Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 4/26/23: Biden Threatens Veto On GOP Debt Plan, Trump Snubs GOP Debates, Bernie Endorses Biden, Harlan Crow's Secret Tax Haven, Tucker Employee Speaks Out, Fauci On Lockdowns, UN Harvard Censorship, Susan Rice Resigns Biden Domestic Policy

Episode Date: April 26, 2023

Ryan and Emily discuss the debt standoff and Biden threatening to veto the GOP debt plan, Trump claims he might not attend the GOP debates, Bernie endorses Biden for 2024, the billionaire with ties to SCOTUS Clarence Thomas is exposed for his Island Tax Haven, a former employee at FOX News unloads on Tucker and the work environment in MSNBC interview, Dr. Fauci gives new interview where he attempts to downplay his past calls for lockdowns during the pandemic, how the UN and Harvard partnered on creating social media censorship, and Susan Rice resigns as Biden's Domestic Policy Chief.To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. 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 2 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 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 podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

Over the years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned no town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've heard from hundreds of people across the country with an unsolved murder in their community. I was calling about the murder of my husband. The murderer is still out there. Each week, I investigate a new case. If there is a case we should hear about, call 678-744-6145.

Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, Ready or Not 2024 is here, and we here at Breaking Points are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it means the absolute world to have your support. What are you waiting for? Become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints. We're coming to you in the middle of an absolutely crazy week. How are you doing, Ryan? Well, we haven't gone over the cliff yet.

Not yet, but it's coming. The global economy has not been blown up. Vladimir Zelensky and Chairman Xi spoke on the phone yesterday. That could be a step toward a Chinese brokered peace. Even the United States believes that China might be the only one that has remotely the credibility to broker something. We're all waiting, I guess, for this spring offensive to finish off, which seems kind of morbid. That people seem to know this war has to end at some point. But hold on, we're just going to do a couple more months of carnage and then we'll end it. Rather than just saying, how about all of those people can live, have grandchildren, etc., and end the war now.

Right. A crazy story that we'll continue to follow because, to your point, the Chinese intervention here seems to be even people in the United States saying, what's going on? After they struck a Middle East peace deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Yeah. No, absolutely. Well, we're going to start today by talking about the debt standoff that's coming to a head maybe today, actually. We're going to talk about some developments in the 2024 presidential race. We're going to talk about the Supreme Court conflicts of interest stories that have come out the last couple of weeks. We're talking about the Abby Grossberg lawsuit that is coming for Fox News. We're going to talk about Dr. Fauci's recent profile in the New York Times. I'm going to talk about the United Nations. And Ryan is going to talk about Susan Rice. Let's start with the news of the day, the debt standoff. President Biden yesterday said,

quote, A one here. Republican efforts. The Republican legislation is a reckless attempt to extract extreme concessions as a condition for the United States simply paying the bills it has already incurred. Now you have, if we put a two up on the screen, Chip Roy, he's from the House Freedom Caucus. He just wrote this in The Federalist. He says this is the question that Republicans are presented with. Quote, Will we cave to the president, Wall Street, massive corporations, swamp lobbyists and the corporate media to continue America's borrow and spend death spiral? Or will we instead take this opportunity to stand up for the American people to demand their leaders stop irresponsibly spending money we do not have.

So that is a preview of what faces Kevin McCarthy should he back down on the legislation. Republicans have a bill that they want to vote on today. They need 218 votes. Kevin McCarthy can actually not afford to lose more than, what, six members of the Freedom Caucus. And so in order to work its way through the House of Representatives, he needs to please people who have the thoughts that Chip Roy has there. Here are a couple of quotes, though, that members gave yesterday. This is Jody Arrington. He's the leader of the House Budget Committee. I love this one.

He said, Speaker McCarthy's been at the table, and he has offered to negotiate with the president. Now we're going to put our terms on a piece of paper, get 218 Republicans, and we're going to put the ball in their court. Ralph Norman, he's a member of the Freedom Caucus, says this is the bare minimum for me and a host of other people. They're going to be, quote, leaning no until they get concessions from McCarthy. So that's a pretty incredible state of affairs and balance for McCarthy to strike today as they want to push this bill over the finish line. Of course, if you've been following this, President Biden said

he's not negotiating, period, because he doesn't think the debt ceiling should have to be raised with any conditions. And complicating matters for Kevin McCarthy is it's not just the Freedom Caucus that he has to deal with. He also has the Nancy Mace, who don't like the idea of voting for kind of draconian cuts, particularly she and other moderate Republicans don't really like voting against some of these kind of green tax credits because that won't necessarily play well in a swing district. Well, I think she has people who manufacture in South Carolina. Right. It's becoming a real industry. Like the clean energy industry is becoming an industry. And so it's going to have jobs associated with it. It's going to have economic impact associated with it.

And therefore, it's going to have political economy power. It's going to have people who are like, hmm, not so sure about this. Equally, you have these Midwest and I'm sure you know much more about this than I do. You've got all these Midwest Republicans who are upset that the Republican bill, in order to save money, is pulling back on ethanol subsidies. And to me, what do the kids call it? Based? Good for Kevin McCarthy. For taking ethanol subsidies? Oh, yeah.

Ethanol subsidies are the stupidest possible thing on planet Earth. Like, what we do— The pinnacle of crony capitalism. Yeah. We take public money and we pay people to grow corn. And then we then turn that corn into ethanol. And then we force people to put in gasoline and put it in their cars. I think we oppose ethanol for different reasons. What are we doing? No, I think that's great. I think that's great. And I mean, the Freedom Caucus should be all over that. And this is how The Washington Post describes the Republican bill on the table. They say it would, quote, slash federal spending dramatically and unwind some of Biden's priorities, including student debt cancellation and efforts to address climate change.

In exchange, Republicans would agree to increase the debt ceiling. Obviously, the statutory cap on how much the U.S. government can borrow to pay its bills. That's from The Post. So as Ryan was saying, it does roll back some of the bills that have already been passed by President Biden, the Inflation Reduction Act. It looks to target some of those things. Obviously, this is not a bill that Joe Biden is going to agree to. It is, however, a bill that gets really interesting when you kick it over to the Senate. Right. But they don't expect it. And also, just to be clear, if people expect there to be some climate benefit out of ethanol, there isn't, because it's so

resource intensive to grow the corn in the first place to then burn it. But right, so Kevin McCarthy's plan here is, I'm going to show that I have 218 votes on this bill. And he's like, I'm not negotiating this bill at all. Like, this is what we've got. This is what we're taking to Biden. You've got some Republicans who are saying, and Gates has said this, unless you fiddle with the work requirements, like if, unless you make higher work, higher work requirements for federal benefits kick in sooner than I'm out, which to me is just not credible because you're threatening to blow up the global economy to move work requirements from 20 hours to 30 hours and to move it back a little bit closer, you know, to implement it a little bit faster than it's being implemented

in a messaging bill that nobody thinks is going to be passed anyway. It'd be like, you know, pass me the pretzels or I'm going to cut your head off. Like, no, no, like that's, this is not a proportionate response here. Like you really think work requirements should be higher. Go to committee, write a bill, talk to your other members of Congress, and then maybe we'll, you know, reform work requirements. I think it's silly, but okay, let's, let's talk about that. But you're going to, you're going to use this leverage that you have to get that? The problem with it being a messaging bill is that Gates has absolutely no reason to come to the table with McCarthy. And then it's McCarthy's

test to see what he can give to Matt Gates, to Chip Roy, to anybody who's demanding concessions from McCarthy in order to build their support. This is really what Kevin McCarthy is good at. It's what he prides himself in doing. He always points back to what he did with Jim Jordan and putting him in charge of oversight, that this was sort of he used the carrot, not the stick, and it worked out really well. So this is probably the first biggest test because really nobody has any clear reason to negotiate. Because if anything, if Matt Gaetz won't get concessions on that, he knows particularly if he doesn't get a concession on that.

