Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 5/24/23: DeSantis Launches Tonight w/ Elon On Twitter, Debt Bomb Looms, Bankruptcies Spike, TikTok Montana Ban, Fox News Woke Debate, Workers Vs Amazon, Meta Record Fines, Kissinger Revealed

Episode Date: May 24, 2023

Krystal and Emily discuss DeSantis planning to launch his campaign this evening in a Twitter Spaces conversation with Elon Musk, the debt ceiling conversation "Nowhere near a deal", Bankruptcies spiking in America, Montana banning TikTok in their state, Emily and Krystal debate if Fox News has gone woke with the pronoun rules in their New York office, Krystal looks into workers using "Choke Point Organizing" to make Amazon pay, Emily looks into how Meta was hit with a record fine over data privacy, and we're joined by guest Nick Turse (@nickturse) to talk about his piece in The Intercept on Henry Kissinger's Secret War in Cambodia.Nick Turse's piece: https://theintercept.com/2023/05/23/henry-kissinger-cambodia-bombing-survivors/To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Happy Wednesday. Crystal, we apparently dressed for like a baptism. Twin seas. Totally accidental, but we're just already like mind-melding on the same wavelength here. We're in sync. Although we'll probably disagree like nine times out of ten today, maybe? I don't know. Possibly. We'll see. It's Wednesday.

Crystal feels a little out of sorts in the counterpoints. She doesn't know what to do with herself. I am a little confused. She keeps calling me Sager. It sort of feels like I'm doing like dream world breaking points. Like the set is like a little bit off. It's like not quite the right name. The host is a little bit different.

But no, I had my kids' kindergarten graduation yesterday. So Ryan filled in for me yesterday. I'm here today. so it all works. I'm happy to be here. Well, it's a big day. Lots going on. We have Ron DeSantis making it official tonight. We've got all kinds of early previews of what the campaign is looking like, the pitch to

voters, the pitch to donors, all that good stuff. We also have debt ceiling, I don't know that I call them updates, maybe like non-updates. Yeah, updates about the lack of updates. That's pretty much where we're at. Yeah. We also have some new numbers about how much the American people are already not feeling great about the economy. And of course, the whole debt ceiling showdown makes that even more precarious. We've got the first state to outright ban downloads of TikTok, and TikTok is suing to try to push back on that. That's very interesting debate there. And Fox News under fire. This is this one I wanted to talk to you about,

because I don't have a sense of whether this is like real fallout for Fox or whether this is like a blip on the radar. But reporter Mary Margaret Olihan revealed they're sort of like behind the scenes woke policies with regard to gender identity in particular. And there's a bit of a backlash. So we will go through all of that. Lots to talk about. Well, let's start with the big news of the day, which is that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is going to announce that he's running for president tonight at 6 p.m. on Twitter in a conversation with Elon Musk and I believe David Sachs as well. He's going to be moderating the conversation. Pretty fascinating. DeSantis is going to follow that up with an interview on Fox News with Trey Gowdy. They're going to release a launch video and he's going to start visiting

those states, early voting states, Iowa, South Carolina, New Hampshire over Memorial Day weekend. So it's a really big day, obviously, in the Republican primary field. Crystal, the Twitter move is fascinating. Yeah. Just nobody saw that part coming. It had been rumored that DeSantis was going to launch on the 24th on Wednesday, and then it comes out of left field yesterday. He's going to be announcing in a conversation with Elon Musk, moderated by David Sachs on Twitter. I think we can put the first element up on the screen here. This is a video. This is the launch video, part of a launch video that I think this was from yesterday, right? Yeah, this was from yesterday. This was shared by his wife as like a little bit of like a quick teaser and getting people to text in,

like, you know, to sign up for their list. So let's take a look at what that is. They call it faith because in the face of darkness, you can see that brighter future, a faith that our best days lay ahead of us. But is it worth the fight? Do I have the courage? Is it worth the sacrifice? America has been worth it every single time. So that's what we got so far. Go and put the next piece up because this has some of the details about the Twitter thing. And then I want to get your thoughts and I'll tell you what I think. So they say DeSantis will launch his presidential bid with Elon Musk.

They're doing that like audio chat thing feature that Twitter has, which I've actually never really used, but is popular among a lot of people. He is going to be in that conversation with Musk, moderated by David Sachs, who has been very supportive of him in the past. He's one of the hosts of the All In podcast. I mean, OK, so there's a couple layers here. First of all, you know, part of the reason that the right was excited about Elon taking over Twitter was the idea like, oh, we're going to make it a neutral platform, neutral free speech platform. I mean, the free speech part is long out the window. The neutral part has also been out the window, but just makes it really clear here.

And I was just thinking about like if the shoe were on the other foot, if it was like Jack Dorsey launching Joe Biden's campaign on Twitter, the right would be freaking out about how unfair this is. And I mean, to me, it's just a revelation that whatever Elon said about his principles, free speech, that that was the core of what he was all about on Twitter. It increasingly looks like he's just using it as like a multibillion dollar platform to advance his own political project and agenda. Well, see, this is really interesting because he was retweeting Tim Scott's like announcement stuff this week, too. And I wonder if he partially sees this as a business opportunity. Now, whether that's better or worse is an entirely fair question. But is he saying I can use the Republican primary to create intrigue and drive people to Twitter by using it as a platform where some of these debates happen? So whether he becomes

fully on board with the DeSantis team, that I think would be, that would be genuinely like, yes, you're using this platform in a way that's like just your own. But already when you're the one launching the campaign, whether he outright endorses him or not, of course that's going to raise a lot of questions about like, okay, well, how are you using this influential platform among elites, at least in order to help the candidates that you like? And I think that's you know, like that is a very reasonable question. And we don't have the insights into Twitter. It's not the transparent

place that he argued it would be. We also just had the specter of him basically, you know, intervening on behalf of Erdogan to help him get reelected in Turkey. So that that is still ongoing. They went to a runoff. So there's so there's that piece of it. The other piece of it, Emily, though, is I just wonder what you think is a political move of DeSantis launching on Twitter, because Biden won the Democratic primary and ultimately the general election with a very famous mantra, which is that Twitter is not real life. Right. One of the knocks on DeSantis is that he has trouble, like, relating to people and just sort of, like, interpersonal reactions, interactions.

The other knock on DeSantis is that he's way too online. Mm-hmm. And this is a very, it is a very way too online, very insular move, in my opinion, for him to start his campaign this way. Yeah, I would think it was really like it actually kind of reminds me of something we see on the left a lot, which is just super, super online behavior that drives candidates to make questionable decisions. Right. Because you're you're trying to placate a very particular slice of the public that's actually fairly out of step and culturally different than the broader public. So I don't disagree with that at all.

I actually think it's interesting, your point about free speech and neutrality and the conservative ambition for Twitter as being a neutral place is fascinating because free speech used to be our standard of what neutrality is. And now conservatives see one institution, all the other institutions, YouTube, whatever, aligned against them. And so one institution comes along and flirts and says, I can do even better than just free speech. I can create a space for conservative speech and promote conservative speech in the so-called business Silicon Valley mainstream. And everyone's like, hell yeah. And it's totally different than what you said. What you said is exactly right. It's totally different than what you said. Like it's what you said is exactly right.

It's totally different than just a neutral free speech platform. Right. And people want that. Conservatives want that. And I think that is to an extent telling. But it also speaks to that like total desperation for just something one place that is going to be supportive and is going to let conservatives say what they want, et cetera, et cetera. That is totally different than free speech. Yeah, it is. I mean, and there were always like obvious. This was clear if you were looking for the science from the beginning. I always talked about Mike Lindell launched his quote unquote free speech platform. And it was like, but no taking the Lord's name in vain, no cursing, like it had a very specific set of rules for what he was defining as free speech. And so this has always been about who's going to

have control over the censorship, not really over free speech, because, again, any idea that this is really, truly a free speech platform, I think, is out the window. Let's talk a little bit more, though, about DeSantis and what his pitch is. Put the next piece up on the screen here, because I think this is kind of fascinating reporting from CNN. And we've seen a little bit of this New York Times reporting as well. This is, to be clear, what DeSantis is putting out to these outlets. And the headline is how DeSantis plans to jolt the GOP presidential primary and seize back the narrative. A lot of this, Emily, appears to be his pitch that he is more electable. And also there was an interesting addition in this reporting that one of the things he's leaning into is the fact that if Trump were to get elected,

he's instantly a lame duck because he can only serve four more years since he's already served one term as president. So his pitch to the base and specifically to donors is if you elect Trump, if he's able to get in there, number one, I think he's less electable. So if he gets in there, though, he's instantly a lame duck. You have to go back to having none of the advantages of incumbency and start from scratch the next time around. Whereas if I get elected, then you're much more likely to have eight years of a conservative in the presidency. So that's part of what he is leaning into in terms of the case he's making. That's a really good point. And again, this gets into the question you asked about what kind of

campaign Ron DeSantis is going to run. I actually think Trump was very online and that's part of the problem in 2020 is that like he gets so in the Twitter bubble, so in the social media bubble. One thing that's interesting is there was a Harris poll this week. It was conducted in mid-May. It found Elon Musk has relatively high favorability, higher than Trump, higher than Biden. He's at 47%. Ron DeSantis is in third place at 45% in that poll. Then it's Bernie Sanders with 42%. So I think there is, like, Elon Musk is probably more than just a super online figure in the rest of the country. There are people who genuinely really admire him for reasons we may disagree with and counter, but he is a fairly popular figure nationwide. Obviously, just a

plurality, not a majority in the favorability race there. But it's going to be really tough, I think, for Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump both to be in this race and to have to resist the temptation of just running for a segment of conservative Twitter or truth social or whatever it is. Because now the entire political class lives and breathes online. And it just through osmosis like soaks into everybody's perception of voters. And that is just so, so dangerous. And so it's definitely a challenge for Ron DeSantis moving forward. He's obviously like the Twitter, the the a lot of his legislation in Florida is has made a lot of conservative Twitter very happy. Right. He's pretty popular in his own state. But whether or not that translates

on a national level, a very different question. What do you think of his electability pitch? Because I see two issues with it. Number one, it's not clear to me. I think donors definitely care about it. No doubt about it. And he's going to have plenty of money behind him. That's not going to be an issue. But it's not clear to me, the Republican base, that this is anywhere close to their number one priority.

