cases of industry getting these carve-outs that make us wildly less inefficient on a bipartisan basis. But what did the left do that may have extended the process here? I would say that in terms of that 14 step process that Ezra highlighted, those steps came from Republicans. And the reason I feel confident saying that is because

the Democrats went into those negotiations with a bill, a bill that was broadly supported in the Democratic caucus by Senator Klobuchar and Representative Clyburn. That was a much faster acting bill and didn't have any of these 14 steps included in it. And those steps came in in their negotiations with Republicans. I will admit there were things that we in the Biden administration and the left more generally were pushing for in that process. And let me give you a couple examples. Number one, we wanted to make sure that if we were going to build this broadband, that it was actually going to deliver affordable service to middle class families at the end of it.

So we put in a regulatory requirement that when states applied for this money, they had to show how this process was going to produce broadband that was affordable to middle class people. Why did we do that? Because we had stories from across the country, especially at the state level, where states had spent a lot of money trying to build out broadband to rural areas, and the broadband got built. And then what ended up happening, these are by definition areas where there's only a single provider. So they were charging $150, $200, $250 a month for service. How useful is that to people? Either pay it or you don't get it.

Yeah. And how useful is that to people if you spent a bunch of taxpayer dollars to build out broadband and then people can't really afford it? So this was actually pushed for by John Tester, not exactly a hero of the left, because he had had this experience in Montana trying to serve a lot of rural households. So that requirement came in. And of course, that's going to take a little bit of extra time. And it's going to take a little bit of extra process for states and for working with their private sector partners to say, here's our actual plan for making sure that a family that makes $45,000 a year can afford this service. But to me, there's no point in building out infrastructure if people can't afford it at the end of the day and actually use it. So I'm not going to say that there's nothing that we put into it, but in terms of the actual,

the length of time that it took to get from step one to the end, almost all of those steps came from the Republican negotiators. And when we say Republican negotiators, we're really talking about the cable and the ISPs, the internet providers. Yeah. I mean, look, I don't want to, Yes, a lot of it, especially the stuff about the challenge process was because of corporate interests wanting to make sure that we didn't quote-unquote overbuild. That's the term that they use. Because they're very concerned about waste of taxpayer dollars. Right. Exactly. Which, by the way, is interesting as Republicans become dominant in rural America, right?

Like that's a fairly interesting political dynamic as well, that there's still – Republican politicians are still overly responsive to that industry. Completely. Yeah, but the other thing is that, look, as I said, there's a lot of examples in West Virginia and Montana and Maine of states trying to build out broadband. And it didn't actually produce usable broadband for people. And the thing is, once you put a little bit of money into it and you start building it out, and then let's say they don't complete the project, they really have you over a barrel. Right. Because they're going to say, don't you want to give us another $10 million to actually complete

this thing at this point? Right? And so a lot of these folks were burned by efforts at the state level. So I want to give them some credit and say they were actually focused in some cases on, let's make sure that we think about this and do it efficiently at the end of the day. And I think that that sort of gets into the broader abundance debate, right? Because sometimes efficiency means fast. I agree with that. But the same folks who will say, let's do this as quickly as possible, will come back a year later and say, why did you waste so much money? Right. Because you went so fast. So the abundance argument from Ezra and Derek Thompson is – zeroes in a lot on housing because, like, I think that's the place where you can really kind of nail some of these NIMBYs who are just, you know, throwing up obstacles because they legitimately don't want something built like

right near where they live. But then he extends that to the whole country and to other policies without explaining how those are similar situations and never talking about the role of corporate power and what is effectively corruption. Like it's not Democrats. And when they're drawing this bill, we're not stupid. They were corrupt and Republicans were not dumb. They didn't, they did not know what was going to happen here. They were taking money from corporations who had a vested interest in having this play out in a certain way. Have you, have you, have you seen, uh, other instances of the way that corporate power and corporate concentration contort and distort policymaking and make it look like – and produce regulations that the public is like, God, stupid liberals. But they're actually designed by corporations to protect their own monopolies.

Absolutely. And look, I... Any other examples? I'm more familiar with the federal level because that's where I've spent my life in policymaking. And I don't want to deny the idea that, especially at the state level, there's lots of barriers that are imposed and maybe a lot of them come from sort of... And housing. Yeah.

But look, on housing in particular, let me just make a point. If the issue is, as in that pod save clip, you want to do zoning reform, you know, as you said, I worked for Senator Warren. We wrote a big comprehensive housing bill and introduced it in 2018, so a long time ago. And a key part of that was federal money for new housing, but a big pot of money for zoning reform,

basically a race to the top process that said any state or any locality that changes zoning requirements gets access to this big pot of money and they can use it to build new parks and roads and whatever. So that's been on our radar and something we've been pushing for for a long time. I think the question is, are they talking about more than that? And let's think about what those barriers are. Are we talking about labor laws, laws that prevailing wage laws, Davis-Bacon, you know, child labor laws? You know, we could build a lot faster if we allowed 14-year-olds to work. Is that something that we should be in favor of?

You know, environmental protections, are we going to be more willing to accept dirty water or polluted air because we want to build faster? I think those are the actually hard questions. And it's not clear to me what their answer is on those types of questions. To your point, at the federal level, in almost every instance, the actor that is slowing down the government from acting is a corporate interest. You know, there's this thing called the Administrative Procedures Act. It basically governs how the federal government can issue new guidelines and rules. And the way it works is that you have to issue, if you're trying to do something, you have to issue something, a proposed rule.

You give the public an opportunity to comment on it. The agency has to come back and respond to those comments and make sure they incorporate those comments into whatever their final rule is. And if you don't, you can get sued. Who are the people who are submitting comments saying this goes too far, this is too quick, this is inefficient? Almost always corporate interests and their lobbyists. Regular people like you and me aren't sitting there looking at the Federal Register and submitting a 25-page comment on a potential rule. And who is it who's suing the government, saying you didn't quite follow our comments, and therefore you should stop doing this rule. It's corporate interests time after time. So I agree with a broader project of abundance here.

I would love for the government to move more quickly. I would love to build more housing, more energy, everything. But we should be clear-eyed about what it is that stops that from happening, at least at the federal level. And more often than not, it's incumbent corporate interests who like things the way that they are right now. Go ahead, Emily. Well, yeah, I mean, I was just gonna say, I think sometimes, like, this is something that is missing on the right a lot, which is this obvious reality that corporations sometimes will push for regulations. Like, there was a point where Facebook came out totally in favor of Section 230, because they knew they could handle the regulatory burden of Section 230 in ways that any other potential competitors, not really that they

have potential competitors, but hypothetically, could not handle. And so I think that's true. I just wonder if you think that the left is sometimes overly responsive to those pushes from corporations because there's this habitual, I guess, reflex to say, well, yes, it's appropriate for the government to step in. And then they just kind of stack up on top of each other in ways that are inefficient. I don't know. I'm just curious, like genuinely what you think about that. Look, I don't want to make it seem like I'm trying to absolve the left from culpability here. There is, I can think of a handful of instances in my personal experience where there is a bit of an obsession over doing the process right. I think people think of themselves,

you know, on the left, thinking of themselves as the good government people, people who want government to work. And they sometimes conflate that with the idea that that means that we should take into account every single piece of feedback that we get and make sure that we're accounting for every single possible argument that anybody could have with something and then trying to come up with something. And that is a deterrent to speed and, in many cases, efficiency. Look, I'm from the side of the party that wants the government to do more stuff. And so I think that it's really important that we show that government can move quickly, can move efficiently. And I agree with all of those end goals. I think the diagnosis of what is stopping us from doing that is lacking a little bit in the abundance books because they're putting it all on sort of liberal interest groups.