He can take it to Fox News. He can take it everywhere he wants and say Kevin McCarthy wants welfare or whatever. And he's standing up to the swamp. Right. And it hurts McCarthy. And so then Gates is in a better position if he's still, you know, in a hostile posture vis-a-vis McCarthy, because if he doesn't get these this package through with 218 votes, then McCarthy is badly hobbled with Biden. Now, people might say, well, but if Gates is the one that hobbled McCarthy,

isn't it Gates's fault? No, people don't pay attention like that. They would just see McCarthy as kind of losing in a standoff with Biden, which then brings McCarthy's demise kind of one day closer. Because if he can't get his own caucus to agree on a debt ceiling increase with all of the cuts that he wants, that his caucus wants, then how can he go to the negotiating table and ask for anything from Biden when it's clear that he can't even deliver on this maximalist position? Right. Yeah, no, that's a hugely important point. And for Republicans, they obviously need to be strategic about this because if they lose Kevin McCarthy, again, as we learned in January, they really have no plausible backup. It just doesn't

exist. And he is the one person, I'm talking purely from a strategic standpoint right now, he's the one person that has any hope of bridging all of these different divides and navigating all of these different competing interests. And so if they push it to the limit on this, especially on the messaging, the messaging bill, if they push it to the limit on the messaging bill, then they could be in serious trouble for the rest of this Congress. And I would just add that so far, it does look good for McCarthy because the fact that Chip Roy and people in the Freedom Caucus are saying, like, we're at our bare minimum, that may seem not good, but it actually is pretty good for Kevin McCarthy at this point,

because that was not easy to do. And it seems like they're making these arguments in good faith when they are taking them to the media. And that is positive for him, bodes well for today. He probably just wants to get a quick vote, get it over with. But that could go in a million different directions. So how would you handicap it? Do you think that he will have the, do you think he'll put it on the floor today and have enough votes to get it passed? If I had to bet, I would say it goes on the floor today or right after and it does get the votes? Or do you think he just kind of retrenches and continues the game of chicken that I feel like he has to lose in order for this to wrap up? Yeah, no, I mean, I think that's a really good question because we saw he went through how many ballots and kept getting concessions and concessions in the speaker race. And maybe there's some muscle memory there. And Matt Gaetz knows that he can keep going through

putting Kevin McCarthy through the ringer time and again and finally get to a better place, despite all odds, maybe, because they really don't have a backup. But it's possible that also blows up in everyone's face and there are relationships that can never be, relationships broken that can never be repaired. So I think that's like the worst case scenario, probably. And yeah, the Freedom Caucus just seems structurally and fundamentally

in the same handicap as kind of the Progressive Caucus, which is that they have some leverage because they have some members of Congress. They want a much different governing structure than exists, but they don't have a majority to enact that. But they have such, Republicans in general have such a slim majority that they have all the power in the Freedom Caucus's court. Or the same thing with like the Tuesday group, and we saw this in the Pelosi Congress with Justice Democrats, they really did wield a lot of power. And I think a lot of people on the left would be correct to say they didn't always wield it appropriately or as much as they could. But the Freedom Caucus has less, I think, reservations about doing that because they already don't have the media.

So they can afford to blow things up because they're not losing media credibility. They never had it. They still have the problem that they don't have the votes. But we'll see. We'll see if they can outmaneuver that handicap. So moving to the 2024 election, interesting piece in The Washington Examiner by Con Carroll, former Hill staffer. Yes. This is called, we'll put B1 up here, called Why Trump Beat Clinton, Lost to Biden, and Would Lose to Biden Again, which I think actually gets at the kind of unspoken truth behind our current politics. And the point he's making, I wanted to get your take on this, is that there's an increasing number of people who hate both candidates and hate both parties. Among those people, though, and this is where groups like No Label is the kind of corporate group that is putting its ballot line on ballots all across

the countries because they keep looking at polls saying that, look, 60% of the country says they don't want either of these two parties. They're like, boom, therefore, they want a corporate-backed Joe Manchin, Lisa Murkowski ticket. It's like, no, I don't think they said that. I think they said the first thing, that they don't like either of these parties. They didn't say they like you. And so what Kahn does is he looks at, well, okay, how are these people actually going to vote in the end? Because almost all of the 60% of people who say they don't like either party,

they have no other choice. They vote. And they vote pretty consistently for one party or the other. But what Kahn points to is that overwhelmingly of the people who hate both candidates, they hate Biden less. Yes, significantly. And they hated Clinton more. And it wasn't that Trump was able to capture the hearts of the nation in 2016. It was that people disliked him less than they disliked Hillary Clinton. And his argument is that's why he lost to Biden in 2020 and would again for that simple reason. Biden's just not

as hateable. Well, I think there's something to that. And it's not as though Biden captured the hearts of the nation either. I think that's what this is. Or Hillary. From his basement in Wilmington. Right. And so, yeah, cons numbers show that Biden is beating Trump easily 54 to 15 percent among those voters that disapprove of both candidates. So then he asks how many of them are this time around? Well, he says 47 percent of all voters believe that neither Biden nor Trump should run for president in 2024. Now, Ron DeSantis has higher favorable ratings than Biden and Trump. That's what Khan points out. He says it's not surprising that when you look at both national and state polls, both Trump is losing to Biden and DeSantis is beating Biden.

So that is a really interesting metric. And it gets to this question of how many of those voters actually decide to go to the polls. So if you have 47 percent of people that don't like either candidate, how many of them just sit out? How many of them actually vote? That's why when I think the pundit class tries to crunch all of these numbers in interesting ways and they get into beautiful beautiful mind chalkboard math. It's just like there's, you can't always predict how many of the people who hate both candidates decide to show up or not. It's just almost impossible to do. Although, you know, since 2016 and because of Trump, I think, I think it's fair to say we've had a surge in engagement, civic engagement on election day.

Young people, you've pointed out. Young people, women, men in Pennsylvania who hadn't voted, didn't even vote in 2016. They came out and voted in 2020. Like people are kind of hooked into the circus and the drama of it in a way that they weren't in like 2012, let's say. And so I do think you're going to continue to see that. It's going to continue to kind of dominate our feeds. And so even these people who hate them both are still going to want to participate. They got to get their selfie. You got to make your content. How are you going to make your voting content, your civic content, if you don't actually participate in it? So I think that'll drive a significant amount of it. But yeah, people just, so the question then I have

for you is, is there any point at which the Republican base starts to become pragmatic and says, okay, yeah, we love our guy, but man, how is he losing to Biden in these polls? And how is DeSantis winning? So we're going to be pragmatic and we're going to switch over to DeSantis or no way. Like they look at Biden and they're like, that's the most beatable guy on the planet. I don't care what the polls say. No, because there's a really easy answer. It's because of the flight 93 election sort of concept that Michael Anton sort of famously popularized. That was, of course, when it was a binary choice between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. But his thing was like the plane's going down. Flight 93, go ahead.