The other issue for him, I think, with the electability pitch is in that same Harvard Harris poll that you were mentioning, Republican voters are very divided on which one they think between DeSantis and Trump is more likely to defeat Joe Biden. So it's one thing if it's really clear to people like, oh, this is the guy, if you want to win, this is the guy. And then you go to that secondary question of, OK, but is that the top priority for the Republican base? But they don't see it the way that he sees it. Right. No, that's a really good point. And here's another, we can put A3 up. This is another part of his pitch. It actually kind of echoes of Trump here. DeSantis envisions shaping 7-2 conservative majority on Supreme Court. That's a Washington

Post headline. And so remember how crucial Donald Trump's Supreme Court, his Supreme Court promises were in the 2016 primary and then in the general when you had all of these like never Trump conservatives saying, I'm not voting for this guy. But then he rolls out the Leonard Leo list of judges that he would put on the Supreme Court. And that solidifies the support of the conservative movement. Here you have DeSantis saying, we're going to shape the court to a 7-2 conservative majority. Obviously, that would be the goal of a Democrat president if they were in a similar situation,

be the goal of any Republican president for the most part, unless it's someone very moderate, but that he is specifically already prioritizing the court is very telling. But that's, again, you have this question of Donald Trump having about 30 percent of really solid support in the Republican Party. 30 percent of Republican voters are Trump voters. They may only vote Republican because of Donald Trump. They may have voted Democrat before, and now they vote Donald Trump. That is an unmovable probably 30 percent. What DeSantis' pitch has always been is that he in Florida is appealing to those voters while also being appealing to suburban is split between Tim Scott, Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, whoever the hell else decides to get into this race.

Yeah. That makes, you know, most Republican voters voted against Donald Trump in the primaries in 2016, which is something that people forget a lot. And now, if you're splitting it up again and Donald Trump is not going to lose that 30%, they love him and they probably, a big section of them are probably like old union Democratic voters who are not going to vote for another regular politician. There's just nothing you can do to winnow away at that number.

And that's a real challenge for anybody, let alone DeSantis. Yeah. And I think I mean, and it's not just that he has that solid 30 percent. There's like 80 percent or 90 percent of the Republican Party that's open to voting. So he's, you know, in a much stronger position than he was in 2016. And then you have all of these candidates dividing the field. complicating factor for him is the fact that he just signed into law the six-week abortion ban, which, you know, if part of your pitch is, hey, I can appeal to suburbanites in a way that Trump has completely turned them off, well, you have just completely muddied that issue because this is the, you know, issue that abortion has become the most animating issue among suburban voters in particular, suburban women in particular. So I also think that that undercuts the electability argument. But, you know, I want to make the best case we can for him. I think that he has already shown, I think his team has

already shown a lot of competence. They've shown themselves to be really nimble, you know, in terms of Iowa, that visit he had recently where Trump pulled out and DeSantis then shows up and kind of is kind of like a little jab at Trump. And ultimately, you know, the pace of this race could be set in those early states. There's reporting this morning about how they want to use their money to really flood the zone in terms of organizers into Iowa, New Hampshire and the other early state primaries and caucuses. So that's their theory of the case.

And, you know, right now I think it looks like a real uphill climb, but you know, it's going to be a long primary season and you never know what's going to happen, Emily. You never know what's going to happen. And my quick final thought on this is that the guy is extremely popular in Florida. That has genuine, like generally been a fairly organic, he barely won his governor's race against Andrew Gillen. It was just by a hair he won that race. He then started, you know, governing in a way that was very alien to a lot of people in the Republican Party, has been, you know, in the sort of Republican establishment circles, very controversial, the things that Ron DeSantis has done. But in his state, his popularity is high. He has passed a lot

of legislation and he has a good messaging strategy on that legislation that makes it popular where the media says don't say gay. Well, Florida is genuinely split on whether or not they like that bill, despite what the media says. It's actually fairly popular, way more than the media says. And so to be able to sell that despite the media noise saying one thing, to be able to have a messaging strategy that cuts to what voters think and what they want to hear, I think that is a sign that he definitely has political talents that people probably underestimate on the national scale. So it's going to be a very interesting primary, to say the least, and an important primary. So as we figure out where the Republican Party is going.

Yeah, for sure. And we'll be watching closely his announcement tonight. I think Sagar and I might jump on and do a little instant react. So so stay tuned for that. You're making Sagar work today on a Wednesday. Sagar is he's nonstop, man. He lives in that suit. He's just like throws on the casual clothes over it so you can rip them off at any moment and be ready to jump in front of a camera. So no, he's unstoppable. All right. Let's talk about whatever we know about the debt ceiling at this point. As you guys know, we are hurtling, barreling rapidly towards the supposed to drop dead date, which is June 1st. I'll tell you a little bit more about there are some questions over whether they could push that out further,

but we'll get to that in a minute. For now, let's say June 1st is when you actually run out of money and have to start making choices about what you pay when you actually go into default, when you have all of these potentially catastrophic consequences that we are all concerned about. So Jake Sherman had some reporting yesterday from an internal Republican House caucus meeting. He's got some details here about what they are saying amongst themselves. Go ahead and put this up on the screen. Speaker McCarthy just told House Republicans, he says, inside a closed House GOP meeting, I need you all to hang with me on the debt limit. Quote, we are nowhere near a deal yet. Very confidence inspiring.

He goes on to say, put this next piece up, Colvin. I told the president three things, no clean debt limit, no raising taxes, spend less money. Remember where we were. They refused to negotiate. We owe Garrett Graves and Patrick McHenry. They're the ones who've been negotiating a round of applause. They made a mistake. He's talking about the Democrats to not negotiate. Let's say stay strong together. He goes on to say McCarthy showed a video with a chronology of Democrats saying they wouldn't negotiate. So their own little like propaganda piece to say, look, we rolled them.

They already caved, which, you know, hard to deny that that's the case. And then another important note here. Put this next piece up on the screen, Colvin. McCarthy got back up from the right in the. McCarthy got back up from the right in the closed, got back up from the right in the closed House GOP meeting. Gates said McCarthy's tone was pitch perfect and Scott Perry also concurred. So that shows a sort of unified Republican House caucus in terms of the demands that they were making. One thing I'll point out here, I mean, saying no raising taxes, that's an issue for Democrats.

And it is very hard to see how this all gets resolved because the ground that Republicans have staked out and that they sort of have to stake out in order to remain unified since you have the House Freedom Caucus taking relatively extreme positions is wildly unacceptable to Democrats. So they have not only called for, you know, in nominal terms, not just accounting for inflation, but in nominal terms, they want spending cuts. That's makes it, you know, very aggressive cuts. They also want to increase the budget for the military. They want to cut spending to the IRS, which actually puts a further hole in the budget because IRS agents help to bring in additional revenue. And so you've left yourself this very limited pool of funds, of programs that you can cut, and that would require really dramatic cuts, not only to social safety net programs, but also to what has been Biden's signature program, the Inflation Reduction Act, which is going to be a really red line for him,

also for House Democrats, for Senate Democrats. So and as he mentions here, they're not putting any taxes on the table. There was also reporting about Biden was saying, hey, let's work into this, like negotiating more prescription drug prices. McCarthy was like, no, we don't want to do anything that's actually good in this whole situation. So they put that off the table. They don't want to close the carried interest loophole. They certainly don't want to roll back any of the Trump tax cuts that largely went to wealthy incorporations. So even though they continue to talk, I just don't know how they actually find some sort of meeting of the minds here that's going to be acceptable. Oh, I don't think there's any way. But although Mitch McConnell did

say yesterday, you know, everybody calm down. They're going to come to a deal, which was fairly interesting because the can has really been kicked over to McCarthy. McConnell has really taken a backseat. Yeah, McConnell's like, all right, dude, good luck. And McConnell was out and injured through a lot of this. He was in the hospital or he was back in Kentucky because he had a fall. But Kevin McCarthy took the reins on this. profiles of how he has held his conference together, despite having this insanely slim majority where people have no incentive, really, to get along with him because they can, you know, if you're the Freedom Caucus, even if you're the moderates, you can, like, do so much stuff on your

own and message on your own and not be unified. And that could still end up happening. We can't count the chickens before they hatch because that's very much still possible. But the level of unity in a very divided conference, in a very difficult situation. One thing that I have heard from Republican circles and especially Freedom Caucus circles is that they think that a lot of these differences were ironed out during the speaker battle in January. And so when they came to loggerheads then and fought so bitterly over whether Kevin McCarthy would be the speaker, they kind of figured out how to get along. And that's helping them now. Again, this could still blow up in everyone's face, but I've been scratching my head and trying to figure out why on earth Joe Biden ever came to the table from a purely strategic standpoint. Like the moral and

ideological questions aside, it makes absolutely no sense that he started negotiating because there is an impasse. Bottom line, there's no compromise. His whole position has been the worst of all worlds in terms of just any sort of trying to get strategic leverage. If you were going to negotiate from the beginning, you should have just negotiated from the beginning. The worst thing you could do is say absolutely no negotiations and then completely cave and negotiate. In my opinion, what they should have done from the beginning is continue to hold out the very clear possibility of 14th Amendment or some other workaround, because that really signals to them, like, listen, we don't have to give you anything. And, you know, also, in my opinion, they should actually exercise one of these options so we never have to deal with this nonsense again, which is truly dangerous and potentially catastrophic. I mean, people can lose their jobs like millions of people can lose their jobs.

You could have the whole global financial system completely collapse, really damaging to America's standing in the world. Treasury bonds are used to backstop like every big corporate transaction around the world. So this is really dangerous stuff that they're playing with here. And not only that, but Democrats could have lifted the debt ceiling on their own back when they had control before they lost the House. And they just didn't do it. That, to me, in terms of, you know, they can't see three inches in front of their faces. And they were so worried about giving the Republicans some talking point about like, oh, Democrats love debt, that they've now risked the entire global financial economy. I mean, listen, Republicans are the hostage takers, so they're to blame in my view. But Democrats just never are able to strategize effectively and actually get

out from under these problems. And I think part of it is not just that they didn't want to give Republicans a talking point. I think part of it is also that they sort of calculated that this would be bad for the Republican Party, the specter of them holding them hostage and all of that. And based on the polling, it's not clear that the messaging is even working out for them. But you know, I think I think politicians on both sides sort of like these kinds of crises because they think they can leverage them for their own political end. And it's really grotesque. So great point.