And again, at the federal level, that has not been my experience. It has been, in many cases, both the right and the left being very attentive to corporate interests and to incumbent large corporations in particular and what they're pushing for. It's kind of a separate but related question. Isn't this all mooted by Starlink? Like, can't they just do, like, it feels like that product is getting quite good. And it's like, you know what, maybe actually give up on the whole laying broadband everywhere. Or am I wrong? I'm not a... I think that we did an extensive amount of analysis about the right way of serving these

households. And if you look at both the technical analysis and sort of a basic cost-benefit analysis, trying to lay fiber optic cable to as many of these households as possible is the right way to go. It saves money in the long term. It's basically a future-proof product. You do it now, you don't have to come back in five or 10 or 15 years

and dig it up and do it all over again. Whatever developments happen in the world of delivering internet to people, having fiber optic cable going to these houses can do that, right? Now, Starlink, sure, it is a pretty effective product, but number one, it hasn't been shown to be able to consistently deliver

the kinds of speeds that you need to do what you talked about. Stream video, do telemedicine, all the stuff that we actually want to do to make sure that rural communities are fully linked into the economy. Second of all, I don't know about you, but I would have real concerns about putting internet access for 10, 15, 20 million households completely in the hands of one guy who's already shown that he's willing

to take the network on and offline depending on his own personal whims. And so I think that that's a concern too. And also, there's a limit to how much junk you can have flying up there. Completely. There's that too. There is. So fascinating conversation. And I guess last question here. In responding to some of the pushback that they've been getting, they've said, all right, we're going to come out with a little bit more substantive analysis that takes into account some of these critiques of corporate power, which is like, OK, maybe that could have been in the book, but I will take it. We'll take it now. One of the things they said, well, OK, the vibes from the administration were such that they weren't really pushing that hard and they were throwing up obstacles that they weren't necessarily required to throw up by the statute. I'm sure you saw that argument. As somebody who watched it happen, is that true?

Why didn't you guys push harder despite the law that was in place? Yeah. I mean, look, I'm trying not to take offense at that as somebody who, after the statute was passed in the broadband case with all these steps, we would have regular meetings with the FCC and the Commerce Department and others. And the entire purpose of those meetings was, how do we speed this up? Okay, so FCC, you're saying you need 18 months to finish this map. Can you do it in 12 months if we, for example, go out there and encourage all of the states and all of the big providers to, you know, they had to submit data about where they have coverage. You know, they had 90 days to do it.

Let's push them, if they can, voluntarily to do it in 30 days so you can start reviewing this stuff more quickly. We did that. And we got the incumbent ISPs to actually submit data more quickly than they otherwise would. And we did cut that timeline down. So look, I think there is, I'm not going to defend every step of this process. We were stuck with a statute that was less efficient than it could have been. But the idea that the administration didn't care about moving quickly, I think is false. And I think that from Secretary Raimondo on to the chair of the FCC on down, there was a real commitment to trying to get this done

as quickly as possible. Great, well, thanks so much for joining us. Of course. Up next, we're gonna talk about Luigi. They're trying to kill the man. That's right. An utter outrage. How could they do this?

All right, stick around. I know a lot of cops, and they do this? All right, stick around. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad.

Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Add free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast hell and gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country

begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. They've never found her. And it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's

mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 67, seven, eight, seven, four, four, six, one, four, five.

Listen to hell and gone murder line on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The OGs of uncensored motherhood are back and badder than ever. I'm Erica and I'm Mila. And we're the hosts of the good moms, bad choices podcast brought to you by the black effect podcast network. Every Wednesday, historically men talk too much and women have quietly listened and all that stops here if you like witty women then this is your tribe with guests like corinne steffens i've never seen so

many women protect predatory men and then me too happened and then everybody else want to get pissed off because the white said it was okay problem my oldest daughter her first day in ninth grade and i called to ask how I was doing. She was like, oh, dad, all you were doing was talking about your thing in class. I ruined my baby's first day of high school. And slumflower. What turns me on is when a man sends me money.

Like, I feel the moisture between my legs when a man sends me money. I'm like, oh my God, it's go time. You actually sent it? Listen to the Good Moms Bad Choices podcast every Wednesday on the Black Effect Podcast Network, the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you go to find your podcasts. Attorney General Pam Bondi yesterday announced that she was instructing prosecutors to seek the death penalty for Luigi Mangione in

the murder trial over Brian Thompson. We can put the first element up on the screen. Pam Bondi did this with a statement yesterday that said Mangione's murder of Brian Thompson, an innocent man and father of two young children, was a premeditated, cold-blooded assassination that shocked America. After careful consideration, I have directed federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty in this case as we carry out Trump's agenda to stop violent crime and make America safe again. Now, Olivia Rengold over at the Free Press has some feelers out in Mangione world, in the world of Luigi fandom. And she checked in on some

of the most intense Luigi followers. We can put the next element up on the screen who were, you know, pretty, pretty disappointed by Pam Bondi's announcement, although that's not entirely surprising. One thing that I wanted to ask you about, Ryan, is if your sense is that the Mangione heads are more left or right. I think it's pretty obvious that like broadly, a lot of the outpouring of support for a alleged murderer, Luigi Mangione on videotape, obviously in this case, shooting Brian Thompson in cold blood. A lot of the support is, I mean, I think it's broadly coming from the left at the same time. I wonder how much of this also is coming from like anti-establishment, MAGA, online MAGA world.

It's kind of interesting. Was it cold blood? I think there's some hot bloodedness going on there too. We keep hearing cold blood. Definitely hot bloodedness. There was this hot blood. Cold blood in the circumstance, the physical circumstance where Brian Thompson was just walking on the sidewalk. They weren't like fighting or anything.

Yeah, fair enough. No, he himself is from the like, what do you call it? Like the Kaczynski libertarian right? Yeah, roughly. And there's a lot of that. There's a lot of anti-establishment right. And, yeah, young people today, you guys watching this show, you know you have curious cross-spectrum politics. But a lot of it is organized around knowing that there's something barbaric about the system. And also knowing that the levers of democratic control have been broken, that in many ways they're an illusion, that you can flip a switch, but

if you actually could look behind the wall, that switch is unplugged from the wires. There's nothing's going on back there. And the switch is just there for you to mess around with and keep the kind of rats busy in the cage. So I think whether that's a left-wing anti-establishment or right-wing anti-system message, I don't know. And it depends on kind of where it's channeled and what energy exists at the time to kind of channel it in a particular direction.