Give them the framework again. So he wrote for Claremont that if the plane is going down, the plane is being hijacked, you put all of your eggs in the one basket that is going to just be completely dramatic. And so if the country is going down, the metaphor follows, why not just blow up the government and see what happens? And metaphorically blow up the government. Grab the wheel. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Grab the wheel. And if you crash, you crash. If you crash, you crash. Because we're crashing anyway. So that's the calculus. And I think there are a whole lot of people sort of like what we were just talking about with the Freedom Caucus. Like what is their incentive to cooperate with Kevin McCarthy, especially in a messaging bill? Well, what is the average voter who might not be like a dyed in the wool Republican, but really likes Donald Trump? Because he said everyone else is lying. Accurate doesn't mean that he's not lying, too. But and sort of provided that glimmer of hope, saying we're going to stop endless wars. We are going to have a robust middle class. We're going

to bring jobs back, et cetera, et cetera. He provided a lot of hope for people like that. And if your alternative then is Ron DeSantis, a guy who has been a politician for a really long time and could never be Donald Trump. Nobody can be Donald Trump. Then, no, you don't have a lot of you don't have a lot of incentive to play nice with the Republican Party or to be pragmatic with the Republican Party. And if we put B2 up on the screen, I think that's what a lot of this gets at. This is a tweet from Ron Brownstein where he says a nude PBS NewsHour NPR Marist poll neatly sums up the Republican situation heading into 2024. 63% of Republicans say they want a second Trump turn, even if he's found guilty of a crime. But just 21% of independents, 24% of non-whites, 27%

under the age of 45, and 17% of, what does that one say? College whites. Okay, college whites agree. And so if you look at that, this is where we're balancing these, what's the best word, like the passions of voters, right? So if you really love Donald Trump or if you don't like either candidate, what does turnout look like? What does your motivation to actually vote for somebody look like? What does your motivation to give look like? If Bernie and Trump get a bunch of small dollar donors, like that actually can really make a difference. So I think that's one of the big questions here is who has the passion on their side among their voters. So the Republican hope, it sounds like, is that the Biden supporters won't be passionate enough to come out on election day as maybe they were in the past or as Trump supporters

would be. And as a result, then Trump will be able to eke it out. Right. Sorry, everyone. The cold water I would throw on that potential, I think it's possible, and maybe he doesn't even live to the election. But the cold water I would throw on it is that it's not that Democrats support Biden with any passion, but man, do they not like Donald Trump. Right, right. crawl over glass. They crawled over glass in 2018 to hit the Women's March in 2018 to go to the midterms in 2020 to throw him out of the White House. And they'll crawl over glass again in 2024, I think, to elect anybody, Kim Jong-un. Not born in the United States, so not constitutionally eligible. But you know what I mean. They would they would vote for anybody and they would crawl over glass to vote for anybody other than that. So that that's my guess, because we're a we're a culture and a politics of fear and hatred rather than hope. And so that's what's motivating people. between Hillary and Biden, as Khan points out, I think really accurately, is that one is less unlikable. And so if you have Joe Biden versus another candidate, I think that's also a really

interesting question because Biden is sort of, you know, you're able to kind of project different things onto him and he does that intentionally. You know, he doesn't sort of stake out a hard claim to the progressive base or the centrist base. He does a bunch of it and lets people just kind of be, he's everything to whatever anybody wants, but Joe Biden can be, or he tries to, I think, use that strategy. And so that I think does allow you to be a little bit less unlikable than Hillary Clinton and get some more votes than Trump. Yes. And speaking of not having any hope, can we put up B5, which is the, this is Bernie Sanders. So after Biden announced his bid for

presidency on Tuesday with his video, Bernie Sanders kind of in the, it's not surprising, but shocking kind of development came out and endorsed Biden immediately. I say not surprising because he's been signaling for the last year or longer that if Biden is running, he's not going to run and he's going to endorse Biden. So we knew this was going to happen. better word, to see the kind of independent democratic socialist candidate who twice ran just immediately endorsing Joe Biden, which I think goes to my other point that people are not getting behind Biden because they have some hope that he's going to bring kind of fundamental transformational change that the working class needs to this country, but that they just want to beat Trump. Bernie in his book, his most recent book, he talks about why he immediately,

why he dropped out so quickly and then immediately basically endorsed Biden, saying that he didn't want anybody to be able to blame him. And he didn't want to feel any sense of personal responsibility for doing anything that could have helped Trump. Because in 2016, he waited all the way until the convention to support Hillary Clinton and spent the next several years getting blamed by that. And it sounds like from the way he's writing in his book that maybe even kind of blaming himself a little bit. I was going to ask, is that the implication that he thinks those charges had any merit? I feel like he, some of them stung a little bit. That's absurd. Because he didn't think,

I think just trying to mind read through his book, he didn't think, I think, just trying to, you know, mind read through his book, he didn't think that Trump was going to win. Right. And he, you know, did not want to endorse Hillary Clinton and dragged it out as long as possible. And I think some of it stings. I think some of it does resonate with him. And I think that helps to explain why he capitulated so quickly this time around. Well, and now Joe Biden has competition in the form of both RFK Jr. and Marianne Williamson. But let's put this next element, I think it's B3 up on the screen, where you see Maggie Haberman pointing out that Donald Trump is threatening to skip debates. That's going to be a question for both of the top candidates, it seems, because Joe Biden hasn't signaled any interest in debating Marianne Williamson or RFK Jr.

Although I think the fact that now both of them are in the race has ratcheted up the low pressure on Biden to debate. I do think, especially given where Marianne is on TikTok, honestly, that and RFK Jr. I think has a pretty big following. Like 14 percent or something. Yeah. He's got a great name, so. He does have a great name. He's got that going for him. And he seems to be running at least a pretty strategically smart campaign so far.

I think that does heighten the pressure on Biden, actually, to debate. We'll see, actually, where that goes from here. And I love Trump just laying out all of his politics in this Truth Social post where he basically says, look, I'm so far ahead. Why would I debate? So maybe DeSantis and Marian Williamson and RFK Jr. can debate. Oh, that would be fun. That'd be a good one. I would watch that. Everybody would watch that. Throw Chris Christie in, see what happens. Absolutely. Chris Christie's welcome too. Trump also makes the point that Fred Ryan, who was formerly the CEO of Politico, is now publisher of The Washington Post, is the chairman of the Reagan Library. He was Reagan's chief of staff after Reagan was president.

And so he's saying, no way, biased. Can't go to the Reagan Library. How does it feel to have the front-running Republicans say that he can't participate at a debate at the Reagan Library because it would be unfair to him? Reagan Library has a lot of problems with the conservative movement. Does it? I think increasingly, yeah. I mean, they hosted Liz Cheney about two years ago. Oh boy. How do you leave that out? Maybe character limit, maybe. Well, we should probably move on now to the increasing conversation about ethics on the Supreme Court. Ryan, there's a new intercept report on Harlan Crowe's citizenship.

Yes. Tell us more. This was a story that Ken Klippenstein did with Jason Palladino in a partnership with the Project on Government Oversight. Everyone put this first tear sheet up here. But essentially, we got leaked documents that show that Harlan Crowe purchased citizenship from St. Kitts, what's called St. Kitts and Nevis. So there are these corporate slash sovereign structures around the world that have managed to kind of basically incorporate themselves into governments. They call themselves places like St. Kitts, which then have allegedly the sovereign powers of a government.

And what they then do, Cyprus being kind of one of the famous ones over in, and a couple others over in the EU, you can kind of like, basically what you do is you can buy your way into citizenship. It's very expensive in the sense that it costs to you and me would be an extraordinary amount of money, but in relative terms to a billionaire is like nothing, which is similar to how kind of the Bahamas like makes so much money or Delaware actually does the same thing that it costs say between $50 and $500 to like incorporate your, your, your company, your tax shelter in Delaware or in the Bahamas with not, not a lot, not a lot of money in absolute terms. But it adds up to millions and billions for these countries.