And particularly one thing I think is genuinely worth thinking about if you're sitting at the DNC right now is how incredibly their advantage with the media has started to become a disadvantage in ways that they don't anticipate. about it in the New York Times recently, those negotiations really went poorly for the Tea Party Republicans, who felt like they had the wind at their back and were doing great and giving the voters what they wanted, and they were going to come out on top because this was the libertarian moment, as Time had on their cover. It did not work out that way, and in large part because the media heavily, heavily, heavily sided with Democrats, and on government shutdown stuff. Average voters hate that. If you're someone who maybe leans right, votes Republican sometimes, votes Democrat sometimes, aren't paying super close attention to the news, what you're going to instinctively hate

is the government not working, like things just not happening and people holding stuff hostage for ideological reasons. You don't care. You want things to work and you're disappointed when they don't. And so that's a built-in disadvantage to being obstructionist, period, even if there are ideological reasons that justify it. You have a huge, huge problem if you're Republicans. Democrats know that. They know that the media is going to take their side at the end of the day. They know instinctively there's independent voters. People just really don't like when government stops. And that, I think, gave them a false sense of confidence that they could basically do whatever they wanted, start negotiating,

say, listen, Republicans are screwing this up. They don't want to work out a deal. And the media is going to take their side, which is true. But it doesn't mean that it shows any leadership and is any healthier for the country when you could have just done the damn thing before this all happened. And you could have just not negotiated. And Republicans can't do anything about it if you don't negotiate. Well, and here's the other thing. By Biden caving, he has basically given credence to the Republican claim that the debt is a real issue right now that needs to be dealt with. And that's why you see a lot of polling that people are like, yeah, we want a debt ceiling increase, but with spending cuts. Well, when you have both political parties basically saying like, all right, we got to, we should negotiate and we

should have some sort of spending cuts, caving into that narrative, of course, you're going to end up with people wanting them to have some sort of a deal because you're not getting any other messaging from anywhere else. When the reality is there's no sign in the market that we are close to any sort of a debt catastrophe. Interest rates were low and still remain relatively low by historical standards, even in spite of the federal reserve hiking interest rates. There were no issues with selling our debt. There was no indication in the market that this was a looming problem. And there is also no indication that Republicans actually care about this issue because they obviously blew up our debt and deficit with the Trump tax cuts, which they are adamantly committed to and have no intention of rolling

back. This only becomes an issue when it's Democrats who are in power. So I think there's a lot of foolishness here all around. But the catastrophic error for Democrats was not dealing with this when they had complete power and when they could have. There was another weird thing that happened in the Republican caucus meeting that we wanted to highlight for you. Put this up on the screen. They did a 15-minute fundraising auction for some used chapstick from Speaker McCarthy. Don't know. OK, whatever.

That's kind of gross. Marjorie Taylor Greene apparently won. Her winning bid was $100,000. This goes to like Republican campaign efforts. He also threw in there that he would attend a dinner with donors and supporters for whoever wins. So congratulations, Marjorie. I think we have a picture of her with her chapstick that she won. Apparently the flavor, according to some in-depth reporting here, is cherry. So there you go. That also happened.

Let's put this next piece up on the screen. Manu Raju, this is what I was referring to earlier. Biden tried to add in a provision to the debt talks to expand Medicare's authority and negotiate drug prices. This is one of those things that everybody pretends to be in favor of, but then it never actually happens because of the power of big pharma. And McCarthy said that seems like a place to try and disrupt the whole negotiations, like trying to throw taxes in, now try to start talking about Medicare. So he comes out there in favor of keeping prices high for Medicare and, you know, gouging the government. That's why it makes sense to put in here, if you're talking about cutting spending, one thing that would cut spending is if Medicare could negotiate with

drug makers on the cost of prescriptions, you could save some dollars there. But no, we'll just keep giving the premium to big pharma. Yeah. And, you know, I like actually am ideologically more concerned about debt and deficit. I think, you know, the the financial management of the United States is to find it genuinely problematic. But the things Republicans and Democrats, to some extent, are picking to have fights over are incredibly stupid. And I really thought that this would be an opportunity, just like hearing some of the chatter in GOP circles, an opportunity to start taking on the surveillance state, to start taking on some absolutely ridiculous, like excessive, culturally radical stuff that's been baked into

the federal government from a conservative perspective that I think most people would probably object to. It's none of that. That's not where any of this fight has gone. Like ridiculous Pentagon programs. Why aren't they fighting about that stuff? No, they want to give the Pentagon more money. Yeah, it's amazing.

Yeah. I mean, how about all of these things? We're seeing all these offices, like Ken Klippenstein reports on a new one every week that nobody knew existed at the Pentagon and has just exist to surveil average Americans for the partisan purposes of the intelligence community. Why aren't they picking fights over that? That's worth shutting down the government basically. If anything is, that's worth it.

There are just other things that would make so much more sense. And people who were doing like crunching some numbers, Russ Vogt, his former OMB director under Trump, put together a budget of things that actually really I thought were worth fighting over. And I just I'm not hearing much of that on the messaging side. And I think part of that is because when Biden started negotiating, it's just it's an impasse. And you can't if you're actually trying to find legitimate places for compromise, it's not going to be any of that. Yeah. None of that stuff. I mean, I'm glad they did, but they took Social Security and Medicare off the table, maybe accidentally, in the Biden State of the Union,

and they took the Pentagon off the table and, in fact, want to increase funding at the Pentagon. That doesn't leave a whole lot left. And so it's like, okay, you're risking the whole global economy for some, like, additional work requirements on SNAP? Really? Really? My other question for you, Emily, is I have also been surprised that they've been able to keep the Republican caucus together

as well as they have. I was frankly surprised they were able to, as easily as they did, pass their bill through the House. My question is what happens when the markets crash? What happens when the Wall Street donors start actually freaking out and calling members of the Republican House caucus? That's when, to me, the rubber sort of hits the road in terms of

whether they have any defections and whether they have anyone who's open to, say, for example, the discharge petition that Democrats are floating where you need five Republicans to sign on to get that through the House. Do you think that you start to see cracks emerge then? Because even though you got Matt Gaetz giving McCarthy backup in this Republican House caucus meeting yesterday, he also then went and told reporters, I don't think we should be negotiating at all. I think our position should be what we passed in the House and that's it. End of story. There have been other Republicans who are on record being like, I will not vote for raising the debt ceiling no matter what. So do you think that you could have cracks emerge there in the unity of the

Republican caucus when if, and I would say it's more likely to when, you have a massive market crash and Wall Street starts to freak? They're incredibly vulnerable. I think they're in a better position than they would be under any other potential speaker with Kevin McCarthy, because he is so intentional. I mean, the real lesson from the Marjorie Taylor Greene chapstick auction, which, by the way, we will be auctioning off Saugers chapstick and it is used. But no, the real story there is a year ago, most of the establishment press would have said how absurd it is that Marjorie Taylor Greene in a really bitter potential shutdown battle over the debt ceiling is actually so chummy with Kevin McCarthy that they're auctioning off Chapstick in the middle of it, and she's happy to make the winning $100,000 bid. That is very unusual compared to

where the Republican establishment and the Tea Party movement were, the Freedom Caucus movement were under Barack Obama, even under Paul Ryan. And so they're in the best possible situation with Kevin McCarthy because he's very intentional about courting those disparate sort of factions of his party, and he's good at it. He's actually pretty good at it. Politico ran a story last year that was just, is Kevin McCarthy dumb? You remember that headline? No. Oh, my gosh. Again, like he actually is not. He's very good at this. And so if there's any hope of preventing that, it's because of Kevin McCarthy. But at the same time, there's just not a lot of incentive on the Freedom Caucus part to play nice when the rubber meets the road. And Kevin McCarthy is getting calls from Wall Street donors. People

are freaking out. That's where things, you're right, are going to get really tough because the Freedom Caucus is not beholden to those people. It's not beholden to the same sort of corporate donor set, especially not now that they were in the past. Well, you have the Freedom Caucus group, which benefits personally, you know, in terms of their like grassroots and online support, the more strident they are. Yes. Right. The more extreme, the more willing to blow things up. They are. Then you have this new crop of Republicans elected in districts that Joe Biden won in places like

New York. And their incentives are very different. Right. They want to get reelected. They want to show to their districts I'm different than those crazy people. I'm the type of like reasonable Republican who just wants some fiscal responsibility in this joint. And so they, you know, if you do have that kind of crash, those disparate incentives may come to the fore, but we'll see how that all goes. There's one other piece here. You know, I keep saying, I really don't know how this is going to be resolved. I don't even have a guess at this point, how this is going to be figured out because it's just very hard for me to see how the White House, the Republicans come to a deal. The White House seems to have put any of the extraordinary measures like 14th Amendment kind of off the table, although they still have

technically kept those as live options. Jeff Stein reports on what is another effort here to at least kick the can down the road a little bit. Put this up on the screen from Jeff. He's got a scoop that Treasury has asked U.S. agencies if any payments can be made at a later date as the deadline nears. According to an internal memo that was obtained by The Washington Post, Biden aides are searching for new ways to prolong the X date beyond existing measures, sources say. So the X date right now is June 1. And the idea here, Emily, is if they can actually push out till June 15, there's a bunch of quarterly tax payments that will flow into government coffers. Then they would be able to stay alive for a while longer and push this off even further down the road. Now, it's the technicalities here are tricky. It's not obvious that they could actually make this work. Go ahead and put the next part from Jeff

up on the screen. I think we have a couple more tweets from him. He says, if they can find a few days worth of extra cash, they can make it to June 15. Then they get a whole bunch of new tax revenue. Obviously, that's not the preferred outcome to punt the deadline to July, but that would at least buy them some more time. They say despite the attention to legally novel arguments around minting the coin and the 14th Amendment, there's a key separate set of options also likely controversial to simply delay the date rather than simply end the standoff as those ideas do. And he puts in parentheses, don't you love the idea of doing this for longer? I think Jeff is also set to get married, so I'm sure he would love having to follow this while he's like, you know, on his

wedding day and on his honeymoon, whatever. But anyway, there's a lot of technical questions whether they can actually do this because there's government regulations about like, hey, you got to like pay your bills on time, federal government. And you can't, you are also sort of usurping some of the power of Congress if you are picking and choosing what bills get paid and what bills don't get paid. So there are some questions around whether the strategy would be feasible or legal. But as of now, you know, I think to me what this shows is they really don't have a clear plan about how to work this out. And now they're like, well, maybe our best bet is just to like kick this down the road. So maybe we can come up with a plan that might ultimately work out.