And it shifts over time time as we've talked about with the kind of the the Bernie to Trump pipeline or the hippie to Q pipeline or whatever you have you know when you don't present people with coherent mechanisms to have their grievances heard, you're going to wind up with, you know, pretty psychedelic politics. Yeah. So Playbook yesterday put an item out that said, quote, how Trump loses Gen Z. And that was their little blurb about Pam Bondi's announcement that she was instructing prosecutors to take the death penalty for Mangione. And I saw some people on the right pushing back on that. And, you know, I also think there's some truth that seeking the death penalty in this case juxtaposed with, you know, you had Bill Cassidy. What was he on Newsmax the other day talking about

cuts to Medicare and then corrected himself and said reforms. Was it Medicare or Medicaid? Probably Medicaid. And so he caught himself referring to quote unquote cuts and then sort of smiled at the camera and said, I'm sorry, I mean reforms. I think when you juxtapose the death penalty in the super high profile case of someone who's become a meme. And I think some of the love for Luigi is genuine. A lot of it is like kind of pop culture meme energy. But when that's powerful in and of itself, and when you juxtapose that with a Republican party that still has no answer on health care other than quote unquote reform of things like Medicaid, it's

actually not a good combination politically. Like that Luigi is such a high profile meme is something that's absolutely on the pop cultural radar that you're looking to use the death penalty in this case. And also at the same time, not having like a humane solution to the health care crisis in this country is genuinely a politically difficult message to carry out. And it's such a high profile case that I think it does matter. And they also are just stripping their own moral authority. Their previous argument was, okay, you have a legitimate grievance that these for-profit corporations are making life and death decisions so that they can,

you know, so that they can talk a bigger game at their next, you know, quarterly conference call. But you shouldn't kill somebody over that. However, we're going to kill this guy over that. And maybe I'm just so divorced from regular American politics and the values that drive it that that won't even be a problem for the people making the argument. But I think for regular people, it's like, wait a minute, you just said that he has legitimate grievances, but you shouldn't kill the person. So you have legitimate grievances against him. He allegedly killed somebody, but you're going to kill him. So now if we're all back on the same moral plane, he allegedly killed one people.

The insurance companies are killing countless people. So if you're going to give up the moral authority of killing, you are not fighting then from a very strong ground, I don't think. You know, I'm not obviously a death penalty person. A lot of the country is, though. And I think there's still, you know, they would say, go ahead and put Brian Thompson on trial. Don't shoot him in midtown. And so I think that's... But then would he get the death penalty after you tried him? And your point makes sense to me that it's like, if you look at the way a Brian Thompson is treated

versus the way a Mangione is treated, or other people who are convicted of murder are treated, there's this just glaring disparity in the way that white collar criminals are either never brought to trial and never treated like criminals. I think that's absolutely true. And again, that's one of those things that the Trump era Republican Party was supposed to kind of have an answer to this high level of elite corruption. And it just never, I mean, now you have billionaires running around, you know, doing liberation and doge. And it's not the same, I think, MAGA that it was in 2015, 2016.

So anyway, I think there's something to that. And meanwhile, some of his supporters aren't taking it well. We can put up the second element here. This article goes through the kind of misery being felt by those who you know, see in Luigi some type of at least vengeance being exacted on their behalf. I wonder at the same time if this could backfire. The number one hope of people who support Luigi is that there would be some sort of jury nullification where this case would be prominent enough that everybody going in would know the contours. Jury nullification usually can't work because juries are barred from hearing from a defendant why they did a certain thing if they did it for reasons of conscience. In general, the judge will prevent a jury from hearing that and just require the jury to

adjudicate the case just based on the facts. Facts being, guy was on the street, here's the video, here's what happened. But so many people have become familiar with this story that the jurors are going to know what's going on here. If the jurors are also, and this is the hope I'm talking about on behalf of his supporters, if the jurors know that a guilty verdict is going to mean a death sentence, I wonder if that actually increases the likelihood from slim to just a little bit less slim of jury nullification. What do you think? No, that's a really interesting point because it's going to be, and that's, I think it's the political calculation of this too, is this trial is going to be so high profile. It is going to be like massive media coverage. Gen Z is going to be paying attention to it. Every time Luigi's face, people get a glimpse of Luigi's face, it becomes another iconic meme in the saga of Luigi Mangione. like remind people over and over again that the Trump administration is seeking the death penalty,

as Pam Bondi put it there, part of their part of Trump's agenda. They see this as like an agenda item to seek the death penalty in the case of Mangione. And they still don't have an actual answer on health care. If anything, they're making cuts. So, I mean, I think, yeah, when you're looking at this teenage, well, not teenagers, 20 something, or maybe he's in his early 30s now, who suffered immensely. There's some part of the reason Luigi's story pops is that there's some genuine sympathy for him based on his story. It doesn't justify anything, but it resonates with a lot of people who have also been pushed to the brink of sanity by the misery of the American health care system. And I think when you have a resonant story like that and you elevate it to a death penalty case, there's something to what you're saying, Ryan. Now, politically speaking, and I'm not saying this is what the Bondi or the Trump administration are doing.

If I were them and I were deeply cynical and just playing this for politics, I might throw the case. Trump actually might benefit from an acquittal and from the shock that that would create among his supporters. Because if you look at the polling, young people by a plurality are supportive of Luigi, but the overall electorate is not. And a lot of the overall electorate is appalled at the people who are supportive of him. And so if you got an acquittal and you had all these celebrations in the street, and they would find blue-haired kids with eight earrings out there celebrating, and they would run those on Fox News. And so they would elevate that and say, look, this is the country that the libs want. And so just trying to further feed a backlash.

So yeah, if you were a deeply cynical political actor in the Trump administration, you might actually figure out a way to kind of, yeah, to throw this one. Heighten those contradictions. Yeah. Like, what do you care? You know, if you can gain political advantage, what do they care if they actually execute Luigi or keep him in prison or let him walk free? he's out speaking, he's angering all of the people that are likely to support some type

of reactionary backlash against that. So he then becomes a gift to the right that keeps on giving. I mean, you're playing with fire, obviously, but that's what cynical actors do. Well, Ryan, you know this better than I do, but we'd have to be talking about probably like a Trump fifth term for Luigi to actually be executed under Trump's watch. The chance that he outlives Trump is high. Yeah. Well, yeah. Because this – I mean the court battle is going to play out. And it's going to be very high profile like in the near

future but then there's appeals and all of that in a death penalty case that could drag on for years and years so we'll see what happens all right let's let's move on to uh you see rogan up here on the screen uh the deportation uh scandal involving uh and i know some people don't like when i call it a scandal, they just think, what do they want to call it? The deportation celebration. But the story of the Venezuelans getting rounded up along with some MS-13 members and sent down to Nayib Bukele's dungeons down in El Salvador broke through to the Joe Rogan podcast, partly thanks to a friend of the show, Glenn Greenwald.