And so, quote unquote, countries. And so, a place like St. Kitts then has a new citizen, Harlan Crowe, who can then park his money there. And if he has the cleverest tax attorneys, he can get around taxes that he owes here in the United States. And so it's just hilarious. It's just too much. is just a complete kind of caricature of an oligarchy. That you would have a Supreme Court justice who presents himself as this guy who loves to ride around the country in his RV and go to NASCAR races,

who is also taking global yacht trips with this billionaire who is such an American patriot that he has purchased citizenship elsewhere so he can not perform his civic obligation of, like, paying his fair share. I mean, if you're at the upper echelons of American politics, whether it's on the left or the right, you're going to end up on a mega yacht and you're going to end up palling around with somebody who has dual citizenship and a tax haven. Who among us? I mean, it is, like, I think that's the sad reality, the sad truth.

I'm not saying it's a good thing, but I do think it really is where the country is right now. I mean, if you're in the upper echelons of American politics, that's people that are just naturally going to be in your circle. The Thomases, and in full disclosure, I very much admire Clarence Thomas. He grew up dirt poor. I think he has an incredible story. He was on the sort of fringe left when he was in college and sort of changed his life, turned his life around. Like Kyrsten Sinema. Not quite like Kyrsten Sinema. Well. Yeah, she was fringe left. I feel like he was even fringier though. Maybe. I don't know. She was out there. She was out there. But I think that some of these

folks who are active with the fringe left come away with it with the most contempt you could possibly have for the fringe left. And it's probably true on the fringe, right? Because if you're a fringe character, you're probably not that fun to be around. Probably annoying in meetings. Probably not fun to do your little cell block activity with.

And then you come out and you think that everybody on the left is like that. And I think Sinema has some of that, that her time with the Green Party, with the Black Bloc, with their anarchist protesters, made her think that everybody was like the people that are in her little block. And so she's taking it out on the world as a result. And I could see maybe the same is true for Clarence Thomas. He just was like, wow, I actually hate you people. I don't know. Obviously his autobiography is really a popular book and an excellent book. But yeah, the intercept story I think raises this question of whether Crow being a dual citizen has any implications for his giving and any implications for disclosures that would need to be made.

He's still, you know, since he still has his American citizenship, he's... Looks like he's good. Even though, but yeah, like the wealth that he has, a significant portion of it is still in his possession because of his other citizenship. If he had maintained only American citizenship, he would have loved less of it. It would have gone to you and me and the rest of the public. We could democratically decide what to do with it. Send it to Ukraine, do whatever we wanted with it. So if you put up this second element over at Insider, you now have journalists combing through past Supreme Court decisions and cases,

trying to fact check Harlan Cloreau's claim that he never had, or Clarence Thomas' claim that Harlan Cloreau never had business before the Supreme Court. Anybody who's a billionaire is going to eventually have some business, probably, you know, some business that they are connected with is going to appear before the Supreme Court. Bloomberg's got them busted here with Trammell Crowe Residential. It's a case that made it to the Supreme Court in 2005. Clarence Thomas did not recuse himself from this one as our ethics rules would suggest,

or do they have rules? as our ethics kind of norms suggest that he ought to have? It's funny, though, because, so on that case, I'm thinking, and this is totally a whatabout, but I'm thinking of how Elena Kagan was the Solicitor General for Obama during Obamacare and then voted on Obamacare and the Obamacare case. And it's like, I mean, this stuff, the Supreme Court, like you said, if you're a billionaire,

you're going to end up having a case before the Supreme Court. And if you're really powerful, you're going to end up hanging out with billionaires. You're going to end up being in the Solicitor General in an extremely high profile case. And so, again, I think we talked about this last week. I'm completely in favor of tighter ethics rules for the Supreme Court. I think this speaks to a deeper problem in a lot of these reports now. Like Politico utterly botched a hit on Neil Gorsuch. I mean, just botched it. And even some of the Thomas stuff was like the original Thomas reporting had some, it was in ProPublica, had some misses in it. And so I just think this would

all be a lot more credible if they were doing it across the board, because now they seem to be scraping the bottom of the barrel to get even like Gorsuch without even realizing that no Supreme Court justice, my colleague, David Harsanyi went and looked. And her big complaint in that Politico story is that he tried to conceal a transaction, a land transaction, because, quote, he did not report the identity of the purchaser. And David said that's true, but he went back and looked at all the disclosure forms of Supreme Court justices in 2017, and none of them made a notation in that box for any transaction. So she's acting as though this is highly unusual and suspect. None of them did that. But the others had sold property?

Let me check. But let's see. None of them had filled that out in financial disclosures. For previous home sales, you mean? Not just for home sales, but for financial, like their financial transactions. I see. So, right. Well, I think, I think one thing that's going on here is that there has been a kind of social contract that the public has had with the Supreme Court, which is that, look, we, we, you wear black robes. Uh, you, you're, you're not on TV when you make your, you don't clap at the state of the union, clap the state of union. You're just out there. You're making the decisions and we're going to trust that you're making them somewhat fairly

and we're going to honor those decisions. We're going to mostly leave you guys alone and think of you as somewhat separate from the democratic process and from the political process. And I think overturning Roe for a lot of people broke that social contract.

Said, all right, you know what? You guys want to play politicians? You want to lead a political movement? We're going to treat you like politicians and we're going to examine your conflicts of interest. And because of this social contract, the Supreme Court justices have been rather lazy about their kind of adherence to ethical guidelines and their financial disclosure reporting because nobody really cared. It's like your Supreme Court was a different thing. It was a black box with black robes. But now that there are people are lifting the lid, I think you're going to find a lot of things like where you're going to say, well, you know what? It's not okay that none of them filled this out. Like we don't trust any of you anymore. Like you want to be politicians. You

want to be political figures. You want to, you want to mess with my daily life like this. All right. Well, now you're going to have to abide by the same standards that we hold everybody else to. And I love that. I am completely not just okay with that but eager for that conversation to happen. But when you have ProPublica saying, for instance, that Thomas, he criticized like a Chevron-related case, meant that he had a, quote, newly popular on the right that would limit government regulation philosophy, that is absurd. Like, that was in the ProPublica original report, which also said that he needed to disclose the yacht because it counted as transportation in the same way that, you know, a bus would or a plane would.

The plane transactions, I think, were—or the plane disclosures, I think, really should have been made. All this is to say, I'm completely fine with having a conversation about ethics on the Supreme Court. What's happening right now is completely, from my perspective, one-sided when this needs to be a much broader, deeper conversation and the media acting like these are uniquely terrible problems for Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas while turning a blind eye to the, let's say, the Kagan thing. Nobody was concerned about that when it happened except for people like

conservative bloggers at the time. I just think it's really unhelpful overall. We're going to get a lot more of it, I'm sure. I hope we get more about the ethics conversations because, yeah, I don't think it's great to have independent jurists who we don't know are really good friends with billionaires and spending a lot of time with them. I think it's helpful to know that, of course. Moving on to Abby Grossberg. So Abby Grossberg is the former booking producer, executive booking producer over at the Tucker Carlson show. She appeared on MSNBC last night, if we can put up this first element here. She is suing Fox News and Tucker Carlson, claiming a culture of what's the toxic work environment over at his show. Hostile and discriminatory.

Hostile and discriminatory work environment. There's all sorts of kind of theories about what the role of her suit has been in Tucker Carlson's firing on Monday. And so she appeared with Nicole Wallace. Let's play a little bit of that from last night. Where are all of those recordings now? Did Dominion ultimately get them? I still have. I have several recordings that I'm still going through that we've recovered from all of the phones. There are 90 that we have. Um, uh, I don't know what Fox turned over. I do know based on what I've read that they did hand over those Sydney and Rudy tapes to them. Um, I, Fox should have everything. They really should. Do you, have you been contacted by Smartmatic? Yes.