They're just going like full Jackson Pollock, like throwing things onto the canvas, seeing what it looks like. No, I mean, it's like, I actually think that's arguably the worst approach is saying we have this potential stop gap. We can keep kicking it down because that's again what they did from last year. They could have done this last year. It's easier. Actually, they have a recess coming up that might have to be abridged if they end up needing to come back to D.C. and vote on negotiations. As silly as that sounds, that is a motivation for members of Congress to be shocked to learn. They don't like to have that stuff interrupted. So all of those things going on, I mean, the incentive to

not figure this out and make a decision, whether it's saying we're at an impasse, we can't compromise, we're going this way or that way, the incentive to do that sooner rather than later is really important because otherwise I think that's where you get into a dangerous situation. If you can't figure it out now, you're not going to figure it out in two weeks. I mean, it's just going to continue to get worse. And whatever deal you come to is going to continue to get worse in the next two weeks. I think there's little measure of truth to what Mitch McConnell says, that something's going to get done. It's probably going to be bad for both Republicans and Democrats.

He may be much more optimistic that it's going to be good for Republicans than it ultimately is. But whatever deal they come to to avoid default, I don't think that's's going to be good for Republicans than it ultimately is. But whatever deal they come to to avoid default, I don't think that's actually going to happen. But crazier things have happened, I guess. The host of Celebrity Apprentice was our president for years. I remember that. I remember that. Things can spiral. But all that is to say, if you keep punting, you're going to further lose your ability to do something that actually makes sense. Because if you can't do it now, you're not going to do it again. I agree with you. Nothing happens in D.C. until there's a hard deadline. And you kind of need the forcing

mechanism. And also, I mean, we're about to talk about the economy. The longer that this hangs over everybody, I think the worse it is all the way around. So let's go ahead and move on to that next part, because we're talking about the potential catastrophic economic fallout if we do have a default, which I think is totally on the table here, guys. There's new polling that shows, you know, Americans are already feeling like the economy is really not good. So let's put this first part up on the screen. You've got these are the right track, wrong track numbers. And you can see that red line is Americans who feel that the country is on the wrong track, the wrong track. And you've got now 62 percent who say that. So an overwhelming majority. Now, those numbers have been high for a while. I want to be clear, but

still not a good place to sit. Let's put this next piece up on the screen, which is more specifically about the economy. You have, again, 62% saying that they think the economy is weak today. And it's interesting because, of course, you have low unemployment numbers. You have a tight labor market. But because you have high inflation that's eating into a lot of people's wages and making it very difficult for people just to get by month to month. You have people feeling, you know, things are still not good right now. But this next piece up on the screen, this is maybe in some ways the most key metric. A majority, 49 percent, so very near majority, say their own personal financial situation is getting worse. Now, if you're an incumbent president, that is the last

thing you want to see, especially Biden actually plans on running on how great the economy is. So when you have a majority of people saying, actually, things are getting worse for me, and only I believe that's 25% that say things are actually getting better. So one quarter of the country is like, yeah, things are going good for me. And everyone else is like, this is really kind of a disaster, not a good landscape. And then finally, only 21% of Americans say that we are going to avoid a recession. You have everybody else saying we are either already in a recession or we will be in a recession in the next year. So again, a very dire landscape right now, even before you get to potential default and whatever that would mean for the economy. So Emily, you know, in my mind, there's two pieces here that I think are really important, as I pointed out, in terms of Democrats and being

able to hold on to the White House with Joe Biden, you know, as their standard bearer that they want to anoint once again. And he wants to run on how great a job he's done with the economy. These numbers do not seem to give him back up there. And then there's just the actual reality that people are struggling. They feel like they're sliding backwards. Personal debt numbers keep hitting all time highs as people try to, you know, cling to, you cling to any sort of semblance of normalcy, any sort of semblance of stability. So it's a pretty dire landscape that we are already facing going into a potential economic catastrophe. One of the things in the poll I think is really

interesting, when the question asked about the state of the economy being strong or weak, the changes over just the last several months are massive. It was like 30% at the beginning of the year, people said the economy was weak, and now it's at 62%, as you pointed out. That's a very quick and very dramatic change. And again, we can put C2 up. Jamie Dimon has been talking about all kinds of things per usual, but here he says, this is a CNBC headline, Jamie Dimon warns souring commercial real estate loans could threaten some banks. Actually, in the same article, it quotes Dimon talking about how you should expect probably more rate hikes. That's pretty interesting, because if anybody's in a position to know whether or not we

should be expecting more rate hikes, it'd be Jamie Dimon. And so when people's personal financial situations are worsening, oh boy, people are right. Things are getting worse for them and they will continue to get worse for them, likely. Yes. And there are huge storm clouds hanging over an already weakened economy, not only with the debt ceiling, but as Jamie Dimon, who's basically king now after all of these like bank bailouts and his bank just becoming larger and larger and larger. Our national bank. Yeah. That's why we have to pay attention to what he says, because all of these politicians we talk about, Jamie Dimon is actually more powerful than all of them put together at

this point. So he's pointing to something that's very real here, though, that I really want to keep our eye on in terms of the commercial real estate bubble. And this is something I did a monologue on a while back because Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's longtime partner, is saying the same thing, that there's huge problems in terms of the commercial real estate market. Why? Because people after the pandemic, you know, you have hybrid work schedules that people are really enjoying. And so you just don't have office workers at the office the way that you did. And you probably never will again. Yeah. It's very difficult to convert office space to,

you know, residential space or anything else, which we could really use because on the other hand, housing is wildly unaffordable because you have very low stock of housing to work with, but it's very difficult to convert that over. And so in the meantime, there are projections. You can see commercial real estate values dropping by 40% and you have a lot of the commercial real estate debt coming due. Half of it is coming due in just the next two years. So this is a huge cloud overhanging the economy. And it's like something has to give here because when you have real estate values dropping by potentially 40%, that is a looming catastrophe. One other piece here, put this last indicator up on the screen. You're already seeing

some signs of trouble in the corporate world. Corporate bankruptcies, especially of large companies, are creeping up as they say pressure grows in the economy. Again, this is kind of limited to large companies. And some of those you guys have probably noted, Bed Bath & Beyond, Vice Media, among others that have filed for bankruptcies. Mark Zandi, who's chief economist at Moody's, says among all types of companies, large and small, the increase in bankruptcies is more muted with filings remaining below pre-pandemic levels and historic norms. So he's saying, listen, things are still not crazy, but these are some warning signs. And also in this article, they quote an analyst who says that even a short-lived failure to pay government debts would push the economy into recession.

That means businesses are going to be struggling with weaker sales. They're probably not going to be able to get credit. So very quickly, you'll be running out of cash and having to make some pretty hard choices, layoff, slashing investment, and ultimately bankruptcy. Any long-lasting default would be catastrophic and cause a tsunami of bankruptcies. So these are kind of, you know, canary in the coal mine kind of indicators. And then the last piece here, there's actually some reporting from Ryan that we wanted to highlight on the commercial real estate piece. Not only do you have this looming potential catastrophe of valuations plummeting because of what the Fed is doing

and also because of changing office work habits and routines. You also have some indications here that banks are routinely overstating the value of commercial real estate. And for those of you who remember how it all went down with the housing crisis, what happened is you had these inflated values for personal residential mortgages. And then those were securitized. They were like put together and chopped up in pieces and sold. And those pieces were also then overstated because the underlying asset value was wildly overstated. And what Ryan and John Swartz here are saying is that you have a similar dynamic potentially unfolding in the commercial real estate market right now, which again, is not

some side corner of the economy. This is like a multi-trillion dollar issue that we could be reckoning with over the coming years. And that article from Ryan and John Schwartz is from 2021. So obviously with the pandemic still in motion, And that was, you know, if we should have started paying attention to this at any time, it was all the way back then. And now you have Jamie Diamond talking about it, obviously. But this is something that under Joe Biden, I mean, we were talking about the debt negotiations in the last segment and how Republicans actually want to gut Biden's cornerstone achievement, the Inflation Reduction Act. Yeah. Well, part of the reason Biden maybe went to the table on this is because he recognizes

that's a big vulnerability for him because you can pin some of the inflation, you can pin some of the economic malaise or economic even like looming chaos to all of the spending that the Biden administration passed, whether you support it or not. And so that's obviously there's corporate price gouging happening and all of that as well. But Biden hasn't been a leader either starting to negotiate with corporations, bringing them to the table and saying, cut it out. What you're doing with these price hikes is insane. And we're going to start pursuing legal action or something like that.

And he hasn't taken a leadership role in starting to really address these big question marks in the economy that we've known about for a fairly long time. And so you can see if you look back how both Trump and Biden set the stage for something that's going to be, is already, not going to be, is already a huge problem for average Americans. Yeah. I mean, it used to be this like fringe theory that corporations were using the excuse of inflation to hike prices. Yeah.

And now increasingly, even mainstream sources are having to be like, yeah, y'all kind of had a point about that. They're saying it. Exactly. I'm like, they're literally admitting it on their earnings call. And you're like, y'all are crazy. They're not doing that. It's like, of course they are.