Let's roll this and then talk about the residents here. You got to get scared that people who are not criminals are getting, like, lassoed up and deported and sent to, like, El Salvador prisons, like that kind of shit. Because I read some story. Was it Glenn Greenwald? It was.

The gay barber guy? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's scary, man. Is that true? Is that story accurate? I don't think we know. Can you explain the story for people that don't know?

Well, from what I read, I think it was in Time Magazine, Jamie, if you can pull it up and maybe we can get it accurate. But basically, with a bunch of these Trendo or Agua guys, allegedly they got one guy, at least least one guy who wasn't a criminal, who was just a gay barber who I think according to the story came here legally. He was here legally. That's what they said. So did he have a green card? I don't know what the details are.

Maybe Jamie can find it. No criminal record. From what it said in that story. Now, this is the problem, right? Because the mainstream media has been putting out so much shit that I. Now, this is the problem, right? Because the mainstream media has been putting out so much shit that I don't know what to believe anymore, right? I feel the same way. And so it's difficult, but

it's something that we actually brought up in one of our conversations. We interviewed the guy from the Heritage Foundation. We brought this up. Because I think we talked about this with Doge as well. When you do things quickly and you do things aggressively, that's how you get shit done, but that's also when mistakes get made. And I think a human being being plucked out of nowhere and ending up in a country he's never been in, in a maximum security prison with gang members, seems like a bad thing to happen to me.

It's horrific. It's horrific. I don't think that should be controversial. No, that's not controversial at all. And this is the thing, you measured twice cut once this is the like this is kind of crazy that that could be possible that's horrific and that's again that's bad for the cause like the cause is let's get the gang members out everybody agrees but what's not innocent gay hairdressers get lumped up with the gangs and then like how long before that guy can get out can we can we figure out how to get him out does ever? Is there any plan in place to alert the authorities that they've made a horrible mistake and correct it?

Well, if you think about it from a government perspective, and this is where I think it gets quite sinister, is once you've done that, the incentive structure is never going to be to admit that and deal with it. The incentive structure is to say nothing, to cover it up, to pretend it didn't happen. So if you somehow missed this particular story, this is about a man named Andre Jose Hernandez Romero, a Venezuelan man who came to the United States in August. He said he was fleeing political persecution. He made an asylum appointment, came to that appointment. When he got there, they noticed on his arm that he had a tattoo of a crown. And this is from the court documents related to his asylum appointment. It says, Detainee Hernandez, Ports. This is sick. It's an error. I don't know what that, ports

these ICE agents are not necessarily the best writers Detainee Hernandez has I guess they mean tattoos, crowns that are consistent with those of a Tren de Aragua member

that's somebody at the Ote Mesa detention center put that into his documents. That sealed his fate. Now, we also know that apparently no Venezuelan gangs use tattoos. Whether that's true or not, somebody can maybe fact check me and find some small gang that does trend de aragua does not use tattoos as identifying marks for its members like that is just a a basic fact that is acknowledged across the spectrum about ternadei aragua other gangs do somehow the d some people in dhs got the idea in their head that there were crown tattoos associated with this gang. And so anybody from Venezuela who had a crown over a soccer ball, which was a reference to Real Madrid's logo, Real Madrid being his favorite team. He's a

professional goalkeeper, Venezuelan authorities, you know, he got all of his paperwork, showed you absolutely no gang connections, you know, whatsoever. He also was scooped up and said to be this gang member. And so I think Rogan makes a very easily understandable point. And a lot of people agree that this is a case, measure twice, cut once. Like that's the perfect cliche to drop on this situation. Because once you cut, and this is why you measure twice, once you cut, that's it. You've cut. Once you have sent this guy to this El Salvadoran dungeon, you've done that. Even if they sent him there for one hour and he was beaten up and then returned. That is a situation so traumatizing it would define the rest of your life. One hour there. He's still there. And that to me is what's so

startling about this situation. So not only did you, you know, you measure twice, you cut once. Sometimes you cut, if you cut too far this direction, you can actually recut it. So the cliche can be overused. But they're not even trying to recut here. They're not even trying to fix this. So does this matter? Is there enough of a kernel of sense of justice and humanity left that it can penetrate the kind of Stephen Miller bubble here? Or is he so locked in on kind of revolutionary mode that he's just plowing ahead?

I mean, I thought that was a very incisive exchange between Rogan and Constantine Kiston, partially because of what Constantine said at the end, where he said the incentive structure is not to correct the errors. And that's really important here because you have support for mass deportations when it's polled, quote unquote, mass deportations, in theory. So the abstract idea of mass deportations polls extremely well in those countries. Majority of people want that. And so Stephen Miller, Trump and others in the administration have, Christine Ohm, have looked at that and said, this is our mandate to do mass deportations. And the only way for us to do mass

deportations, this is a logical leap that I think is insane, but is to screen for these tattoos and to take these kind of bubble cases. And just everyone goes to El Salvador if Venezuela won't take them. And the public is so opposed to the Democrats' policies, to the Biden administration's policies, that we can get away with these extreme measures because the alternative is so much worse. And so to Konstantin Kisin's point, that's part of the background of why the incentive structure is not to say, all right, we made a mistake. The incentive structure is to double, triple, quadruple down. And yet what we've seen is the administration failed to supply additional evidence that, let's talk about the

barber in this case, he's significantly linked to Trende Aragua and was a case that demanded deportation to El Salvador. There's still a chunk of the public that has absolutely no sympathy for this guy. They just say, of course, if you're not a citizen, the administration can take you and move you and get you out. You don't have the same level of due process and et cetera. That's not going to fly with the majority of Americans. It may still be powerful with a group of the American people. But where you what we're seeing here in the Rogan clip is that you will start to lose people. It's going to start to look insane and un-American.

And so the thing on that, we have this next thought of Caroline Levitt getting questioned. This is going to be E2. It's also happening with the student deportations. It's a very similar dynamic playing out, I think, in both cases. And the administration has to start ponying up the evidence. The problem for them is they don't seem to have it in some of these really high-profile cases. So let's take a listen to Caroline Levitt here. This is E2. Just changing subjects for one second.

The administration has expressed a complete confidence in how all the deportation flights to El Salvador were conducted. But now that the administration has conceded that there was an error of one Salvadorian national, will there be any reviews conducted? And does the president express any thoughts on the one error that was disclosed in court last night? Well, first of all, the error that you are referring to was a clerical error. It was an administrative error. The administration maintains the position that this individual who was deported to El Salvador and will not be returning to our country was a member of the brutal and vicious MS-13 gang. That is fact number one. Fact number two, we also have credible intelligence proving that this individual was involved in human trafficking. And fact number three, this individual was a member,

actually a leader of the brutal MS-13 gang, which this president has designated as a foreign terrorist organization. So Ryan, I think the best that, you know, the furthest you'll see Stephen Miller and his sort of fellow travelers go in this administration is to slow down and start being more judicious in the deportations and maybe just hope it fades into the background of the news cycle. But this case that they're referring to is really interesting. We can put E3 up on the screen. This is a thread from Will Chamberlain, who people have seen on the show a couple of times, very staunch conservative pro-Trump attorney, who dug into the story of this Maryland dad, as the Atlantic called him, who ended up being accused of being in MS-13 and deported by the Trump administration. The Trump administration admitted he was deported due to a clerical error.