And you've shared all the Otter recordings with them or whatever? I've been subpoenaed. We haven't shared anything yet. You haven't begun the discovery process. Are you? So she also talked, we'll run, let's run through these clips too. So she also talked about the culture. This is her specifically describing the culture at Tucker's

show. Early on, they had Andrew Tate on the show, and I raised my hand and I said, we have to be very mindful that this is two white males together. And I use the example of Gayle King and R. Kelly saying that she could go in a different direction with that interview, that I felt Tucker couldn't. And they weren't happy about that because they wanted to be a bro fest. They were all laughing about how fun it would be to go to Romania and hang out with him. They liked his messaging. So whenever I said something like that, it put a target on my back and gradually I was shut out of meetings. I was mocked. I was eventually demoted. That's how it played out for me. And it got worse and it got worse and it got worse every time I spoke out.

I'm sure you have thoughts there. Plenty. Let's produce some even deeper thoughts with this last one, because this kind of builds on the earlier point. This is her talking about basically her reaction to some of the January 6th coverage and her involvement in some of it. When the January 6th tapes were coming out, Tucker was very set on finding an FBI person who was implanted in the crowd and spinning this conspiracy that they were ultimately the ones responsible for the Capitol attack, not Fox News, as they're about to go into the Dominion trial, that it was really, you know, the FBI that set up this thing, not Fox telling the American people that the election was rigged and the voting machines did it. And when I went back to them and said, look, there's no conspiracy theory here. I called this attorney that's representing one of the Proud Boys, and he flat out told me on two occasions, there is no conspiracy. Get away from this stuff. This is dangerous. Tell Tucker to stop.

Oh, I'm sure that's exactly how it happened. This woman worked for Maria Bartiromo for a long time, who obviously is named in the Dominion suit and probably the Smartmatic one as well, and then joined Tucker's show in September of last year, quickly after that testified in the Dominion suit and is now claiming this like total ideological pivot is being totally fetid by the media, given all of these interviews and treated by Nicole Wallace there and by others. We had the element from the New York Times giving these photo shoots as something of a hero, as entirely credible because she's speaking out against Fox News, when of course, all of the incentives in corporate media right now are to speak out against Fox News. So I would take everything that she says with a giant grain of salt. I have a lot more thoughts that I could run through.

But, Ryan, what do you make of her conversation with Wallace? It's jarring to hear kind of progressive language attempt to be applied. Right. Or social justice language attempt to be applied to a Tucker Carlson newsroom. It's like as if the problem with an Andrew Tate interview on Tucker Carlson's show is that it's too many men. The guys were excited about it. Yeah, they need more gender diversity in your celebration of Andrew Tate. Yeah. Like, I don't even know where to go with stuff like that.

Yeah, it's like diversifying the Raytheon boardroom in some ways. It's like, this is still Andrew Tate. Where do you think you're going with this? So I have no problem believing that Tucker Carlson's newsroom is worse than a locker room. I don't. I don't. Like, if I'm on that jury, if you're watching the show, you're like, and she said, I don't think she said it in these clips, but she said elsewhere, she said the people that worked for him were true believers. Yeah. But she said that as an insult. Right. I know. Which is like, well, I don't like their true beliefs. However, what are you saying? Are you?

That you want people who spew the kinds of things they spew on the show but don't believe them? Right. What does that mean about you? And are just doing it cynically for money and ratings? Right. That's the world that you think is appropriate and ethical. That is really the key statement from her because that's why she's being trotted out into Nicole Wallace's show, The New York Times, MSNBC, because she's not a true believer because she sat there and took what we know. She has like 90 recordings.

And she released one of Ted Cruz and Mario Bartiromo yesterday that was pretty thoroughly uninteresting. Ted Cruz saying that 2020 should have a board like they did in 1877. He said that on the Senate floor. Yeah, he said that on the Senate floor. But if you are duplicitous enough to take a paycheck from somebody, record things, pretend to be on the same team for literally years and months, at least when it comes to Tucker, then no, you're not a true believer. You are taking money and power to further a cause that you're uncomfortable with, which is quite a statement in and of itself for the media then to not be like questioning her as to what did you ever believe what do you

believe now and why did you book on these shows that you say are evil for so many years right i just don't see how it's better that you're promoting this stuff not believing in it. Mm-hmm. Well, I don't think... Or, like, I don't... Who cares whether you believe it or not? Like, the product you're producing is what matters. Anyway, just, yeah, it's just rather extraordinary to hear that claim being made that, like, the real problem was that they actually believed the things that they were saying.

God forbid. Well, and can I just, like, there is a really big swath of this country that, like, unfortunately enjoys watching Andrew Tate videos. And if you have followed what Tucker has been doing over the last couple of years, I don't think he would dispute that he runs a newsroom that is comparable to a locker room in some ways. Maybe it would be different when you're actually subpoenaed in a courtroom. You would have to describe your newsroom a little bit differently. But I don't think he would dispute that it's like a masculine environment because a lot of what he talks about is that we've overly feminized places. And he truly, truly believes that, that men don't have the same outlets

for their natural impulses that they used to. And you can disagree with that or not, but he does really believe that. His team really believes that. Or he says it on TV. Yeah, I mean, he definitely believes that. And if you- Right, she's saying that he really does.

Right, yes. And I mean, he absolutely does. And it's consistent with his work over the course of years. And that's why he's interested in Andrew Tate, because Andrew Tate talks about those things. It's not to say he like I don't know, I didn't watch the Andrew Tate thing. It's not to say that he's completely endorsing Andrew Tate. And I would disagree with that if he did. But the point is, it's consistent with his beliefs. And those beliefs are not completely out of touch with the with a chunk of people in America who have zero voice in media.

Everyone in media says this is evil. Andrew Tate, bad. You're bad if you ever watched Andrew Tate. If you ever looked at Andrew Tate, you're also a bigot and a sexist. And if you have one voice in all of the media who's willing to engage with Andrew Tate and do an interview with him, acting like that's the end of the world, I think, is silly. And it's funny to see her just get treated like this by the corporate press. Well, I mean, I think Andrew Tate's as deplorable a figure as you can have. He's facing credible charges of rape and sex trafficking out in Romania, even. To get charged with sex trafficking in in romania yeah almost impossible he even said like

out loud like when when he was going there like yeah he was there because of the loose laws around that yeah so you have to have really done something it's like getting caught speeding on the autobahn so good lord what we can't even imagine what he was what he was up to. But the idea that it would be okay to platform, promote that type of ideology without kind of rebutting it. I think if you want to rebut it, then I think people

should do that because obviously the alternative isn't working. He has spread wildfire around the entire world. But the idea that the only thing you really need to do is make sure you have gender sensitivity and gender diversity in the platforming of it, to me, is just mind-boggling. Yeah, no. Agree on that and totally agree that if you're going to interview him, give him an extremely tough interview and ask all of the questions that need to be asked. But this idea that just to engage with him at all, even though he's like very popular, um, surgingly has a surging popularity at the time of that interview. I mean, that's absurd and out, out of the sort of spirit of journalism.