Of course they are. That's what they do. And to your point, Emily, Biden has a lot of tools, even just rhetorical tools, to call out the behavior and call the carpet corporate price gougers. But he hasn't gone in that direction whatsoever. And so instead, they've used the very blunt instrument of the Fed hiking rates in hopes that that will crush the economy and crush ordinary workers, et cetera, when it really is not a tool effectively designed. It's not going to deal with corporate price gouging whatsoever. It's not going to deal with supply chain issues whatsoever. So it's a very poorly designed tool, which is why it hasn't fully worked. You've seen the pace of

inflation slow. It's not as fast growing as it was previously. But you still have a lot of inflation in the economy that is really hurting people. So all of this is a long way of saying that as we approach this debt ceiling wall, whether it's June 1st or whether they're able to push it out and kick the can down the road a little bit, you know, there's a lot of reason to be very concerned already in the economy without adding this potential catastrophe on top of it. That's right. Yeah. Nobody needs us to tell them that, but they're not being served well by the political or corporate class. So it's some happy news to deliver on this Wednesday morning. Yes. All right, let's move on to news out of Montana, actually, where the first TikTok ban is being challenged by TikTok itself. You'll be shocked to learn. We can put the first

element up on the screen here from The Wall Street Journal. They report that TikTok is suing Montana over their new ban of the social media platform. They're actually challenging it on a constitutional basis. Here's more from the journal. The suit was filed Monday in the U.S. District Court of Montana, and it alleges that the ban violates the First Amendment and several other laws. The case was brought against the state's attorney general, who is the person that was tasked by the law with enforcing the ban. Now, that ban is not set to go into place until January 1st. This is a little sentence in the Journal report, quote, it is unclear how it will be enforced. That is true. It is unclear how it will be enforced. The law, this is more from the

Journal, it's saying that it's banning ByteDance from, quote, operating in the state and app stores such as Google's and Apple's. That is pretty interesting. And it says any entity violating the law will be fined $10,000 a day while individual TikTok users will not be punished. Now, a group of TikTokers actually sued the attorney general last week over the ban. They have all kinds of followers. They say that it's unconstitutional, violates the First Amendment and other laws. TikTok is also saying that it's not within Montana's purview to actually enact a ban based on national security concerns, because that's exclusively the federal government's right with foreign entities. That's something that is not at the

state level. It's an interesting part of the lawsuit because it sort of challenges the system of federalism. And TikTok is saying this ban is in violation of a law that prevents the government from saying a person is guilty of a crime and then punishing them without ever going to trial and rules that govern interstate commerce, as the journal reports. And they quote a professor at the University of Richmond, a law professor, who says, quote, the First Amendment argument is a very strong one. He continues to add the claim for Montana is that they're protecting national security, and that is something squarely within the domain of the federal government, not left to the state. So on two points there, you have a law professor saying the Montana ban is vulnerable,

the first point being the First Amendment, the speech questions. The second point being, if you're doing this on national security grounds as a state, it's constitutionally shaky ground as well. Now, I am totally against TikTok for a number of reasons. Whether a state ban is the way to handle it is a separate question from whether something needs to be done. Yeah, I was wondering about that because, you know, for you, I was wondering what your thoughts were. In my opinion, you know, I have a lot of concerns about, obviously, privacy, not only when it comes to TikTok, but when it comes to all of these social media platforms. That's number one. There's a lot of civil liberties violations there, in my opinion. There's also increasing research,

including dire warning from the Surgeon General about the impact of overuse of social media on mental health and especially mental health of young people. I have a 15-year-old. I see this like up close and personal. As a parent, it is something that I'm very concerned about. I think a ban is way too blunt a tool and goes way too far. Just to say in one fell swoop, like this one particular company, we're going to target for a ban. I think that that, you know, I don't know whether it's going to end up being legal. I couldn't tell you I'm not a legal analyst, but in terms of whether I think it's the right approach or not, I would say, no, it goes too far. You know, doing it on

the state level is really interesting too, because there are pretty clear national security reasons to target TikTok to say, like, obviously we have a problem here because Americans' data is being sucked up by a country that's posturing as a hostile foreign power. And it just doesn't make sense to be hoovering up all the data with really no concern, really no safeguard, because even TikTok says with Project Texas, which is their delivery of American data into Oracle Cloud, there will still be some people in Beijing who are authorized to view the data. Okay, so that's already a concession that there's going to be some people that could be. We know, thanks to excellent reporting from

Forbes, there are plenty of members of the CCP that actually work at ByteDance's headquarters in Beijing. So who's going to have access to the data? How close are they to the Chinese government? That question is not solved by Project Texas whatsoever, despite TikTok's repeated assurances that this is the answer to the problem. But that's, again, it's a federal question. That's clearly a federal question, not a state-based question. Utah actually just banned access to Pornhub. Did you follow that at all? A little bit. I saw Utah was doing a lot in terms of also providing parents with access to their kids' social media accounts. They're doing a lot over there, which I also have sort of

complicated feelings about. And I don't think any of this breaks down along easy partisan lines because although Democrats are allowing it to, there's a lot of there's a lot of tricky principles in conflict when you talk about these. I mean, the other thing that struck me about the Montana ban that I was kind of surprised about is I didn't think that you could just directly target one company. So in this bill, they single out TikTok. Yeah. Usually what lawmakers do, because I think it's the way you're supposed to legislate, is they'll put in a bunch of stipulations. Oh, it's going to apply to a company that has this percent foreign ownership, blah, blah, blah.

Where at the end of the day, OK, it maybe only applies to TikTok or like two other things, but it really is aimed at TikTok. But they explicitly were like, no, this is just about TikTok, which also, you know, makes me feel like part of this, too, is not just genuine concerns about data privacy, which, again, apply across the board to all of these social media companies, but is also specifically about this like China Cold War hawkish view towards one country in particular. But, you know, if you really are concerned about the data privacy piece of this or about the teenager social media mental health piece of this, I think what you have to do is you have to have an across the board regime that

protects people's privacy that can be applied to TikTok. I mean, listen, Twitter has Saudi investors. So why are we not concerned about that? Right. I mean, listen, Twitter has Saudi investors. So why are we not concerned about that? Right. I mean, a lot of these companies have foreign investors that one could be concerned about if you're worried about foreign powers having access. And they also are all giant, you know, multi-billion dollar corporations that have been weaponizing our own data against us and, you know, selling it to the highest bidder. So it seems like the right approach is federal. It seems like it's protecting data privacy and not just aimed at one particular company for an outright ban,

which again, I think is too heavy handed. And some of this is the normal, like using the state level as the laboratory of democracy. And maybe there's a novel legal theory that's going to be put to the test in court over this where there's there's some provision in Montana state law or there's some provision that's been tested. There's some Supreme Court ruling that could apply and protect Montana's ban. And that's all going to be tested and tried. And maybe we'll we'll learn some interesting things through this legal back and forth. Yeah, that's fair. Yeah, I just this is a huge problem because it's not just going to be TikTok, to your point.

It's it's also American companies that are exporting. And we're going to talk about this a little later in the show. Some heavy surveillance tools to other countries, other countries aren't cool with in the same way that Montana is not cool with it and that the United States, a lot of people in the United States aren't cool with ByteDance. We're kind of doing the same thing with Facebook. And Facebook operates Instagram, Snapchat. These all have the same Twitter. These all have the same bad incentive structure that is addictive. And as Jonathan Haidt has been documenting extensively over on his sub stack after Babbel, the evidence is now mounting that these have been very, very damaging to young people's brains, to their mental health. That is not just coming from Beijing.

I think it's ultra or extra problematic that you could have potential manipulation coming from a foreign power of the algorithm that's going into teenagers' brains. I think it's problematic that they could have control over election stuff. They have people say whether they're interested in voting and registering on TikTok. Well, you can all then be fed misinformation based on what they can guess about your party and what they can guess about your location. All that stuff is not good. So I think the instinct to take action against TikTok is understandably more urgent than the other companies. But if you're not starting to target the other companies, I don't know if I can take it seriously. Yeah. There are all sorts of products that we regulate because of our concern over their harm to kids in particular, whose brains are still forming. This is a like brave new world we're in where not only is it social media, but the way

that it's not accidental that these things are addictive. They are engineered to be addictive. They are engineered to keep you on their platforms as long as possible, even though this is to keep you angry. And to keep that, I was going to mention that. I mean, that was one of the interesting revelations from the whole like Facebook file thing that came out was that they saw that people liked their product less, but stayed on it longer when they amped up the anger and the rage content. They're like, people find this to be a worse experience, but they stay longer and that's all we care about. And you can bet it's not just Facebook that is making those sort of calculations. So we're seeing now huge fall, and especially among teenage girls, from the amount

of time on these platforms and the way these platforms have been engineered to basically like, you know, torture us. And that's why even like most libertarians are not in favor of legalizing heroin. You know, like the hardcore ones are, but like free markets don't work when a product is intentionally addictive because there's no market incentive for somebody who's addicted to the product to stop using the product. It's not a pure free market experiment if you're becoming chemically addicted. And we do have increasing evidence. Do I go back and forth on how we treat cigarettes? Yes. But this is arguably more serious because all of our politics are being funneled through a platform that functions as a giant cigarette. It's so much worse than that. Your personal life, it's like, okay, yeah, you get addicted to go out for a smoking break. Well, guess what? Now

you're addicted because every time you get a call, it could be the worst call of your life. It could be the best call of your life. And so you have an incentive to keep this on you and to think about it mentally. There's research on just how having a phone in your vicinity changes the function of your brain. Interesting. It's crazy stuff. And we're, I think, obviously too slow to come around on it. We're just scratching the surface. And it gives an excuse for Republicans and Democrats to put legislation like the Restrict Act on the table that just gives them more surveillance powers. Whenever there's bipartisan agreement on something, there's danger for bipartisan corruption. So it's a complicated set of problems that we have shown very little

ability to deal with. Yes, indeed. Speaking of complicated problems, let's move on to the next segment. Crystal has twisted my arm and forced me to talk about it. There's an excellent report from Mary Margaret Olihan over at The Daily Signal. That is a publication that is run by the Heritage Foundation. Mary Margaret, we can put the first element up here. That would be E1, reports

that Fox News employees are allowed to use bathrooms that align with their gender identity rather than their biological sex and permitted to dress in alignment with their preferred gender. She also goes on to quote a former producer for Tucker Carlson tonight who says, Fox wants you to think it's a place that supports traditionally conservative values, but in reality, they're pushing this nonsense behind the scenes. She also says that they were, she mentions that they use preferred pronouns on the website. That's actually in accordance, by the way, with AP Style, the Associated Press in their style guide, which most newspapers and publications follow around the country. You know, if you're—Gannett certainly follows it.