And this gets us, it will go through the case. And I think found legitimately a lot of things in the case of this man that the Atlantic, just from a journalistic perspective, left out of the story. Its audience would have been better served knowing the full saga of this guy's pinging through the American court system,

non-citizens pinging through the American court system, non-citizens pinging through the American court citizen system, why he claimed he suddenly needed asylum after being here for close to the better part of a decade. So this is a, it's an interesting case, but it's one that gets us back to the Constantine Kiston point where it's like the media has not done a good job of covering these things up until now. And so the Trump administration knows it can get away with more because there's so little trust in the media that could turn around, though. Yeah. And so that case and Will's threat is interesting because Will kind of elides throughout the whole point or kind of sidesteps as an important issue the fact that this guy was sent to this El Salvadoran torture chamber.

And Will, in his threat, acknowledges that he should not have been, that that was wrong, that legally he should not have been sent there. Yet he says, well, that's kind of a minor point here. And I feel like they're kind of, Will's kind of missing the, losing the thread here. So basically what happened here, I think, so the guy came, it appears clear that he came illegally sometime around 2011, 2012, something like that, from El Salvador to the United States. In 2019, he was picked up at a Home Depot.

And Home Depot is where day laborers gather and subcontractors go by every day. You got to have your own tools. All right. I need people on a site. Come on. So he gets picked up there. He got to have your own tools. All right. I need people on a site. Come on. So he gets picked up there. He was wearing a Bulls jersey. And so they said the Bulls jersey was MS-13, which is kind of ridiculous. But then they also said they had a confidential informant who had knowledge of MS-13 who said, this is so-and-so. This is his name in the gang. This is his rank. And this is where he, you know,

operated as a gang member. Turns out he'd never been there. The confidential, most, you know, confidential informants are literally paid to lie. Like the confidential informants are not remotely trustworthy. But this didn't get adjudicated. It just goes into a hearing, went into a bail hearing, and the police said, look, this CI says that this guy was in MS-13. And so the judge is like, all right, well, you can't rebut this. And so therefore, I'm not going to give you bail. He spent a year, year and a half locked up. Eventually, they concluded that this guy was lying. He was not an MS-13 member. He got out on various court dates. And then he goes into that very long immigration process, which I think everybody across the spectrum would agree is far too long. And he reapplies at that point for asylum, saying that his, and this is what Will gets into, that his family's pupusa business had run afoul of an 18th Street gang down in El Salvador.

They were extorted. He was threatened. It does appear that his brother, like that definitely happened to his brother, and his brother fled. So there is some real truth to these claims. The question of whether 10 years, the threats are still live, that's an open one. And that's the kind of thing that you then kind of adjudicate in an immigration hearing. Instead, it seems like what they did is they were just looking for anybody with any gang affiliations. And I guess he popped up in the computer because of his old 2019

confidential informant claim that he was in the gang, which had since been basically rejected. And because he was moving forward with his asylum claim effectively, there was an order that he not be deported to El Salvador. And they ignored that order. And so that's what they're saying was the clerical error. They're saying, what they're saying is they should have been able to deport him somewhere, just not to El Salvador. And they're saying, well, that's, you know, mistakes happen. It's like, okay, but that's a pretty huge mistake. And also, secondly, like, you sent this guy to a dungeon from which he may never emerge. Like, for what?

Like, for what crime? Let's say you don't like that he entered the country illegally. Okay, then you deport him. You don't like that you're barred from deporting him to El Salvador. Overturn that. Say, look, the gang, 18th Street gang, Bukele wiped them out. We can now deport him. So fix that paperwork and deport him into El Salvador, where he then continues his life as a free person in El Salvador. To put him in chains and fly him down to this dungeon,

that's the part that, like you're saying, that should be un-American. And at the same time, I look at The Atlantic as someone on the right and think, why was so much of the story left out, even in the interest of time? And I feel like that's where things, to the point Constantine Kiston was making in the clip earlier, end up getting locked up. Because to me, it's very important that these stories are told correctly because there are cases that are more sympathetic than these people who claimed asylum right away and do have credible fear. You know, this is more credible fear than this, even if there's some evidence that he may have had fear, you know, where 10 years, as your point, as you said, 10 years beyond that point. So it's a, it's a different calculation than, than some others. And so it, it's hard for people on the right then not, you know, I'm, I'm happy to say it.

I'm not in the administration, but for the administration, they feel like politically, um, they can get away with doing these things because people care when the media botches it. And, you know, Biden lets a net eight million people into the country and basically nobody talks about it except for, you know, the media ignores it for a long time or relatively ignores it for a long time and doesn't tell the story so anyway all that is to say i think you know this is the the what's likely to what the the best case scenario um is that they start to slow down and be more judicious about this and ryan one of the things i wanted to ask you is that it reminds me of your story the drop site story about the guy who uh bukele did not want. And maybe you can, I know you talked about it, but what if they accidentally do that? What if they accidentally,

what if one of those guys gets caught up in this? Oh, so yeah, so we did this story, Jose Arlovarez and I over at Dropsite. It's a fascinating piece. He took the lead on it. Going through court records relating to some of the MS-13 members that were deported down to El Salvador. And there's an absolutely fascinating story behind it. And it's not what anybody would expect from what they hear about Trump and Bukele. Bukele, when he first came to power, negotiated and denies this, but everybody

knows that it's true, negotiated a secret deal with MS-13 where they would agree to reduce levels of violence in exchange for some detente with the state and some already in prison. At some point, eventually, this peace accord with MS-13 broke down, more violence broke out. Bukele launched his kind of more aggressive crackdown on them. But before that happened, MS-13, as part of its deal with him, pledged election support. And his landslide election victory was significantly a result of this secret deal that he cut with MS-13. This secret deal is talked about a lot in El Salvador and is very, very unpopular, but he maintains a complete denial of it to this day. One of the people who was involved in those negotiations, his gang name is Greñas. He's here in, or he was here in the United States charged with, you know,

RICO and all the different things you charge a gang member with. And he was headed to federal court where he was expected as part of his trial to tell the full story of these secret negotiations that Bukele had with MS-13. Bukele has desperately been trying to get his hands on Greñas. And there's been this push and pull where the U.S. has been trying to get its hands on people that they know were involved in this deal and vice versa. One of them was in El Salvadoran prisons, what we write about in the article. The U.S. had an extradition request out for him. Instead, Bukele just let him go. And Bukele's top official who had negotiated this secret deal

drove the guy to the border to get him out of the country. He then gets caught in Mexico. And then El Salvador and the U.S. have a fight with Mexico over who can get this guy. Because everybody wants these top MS-13 leaders who know the story of what Bukele did. And so Trump has now sent some of them. So that was Bukele's price. He's like, ah, I'll charge a very tiny fee. He's not looking for dollars to house these Venezuelans that the U.S. is deporting there. His price was, he's like, I want these guys that know too much about my dealings with MS-13. I want

them under my control. So Trump has sent some of them, but we've still held on to others as sort of blackmail against Bukele. So the story is always a little bit more complicated and interesting than you're being told. But when you're starting to use humans as pawns like this at a rapid clip, we'll see where some of those cases end up going. It was a great story. Just before we leave this block,

there's another case we can put E4 up on the screen of a Minnesota student from Mankato who's now been caught up in these ICE deportations. Ryan, do you have any insight on this? I mean, it's actually kind of hard to keep track. Yeah, it's another student who, you know, some very minor protest activity presumably appeared on some list that a pro-Israel group sent to, you know, sent to the administration, the Canary Mission, Bataar and others are, you know, very proudly advertising that they are producing lists of students that they want kicked out of the country for protesting against the war. They're very clear.