And I think what I mean about not having a hard time believing that there's a toxic work environment in his office is that if you take the standard corporate HR definition of a, of a toxic work environment, uh, and you just say the things that he says on his show. Oh, 100%. Like his show, like the things that we know he said in public on his show would land any manager in like HR reviews like any day of the week at almost any company in this country. So the idea that there was a work environment that a normal HR department would classify as toxic seems to me rather easy to demonstrate. We'll have to agree to disagree on that point

because I would argue that says more about the normal HR department than... Right, right. But you would agree that it would violate the HR... Oh, totally, yeah. Like the current understanding of what a toxic work environment would be. Right, right. But you would agree that it would violate the HR, like the current understanding of what a toxic work environment would be. Absolutely. Yeah. I think that would probably not be a terribly difficult case to make. Press play on this show. All right. Well, let's move on to Dr. Fauci, who sat for a very long interview in the New York Times that was

published this week. He had some interesting things to say. One of my favorites is, he says, when people say, quote, Fauci shut down the economy, it wasn't Fauci referring to himself in the third person. The CDC was the organization that made those recommendations. I happen to be perceived as the personification

of the recommendations, but show me a school that I shut down and show me a factory that I shut down. Never. I never did. I gave a public health recommendation that echoed the CDC's recommendation and people made a decision based on that. All right. Let's actually just roll right into the We have E2 here. You can make your own decision up based on what Fauci just said there and what Fauci says here. I recommended to the president that we shut the country down. And that was a very difficult decision because I knew it would have serious economic consequences.

All right. So technically not mutually exclusive there. He's saying I recommended to the president that we shut the country down. But you can see how he's much more eager to take credit for having a pivotal voice in those recommendations, for being one of the recommenders that actually mattered and convinced Donald Trump to shut the country down. And then when it's not convenient for him to take credit, he said, well, I don't know, I was just one of the many people making recommendations that would echo the CDC. Ron DeSantis, if he actually does end up running, will love to make hay out of that distinction and say, actually, it wasn't Fauci. It was shut down Trump. Trump's the one that shut down the economy because he had Anthony Fauci in his ear, couldn't stand up to five foot five Anthony Fauci. Yeah, as DeSantis referred to him as an elf that needed to be chucked into the Potomac. And further, they're actually already fighting about this, about the shutdown timeline. DeSantis and Trump.

And DeSantis isn't even a declared candidate. There you go. All right. I have just that intuitive sense of what these Republicans are going to go at each other about. Republican strategists. There you go. But to me, Fauci should just own it. Trying to make a distinction between, okay, yes, we can all agree that Fauci was not a dictator in 2020 and was not able to just, by his own pen, kind of dictate American policy. There was a

process that was involved in Anthony Fauci's kind of public policy ideas becoming the policy ideas that we all followed. And that involved him talking to the president, him talking to the CDC, and him talking to the media and becoming kind of the face of the COVID response. So to me, it would just be so much more helpful as we're thinking through our response to the pandemic,

if he would just say, yeah, these were my recommendations. Here's how I think about them in hindsight. And he can even say, look, in the moment, you're never going to get every single call correctly in an unprecedented scenario. Here's the information that I had, and here's why I made the decision. Here's the reasons I think it was a good decision. Here's the reasons I think it was a good decision. Here's the reasons I think it wasn't. Instead, he's going to get all tangled up in, well, look, man, I was just spitballing.

It was Trump that really kind of ran the show. Or blame the CDC. He keeps blaming the CDC acting as though that his, why did you make the recommendation if it didn't matter, Dr. Fauci? Go ahead. Right, he wants to blame the CDC except when he doesn't want to defer to them when it comes to the origin of the pandemic. Right. Yeah. So no, of course not. And let's put E3

up on the screen. He got into masking as well. And this really, I saw some people reacting to this rightfully with a lot of anger. He says from a broad public health standpoint at the population level, masks work at the margins, maybe 10%. He goes on to say that if you wear like a properly fitted K95, you know, they really do work. That's his take. But again, it's just he's so flippant about saying these things that a couple of years ago were really affecting the daily lives of many, many, many Americans. And here's another one. Like to your point, Ryan, daily lives of many, many, many Americans. And here's another one. Like, to your point, Ryan, he sort of toes the line.

Like, he creeps up to the line of taking some blame and accountability. He says, when asked by The New York Times—this was actually a pretty tough interview, and Fauci at a couple points gets upset with the interviewer, which I think also reflects an incredible sense of entitlement. But he says, we probably should have communicated better that the clinical trials about the vaccines were only powered to look at the effect on clinically recognizable disease, symptomatic disease. So saying, you know, we should have communicated better that the vaccines weren't going to function like vaccines that people think of when they think of the definition of what a vaccine is. So he sort of

flirts with taking some accountability. He says, we probably should have communicated better, and then goes into this dense medical language. And also, here's another quote from the interview. Did we say that the elderly were much more vulnerable? Yes. Did we say it over and over and over again? Yes, yes, yes. But somehow or other, the general public didn't get that feeling that the vulnerable are really, really heavily weighted toward the elderly. So again, he continues to blame the public. You see this over and over in the interview where he's completely saying, listen, we did what we were supposed to do, but the public is just so dumb and angry. He continues to blame divisiveness. He invokes that word over and over again as though it's a totally detached phenomenon from him, that he would have nothing to do with that divisiveness, even though he changed his tune on masks, even though he changed his tune on a number of different issues.

Lab leak, for instance, we have emails that show he's saying things differently in public and in private. He is not willing to grapp of use this language that superficially admits some minor mistakes here and there, but then blames it on the public for being too dumb and too divided to really understand what he was saying. it did break through that the elderly were much more vulnerable than others and also other the morbidly obese was the was the comorbidity that was you know so tightly associated with it which everybody kind of stayed away from including including Fauci for I think sensitivity reasons that backfired on you know for for a lot of people. But I do think that that gets to his kind of his fundamental flaw, which was a lack of trust in the public and a misunderstanding of the kind of government's ability to influence public opinion in an era of social media and divided kind of media loyalties. And so I think what he felt like was, I'm going to err on the side of fudging. I'm going to say that, you know, herd immunity admitted that he lied about masks early on because he said

he was nervous that the public would panic and would go out and buy up all the masks. And so he kind of lied about their effectiveness early, undermining his own authority. And I think he didn't lean into the vulnerability of the elderly population more because he's saying he regrets it, but he didn't do it because he was nervous that if he said that, that some people would read it as, oh, well, that population is more vulnerable. Therefore, I'm less vulnerable. Therefore, I'm not going to care about any of these precautions. And so he went overboard and he erred on the side of telling everybody that they're more vulnerable than they actually might have been. And then that ends up undercutting his authority in the eyes of a lot of people. the reasons that people interpreted them as not saying the elderly were the most vulnerable over and over again is because the guidelines that he recommended and that the CDC put out treated

everybody as though they were just as vulnerable as the elderly and locked everyone down and didn't do a whole lot of isolating vulnerable populations for, in some cases, sensitivity reasons. But anyway, basically everybody was lumped into that category. We do have one more on one of Ryan's hobby horses here from the interview. I'll put up Josh Rogin's tweet here. Yeah, this is E4. He started talking about the lab leak. Fauci says there, this quote is actually really funny,

he agrees that it was not, he says, all intel agencies, quote, agree that this was not an engineered virus. He says the DNI assessment says, quote, most assessed with low confidence, quote, probably not engineered. He also says if it escaped a lab, even if it did escape a lab, quote, that ain't a lab leak. What did you make of that, Ryan? So his argument is that if somebody went to a cave, you know, a couple hundred or a couple thousand miles away from Wuhan, collected bat samples, got infected doing that work, came back to the lab, left the lab, went to, went around Wuhan and spread the virus, that that's not a lab leak. I think what he means by a lab leak, which is actually disturbing if this is where his mind goes,

because it means that it's something he's thought a lot about. I would hope so. He was funding it. But then, right, why are you continuing to fund it? What he, it seems to think of as a lab leak is that you are specifically engineering a kind of highly pathogenic virus and then that leaks out. Right. and because of poor kind of PPE that you get infected and then your workers leave, that that's somehow not a lab leak. Yeah. Which is – that's one of the most frightening things I've heard because if he's like – if public policy officials and politicians are coming to him and coming to the NIH in general and saying, look, we want to make sure that there are no lab leaks going on when it comes to the work that you're doing around here.