So your local Gannett paper, you know, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel or wherever it is, they're going to follow AP Style Guide. So every locality in the country was changed by this decision. I think it was back in 2017, like before a lot of the country was on this issue, to use preferred pronouns. And that applied basically around the country for publications and was, I think, part of where this clash came from. Now, a source who still works at Fox News told Mary Margaret Olihan, The Daily Signal, that after Tucker Carlson's show was canceled in April, producers for the 8 p.m. Fox News Tonight program were told not to bash Mulvaney.

That directive came from high-level executives, the source said. When we're referring to Mulvaney, that would be Dylan Mulvaney, and all of this was unfolding as the Bud Light saga was unfolding as well regarding Dylan Mulvaney. There's more here from Fox's corporate handbook. They're citing the human rights campaign and going into the whole, like the full gender identity and sex are the same thing. And once you sort of accept that premise, you go to bathrooms, to locker rooms and all kinds of different places, which is unusual for Fox News as people see it. Now, this report circulated really heavily in conservative circles. You know, someone made a really good point. I think it was my colleague, Eddie Scarry,

made a really good point, basically, that if you do this in conservative media, this is giving up one of the biggest platforms that you could ever have. If you criticize Fox. If you criticize Fox, especially with reporting like this, it is basically you're signing a death warrant with Fox, which traditionally has been where you reach conservatives. That is the one place where you can guarantee you're going to reach a huge swath of conservative Republican voters at the same time. So it's funny, the week before Tucker Carlson got yanked off the air on Federalist Radio Hour, I was having a conversation saying the litmus test for conservative media should be whether or not people are willing to criticize

Fox News. You know that you can trust a conservative publication if they're willing to be critical of Fox News, because that takes a lot of guts on the right, because you have a hard time reaching people without having that on your platform. And it doesn't mean you have to be overly negative. It doesn't mean you have to go after them. But everyone makes mistakes. And so you should be willing to say that. Indeed. That's a big deal. So this report is a really big deal, I think, because conservatives, it gave them like Matt Walsh an opportunity. He's quoted in the report being like, listen, Fox is just like every major media corporation.

I had heard revelings of all of this stuff for years. Like people had been privately griping about that for years, some of this stuff for years. So that this suddenly is surfacing post-Tucker. As we can put the next element up, E2, the ratings are cratering in that hour. This is from The Wrap. Since Tucker's surprise ouster from Fox News just over three weeks ago, viewership on the cable news channel has cut in half, cut in half. And where are those people going? Oddly enough, they're going over to Newsmax. Newsmax ratings are up, which again, a year ago would be unthinkable that Newsmax is competing with CNN, that they're competing with these giants is fairly remarkable. So this is basically a panic type situation for Fox at this point.

Yeah. So I have also a lot of thoughts about this. I mean, obviously I have no issue whatsoever with the policy. I think it's appropriate. I think adults should be able to do what they want to do with their lives. And if they, you know, have a pronoun they want to use that's different from the sex they were assigned at birth, I have no problem with that whatsoever. So my personal views, I think there's a few things here. Number one, this clearly seems like somebody aligned with Tucker leaks this. This is like, you know, they were leaking some stuff on him. This is like him trying to get revenge. Because he's trying to get out of his contract, remember. In order to do his Twitter show, he needs to get out of the contract. Right. So they're not letting him out. And he's saying,

you let me out or I'm going to blow this place up. I'm going to embarrass you. I'm going to blow the place up. Yeah, exactly. Exactly right. So I think that's that's probably where this leak comes from, which is interesting in and of itself. Another piece here is that I do think there is something there in terms of Fox News anchors. They portray themselves as sharing the values of their mostly sort of like heartland conservative viewing base. Meanwhile, these are multimillionaires living in New York and D.C. They're new. They're Manhattan liberals. Yeah. And so this is, you know, there is like showmanship going into that on-air caricature. And the minute you pull the mask off, I do think that that is an issue

for Fox. If you have widespread realization within their viewing audience that like, oh, these people are just putting on a show for me. Like behind the scenes, the way they're actually acting is very different from the values they're pretending to support on air. That's another piece of this. The other piece, I think, in terms of like the freak out over these particular policies is I also think it sort of exposes the lie that conservatives are just worried about, like we're just worried about the kids here with regards to trans issues, because we're not talking about kids. We're talking about adult workers in the workplace wanting to identify however they identify and be treated as human beings. And

there's a lot of upset over adults. There are no kids involved in this. So I think that part is revelatory as well. But, you know, I go back and forth on whether or not Fox has a real issue in terms of like persistently losing audience. I think they're on overall the same downward trajectory as the other two cable news networks. You have new numbers out about just how many cord cutters there are now reaching record heights. So they have a huge like business issue coming down the pike that all of cable news is basically reckoning with right now. But in terms of these individual instances, what they're betting on is basically like in one of these reports, somebody outright said this, like

our audience is really old and they don't know how to go anywhere else. Like they actually will struggle to like figure out where Newsmax is on the channel, let alone go on Twitter to see DeSantis and Elon Musk or go over to the Daily Wire to be able to figure out. This is their habit. They're old. They're set in their ways, and so we think we're good. That's their bet. And to be honest with you, I'm not sure that's a crazy bet.

No. Fox had a bigger built-in hedge than a lot of the other cable networks because they had a huge, like their audience was basically double the size, their permanent audience. But obviously, sadly, this is not a, it's a blunt way to put it, but it has been slowly dying off. And that, but that would have lasted them longer just because it was a bigger kind of permanent base than the other cable news networks, CNN, MSNBC, who are also actively like infuriating some part of that permanent audience that was fleeing. But that said, you know, you live outside D.C. and it's to me like there's times when things on Fox News just

feel like what Nashville does to country music, which is like, do people actually behave the way that these ridiculous corporate written country songs write about them. No, you have a bunch of dumb ass, rich Nashville country music executives who put people in a writer's room and make them come up with like redneck mad libs and throw it into a song that they put a hip hop beat on. And it sounds stupid. And it's exactly what they do. I like corporate country. So I do, too. I would exempt myself from this conversation. I do, too, because they're really good. They're really good at making, like, catchy music.

But, like, the picture that it represents, like, sometimes is, like, people who have actually no idea what happens in rural America. And they're just, like, guessing. They're like, yep, Crown Royal in the bed of a Ford pickup. And everybody's, like, half naked at the river. And does that happen sometimes? Yes. Does it? Is it an everyday occurrence? No. But it just it's that stuff that drives me insane of like you have in Fox News, like getting people at News Corp getting rich off of I think what sometimes is this very ham-fisted version of red meat conservatism. And there have been people at Fox who are very, very responsive to their audience

and are very good at this. And it is, I think, the last bastion of the sort of mainstream, so-called mainstream, that allows conservative voices to speak. Like, the fact that Glenn Greenwald was on Tucker's show is like insane for Fox News and that Taibbi had a platform there and that other people had, you could say certain things. I think that's actually fairly remarkable. And I don't think it's a good thing if that goes away entirely for the right, because there's something powerful about that. But at the same time, are people being well-served as, you know as the executives are just cutting those checks, getting the money off of them?

I don't know, and it's sort of something that's always bothered me. Well, I think one of the things that came out to me in the Dominion discovery was a level of contempt from the hosts towards their own audience, where they felt like they thought a certain way about Sidney Powell, about Stop the Steal, about Donald Trump, you know, Tucker saying like he hated him and he's a demonic force and whatever. But they didn't feel like their audience could handle that. They felt

like their audience were like a bunch of rubes that just needed to be like served whatever red meat they, you know, needed to be served. And so to me, when you're dishonest with your audience, that's sort of like the highest form of contempt. And, you know, that did, that did come out in the Dominion filings. And I think it is, I think there is a potential damage to them from having the mask pulled off and people really starting to look at them rather than, rather than seeing them as these like authentic voices of conservatism, as people who are getting rich off of them, living in Manhattan, living in D.C., and not really sharing their values, lifestyle, or culture. So to me, that's, you know, do I think that this particular like blow up over the, you know,

pronoun policy within Fox is going to blow over? Yes. But the more that you have these pieces add up where it's like, you know, you all are really not what you're representing to us. I think that is kind of an existential issue because in the current media landscape, authenticity is everything. Feeling like you're getting the real deal from people, feeling like even if, you know, maybe you disagree with them on an issue, like they're really telling you what they think. I think that's like the most valuable commodity and they are kind of squandering that. So that's interesting because one of the things I picked up on from those text messages is sort of the opposite. I see what you're saying.

The Trump thing in particular does bother me because you see that from a lot of people, especially a lot of like elected Republicans here in D.C., saying one thing publicly about Trump and another thing privately. It actually does bother me because they think that their voters can't handle nuance when it comes to Trump. But Tucker and I think Laura, to some extent, Laura Ingraham, were frustrated by Fox News executives who they saw trying to manipulate voters and trying to do things that they were uncomfortable with. They felt their audience would be uncomfortable with. Tucker was saying it's not fair to the audience and a couple of text messages. And then he also was saying from a purely business

perspective, it doesn't make sense. Yeah, well, that's what they were worried about, like the ratings and the business and like their the value of their stockholdings. That's not concern for the audience. That's like, you know, again, it's a level of inauthenticity. Like this is my bottom line is my bottom line. And this is a problem for me. Tucker had a couple of times where he said that it wasn't, he was actually saying like our audience thinks this is BS, like blah, blah, blah, where he was saying like it actually, but the motivations, clearly there are business motivations involved. I personally think that Tucker was like very, very frustrated. And I just from things that I've heard, was very, very frustrated with the Fox executive level. And some of that leaked out over it.