They're not claiming, we have evidence that this is the person that was swinging the hammer that smashed the glass at Hensall. They're not saying that. They're saying that this person wrote this op-ed, as in the case of Ozturk, or this person came to this encampment, or this person tweeted this thing, and then kicking them out of the country. And Rubio has said that he's canceled upwards of 300 student visas and is continuing to do it every single day. When you apply for a student visa, it doesn't say anywhere that when you get to the United States,

these certain liberties that we hold dear for persons in the United States do not apply to you if you are protesting U.S. funding Israel's war in Gaza. That was never said. If that's the new rule, obviously it's quite okay if you're here on a student visa to protest for the war. It's not that you can't weigh in. It's not that you can't have an opinion on what's happening in Gaza. As long as your opinion is that it is good and the U.S. should do more of it, that's fine. It's if you are critical of what the United States is doing with its support of Israel, then according to Rubio, that is a cause for you to be immediately deported. Well, not immediately. That would almost be more humane. First, they're sending these people to detention centers, completely harmless people, having them

sit in these brutal detention centers for very long stretches of time before being deported. And with that 300 number, I mean, we've seen maybe half a dozen really big cases so far. But what that means is there's going to be a drip-drip. And again, maybe this will happen with immigration. Maybe it'll happen with students. And the administration will try to move it to the background and be quieter about it, be slower about it. Who knows? But the drip-drip is coming no matter what because they've staked a lot on these efforts.

So it's, it's not going to end. We'll continue to see cases like this one. I know a lot of cops and they get asked all the time. Have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes, but there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple.

Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multibillion-dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1,

Taser Incorporated, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast, hell and gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Catherine Townsend.

I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country, begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband. It's a cold case. They've never found her. And it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on hell and gone murder line, I dig into a new case,

bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The OGs of uncensored motherhood are back and badder than ever. I'm Erica. And I'm Mila. And we're the hosts of the Good Moms Bad Choices podcast

brought to you by the Black Effect Podcast Network every Wednesday. Historically, men talk too much. And women have quietly listened. And all that stops here. If you like witty women, then this is your tribe.

With guests like Corinne Steffens. I've never seen so many women protect predatory men. And then me too happened. And then everybody else wanted to get pissed off because the white said it was okay. Problem. My oldest daughter, her first day in ninth grade and I called to ask how I was doing.

She was like, oh dad, all I was doing was talking about your thing in class. I ruined my baby's first day of high school. And Slumflower. What turns me on is when a man sends me money. Like I feel the moisture between my legs when a man sends me money. I'm like, oh my God, it's go time. You actually sent it?

Listen to the Good Moms, Bad Choices podcast every Wednesday on the Black Effect Podcast Network, the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you go to find your podcasts. All right, Senator Cory Booker broke Strom Thurmond's record for longest speech in the United States Senate. I think it was 25 hours and five minutes. This was Booker's response

to a deeply frustrated Democratic electorate. Isn't there anything that you can do like is something like nothing like you can't You can't even like negotiate a slightly better CR with these fascists that are rounding people up and just destroying You know the country as far as we're concerned and so Booker, you know came to the floor and said, okay I'm gonna show that we're at least trying to do something. Let's roll a little bit of, you know, only a few seconds of this 25 hours. Our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor. We need that now from all Americans. This is a moral moment.

It's not left or right. It's right or wrong. It's getting good trouble. My friend, Madam President, I yield the floor. Put up the next element on the screen. So this is, it says Cory Booker's officially delivered the longest Senate speech. That is, that is, that's Strom Thurmond in his earlier years, actually, because he died at like 101 or something like that. He was old. Like he was in Congress, like when I was covering Congress, and he set his record filibustering the 1957 Civil Rights Act. So that's how long this guy served in the United States Senate. One of the most vitriolic segregationists in the United States Senate, there's a, I forget what book it's in, but there's a scene where there are a couple of, you know, hardcore white supremacist Democrat senators in like my God, this guy really believes this stuff. Like the, the, the racists thought that this guy was like, uh, too over the top. And it is,

it has always, um, been a real, uh, craw, uh, or thorn in the side of Democrats who are now on the other side of this, uh, white supremacy question, um, that he held this record. So it wasn't just pushing back against the Trump administration. And Booker has said as much. He very much wanted to knock this guy off the pedestal. And he successfully did it with several hours still to go until he broke the record. He was on the floor saying, I don't think I have enough gas in the tank. I don't think I'm going to be able to make it. And the galleries filled up. A ton of Senate Democrats came to the chamber,

which is very unusual. The chamber is almost completely empty, and sat there to kind of give him a little bit of gas to kind of get across the finish line. And when he finally made it, you know, gave him a rousing applause. And around the country, you can put up F3. It did capture a lot of people's imaginations. Like the TikTok numbers were wild. The kind of live streaming numbers,

you know, he said he got enormous numbers of calls to his office. You know, it's like, you know, in a dark time, even a tiny little bit of light is something that a lot of people are going to fly toward. Did you follow this as it was going on? And what are Republicans? They kind of just amused by this? Or do they see this as a little flickering of life from the opposition? Well, I mean, the point you just made about even when you're in a period of darkness, even a tiny little bit of light can bolster your spirits. I think that the little bit of light here was very, very tiny in substance.

It's unfortunate that for Democrats like Cory Booker wasn't filibustering something, I think, more substantive. This was a huge boost in the Tea Party years for Ted Cruz. I think Rand Paul at one point, too. Rand Paul was on drones. Right, right, right, right. And so it was... Ted Cruz was to support a government shutdown.

Yes, and there was the green eggs and ham breeding that was much derided at the time. But that's where I want to go with Booker, actually, is I just find him rhetorically insufferable. And I don't think his tone is like generally lands. It might land with the Democratic base. But the clip even that we just played of him ending the filibuster, a feat, no doubt, like an impressive feat at that. especially because it's not organized around a substantive policy, what's the right word? A goal, right?