And his mind goes to a place, oh, no, don't worry. There's no lab leaks. Just maybe a couple of researchers getting infected and spreading viruses that they're working on and producing pandemics. But that's not a lab leak. And if you don't know how his mind is working, you don't know to ask that follow-up question. All you hear is, oh, we're good. It's incredible because he even talks in this interview about his back and forth with Rand Paul on gain of function, the definition of gain of function. And it's the same tactic. He's doing the same thing with the lab leak definition that he did with the gain of function definition. He tries to exhaust the interviewer by filibustering with these completely abstruse, like medical definitions of what is, what isn't, and like

how this is, you know, really semantically, not technically gain of function, not technically a lab leak. And all of it is just like this incredible cover for things we don't, we still don't have answers from him about. And for him to just sit there and say, you know, if anything, well, all we did wrong was underestimate the idiocy of the American public. I just think it's like unbelievable. And if I were anyone close to Dr. Fauci, I would, I would recommend that he stopped doing interviews at this point, because the more he talks, the more fodder there is to just realize the well that this is springing from is one that is very much, and I understand, listen, like he's been attacked more than anyone,

I think for some good reason, but just psychologically, you're going to feel like you're in trench warfare and you have to lash out at everyone. It's not a good look. Right. Not a good look at all. A new report from Michael Schellenberg, if we put this first element up here, called United Nations Harvard and Facebook Google Launch Push for Censorship Worldwide. Emily, this is something you wanted to talk about. What do you find in here? Yeah, well, we have a lot of conversations about the dangers of exporting classical liberalism from the Western world elsewhere. And I can't think of a better example of that and how that happens in 2023 than the Schellenberger story that broke as we were preparing yesterday's show. Let me just read from his lead here. He writes, the United Nations is training people worldwide to demand censorship by social media platforms of their fellow citizens for, quote, potentially harmful content. At least one U.S. government-funded group, the Atlantic Council, is involved. Now, this U.N. program, as Schellenberger reports,

is hilariously called, quote, social media four-piece with the number four, not actually spelling out the word. I guess that makes it a little bit more hip. It's a pilot program for pro-censorship activists based in Bosnia, Herzegovina, Colombia, Indonesia, and Kenya. So those countries are like their test cases that the UN and UNESCO are all using social media for peace, again, forepiece, to export. It's also funded by the EU, according to the UNESCO website. It had some online meetings for the censorship workers in Kenya and Colombia, both this week and last week, according to Schellenberger's report.

The UN effort, as he continues, emphasizes research and, quote, monitoring, but as in the US, the explicit goal is to pressure social media platforms to censor disfavored voices. I actually went and looked on the website for this effort to pull some quotes for myself because it's as bad as you would expect it sounds, right? Like some of this stuff is really legitimate. And Matt Taibbi this week actually published a very good long essay by somebody who worked reasonably in this disinformation space for a very long time, but has come to be disillusioned with the efforts to actually track disinformation because it's turned into a weapon. people who disagree with everyone else, who disagree with their perspectives on economics,

on everything from A to Z by increasing that definition, inflating that definition of what constitutes misinformation and disinformation simply to alternative facts, facts that they disagree with. And so there is a really, there's a right way, of course, to combat propaganda and on global scale. Absolutely, there's nothing wrong with helping people do that. That's not what this is. That's not what the entire censorship industrial complex is doing. They're able to couch it in really friendly language. But listen, this is from their website.

Social media are increasingly used as an information source in electoral processes. This means that while they enable greater access to information, they can also be used to distort the information ecosystem in a divisive manner and influence voters with manipulative or deceptive messages. All right, manipulative or deceptive, that is doing a whole lot of work. That can range from somebody doing what is actually manipulative and deceptive. For instance, who's the I forget the name, Robert Mackey, the guy who just I think was was wrongfully punished, overly punished for putting out a meme saying that you can vote for Hillary Clinton by texting this number, et cetera, et cetera. Listen, I think that is terrible. I think that's exactly the kind of thing that we should crack down on. Do I think it's as big of a deal as his sentence? No, I think that's disproportionate with its harm. But I do think that stuff is legitimately harmful. And you could consider that, quote, manipulative or deceptive, as UNESCO's language says here. But you can also talk about how we

were told the Hunter Biden laptop was manipulative and deceptive in the wake of it being reported by the New York Post in 2020 and then turning out to be true. For the most part, everything has been confirmed from that laptop, the reporting on it. So I think this is just a great case study in how now the sort of center-left, the elite center-left, has co-opted these institutions and is using them to spread these classically liberal Western values, which have now been distorted into outright censorship. If you take the American pride in our First Amendment, which Prince Harry, for instance, has said, oh, and he helps like the Aspen Institute on censorship issues. It's like, well, in America, you have this weird thing called

the First Amendment. If you take things like the First Amendment and our longtime pride in the First Amendment and the fact that you used to have the old school ACLU types having a decent voice in the American media and go to where we are today, what we're taking and sending to other countries, because you, of course, remember the US is the top funder of the United Nations, billions of dollars a year. It's like a fifth of their annual budget is from money that was given by the United States. So we're funding this. We're funding this exportation of values abroad. That used to sound really great to people and to the blob in particular, but this is just a great example of how badly it has gone wrong that we are now going to be paying for and training people in other countries to crack down

on speech that threatens power in other countries. This is going to go south really quickly. It's going to go wrong in a number of ways. I predict we'll be back here talking about how it's gone wrong in a number of ways in places like Kenya, not too far from now. But the point remains that there's this instinct amid populist uprisings in the West to say elites have a responsibility to crack down and control. And I think that's what really is off-putting to people about everything they hear at Davos and out of the mouth of Klaus Schwab, because there's a lot of anxiety among elites. There's a lot of anxiety among populists or people who share populist sentiments because the world feels like a really dark place right now. Those instincts could be channeled in more democratic ways or those instincts can be channeled in more authoritarian ways. And what we're seeing right now is an exploitation of the good democratic infrastructure of the West for authoritarian purposes. So, Ryan, you've been

following this stuff, obviously, for years. When I talk about the exploitation of America... Brian, you're about to talk about, I think, some of the biggest news of the week, despite the fact that it hasn't gotten much attention in the media. The president resigned. By that, I mean the shadow president, Susan Rice. What have you got? And so Susan Rice will be in her role as director of the Democratic Policy Committee for the next month. But that means that the president is in the process. She actually

announced that she was stepping down on the same day that Don Lemon and Tucker Carlson were fired. And I think, you know, when it comes to kind of historical consequence, her departure will actually have much more meaning and significance down the road, probably than either of theirs. Because, theirs. Because we've seen plenty of people leave Fox News. They build their own platforms. Fox News finds new people. CNN will be CNN without Don Lemon. But the choice of who directs Biden's Democratic policy over the remaining 18 months of the back half of his first term is going to determine everything from immigration policy, gun control, the implementation of the climate provisions and the Inflation Reduction Act,