And the other thing I thought was interesting about this story, to your point about the adults versus kids thing before we wrap, is that this is in accordance. Basically, Fox News is aligned with New York City's human rights law, which a lot of people probably remember was passed sort of controversially a few years ago. But it actually requires employers, as Mary Margaret writes, to use the names, pronouns, and titles with which a person identifies regardless of their biological sex. So in some ways, Fox's hands are tied. Like there's not much they can do. It does seem like from the corporate handbook they're enthusiastic about these policies and promoting these policies. And that's something that I have heard that, you know, there are people in corporate facts that have pronouns in their bios, et cetera, et cetera, or in their email signatures, et cetera, et cetera. And whether or not that's true, that is really difficult because that does compel people to use pronouns that they may not be comfortable using.

Like it's government-compelled speech. And then it also creates the question of single-sex spaces and whether women want that and whether that's safe. And so I think the adult thing just goes on the table when you have compulsion from the government and that even Fox News had to deal with it or chose to deal with it in this way, whatever, not present a legal challenge or whatever, I think is actually kind of an interesting barometer of the country right now, too. Yeah. I mean, Liz, honestly, I disagree with your views on these issues. But I do think conservatives have tried to at least initially frame their concerns as just about protecting the kids. And it's very clear, very clear that that is not the case,

that they also are worried about adults who are living their lives and want to transition. And we've already seen legislation, talking about state compulsion, I've already seen legislation coming in that's impacting adults in their ability to make choices. So that was one piece that I thought was reflected here. I was like, oh, this has nothing to do with kids. And yet there's a lot of upset over it.

Yeah, no, I think that's a totally fair point. So I've got some happy news for all of you, a few different pieces of this with regards to the labor movement. Let's start with the big corporate behemoth, Amazon. Let's put this up on the screen from the New York Times, they have a new report about how even in places where they don't have unions, Amazon workers have really found effective ways to garner concessions from this company. And basically what's happened here is because Amazon has become so large and because they have taken on so much of the delivering of their products themselves, they have these critical choke point locations where even a few dozen workers taking collective action can really hobble them and hobble their ability to deliver goods in the timely fashion that, you know,

is part of their core promise. So within this report, I'll just tell you, they've got a few examples here where workers have really effectively sort of pushed back on the company. They say in September 2019, workers at an Amazon delivery station in Sacramento began campaigning for paid personal time off, and they were able to actually gain those benefits through this sort of collective action. You had walkouts over pay and working conditions at two Chicago delivery stations just before Christmas. They then received raises of about $2 an hour. They also point to a situation where Amazon had suspended a San Bernardino AirHub employee named Sarah. And suspicion is because of her union organizing and advocacy. The next week, workers wore Hello, My Name is stickers and they wrote on it,

Where is Sarah? And lo and behold, Sarah was reinstated. Now, if you know anything about Amazon and the way they treated Christian Smalls and other Amazon workers who were also union organizers, you will recognize how extraordinary it is that the company was actually forced to bring her back to work and reinstate her because of her co-workers upset. They also mentioned here a location in Kentucky, in northern Kentucky, sort of near Cincinnati, that has become their primary delivery hub in the entire country, really, really critical to their operations. And you have a lot of union organizing activity there and potential for this sort of choke point organizing that can gain concessions, additional

pay raises, you know, paid time off, and these sorts of things, which you think in the abstract, you've got this giant multi-billion dollar global corporation, and then you've got these workers, even at one location, they make up a tiny sliver of the overall Amazon workforce. But when you have critical functions at some of these locations, these critical choke points actually provide a mechanism of very effective organizing. One thing they point to here that I thought was really interesting in light of this is there was a very famous strike back in 1936. It's called a sit-down strike in Flint that forced GM, which had been very anti-union, to recognize United Auto Workers because the workers chose to do this sit-down

strike at a plant that was called a mother plant. It was the only location that manufactured some of the parts for GM. So it was so effective, GM was like, ah, we got a cave. We got no choice. This is the only place where we make these certain parts. But after that, they learned their lesson, and they then distributed all of their parts production across a lot of locations. Amazon has gone in the opposite direction of consolidating a lot of functions at these critical hubs. And that's what's making them vulnerable to these choke point to this choke point organizing. So that was the main piece. There are a couple of other stories that I just wanted to highlight. There was a successful effort to unionize bus makers down in Georgia, in rural Georgia. I'll put this next piece up on the screen.

So this is Bluebird. They make a lot of school buses, and they voted overwhelmingly, this workforce, 697 to 435, to organize with the United Steelworkers. One thing that was really interesting to me about this is part of why these workers were able to succeed, even in a very anti-union state in Georgia, even in a rural area where there may not be a lot of other employment, is because within Joe Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, they actually had provisions saying if you're going to benefit from these tax credits, you're not allowed to use the money to do anti-union organizing. So they didn't have those captive audience meetings. They say you have to remain neutral in any organizing campaign. And so that helped to tilt the scales a little bit and potentially contributed to this success for the United Steelworkers. And then the last piece

here is in Minnesota, you know, the conservative laws that are getting passed in states across the country have gotten a lot of attention. But in the wake of the last midterms, you actually have more states that have Democratic trifectas. You had Democrats take back control in a lot of places in terms of state legislatures. And in Minnesota, they are really pushing the ball forward on labor rights in particular. You've got a new measure that passed that mandates paid sick days for nearly all workers. It forbids non-compete agreements in labor contracts, something the federal government's been looking at as well. It establishes, I thought this was the most interesting part, a sectoral bargaining system for nursing homes, allows teachers to negotiate class sizes, and bans those captive audience

meetings where employers force their workers to listen to anti-union propaganda. So, you know, we had a lot of excitement last year about strike waves, about Amazon victory, about Starbucks grassroots movement. Some of that has felt like it slowed. We also got the numbers at the end of the year that were like, ah, in spite of these exciting waves, we still went backwards in terms of union density and the number of workers that are in unions as a percentage of the total working population. But I think these small shifts actually pretend something really positive. And Emily, we also see in terms of public opinion. Emily, what are you looking at? All right. We're going to be talking about something very niche, Section 702.

I'm excited. You know, Section 702 is something that the American left is very familiar with and has been very familiar with for a long time because it's something that came out of the Snowden revelations. And it's an interesting story because just this week I saw a headline, and we can put this up on the screen. This is E1. This is from the Associated Press. MetaFind record $1.3 billion in order to stop sending European user data

to the U.S. What does that sound like? It sounds a little bit like America's complaints about TikTok, doesn't it? Those questions about how user data is sent back to Beijing. Now, of course, in this situation, it's a little bit different because we're generally allied with the European Union, but it raises a really interesting question about American exports. And obviously, I think to people who have concerns, you know, Section 702, as much as it's been an issue on the left because of Snowden, there are a lot of libertarians on the right that have followed Section 702 for years very closely as well. But to flesh out this AP story a little bit, they're reporting that the EU slapped Meta with a record $1.3 billion, $1.3 billion as a privacy fine on Monday and ordered it to stop transferring users' personal information across

the Atlantic by October. The Associated Press describes this as the latest salvo in a decades-long case sparked by U.S. cyber-snooping fears. Now, when you see in the United States these complaints about TikTok, which, by the way, I think are entirely legitimate, that you have just a truly astounding amount of data on children in some cases that will follow them their entire lives being sucked up and then accessible. Even with Project Texas, that's TikTok's plan to transfer American user data to Oracle's cloud server. They still concede that people in Beijing will have access to that data.

We know, thanks to Forbes reporting, that people in Beijing, in the headquarters there, there are members of the Chinese Communist Party, former members of state media that work there. So these concerns are very legitimate. But you can understand why, one, people in the United States are concerned about how their own data is being used by their own government, let alone how American companies that export that business model of surveillance capitalism that we pioneered here in the United States over to other countries in Europe, you can understand why those countries in Europe, even though we're generally allied with the EU,

would have problems with it because even we have problems with it and we should here in the United States. Now, Section 702, to be clear, if you're not familiar with it, it's one of those very, very, very broad powers that was delegated to the surveillance state, basically. I think it dates back to 2008. I have it right here in front of me. Yeah, it dates back to 2008, and it allows the federal government basically to tap into a huge amount of data that comes from these things. So that's, yeah, it's actually part of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It lets the NSA, this is from Fox News, intercept communications of foreign terrorists or espionage suspects that pass through U.S. telecom and internet companies.

But the tool also vacuums up data about American citizens living in the U.S., for instance, when they communicate with people overseas. And just actually recently we learned, it's amazing, we recently learned the timing here that the FBI used Section 702 to spy on, they were searching for information about defendants in the January 6th attack and then also on the 2020 George Floyd protests. And so this is actually, they found a truly insane amount of abuse. I think it was an inspector general who found a truly insane amount of abuse on the platform. And so you have conservatives now mobilizing against Section 702. The left has, people like Ron Wyden have always been against Section 702.

And to just put an emphasis on how crazy this timing is, Section 702 is up for reauthorization this year. Its mandate expires on December 31st. So as you have all of these Republican concerns about the surveillance state being used to target, for instance, people who were at the protest part of January 6th outside the Capitol, didn't go in, didn't trespass even. So as you have concerns about that from Republicans, concerns from Democrats, again, reasonable stuff about people who were protesting in 2020 and weren't involved in any violence, but were being spied on based on a law that's just supposed to be used when you have a legitimate reason to be overseeing communications with somebody in another country, not an American citizen.

When you have that and you have cooperation from companies like Meta, when you have cooperation from companies like Twitter, who knows what Elon Musk would be doing with Section 702, that becomes a huge problem for both political parties. And what I just want to say here is that Republicans have all the incentive in the world, politically and ideologically, right now to get on the right side of the surveillance capitalism question, because we are exporting a product that is invading people's privacy to other countries, and we're using it to create a wildly out-of-control, vast security state, not just on Americans, but in people in other countries. And the real motivation here that should get those Republicans on board is that $1.8 billion fine, or $1.3, I think it is, billion dollar fine. Because if there's anything that can get Republicans on board with ending surveillance capitalism, it would maybe be the capitalism

part of this. When does it start hurting American businesses? Because we can put E2 up. This is the Fox News article that talks about the political concerns with Section 702. Again, that's from this week. The timing here is so perfect because of the excess spying. So this is the FBI that tracked a truly insane amount of abuse of the program, 278,000 violations in 2020 and early 2021 by the FBI. They're supposed to follow particular procedures that were not followed when they start spying on people. 278,000 violations. 278,000. I mean, just an astounding level of abuse. So you have that. But also we put E3 up. This is the real thing. Maybe this can entice Republicans. This is a graph that shows,

it might be listed as F3, but this is a graph that shows the tech industry in the U.S. as the percentage of GDP. So it's about 10% of our economy right now. It's a huge swath of our economy and only growing. So as tech and data becomes the chief American export at this point, as it becomes such a huge American export, And that American export is threatened because other countries actually, you know, are concerned about their citizens' privacy. That will come into conflict with the capitalism question. And the one thing that I'll end on is that it also is going to come into conflict

with people in the EU. Taibbi, Matt Taibbi, had a great report this week about, over on his Racket News, about how Australia was trying to use, I think it was Twitter at the time, to oversee communications by people in the service of cracking down on vaccine disinformation. We know that people in the EU, the sort of Davos set here in the United States and the European Union and all across the West want to use these capitalist products as surveillance tools, but they also have really

tight privacy laws and tightening privacy laws. So all of this is coming into conflict. And with Section 702 up for reauthorization this year and fresh information about how widely abused it has been against both the right and the left on top of this fine, we see a lot of different interests coming into conflict and it makes it right for Republicans to get on the right side of the debate. I'm never optimistic about any of this, but if anything could do it, Crystal, I think maybe it's that $1.3 billion fine. Is that the best hope? We're joined now by Nick Turse. He's a contributing writer over at The Intercept and also the author of the book, Kill Anything That Moves, The Real American War in Vietnam. Nick, thank you for joining us. Thanks so much for having me on.

Nick is the author of a stunning but not surprising new series of reports over in The Intercept about Henry Kissinger and Vietnam. Again, I say stunning but not surprising. It's called Kissinger's Killing Fields. This is based on new information, and that's one of the most, I think, interesting aspects of it. We think we basically know everything about what happened at that time, and we think that is bad enough, but it actually continues to get worse. So, Nick, I want to start just by asking you, what is some of the most important new information that you learned over the course of this reporting? Thanks for having me on. Yeah, I think the key takeaways here are that Kissinger is responsible for more civilian deaths in

Cambodia than was previously known. And this is according to an exclusive archive of U.S. military documents that I assembled and also interviews with 75 Cambodian witnesses and survivors of these attacks. This archive that I put together offers previously unpublished, unreported, and also unappreciated evidence of hundreds of civilian casualties that were kept secret during the U.S. war in Cambodia during the late 1960s, early 1970s, and remain almost entirely unknown to the American people today. Talking with these 75 Cambodian witnesses and survivors, I learned about new details

of a long-term trauma that's borne by survivors of the American war there. And taken all together, this adds the list of killings and crimes that Henry Kissinger should, even at this late date in his life, be asked to answer for. Well, let's pick up with that. Just give people a little bit of a history lesson of what we were even doing in Cambodia in the first place. And to your point about, you know, Henry Kissinger's involvement here, why is this still relevant today? Basically, Richard Nixon was elected, took office as president in 1969, promising to end the Vietnam War, to achieve peace with honor, as he put it. But really,

what Kissinger did and, you know, what Nixon did, and Kissinger was really the architect of the war policy there, was to expand the Vietnam War into Laos further than it had been, but also notably to Cambodia. Kissinger came up with a plan, engineered a secret bombing of Cambodia. Ironically, the secret bombing is the one that we've known about for decades. A tremendous amount of ordnance dropped on Cambodia that destabilized that country and eventually ushered in the Khmer Rouge and a genocide that followed. But my reporting shows that there were other attacks that haven't had previously been brought to light that also wreaked havoc on Cambodia and killed a tremendous number of civilians. So there was a secret plan to end the Vietnam War, and really it just expanded the war and expanded the killing.

Yeah, and just to get to the title of the series, Kissinger's Killing Fields, you have transcripts of his calls. Part of one of the series is an article on some of his calls that you say reveal his culpability. It's helpful to kind of, I think, nail down exactly why this is pinned to Kissinger himself. You just explained some of it, but could you get into a little bit about what we know when it comes to how Kissinger himself is the architect of this death and destruction? Definitely. Kissinger had a really hands-on role here. He was the national security advisor for Richard Nixon. And there hasn't been a national security advisor before or since that's had the type of sway that he had. He was really co-president in a way for a policy, war policy,

in Southeast Asia. Kissinger actually picked targets for bombings. The secret bombing that was carried out, there would be a colonel from the Pentagon who came to Kissinger's office. They would look at maps. Kissinger would point to different sites and say, bomb here, bomb there. So, I mean, very hands-on in that regard. And you mentioned there's a sidebar article that I wrote about Kissinger had a taping system, not unlike his boss, Richard Nixon. And the transcripts of these calls, you can see Nixon calling up Kissinger in one instance in a rage, saying that he wanted anything that flies to hit anything that moves in Cambodia. And Kissinger getting off the phone and relaying this order to his military deputy.

And, you know, I was able to match this up to show palpable effects out in the field. After that order came down, the strikes on Cambodia increased threefold over the next several weeks. And I chronicle attacks on villages by US helicopter gunships that resulted after this. So you can see a direct line from Kissinger's office in the White House to villages in Cambodia 9,000 miles away. And there's a clear line of death and destruction between the two. Nick, you talk about how when you went and interviewed people in Cambodia who lost relatives, loved ones are still dealing with this trauma, that they were sort of shocked that there was an American that even knew about it, that cared about it, that cared enough to come and interview them and write a whole series on what you were able to uncover. What does it say about the U.S.?

What does it say about our current foreign policy? What does it say about our inability to reckon with the past that to this day, Henry Kissinger is fetid, sought after, looked at as this sort of sage advisor on foreign policy. Yeah. I mean, I was always humbled by the response of my Cambodian interviewees there and that the trauma that they experienced was, it was palpable. And yet the interviews and the documents really demonstrate a consistent disregard for Cambodian lives, a failure to detect and protect civilians, to conduct post-strike assessments, to investigate civilian harm allegations, to prevent such damage from reoccurring, and to punish or hold accountable U.S. personnel from the field all the way up to

the White House. And I think these policies not only obscured the true toll of the conflict in Cambodia, but they set the stage for the civilian carnage of the U.S. war on terror from Afghanistan to Iraq, Syria to Somalia and beyond. You know, this legacy, I think, is something that we're dealing with today. And the Pentagon has always been reticent to look backward and hold its people to account. Just last year, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was asked about attacks in the forever wars if the United States would look back and try and take accountability for strikes that we know that have happened that they've never done

anything about as far as accountability or compensation. And he said there was no plan to do that. And if there's no plan for that, you know, the possibility that the Pentagon will investigate these crimes 50 years later is pretty much nil. I'm really fascinated by how little we knew at the time of what was going on and how much we continue to learn about it, because I think it speaks to how the sort of Pentagon has taken that as a permission slip to continue acting that way. As you say, Nick, that it extends into Afghanistan or wars in the Middle East. So that's my question here is just the intentional or strategic targeting of villages, as you write about in

particular at Nick Long. I'm probably saying that incorrectly. But learning more about that, I think, tells us a lot about where the strategy comes from and why it continued to happen. So as we wrap up here, could you just tell us a little bit about what you learned in that particular instance and how it speaks to perhaps a broader strategy that continued on afterwards? Particularly in Neklung, this was an accidental bombing that occurred in 1973 through sheer carelessness and disregard. A full bomb load from a B-52 stratofortress, 30 tons of high explosives were dropped on this Cambodian town. It was reported that at the time, it was known that hundreds were killed or wounded, and the U.S. actually made a restitution.

But that wasn't the whole story. I found State Department documents that show the U.S. knew it had killed and wounded about double the number of Cambodians, as was publicly announced, but they covered it up and they kept it secret until now. The US also announced that they had paid out $400 to victims' families. It wasn't a lot, a few years salary. And these were often families who lost their sole breadwinner. So a few years wasn't going to make a huge impact. But the documents

that I found show that the US didn't even pay out that paltry sum. They paid out only about half, about $215. But again, they kept this secret. And they acknowledged it and said that we shouldn't release these figures. We should just let the press coverage go with the original story. So again, you can see this lack of accountability and the inability to hold the Pentagon accountable at the time. And I think we can see this extend, as I said, to the present day. They've been able to get away with it for decades. And until they're held to account,

I think they'll continue with this same line of obscuring the true costs of our wars. Yeah, I think that is really well said. I very much encourage people to read through the whole report exactly for the reason that you're stating. If there is no accountability for those past crimes, they're just going to continue. We see it in, for example, the withdrawal from Afghanistan when a drone striked an aid worker's house, pretended to pretend, you know, tried to pretend he was ISIS-K, even after reporters uncovered that they blew up this man and his whole family that were completely innocent. Was there any accountability for that? No, it was just a, oops, our bad moving forward.

So thank you so much for your work and reporting on this. And thank you so much also for your time today. Thank you so much for having me on. I appreciate it. Yeah, it's our pleasure. You can read Nick's story in The Intercept. You can also go get his book, Kill Anything That Moves. Crystal, kind of a somber note to end the show on, but a really important one for the reason you just said. This just happened. The strategy is, you know, don't ask permission, ask forgiveness, but then they just don't even do the ask forgiveness part because they cover it up and don't pay out when they're supposed to. Yep, that's exactly right. Emily, thank you for having me today. Thank you for being here. Actually, Crystal, you're going to be back next week. Yeah, you're stuck with me

again next week. So Ryan and I, being parents, both have all this like end of school year stuff going on. So I think he's got some of that to take care of next week. So I'll be doing breaking points and counterpoints next week. So full week for me. I'm looking forward to it. It'll be good. We'll see everybody back here next Wednesday. And Crystal, we'll see you what, tomorrow?

Yeah, apparently. There you go. You're going to get a lot of Crystal this week. I haven't wrapped my head around that yet, Emily. Yes, I will be back here tomorrow. All right. We'll see you go. You're going to get a lot of crystal this week. I haven't wrapped my head around that yet, Emily. Yes, I will be back here tomorrow. All right. We'll see you then. I know a lot of cops.

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