He wasn't blocking X or shutting down Y. So it's a lot. But at the same time, those numbers that we just showed are really significant. There's an F4, this is just the voicemail numbers. We put this up on the screen, um, the voicemail numbers, uh, which, which sounds silly, but Booker's team just told MSNBC, they've gotten 14,000 voicemails from people, um, for people supporting Corey's filibuster and sharing their stories. And another 280 million people have liked his speech on TikTok alone. So even when these stunts feel insufferable,

they, in this case, I think this one is as tempted as I was to dismiss it and laugh at it and roll my eyes. He designed it in a way that actually from TikTok in particular, but also on other platforms, I think was a real shot in the arm for Democrats who are looking to rally a very disillusioned base. The base is more disillusioned than it was in 2017 and 2018 because Trump came back and won again after all of their best efforts to stop him. So I think, you know, that's it works with the base. And that's what really matters right now, heading into a midterm cycle. Yeah, and for the parliamentary details, you really can't do a filibuster anymore for the most part

because if the other side gets 60 votes, they can move to a final vote. And if they don't, they can't, whether you're talking or not. And so this was just kind of an open session where he just kind of grabbed the floor. And what you can still do in the Senate that you can't do in the House, you wouldn't be able to do this in the House. In the House, you get a minute, you get five minutes, you get an hour, whatever you get, you get. And when that's up, you're done. Whereas in the Senate, if you can keep going, you can keep going under certain circumstances. What he would do in order to give himself a slight break is he would say, somebody would come to the floor, say a Chris Van Hollen or somebody, and say, will the senator yield? And he would say, you know, I yield to the

senator for a question, you know, but I'm holding onto the floor. And so he would yield to another Democrat who would then ask him like a fairly long-winded question, which would allow him to at least give his voice a break. But he wasn't allowed to leave, wasn't allowed to sit down, so he'd kind of just be shuffling from one foot to the other, leaning over. We had Manu Raju from CNN answer the question that everybody's wondering, which is, how did he not go to the bathroom for 25 hours? And according to Booker, this was not some secret diaper that he brought onto the floor, that he stopped eating on Friday and he stopped drinking 12 to 24 hours before going onto the floor. So he kind of emptied his body out ahead of time.

So he went on there, which is, you know, smart for those, for the purpose of not having to go to the bathroom. It would also make the stamina much more difficult, you know, to be able to stand there for 25 hours. How long, how long a speech you think you'd give on the, on the Senate floor? I mean, this is a impossible question because i would never want to be giving a speech on the senate floor what's your answer i don't oh man i i i think it'd be pretty hard to go 25 hours like that's i don't think i could get anywhere near that and yet at the same time i don't have to say i mean i you know i've got maybe a half an hour

stuff to say yeah yeah well you can always read green eggs and ham over and over again pro tip um yeah i don't know i don't know how many i guess i could do a few hours i don't know impressive it's definitely we should do it we should do a show where we just just go actually we could probably first person to leave loses money off that we probably make money off that uh well ryan should we move on to a friend of the show jefferson morley's testimony uh in at the uh john f kennedy assassination hearing yesterday and just as we move into this block i want to give a tip of the hat to Ryan Ansager, who Jefferson Morley, the premier JFK researcher, was very impressed with after his interview last week, which was really widely circulated. And Morley left that saying he'd done tons of interviews in recent days, and he thought that one really was the best.

And I couldn't agree more. So well done. Yeah. People go back and watch that. It's like a 20-minute interview, and I think it'll get you pretty up to speed on the situation. I feel like nobody on the committee watched that interview or read any of the documents or has any idea what they're talking about. Let's roll through a bunch of these clips from this super embarrassing hearing as quickly as we can. So here is Jeff Morley.

It's an honor to testify before you. It's a solemn responsibility to report on the disturbing new revelations that have emerged from the newest JFK files. And it is a grave matter to assert that CIA officers were culpable or complicit in the death of a president. So I want fact checkers to have all the evidence that I'm used to support my testimony today. The new fact pattern leads to a new conclusion. We know now what they knew about Oswald and when they knew it. We know now that Richard Helms, James Angleton, and George Ioannidis were responsible for or complicit in the death of the president, either by criminal negligence or covert action.

My recommendations to the task force are, one, secure and release the personnel file of George Ioannidis, and two, ask the CIA to provide a public statement answering the question, why did these three men lie to JFK investigators? The answers will help fulfill the task force goal, the president's goal, and the people's goal of full and complete JFK disclosure. And what he means by criminal negligence there, and he expounds on this in his interview with us, is that Angleton was getting regular updates based on their surveillance of Oswald. And still, somehow, let the guy kill Kennedy. Let's roll one more clip from Morley here. You actually had written an article specifically addressing

a whistleblower that had reports at the CIA potentially showing information that Oswald was in Mexico City. Can you speak more to that? I was approached a few years ago by a man who had worked inside the CIA, had a very high security clearance. And in 2018, he came to me and said he was concerned that there was a JFK assassination document that he had read while he was working at the CIA, and he was afraid that it would never become public. The man was taking considerable legal risk by talking to me. This was, he was talking about classified or potentially classified information. So I published his story last year without his name, which is not something

that I usually do. I don't like stories with anonymous sources, but I felt that it was important to get out and he felt it was important too. I have spoken with him and he says he is willing to come public and tell his name under his own story with assurances that he will not face legal retaliation. I hope that's something that can be arranged in the near future. That is something that we will definitely follow up on. Let's play one more Morley clip and then move to some of the reaction. So who do you think fired the shot? I don't know. You don't know, but you don't believe it was Lee Harvey Oswald? Oswald was not the intellectual author of Kennedy's death, even if he fired a gun that day. Who do you think was the intellectual author of Kennedy's death? Kennedy's enemies high in his own government is as specific as I can be based on the available evidence.

Probably CIA and Pentagon. And now, so here's Jasmine Crockett and Lauren Boebert. They embarrassed themselves in a different way. I think Crockett's is more embarrassing for what it says about the Democratic Party, that it now feels itself to be in a genuine coalition with the CIA, such that even when the CIA is being criticized for something that happened 60 plus years ago, they feel like they need to leap to the agency's defense. It's absolutely mind boggling, but let's, and then Bo, we're just being dumb. Go ahead. And vice versa, the Republicans latching onto the CIA as soon as the CIA became anti Republican. Right now, right now, all of a sudden, yeah, they're like, yeah. Anyway, so let's roll these.

Previously classified JFK assassination files are now public and show no evidence of a CIA conspiracy. But what I find funny about this hearing is that the Republicans are here relitigating whether CIA agents lied 60 years ago, but aren't doing anything about the CIA director lying to Congress just six days ago. We should be having a hearing on the fact that the unqualified Secretary of Defense and other senior Trump officials were carelessly discussing classified military plans over an unsecure signal group chat. And instead of providing oversight over the administration's handling of classified information, the Republicans have spent a week trying to convince the American people that the military plans were not classified. So instead of giving a platform

to conspiracy theories, and let me be clear, there are holes. I don't want y'all to think that I don't think that there are holes. But when we're looking back, we need to look back so that we can look forward and hopefully do better. You had something to add on that? I think you're confusing Mr. Oliver Stone with Mr. Roger Stone. I haven't stated it yet. Sorry. It's Roger Stone who implicated LBJ in the assassination of the president. It's not my friend Oliver Stone. Is that all the whispers were there? I may have misinterpreted that, and I apologize for that. But there seems to be some alluding of, like you said, incompetence.

Quite a misinterpretation. And then she talks about incompetence right after that. She was asking Oliver Stone about his theory that LBJ had been behind the assassination. Oliver Stone was confused because he was saying, LBJ may have had knowledge of or complicity in the Warren Commission, adding Alan Dulles to the Warren Commission, but LBJ, he's like, I've never said that. And Jeff put the pieces together and said, oh, I think you're confusing him with Roger Stone, which is somewhat hilarious.

And if you weren't watching, if you were just listening to the clip of Jasmine Crockett, you could see Oliver Stone with his head buried in his hands. She was doing this like brain dead analysis of like the signal chat being somehow relevant to even bring up in this. I mean, it was just pathetic. And what I want to know is who wrote that? Staffers write these questions almost all the time. What I want to know is who wrote that question? Was this a leadership staffer? Was this a committee staffer? Was this, because I don't think it would be somebody from Crockett's office, because I think somebody from Crockett's office would have better political instincts than that. And in fact, what's so

revealing about that clip is that you can see, tell me if I'm analyzing this wrong, you can see Crockett's own political instincts kick in as she's getting to the end of her own question, where she's like, oh my God, I just called these folks at this hearing, conspiracy theorists talking about the Kennedy assassination, when everyone in this country believes that a conspiracy was behind, people have different theories about which conspiracy, but everyone thinks that some type of conspiracy was involved in killing Kennedy. And I just mocked that because Democrats are just so ready to instantly shoot first at any conspiracy and then ask questions later about whether or not it's true. And you can see her mind where she's like, oh God, that was stupid.

And so then she puts the question down that was written for her and says, not that I'm saying there aren't holes. There are holes. There are definitely holes. And she even used the word platform, which is like a classic kind of mid-2010s democratic phrase. We're here platforming conspiracy theorists. And that's when her mind was like, did I just say we're platforming conspiracy theorists in relation to the literal one conspiracy that everyone in America believes should be platformed? Yep. And talking to, like, say what you want about Oliver Stone, he's a fascinating guy. Jefferson Morley is a very sober journalist who's covering this, and he's not going to say more than the fact pattern will allow him to.

And the documents and almost exclusively on-the-record sources will allow him to. But she seemed to catch herself but it to me the whole thing was revealing of how how woven now the democratic party is to the cia and the deep state that they feel like they even need to defend alan dulles right who democrats for dulles who like if they exhumed him, he'd like put them in the grave if he had a chance. Yes, he would. He would deport all of the students. Yes, I'm sure he would. And so would his brother. And so would Angleton, who was like, you know, handling the Israel file. Yeah. Well, if Jasmine Crockett's political instincts were truly legendary, she would have known that this hearing was coming up and Democrats in general would be trying to take this issue off the table for Republicans. I mean, it was Republicans for a very long time who were on the wrong side of this. And for Democrats, they could be out there saying Democrats have a long, proud history of trying to shed light on what happened to this Democratic president, a Democratic standard bearer. And we absolutely are just

as eager as our Republican counterparts, if not more eager, to get to the bottom of it and ask really smart, insightful, savvy questions. But they did not do that yesterday. They used it as a sort of weeks to digest this insane volume of new information, which is, I mean, it's going to take a very long time to put all of these puzzle pieces together. But they've done the Lord's work. Morley has done the Lord's work trying to piece this puzzle together quickly. And his voluminous knowledge of the case has allowed him to do that. So all that said, to see these things being aired in the halls of Congress, I still thought was really powerful. I mean, we have Twitter now and we've seen some of this play out in real time. But Oliver Stone's 1992 congressional testimony was critical. I mean, it took a long time for the country to catch up, but looking back,

it proved to be a really important point because there was legislation that came out of Congress that led to declassifications. And so I thought that it was really important. Yeah. So his movie on Kennedy, Oliver Stone's movie on JFK, basically produced the legislation that produced the records that we got just recently and that we've been getting over the last decades. So yeah, that is kind of a fascinating arc to see. And the last point on this is like, Democrats may not understand why I'm harping on this. Like people who don't follow politics closely create heuristics about who's with them and who's

against them and who is right and who's wrong about particular issues. So a proxy for a lot of people would be, are they credible? Are they open-minded about the Kennedy assassination? You don't have to necessarily agree exactly with what you think on it, or are you just lying and mocking anybody who believes in a conspiracy theory? So if people who don't follow politics closely see these clips circulating online of Democrats making fun of anybody who thinks there was a conspiracy behind the Kennedy assassination, they're going to just reject and dismiss anything else they hear from those Democrats.

And that's a rational approach when you have a limited amount of time to invest in analyzing the political situation. It's like, oh, these people are liars or stupid. Like one or the other. Either way, I don't want to hear anything else from them. So not helping themselves with regular people by this performance. Needlessly so. It's just so easy for Democrats to... Don't be afraid of Alan Dulles anymore. He's gone. It's crazy. He's gone. No reason. I mean, Ryan, maybe there is something substantive about their ties now to CIA world and Intel world, meaning that they don't think the sort of cost benefit makes sense for them to start going in on the CIA

because the CIA still obviously does not want a lot of these pieces to be put together. It doesn't want to see the puzzle come together. So maybe this is actually not just politics, but yeah. Anyway, uh, hope you had a good time in Wisconsin. Thank you for joining us from all the way out there. Very much appreciated. Um, see you back here. We'll do a Friday show again. You'll be back in here at DC, I assume for that. Oh yeah, absolutely. Looking forward to it. Uh, we look forward to those Friday

shows a lot now and just hope you guys do too. They're a lot of fun. Just as a reminder, breakingpoints.com to nab a premium membership, premium subscription. Appreciate everyone tuning in. Thanks for letting me zoom in here, Ryan. All right. And we'll see you on Friday. This is your girl T.S. Madison, and I'm coming to you loud, live and in color from the Outlaws podcast. Let me tell you something. I've got the voice. My podcast, the one they never saw coming. Each week, I sit down with the culture creators and scroll stoppers.

Tina knows. Lil Nas X. Will we ever see a dating show? My next ex. That's actually cute, though. And Chaperone. I was dropped in 2020, working the drive-thru, and here we are now. It's a fake show, you tell me I'm safe.

I'm going right on the phone and call her. Listen to Outlaws with T.S. Madison on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts, honey. I know a lot of cops. They get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no.

This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. Listen to Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Glott. And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast. Last year, a lot of the problems of the drug war. This year, a lot of the biggest names in music and sports. This kind of starts that a little bit, man.

We met them at their homes. We met them at their recording studios. Stories matter and it brings a face to it. It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two I Heart Radio