expanding access to abortion services for people who are in states where it's banned, infrastructure rollout. Like, there is an unprecedented, really, amount of money kind of in the pipeline that can be directed, you know, toward pursuing a Biden agenda, but it's insanely difficult to do in this country. Like, you would not believe how hard it is to just spend money. Like, you know, the Tea Party and Freedom Caucus types probably think that, state, and federal agencies, actually doing things in this country is getting increasingly difficult. And it's something that kind of, you know, Tucker Carlson would talk about on his show, that like it's a country that has a hard time doing things anymore. And when you travel abroad and you see other infrastructure, other airports, other

ways that kind of developed countries have managed to actually build things, you're like, what are we, what's going on in the United States? And one of the main things going on is that nobody cares about policy anymore. And so who he puts in this position is going to be extraordinarily important. This isn't the kind of thing that a lot of people on YouTube are going to go crazy about sharing. But that's the nice thing about how we're only putting a couple elements up. We can do things that actually matter to people and not worry about how much they're going to click on YouTube. So I'll just run through some of the candidates that I've been hearing from people kind of in and out of the White House who are being considered. The one who is kind of campaigning the hardest for it

so far is your old buddy Neera Tanden, who is one of the most polarizing figures in the Democratic Party. She was nominated to run OMB, former Hillary Clinton loyalist, ran CAP, Center for American Progress. She was nominated to run the OMB, but ran into bipartisan resistance in the Senate. One of the only, I think maybe the first Biden appointee not to get Senate confirmed. They found her a job anyway as an advisor to the White House. She was recently promoted to staff secretary, which is a kind of lame sounding name, but it's actually a very influential position. You're in basically every meeting and you're controlling kind of the paper flow. And so that gives you an enormous amount of power over the agenda.

And so she is said to be the one that is kind of pursuing this the hardest, which could also cut against her because this is a city where like filled with like super ambitious people who are supposed to pretend that they're not. And if you don't mask that, people don't like that. And so the kind of try-too-hard aspect might undermine it. Also, the job of DBC director is to kind of build coalitions for a policy agenda and then implement it. And in order to build coalitions, you have to be able to kind of work well with people. And she has an enormous number of supporters. She has an enormous number of detractors. So that may end up hurting her. So a second candidate who's being kicked around, Tom Perez, who was former Obama labor secretary, then became chair of the DNC. This is so heavily a kind of managerial and executive role that you

would think his handling of the DNC and also of the Iowa caucuses could come back to haunt him here. He bungled the Iowa caucuses so badly, Democrats don't do an Iowa caucuses anymore. It was that bad. If you remember, they had these crony contractors come in and build an app. The app completely melted down. Nobody had any idea who won. Pete Buttigieg goes on stage and declares that he won. Tom Perez is nowhere to be seen. He just kind of tries to blame Iowa. Iowa folks blame Tom Perez. Just a complete nightmare. So he thought about running for Maryland. Governor didn't. So he's in line for that. We've got Tara McGinnis, who is also somebody from CAP, but she was on the kind of political

side of CAP. So there's a line between the C3 and the C4. She was somebody who is kind of known. She worked with Jeff, is it Zients or Zients? I can never. I think it's Zients. So she worked with Jeff Zients to try to right the ship when I can never. I think it's Zients. So she worked with Jeff Zients to try to right the ship when Obamacare blew up. You remember when they launched that, they launched their marketplace. And so she and Jeff Zients kind of worked hand in hand, you know, fixing that and getting that moving. And out of her experience, she wrote a book about technology and government and how to make government actually work. And out of her experience, she wrote a book about technology and government and how to make government actually work. And so because Zients has worked so closely with her,

he understands what she's capable of. And so I think that she might be kind of a dark horse candidate for this. Because if Biden decides what I actually want is for my agenda to actually be implemented, for the money to go out the door efficiently and quickly, and rather than it get tangled up in scandal and kind of palace intrigue, then he would go with somebody like Tara McGinnis because her reputation in Washington is not flashy but she's going to really get the job done. Another one who's similar to that is this woman named Ann O'Leary

who since the Clinton administration has been kind of this kind of powerhouse policy person from the Clinton world she was Gavin Newsom's chief of staff you might have seen her fighting publicly with him now because she was the lawyer for Walgreens, which was trying to write its policy for how they were going to give out the kind of abortion medication. And Gavin Newsom started attacking her publicly, kind of weird, like his old chief of staff. She was trying to like, it sounded like she was trying to get Walgreens to just follow

the law, but also get medication abortion out. That's a complete side note. People don't think that she would want to move to DC for this job, but if Biden was looking for somebody who's good at doing stuff, that'd be somebody. And the last one we can talk about is Sarah Bianchi. So she's the deputy U.S. trade flunky underneath them to sort of like babysit and watch them and make sure that like they're not really going to do all these things that they say they're going to do. And so Catherine Tai, the U.S. trade representative, is very good. And so Bianchi, the deputy, is somebody who feels like comes from more of a corporate background. She was literally the lead lobbyist for Airbnb. So Biden talks about being the kind of most pro-labor president in history. And I think it would be tough if he had a gig company lobbyist running his domestic policy.

But that doesn't mean she's out of the running. So, but we'll see. So these are the kind of folks, there are a couple others, but I don't think there is, I'll have a story on this in the Intercept later, today probably, I don't think there is much in the running as these ones. Who do you think is like probably, is it Neera Tanden? So Neera, what everybody says is that Neera has the inside track that she's been gunning for this for a couple of years. That's crazy. Yeah.

And the only question is, is she too polarizing? Yes. I mean, the answer is yes. But does Zients and Biden think that she's too polarizing for the role? I mean, after what happened with the OMB nomination, you'd think that would be completely glaringly obvious to them. You would think. I can't believe she's even in there. I mean, I can believe she's in the running

because she comes with so much clout in Democratic circles in Washington, D.C. And so, therefore, she has a lot of people who will lobby on her behalf and say, I'd love to work with Neera. Like, bring Neera in. You don't necessarily want to upset Neera, et cetera, et cetera.

But, man, that would be interesting. I actually hope that she is it because I would love to watch that. Like from the outside, that sounds hilarious. It could be some fun drama. Could be some very fun drama. Yeah, and maybe the White House thinks that putting a thumb in the eye of the left is like a good thing electorally to kind of show their independence. We're not, Bernie might have endorsed us,

but don't worry about that. We don't care anything about Bernie. Well, that's a good point. If heading into 2024, that's the direction that they think they should tack in that will be most beneficial to them, then Neera Tanden is your gal. Yes, there you go.

We'll see. We'll see. Oh my gosh. That's one to follow. I know I'll be following for the schadenfreude because Lord knows we're giving you plenty of it from the right. Yeah. And I think from the right, that's probably a best case scenario for you, too, because then if if you get caught up in a lot of palace intrigue, then less of the IRA money is going to go out, less the the Biden agenda that was passed through Congress then ends up getting implemented. So I guess that would be a win for you guys.

I mean, depends on what happens, what gets stalled. Plus you're Nancy Mace and you've got a clean energy factory in your district that you actually want this stuff to get out to. You need those votes. Yeah. That's funny. Well, thank you so much for tuning in to today's edition of CounterPoints in the middle of this absolutely insane week. We appreciate everybody watching.

We appreciate everybody listening. There's so many stories that we'll continue to follow up on because they aren't going anywhere soon. So if you're in the media and you're watching this, just cross your fingers and hope you aren't fired this week because it's coming for everyone. There you go.

We'll see you back here next Wednesday. See you later. 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 Lott. And this is Season 2 of the War on Drugs podcast. Yes, sir.

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 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Over the years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned no town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've heard from hundreds of people across the country with

an unsolved murder in their community. I was calling about the murder of my husband. The murderer is still out there. Each week, I investigate a new case. If there is a case we should hear about, call 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast.