Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 5/3/23 BREAKING: Russia Says Ukraine Behind Drone Assassination Attempt On Putin, Bipartisan AI Legislation, WGA Strike, Biden Sends Troops To Border, More Leaked Tucker, 2nd Haitian Revolution Begins, Death of Press Freedom

Episode Date: May 3, 2023

Ryan and Emily discuss the Breaking News that Russia claims it was attacked by a Ukrainian Drone assassination attempt targeted at Putin, bipartisan AI legislation is introduced, the WGA strike begins as major tv shows shut down, Biden sends troops to Mexican border, Schumer says he's going to make a decision next week on the bill democrats are putting forward to solve the national debt, the USTR working with tech companies to block anti trust legislation, more leaked clips from Tucker Carlson, Emily looks into the Southern Poverty Law Center losing a legal battle to an immigration group, Ryan looks into a second Haitian revolution underway, and guest Ann Wilcox from DC Actions For Assange joins us to talk about the event Death of Press Freedom and Julian Assange.To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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All right. Welcome to CounterPoints, everybody. First of all, we want to start by thanking all of the premium subscribers who either became premium subscribers or upgraded in order so that we could build our new studio. Because, I mean, I don't know about you, I've never been a huge fan of these bricks. I was just going to say, you're liberating us from the bricks. Yeah, I'm hired help, but not up to maze.

But I've seen the designs of the new one. I am very excited about it. It's extremely cool, and we understand there are a lot of people who have been super helpful in that. So thank you. We really, really appreciate it. If you want to help, the link is in the description. We do have some huge breaking news to get to right at the top of the show. As we were filming, news broke that there was a drone strike.

Russia is saying there was a drone strike on the residence of Vladimir Putin in Moscow. Put up the New York Times clip here. So, right, so the most extreme Russian claim being made here is that this was an attempt on Vladimir Putin's life by two Ukrainian drones that were taken down over the skies. The media, the U.S. media is saying that they don't, they're not able to verify that. We do have a little bit of footage that has surfaced of this. We can roll that here. Unbelievable footage. And so this appears to be a drone being taken down. Now, Russia is saying that it's moving from here to ban unmanned aerial vehicles,

you know, all around Moscow. So we don't have any direct evidence yet that these actually were even Ukrainian drones. We're going, you know, based on only what Russia is saying. This is their claim. Now, it very well may be the case that these were, in fact, Ukrainian drones, that they were, in fact, aiming to target the Kremlin. Would it be surprising to me if they were actually trying to take out Vladimir Putin? Do they know exactly where he is at all hours? In any event... I would think their intelligence would be good enough to know that Putin was not there. He was not at the residence. He was elsewhere. And you would think their intelligence would be good enough to know that, but maybe not. This harkens back to the

kind of early days, February 2022, when Russia had unleashed several teams trying to assassinate, capture or assassinate Volodymyr Zelensky. And so it's not as if necessarily either side is above this. Ukraine has taken out, I've lost count of the number of Russian generals that they've been able to identify and then kill with airstrikes. So it's not as if this type of thing, this obviously would be an escalation by orders of magnitude. Well, I was going to say, correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe one of the things from the Discord leaks that Sagar and Crystal talked about was China's kind of red line for getting more directly involved in the conflict was an attack deep inside

Russia. So what was a Ukrainian or Western sponsored attack that went inside, like towards Moscow? Right. And so that raises the question, which you always have to ask in situations like this, of the false flag. Like, you know, in warfare that every country engages in false flag operations, intending to give themselves a tactical or strategic advantage. And so you're certainly going to have some people on the Ukrainian side perhaps saying, well, this is not what they're saying it is. And in fact, it is an effort to A, either, like you said, bring China more fully into the conflict,

get China to supply the weapons that the U.S. says that Russia keeps asking China to supply, or to justify whatever type of escalation Russia might be contemplating in the face of this long-announced Ukrainian counteroffensive that is coming this spring. Right. And yeah, the long-announced counteroffensive that we've heard about for so long is, we talked about this last week, what people see as the final hurdle. You know, depending on how the spring counteroffensive goes, people can come to the table. You made a great point last week saying, well, maybe we just skip all the death and destruction and come to the table now. What's the point if you're saying that, you know, we just want to kind of see how it goes. But this comes still before that is underway, which I think is a really interesting piece of timing information.

And it also reminds us of the terrifying reach of drones around the world. come to grips with the fact that it changes the battlefield in a way that nothing has in decades by exposing so many different people and civilians and civilian leadership to the battlefield in a way that if you think about Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian general, he was hit by, what, a drone strike. He was driving just outside of the Baghdad airport when he was hit. And so then the question becomes, where else does that go? Do we start seeing those in the United States? Do we start seeing them in Europe, in Poland? Yeah, absolutely. And, oh, just can't wait

until those get hooked up to generative AI. Max Tadon, he's the Financial Times Moscow Bureau chief. He says the Kremlin right now is claiming its military and secret services, quote, acted timely to shoot down the drones. And they say, quote, Russia reserves the right to take retaliatory measures when and where it sees fit. Now, again, this is on the heels of more information about what could have been a deadly strike on an aircraft in the Black Sea, right? It was a British aircraft, had something like 30 personnel on it, a near miss, and again, a near miss by Russia. And again, this is such a just tragic, tragic reminder of how quickly things can change,

how quickly things can escalate. And the coming hours are going to be an incredible test of the United States, the West, and Russia as well, and China, all of these countries who are entangled in the conflict, how they handle footage going viral on the internet without, you know, the public having the full story. Right. And this, exactly. And this is the type of reason why wars are so dangerous, because they are so unpredictable. People think that they can keep a handle, that they can control the fates of these wars,

say, oh, well, China thinks it's useful because it's draining Russia. The United States thinks it's useful because it's draining Russian power. But that comes with a hubris, a sense that you can actually guide events in a way that history shows people just don't actually have a way of guiding, that there are so many hinge points and contingent events that we can't get our minds around, that the more space you give for them, the more likelihood you are to create some type of conflagration that you then look back on and say, how did we let that happen? Right, right. And we're in those moments right now. Precarious. All right, moving on. There's new legislation in the House and the Senate that would require

human beings to be involved if we're going to nuke the world. But yeah, let's put up A1 here. And so this to me has to be the kind of the collision of the two most frightening things in the world, nuclear Armageddon and artificial intelligence. And so this is a reintroduction of a bill by Ken Buck, you know, your buddy, right? Republican member of the House with Ed Markey, Ted Lieu. So very bipartisan. And Don Bacon, a Virginia Democrat. And we can put up A2 here, Ars Technica, writing this up. The bill, and I read it this morning, it's quite short, basically says you have to have a human being involved in autonomous weapons that could blow up the world.

Yes. And I think that seems fair. And you know, it's funny because as you say, Ryan, it's a five page bill and the lever for this, the mechanism by which they hope to ban any artificial intelligence from launching a nuke is federal funding. So you can't have any federal funding used to launch a nuclear weapon with AI essentially. Seems pretty reasonable. Yeah. I think that sounds fair. And so at The Intercept, we have, and maybe you guys have these too, we have what you call an air gap computer, which is it's not connected to the Internet in any way, so that if somebody leaks us documents on some type of a thumb drive,

we can just load it onto the air gap. Basically, the Snowden files were kept on a sophisticated version of that. That's how you make sure that there's no penetration by anybody into the system. So basically I think you've got air gap, your nuclear weapons. Like no links to the internet between nuclear weapons and the internet.

Because the AI If it wants to do that could eventually at some point, let's say it say it's 200 years from now Yeah, but we don't want to even if it's a 1% chance or a point zero one percent chance You don't want to leave open the possibility that some maliciously Thinking AI decides that it's going to worm its way into nuclear. I think you just, just keep it, keep it gapped that the only way you can press it is, I don't know, with a lighter or something. Yeah. And this bill was introduced yesterday. I think it's actually some of the biggest news in the world, despite the fact that I've seen very little coverage of it.

Sager and Crystal yesterday talked about Jeff Hinton, who left Google, not because, you know, he talked about this in the MIT Technology Review in an interview yesterday. We have this element. Not because, you know, he suddenly hates Google, but because he thinks he can do more help outside of Google. He's an early deep learning pioneer who has now left these AI projects and is pretty terrified of where artificial intelligence is going.

He's speaking in pretty extreme and dramatic terms about how this could, he said right there, you can see the quote up on the screen, I have suddenly switched my views on whether these things are going to be more intelligent than us. He now, this is from the MIT Tech Review, he thinks the international ban, this is Hinton, on chemical weapons might be one model of how to go about curbing the development and use of dangerous AI. Quote, it wasn't foolproof, but on the whole, people don't use chemical weapons, he says. Well, a little comfort given that people do still use chemical weapons and it would take about one AI nuke launch to get us in a really terrible situation. This makes another, this is

from the MIT review. There's another expert here who's saying, quote, I believe that we should be open to the possibility of fairly different models for the social organization of our planet. And Ryan, I'm going to toss this to you with the question. This bill is for the United States. Artificial intelligence has been unleashed globally. There are other countries with nuclear capabilities. We can, you know,

sort of take care of this at home, cross our fingers and hope everybody follows the law and the mechanisms work. But without, you know, the United Nations is founded. I'm no fan of the United Nations, but it was founded, and you can look at like what Winston Churchill said at the time, after nuclear warfare hit the planet. It seems reasonable to think that we should be looking at global mechanisms right now to ensure that in a very short period of time we don't have catastrophe. Nuclear nonproliferation, can't agree more. And it's going to require every country to actually be honest about where their programs are. That includes getting inspectors into the Iranian nuclear program,

getting that deal going again. And also Israel just admitting publicly instead of like the wink and nod that they have it and everybody knows that they have it, like just say, okay, we got it. Here's how we're gonna make sure that we don't accidentally launch it. Because you also don't want a situation

where you have some lunatic hawk who thinks, you know what, I actually really do wanna launch this nuclear weapon at Tehran or whatever. And then afterwards, you're gonna say, God, that darn AI, don't retaliate against us because, gee, we're so sorry about that. We're gonna put safeguards in place so this never happens again.

So I think Elon Musk made a good point on AI that regulation so often comes after a disaster. And this is not the kind of disaster that we can afford to wait till afterwards to start regulating, that we have to do the unthinkable for humans, which is to think ahead. And the counterpoint, pun intended, from people who are actually very scared about what it would mean to pause some of these rapid advancements in AI is that if we do that, we fall behind China, who's, they've put a lot of emphasis on AI. We fall behind other countries who are really rapidly developing their AI for defense capabilities. And if you sort of pull back on Silicon Valley through the government, through the culture

in the United States, you end up falling dramatically behind. I have actually zero fears of us falling dramatically behind any of those other countries, precisely because Silicon Valley is going to continue to do what it's doing. The question is whether we can put safeguards in place that allow them to do it in a way

that is not just protective of us. I mean, think about people who have no stake in this right now. Think about the people of Haiti, who we're talking about later, who are completely vulnerable to something like this. I mean, you have these wealthy countries developing this technology that could spell more doom and misery for people who had no input in the development of it in undeveloped countries. And I forget who said it, but somebody has said that the biggest handicap that the human race has is people's inability to understand the exponential function. Yes. Like we can understand a linear function, like, oh, things are going this way. They'll probably still continue to go this way, or they might go down like this. But exponential, that we just can't grasp.

And that's what shocks so many people about COVID back in March of 2020, thinking like, how could the world go from what it was in March 1st to what it is now on April 1st? And linear thinking cannot explain that. You have to be able to kind of absorb the exponential function. And at the same time, people couldn't understand how exponentially it kind of collapsed. Because just as the way that the chart goes up like this, it comes back down like this. And so you had a lot of people who finally had understood that we were in the middle of this pandemic, but they couldn't kind of ski down that exponential slope. And so they're over here still treating it as if we're up here. And so like like Musk was saying, you cannot misunderstand this function this time around.

It's one thing to misunderstand a pandemic that is that has a kind of case fatality rate of point five percent or point one percent. It's going to lead to millions of deaths, but it's not going to lead to the end of human civilization, which, you know, this good if we screw it up. Oh, my gosh. And that's what Hinton is saying. I mean, he's saying, you know, if you think about what AI sees as increasing its power, what an algorithm might see as increasing power, it's cloning itself. It is going after other people that threaten its power. Just logically, you can understand how an algorithm would get from point A to point B, and that creates something that spirals out of human control very, very quickly. And so I am concerned about things like teenagers using AI and getting basically sexually assaulted by AI.

I think that's a huge concern. But those are also the cases that people use to say, listen, you know, there are always dangers to teenagers. This is within our ability. It's within, it should be within the scope of parental responsibility to safeguard this, et cetera, et cetera. This is so much bigger than that. Just profound change in human existence. And so this is the potential here. This is actually some good news out of Washington. I think that you have a bipartisan coalition of people who are paying attention to this. I don't know where this bill is going to go, but it's important that we see here, you have not just Democrats, not just Republicans

talking about it and coming on shows like this and talking about it, but they actually have legislation on the table. Yeah, and the idea of putting safeguards around this actually brings us to our next topic, which is the writer's strike. And watch if we can put up A1 here because, you know, one of the key things, so they walked out on the job, sorry, B1. They walked out on the job yesterday. So we're looking at a work stoppage. We're going to be looking at a lot of reruns, a lot of people are going

to have a lot of time to catch up on some streaming that they have been putting aside for a while. First strike in 15 years, and people might remember the last one, that went for about 100 days. Produced the reality TV industry, basically. Yeah. Some people would argue that it really fueled the rise of reality TV. But this time around with streaming, that's really what this is about. I mean, I think everybody understands that's what this is about, although it's also a little bit about AI. This time around with streaming, there's such a backlog of content. It's less of a threat directly to the studios or to Hollywood, I should say,

because right now it's at the end of the season. We're in May. And so if this goes into the summer, that's where it becomes a really big problem for the networks. But for streamers, they do have a lot of backlogged content. So I think that has hurt the leverage a little bit. Yeah, and if we put up B2, which is this tweet from Adam Conover on behalf of the union, and you can go check this out if you want to read it in more detail. He's at Adam Conover on behalf of the union. And you can go check out, you can go check this out

if you wanna read it in more detail. He's at Adam Conover. And what they do, and I like this, thank you for the transparency, writers. They put up what their proposals were and they put up what the responses were from the bosses if the bosses had any particular responses to this. And what you see in a lot of it is, like you said,

anxiety about the way that they're moving from movie mindset to streaming mindset. And so what they're trying to do is say, look, if this is a $12-plus million budget type of film that would have had some type of theatrical possibility or theatrical release in the previous era, we want theatrical basically pay for this. And they come back, they say, well, if it's $40 million, we'll give you this type of thing.

So those do feel like the kinds of things that can be negotiated around. And do we have the SOT from Conover? Yeah, and this is great. Let's play this. This is Conover on CNN. Say, look, times are changing. We are not making as much money as we once did. This is not the golden era of television, although some of us would argue the shows are great. What do you say to them?

So I'd point out the fact that David Zaslav, the CEO of Warner Brothers Discovery, which is, you know, the parent company of the network I'm talking to you on right now, was paid $250 million last year. A quarter of a billion dollars. That's about the same level as what 10,000 writers are asking him to pay all of us collectively, all right? So I would say if you're being paid $250 million, Ted Sarandos made about $50 million last year. These companies are making enormous amounts of money. Their profits are going up. It's ridiculous for them to plead poverty when the writers who are making their shows,

some of them are not able to pay their rent or their mortgages. I literally know writers who have had to go on assistance because they have not been able to make their year. If you look at these companies, they're making more money than ever. It's the people who make the shows for them that are making less. That was absolutely fantastic. It's like he's interrupting their programming with some harsh reality. But he also, Conover tweeted, we proposed in negotiations that AI not be used to undermine our work. They rejected our proposal and offered a, quote, annual meeting to discuss advances in technology. Wow, a meeting.

Thank you ever so much. An insulting counter just dripping with contempt. NBC reports the main, quote, sticking points, according to entertainment companies, include union proposals that would require companies to staff TV shows with a certain number of writers for a specific period of time, quote, whether needed or not. This is a quote. I think we're getting to the point where it's going to be that the only people who can afford to try to start a career in television or movies are going to be people who are independently wealthy already, which I don't think is good for television or movies. I don't think we want that.

An expert quoted in the NBC News piece said that is an absolutely critical point. And one of the things that the writers are complaining about is they've essentially been pushed into a gig economy model when in the past, before streaming, when you just had these broadcast networks who had much more control, much fewer programming, you could have like a really stable job, like the sort of normal type of job where you can feed your family, you have your expectations, everything is more stable and clear about what work looks like. And now it's like picking up stuff here for just a second and getting paid for it that way, stuff here, here, and here. It just makes it really hard to make a living. And I would argue one of the biggest

problems with Hollywood right now, and it's the same thing with the news media. It's not just political bias. It's class bias that creates all of these other kinds of biases. You know, whether it's representation, which I actually think is even, I'm conservative, I think that's a very real thing. And it's not just about racial representation, sexual representation, but class representation. And this is going to make that so much worse if they don't find a way to come to a solution here. And because there is such kind of, you know, there's such universal respect for not necessarily Hollywood elites, but for Hollywood itself and TV and movie production in the United States and around the world. What that has meant is that people from all walks of life have strived in America to kind of become part of that industry.

And as a result, I think they actually in TV, when it comes to TV movies, they've done a better job than I would say like the national media in portraying the working class, whether black, white, brown, types of experiences across the country, whether it's Yellowstone or something else. There is a, they have maintained their connection with all of America because all of America wants to work in this field because it's the thing that's, like a lot of talented kids grow up wanting to do. And if you restrict it just to rich kids who can afford, you know, to take these gig jobs, then you're not going to be in touch anymore.

It's one of the big things that ruined news media. I mean, it really absolutely is. It's, if you look at the pipeline coming from all of the fancy schools and the people coming from those backgrounds, it created these huge class blind spots that have been, I think, central to the failures of media. And the last thing you want to do is then create the entire culture, that problem in the entire culture. And it's been fun to see the kind of solidarity extend to big celebrities. So you had Jimmy Fallon the other day saying that he's a guild member, that I think he said they're going to big celebrities. So you had Jimmy Fallon the other day saying, you know, that he's a guild member, that, you know, they're, I think he said they're going to go dark.

Yeah, all of late night TV is. Right, so, and here's Colbert, Stephen Colbert, his response to the walkout. These are our writers. These people, these are our writers, and I'll stick myself in there because I'm WGA2, and they're so important to our show. They write the monologue, the meanwhile, the cold open, and without these work so hard to bring you this show every night. Which is why everybody, including myself, hopes both sides reach a deal.

But I also think that the writers' demands are not unreasonable. I'm a member of the Guild. I support collective bargaining. This nation owes so much to unions. Anyway, and then he does a TGI Fridays joke, which was actually kind of funny. Oh, you like the TGI Fridays? I thought that was pretty good. Yes, you got to go find the clip if you want that. But the thing that the writers are so nervous about is that AI's quickly developing capacity is going to be deployed to throw them out of work. And I think when you think about law and order,

you can imagine a TV executive being like, hey, chat GPT. Yeah. Like, here's a new headline. Like, here's a plot. Write me a law and order. Right. Somebody, I think Dave Anthony was posting on Twitter,

he's like, we already have AI-generated films. They're called Marvel. And so, you know, there is a risk that you could imagine the more formulaic that Hollywood becomes, then the easier it would be for an LLM to produce that formula. Well, there's a great viral video of all the local news reporters who wrote their scripts with ChatGPT and like read the packet or like did the news story. And then at the end of it said, that was written by ChatGPT. And so it's already obviously affecting the way people are writing for television. Obviously news is a little bit different, but you can see that's pretty,

pretty translatable, um, to anything else. So AI is a huge threat streaming. The streaming area era is one that Hollywood never really reckoned with in terms of pay structure. And so I think that's why at the heart of this, like, you know, it's all a reasonable conversation. And I do think they're going to come to an agreement. I don't know, you know, how tough it's going to be. I don't know how long it's going to be because I do think some of their leverage has been hampered and their demands are reasonable, but it is just a great example of how like the David Zaslavs of the world raking in quarter of a billion dollars don't even want to like really come to the table in a serious way. You think he could live, I mean, I don't want him to suffer, but you think he could live

on maybe $5 million a year? I think he could maybe live, I don't know if you're going to agree with this, on just $200 million. $200 million? An eager $200 million. $200 million. I don't want to be inhumane. You start doing the math on that and it's hard to make ends meet.

Yeah, you've got to get rid of the plane. But that would be $50 million to spread around to the writers. Yeah, there you go. So, all right, that's a place to start. Well, speaking of disasters in the United States of America. President Biden announced yesterday that he is sending 1,500 active duty troops to the border with Mexico in anticipation of the end of Title 42. Ryan, what did you make of this announcement? It suggests to me that they're not prepared. We have known that Title 42 is going to be ending. We haven't known precisely when for two years, but we've known for two years that at some

point it was going to end. We've known for a very long time, with some precision, that it was going to end. We've known that the gang networks and the smugglers have been broadcasting to people across Central America and the Caribbean that Title 42 is going to be ending because it's good for their business. Whether or not it actually means that people are going to be getting over the border easier, they will use anything they possibly can

to entice people to say, look, now is your shot. I wouldn't be surprised if they start circulating fake polls showing Trump like 10 points ahead of Biden. I bet that's already happening in WhatsApp groups around Central and South America saying, look, Trump's going to win. He's going to come back. He's going to do the child separation again. You know, if you want to, you know, if you want to get up there, you got Title 42 is ending. You got to come now.

And the result then will be an effective kind of word of mouth campaign that will get people surging to the border. And so Biden's response is sending 1,500 troops, which adds to some National Guard, what, 500 or so? 2,500 National Guard troops that are already there. So they're saying that they will be armed, as active duty troops often are. They will not be participating in security operations. They'll be more handling logistics, helping to, you know, everything from moving equipment to building shelters and other things necessary for an influx of migrants that's expected.

What was your take? Well, yeah, so they're going to, it's a 90-day deployment as of right now. And of course, that can change. But the big question is, May 11th, 1159 p.m., is when all of this is about to expire. How dramatically, almost war zone-esque is the border going to become? And then what does the Biden administration do? Because right now it's kind of been doing a math, using math, using like this, this weird mathematical magic trick to make it look like numbers are going down in a way that kind of placates both the left and the right by changing how they count encounters, how they count illegal crossings. They use the CBP One app and

say, you know, if you didn't schedule an app appointment and you cross the border, you're out of here, you're going back. But we've also seen people get humanitarian parole, even if they don't do that. So it's a lot of discretion at different parts of the border of the people that are managing things there, which has created just like this complete messy patchwork that allows cartels to fuel this huge influx with disinformation. Because when people get in, people who are desperate say, it's worth it for me. I'd rather camp out in Reynosa, Mexico on the street than be here in Nicaragua, because at least there I have a chance, and it's an increasingly high chance,

as the cartels will tell them, of at some point getting across the border. I might have to wait six months, but that's better than just being in Nicaragua without any way to get across the border. And so I think the way the Biden administration handles not just that 11.59 p.m. on May 11th, but the surge of people that come up through Central America through the Darien Gap and through these very dangerous places, that's already happening. And it will already hurt people for generations to come. There are children that are permanently scarred by this that are on their way up to the border right now because they know Title 42 is ending, because their parents know Title 42 is ending

before a cartel, because a cartel that is preying on them knows it's ending. There are people right now who are being raped on their way up to the American border, that are being kidnapped on their way up to the American border because of all of this. And so the troops, I think, actually, it's a step in the right direction. And maybe we can play the White House thought here of how Karine Jean-Pierre handled that. This is Steve Doocy with KJP. You said yesterday that when it comes to illegal migration, you've seen it come down by more than 90 percent. Where did that number come from? It was, I was speaking. He is telling us the number

is. I hear you. I'm about to answer. I'm about. I'm about to answer you. If you, if you, if the dramatics could come down just a little bit. If the dramatics could come down a little bit. What's dramatic about asking a question about... Okay, I'm going to answer. So I was speaking to the parolee program. As you know, the President put in place a parolee program to deal with certain countries on ways that we can limit illegal migration, and we have seen the data has shown us that it has gone down by more than 90%.

That was what I was speaking to. No, we're going to go. We're going to move. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. We're moving, Peter. Let's go. It's a real problem for the Biden administration, not wanting to call the border crisis a crisis while at the same time deploying 1,500 active duty troops. It's like the meme with the dog drinking the coffee, that this is fine and the flames behind

it. Everything is fine. Yeah, and then the dog doesn't want to go for the fire extinguisher because then he'll be called out. You said everything was fine. Why do you need the fire extinguisher? What, is your house on fire? But you're like, oh, actually kind of the house kind of is on fire.

And if you think that it's only criticism from the right, here we put up C3 here. This is the former NSC deputy who was in charge of the border for the Biden administration saying that this shows that they just simply weren't prepared. And now this could be her kind of expressing some internal kind of office politics and like digging at her former colleagues that she's upset about for things we don't understand. Could also just be correct because it also does – it scans.

It does scream we're not ready. And it also goes to Susan Rice's extraordinary ability as a politician, because Susan Rice, as DPC director, oversaw this calamitous immigration policy for two years, and she just up and leaves right before Title 42. She managed to keep her name mostly out of the news when it was connected to Biden's immigration policy, Biden's border policy, even though she was, you know, instrumental in setting it and I think setting it in a poor direction. And as it's really going to start making news, she's like, yeah, you know, I think I'm good. Check my check. Yeah, I'm out of here. Good luck, everybody.

Right. And there's no serious movement on action from Congress legislation that could be signed by the president, legislation that could be signed by the president, legislation that could be passed at all. We're doing all of this through essentially administrative channels, which is why it's a patchwork at the border, because there's no clarity from Congress. There's no clarity from the law. So you can just sort of change it here, change it there, send migrants in this way, that

way. And it's just really dangerous for everybody and I think a real tragedy and a real shame on us and our leadership. Yeah, we'll be following it as it unfolds. Now, it was announced yesterday that Chuck Schumer said he'll make a decision after the May 9th meeting on whether to bring a two-year clean debt limit bill to the floor of the Senate for a vote. This is big news as Republicans and Democrats in Washington race to figure out a solution. Or maybe not. Maybe they're just racing with their individual teams to figure out what their team's position is going to be, as opposed to what a solution between both of those teams

would be as the debt ceiling gets closer and closer and closer to becoming an incredibly serious problem for the United States. Obviously, Republicans passed that, I would say, like, remarkable compromise legislation last week just purely from a political strategy standpoint. They're able to get their House coalition on board with that legislation. Ryan, yesterday we learned about the discharge petition. Tell us about this because you were reporting on this back in January. Yeah, if you want to put up the second element here,

this was from the Washington Post, New York Times, I think might have scooped this. They say, you know, House Democrats maneuver to force a debt ceiling vote as default looms. And right, so this is what's known as a discharge petition, which is a rule that Republicans left in the House rules, which says that if you gather 218 signatures on any type of legislation, then you can pull it to the House floor no matter what the Speaker says about it. Now, there are a whole bunch of rules around this. And the fun part is, like you pointed out, early January, after the rules package was agreed to, I reported this, if you put up the third element, that the Republicans had left this in

and that it did produce an opportunity for Democrats to do something about it. If you want to put up the fourth element, the point I made at the time was that they had to move very quickly, that because of all of the arcane rules around a discharge petition, it has to be introduced for 30 days, it has to be referred to a committee, it's got to sit before the committee for a number of days. And then if you look at the crazy part about a Monday, like it can only appear on a certain Monday after a certain amount of time, they had to move fast. I thought that they had given up on this, like most of my harebrained ideas. People are like, huh, that's kind of cute. I guess we could do that. Grim is on another one. He's on one again. Yeah, we're not going to do that. Nice

try. But it turns out three weeks after I published this, they had a backbench member of Congress who filed basically a shell bill that was called kind of the Break the Gridlock Act. And it was filed as a rule, which actually makes it so that it's easier to get it to the floor. A bill requires a rule and a bill. A rule is just one rule. It goes right to the floor out of the rules committee once it gets discharged from there. And what that did is it allowed it to get referred to committee, and it got the clock ticking without saying, hey, this is a discharge petition,

and this is our backup plan in order to force Republicans. And so now, because they have, because they got it in in January, it looks like June, sometime in June, they could actually get it to the, they could get it to the floor. Now, McCarthy has at least two mechanisms that he can use to prevent it from getting to the floor, even if they get 218, which require like four Republicans or something like that. The two mechanisms are arcane. One of them is, it's so funny, Congress can define what a day is. Oh God. You know, like we think that a day is 24 hours. No, Congress does what it wants. And so if it doesn't kind of gavel out of session a legislative day, there have been legislative days that have lasted like 45 days or something.

It's hilarious. And so you say, hey, well, seven legislative days haven't passed. But seven days passed. The second thing you could do is on the Monday that it's ripe and is required to be voted on, he could just simply keep Congress, keep the House out of session. If the House isn't in session, can't be brought up. And it's like, ha, the discharge petition writers didn't think of that. But what that does is it makes McCarthy the actor. He's now blocking a solution to the crisis. The reason that he wanted the 218 votes, or he got 217,

somebody didn't show up, but it passed. The reason he wanted the House to pass a debt ceiling bill is so that he could say, look, we've done our part. It's Biden who's going to default on the debt because all he would have to do, move this through the Senate, sign it into law, and there's no crisis. He won't do that. What the discharge petition does, it puts a shoe on the other foot. It says, look, we have the votes. It's McCarthy who's doing this arcane stuff, blocking it from coming to the floor.

What's your sense of how serious this is? Obstructionism absolutely never works out for Republicans. And I think they know that because there's no way, especially in this climate, that the sort of cultural arbiters, whether, let's say hypothetically, Republicans have a really good argument for obstruction here. I don't know what their final bill is going to look like. I think they have some pretty reasonable spending cuts on the table. But let's just hypothetically say, yes, they have a good case for obstructing this process. Even so, the media is so contemptuous of Republican strategy, period, and Republicans, period. They don't have a good relationship. It's very adversarial right now. The public never likes obstruction, period. If you

go talk to average voters, like, why is Washington not working? Why are they not getting anything done? And so even if Republicans have like some sort of complicated answer to that question as to why obstructionism has to happen here, as you may remember, you know, Ted Cruz, his filibuster in the Obamacare days and the Tea Party days, there was a lot of talk of just obstructing government. It never worked in the media. It never works with the public. They want politicians to actually figure out solutions. And even if you have a good case to make, it doesn't fly.

And so Democrats know that. Democrats have known that longer than Republicans have known that. And so that's why it's smart to put the shoe on the other foot in whatever way you can, because it's putting Republicans on their heels no matter what, and that works for Democrats no matter what, which creates leverage for them. And that's why Joe Biden has said, I am not negotiating on spending cuts. We're not tying. We're not making it conditional.

We're not making raising the debt ceiling conditional on Republicans getting this wish list of spending cuts because he knows, and Janet Yellen has warned, actually, I think this was in a letter on Monday afternoon, that that default on debt could happen as early as June 1. To terrify you just a little bit here, the House and Senate are in session for a little more than 10 days for the rest of this month. We're in May now, legislative days. Right. So that's, Joe Biden knows he can get away with not coming to the table on this. So, I mean, maybe Republicans can squeeze some tiny concessions out of him,

but Democrats have ever reasoned strategically not to budge because it always backfires on Republicans. And so then the question for you is, can Democrats find four Republicans to go along with four or five Republicans? And what would it take to get there? Like, obviously, right now, no Republicans are interested. What would it take? What would the stock market have to do? What would the kind of media have to do to browbeat four or five moderates into signing a discharge petition? It depends on, yeah, they can easily get four to five moderates,

but it depends on, I think, whether they come from the moderate wing or the Freedom Caucus wing. You know, they can pull four to five Republicans. I'm just curious as to whether they end up being from like the Tuesday group or from the Freedom Caucus. Why would the Freedom Caucus come along? That's an interesting idea. If they get upset about how McCarthy is handling these negotiations with Biden in the same way that the Tuesday group people could be like, we're screw this. We're done with this. They can just throw a wrench into everything. And, you know, he's been good with managing them so far. Like, again, from a purely strategic standpoint, he's been remarkably good at managing

them so far. But, you know, if that goes poorly because Joe Biden knows that he's got most of the leverage here and McCarthy starts, you know, sneaking towards some type of compromise or giving Biden his way, which I think he may ultimately have to do, then maybe they just say, screw it, we're throwing a wrench at this. Could McCarthy get to a place where he allows it to happen? In other words, he could keep them out on that Monday. Markets are tanking. He's gotten nowhere with, you know, he can't get his caucus to agree with the Senate Republicans and with Biden. And he's like, there's no path forward. He's got rumblings from a couple of moderates that they want to just move on. Maybe they get, like you said, some concession about a continuing resolution from Biden. And McCarthy says, you know what? Fine. I'm gaveling

it in. I'm not putting this on the floor. I didn't do this. Y'all did this. And he just kind of takes the L and then survives as speaker because he didn't do it. Is that a possibility or does he have to go down? No, I think it's all a possibility because it's all part of, and we saw this with the Speaker, the Speaker race, it's all part of these negotiations. So Kevin McCarthy being like, yeah, okay, go ahead and do it, but I'm going to do this. I can see that becoming part of the negotiations just as they're from a purely public relations standpoint as they get closer to knowing what's going to happen, how the public's going to receive it. Anything is possible. How brutal is it for Republicans who sign that petition?

Do they assume they're presumably these are going to be Republicans who are in districts that Biden won. Do they get kind of nihilistic right-wing challengers who are like, we'd rather not have this seat at all if we're going to have a rhino like you? Yeah, absolutely. And would the primary voters stick with them? Or are they like, you know what? We like Nancy Mason. We're glad that she saved the economy. Yeah. I mean, it's a district to district type of thing. But I think if anything, those sentiments have only ratcheted up since the Tea Party years. So there was a huge appetite for obstructionism among the Republican base, not the general electorate, but the Republican base. And that's one of the things that's very difficult.

And during the Tea Party years was very difficult for, like, a Ted Cruz who wanted to mount a presidential bid in 2016. So this is exactly what the Republican base wants. That has not gone anywhere since 2014, 2016, and to 2023. But it is less palatable probably to the general public than ever before, even though it's more in demand among the sort of Republican or conservative movement activist class. Because, and again, like, listen, I think there's some good reasons for wanting to have a conditional debt ceiling increase, obviously. But you don't have the White House, you don't have the Senate. There's, it's, you know, it is what it is. And because McCarthy knows that the other way that 218 members of Congress could get this through is through a motion to vacate. So a

Republican could do a motion to vacate the chair. Five minutes later they elect Nancy Mace or somebody, Speaker of the House. Nancy Mace gavels through a clean debt ceiling increase. And then they do another motion to vacate and then they have another speaker fight. Because Nancy Mace obviously isn't gonna become Speaker for life. It would then be another Republican,

whether it's Jordan or McCarthy wins it back or something like that. So I think for McCarthy, if there are 218 people who want this to get done, it's better for him to kind of play dead on the discharge petition than to force them to vacate the chair and plow through them. And in other news, it's just great to see those Justice Democrats reading The Intercept. There you go. Akeem Jeffries, little Intercept reader. So Elizabeth Warren is out with a new report yesterday and put up this first element here called Big Tech's Big Con, Rigging Digital Trade Rules to Block Antitrust Regulation. I want to highlight this because it relies on emails that were foiled by the group Demand Progress between the head of the USTR and the deputy head of the USTR, Catherine Tai and Sarah Bianchi, and big tech

lobbyists, Amazon, Google, some of the heaviest hitters, which show a level of coordination that they have access to that the public doesn't. And I want to be clear about what the emails say and what they don't say. We don't have any smoking guns about them directly kind of getting particular things in because all of the emails just say, good talking with you.

Here's the call. Here's the call in. I want to give you a briefing on what we just heard from the South Koreans or hey, when can you talk about this? So it shows that they're in regular conversations with these big tech lobbyists, particularly as they're working out what is the kind of the new TPP, what do they call it? The Indo-Pacific Trade Agreement or whatever it is.

It's like a fifth, it's bigger than the TPA. It's like a 13 or 15 country agreement trying to set rules on trade. And it's disturbing to see how much influence big tech continues to have. They seem to have, based on these emails, much more influence on number two, Sarah Bianchi, who herself, as we talked about last week, was the top lobbyist for Airbnb.

So she was a gig company lobbyist. But also some connections to Catherine Tai, who was celebrated by progressives and populists across the board who had worked with her on the Hill. She was a Hill staffer as somebody who was going to stand up to big tech and had a history of standing up to big tech as a House staffer. And so, and it's also interesting that Warren would put this report out because Catherine Tye is not exactly a tight inner circle member of the kind of Warren mafia, but she's somebody that people in that world are generally sympathetic to. And so to see her willing to come out with this report, um, is kind of like a brushback pitch.

I feel like, like we're, we're, we're watching as this, as this unfolds, don't think, uh, that you're going to be able to just kind of smoothly kind of get back into the place that you were in 2015. Yeah. I mean, these are really interesting kind of glimpses into how the democratic process has been totally hijacked by special interests that aren't accountable to voters. They aren't even accountable to consumers anymore because some of these companies are so big. What they're doing is not in the best interest of their consumers, but the consumers have no market power to make that known. But what, are you just going to stop using Google? Good luck. Good luck just boycotting Google. I wish you the best in your effort. And so when you have power like that,

so much more power than your consumers, you're not accountable to a customer base because you have this massive multinational scope, then you can do stuff like this. And our democratic process in Washington, D.C. has allowed that to be exacerbated. And if Bianchi were meeting with members of the antitrust community, members of the public, consumer groups also, then it's like, okay, you know what? If you want to meet with everybody and be transparent about it, okay. I'd rather you're not having calls with Amazon and Google on this. But if you're having calls with everybody on this and treating it with some level of equity, then okay, then I can see it. But that doesn't appear to be what's happening based on this report.

There's not a lot of money in antitrust lobbying. There's not a lot of money in taking on the airlines. Yelp can only fund so much. Yeah, no, I mean, yeah, right, right, right. So yeah, you're not going to have as much power in the average consumer who might benefit from those lobbying efforts. They're never going to have parity in terms of lobbying because good luck. You're not going to have that money. And for people who don't follow this closely, I'm not kidding, Yelp is one of the kind of leaders in this space because big tech has been trying to destroy them since they started. It's actually a miracle that Yelp still exists

because every company like Yelp that was birthed in that time period was either crushed by the Google and the other ones or absorbed and bought up. They have managed to stay both independent and relevant. And so as a result, they've become serious players in Washington. So clearly nothing needs to change. Yelp can survive.

The market is working. I know. That's the funny thing, that you'll have the big four be like, look, we didn't crush this one yet. Yeah, that is what it is. So just leave us alone. They're doing great. All right.

So moving on to the Tucker files. The Tucker leaks. The Tucker leaks. Let's go with the Tucker leaks. The leak attack. The New York Times published a text from Tucker Carlson last night in an article that to me had multiple different elements. We could put up this first one here. And why don't we, here, do we have, let me, why don't we read it? Here's, yeah, so I have something from the New York Times right here.

They say, in the days, or I'm sorry, this is from Mediaite, in the days after Carlson was fired from Fox, multiple reports claimed his ouster was in part fueled by network leadership learning, as the New York Times put it, of, quote, highly offensive and crude remarks Carlson made. The Times reported that they reviewed some off-air footage of Carlson talking about whether his, quote, post-menopausal fans will approve of his looks, as well as another video where he commented that someone else's girlfriend was, quote, yummy. Now, Media Matters got those videos and published them yesterday on the heels of Media Matters publishing that video, which I swear, like, it looked to me like such a deep fake, but apparently it's not, of Tucker Carlson laying in the Fox Nation and

saying that they need to improve the product, et cetera, et cetera. So why don't we just take a look at the SOT E2 here so you can see the video yourself. I'm not, you know what, I'm not qualified on that score, I will say. I thought his girlfriend was kind of yummy. Just kidding. Just kidding in case this is being pulled off the bird. Yeah, the bird. Hey, media matters for America, go fuck yourself. That's the first thing I want to say tonight. Second thing is, totally kidding, I don't even know what his girlfriend looks like. And if I did, I would not find her yummy. Okay, so that's definitely why the video got

leaked to Media Matters, specifically because he literally flips the middle finger to Media Matters. You're left with no choice at that point. And that's another element of this entire story is that it looks like Fox is leaking video. And it could actually be what gets Tucker out of his contract with Fox. He still has two years left on his contract. If they're leaking and that can be proved, it's sort of probably you're able to talk about that as a breach of contract. What did you make of the videos? I thought that the text was more interesting, and I wanted to get your take on that as well. If we could put up E3, and we'll just read it so we have the full context.

I actually didn't like the way that the New York Times kind of broke the text into two separate sections. And this came like last night. This was a huge story as we were prepping the show last night, this released text from Tucker. Right, right, exactly. And so I'll just read it. So Tucker writes, a couple of weeks ago, I was watching video of people fighting on the street in Washington. So this is January 7th, 2021. So he's referring to videos that were going around in December, which people might remember.

It was like Proud Boys and their affiliates fighting with Antifa on the streets. He writes, a group of Trump guys surrounded an Antifa kid and started pounding the living crap out of him. It was three against one at least. Jumping a guy like that is dishonorable, obviously. It's not how white men fight. And I want to get come back to that line yet suddenly I found myself rooting for the mob against the man hoping they'd hit him harder kill him I really wanted them to hurt the kid I could taste it then somewhere in my brain

an alarm went off this isn't good for me I'm becoming something I don't want to be the Antifa creep is a human being much as I despise what he says and does, much as I'm sure I'd hate him personally if I knew him, I shouldn't gloat over his suffering. I should be bothered by it. I should remember that somewhere somebody probably loves this kid and would be crushed if he was killed. If I don't care about those things, if I reduce people to their politics, how am I better than he is? And so I've seen a lot of people hitting him for kind of his glorification and celebration of the violence at the top of that. But to me, there's some interesting parallels here with the Shirley Sherrod case, if you remember this.

Oh gosh, yeah. This was Breitbart's kind of face plant back in 2011 or so where he got video of Shirley Sherrod, who was a Department of Agriculture employee, who gave this speech about how very early in her career in Georgia, a white farmer came to her with some type of a need, and she did not give him the kind of service that he deserved due to racial bias against him. And she said that she sat with that, she thought about it, she realized how wrong it was, and it kind of changed her entire outlook.

And she decided and she realized that we're all people. Everybody needs help. We all struggle. She talks about how she and him became good friends over time and how this story led to her finding a more graceful relationship with race than she had had very early on. And I think that it's a good thing for people to be honest about their feelings and their struggle. And I think that liberals who are jumping on this part of it now, the white people thing,

I think is a completely separate thing that we should talk about. But liberals who are jumping on this should remember that they too have thought of their political opponents in deeply callous terms. Like if you think about during the pandemic, all of the joking about unvaccinated people who died, like those are people who similarly had loved ones who were crushed by their loss. And so, if you were one of those people who was doing that, and you came back from the brink,

and you were alarmed by the feelings that you were having, and it made you rethink the way that you were just, as he says, defining people just by their politics, and you reflected on that and changed. And I think that that is a story that people should be willing to tell. Now, I didn't see evidence that his reflections manifested themselves or expressed themselves in any way on his show. I would have loved it if he would have gone on air and expressed some of these human sympathies

toward migrants or toward, even toward the Oberlin grads that he's always dunking on. Like we're all humans on this planet struggling to make our way in it. And this realization that he expresses in this private text didn't, to me, seem to make it onto air. Yeah, that's interesting. I think if you had him here in front of you, he would probably agree that he could have done a lot more of that because, you know, this is a leaked message from his opponents to make him look bad. It's not him trying to make himself look good or anything

that was supposed to be public. So that obviously gets to the sincerity of what he's saying. The white men fight line, that's not how white men fight. The context of, as you were saying, Ryan, the glorification that people read into the top of the text message of violence. Well, in the context, what he's doing very clearly is disparaging his own wrong-mindedness. You know, he's sort of like mocking his own thought process. And like he's giving a caricature of his own thought process. And that's why I think, you know, the social media climate makes it so difficult. And people said the same thing about cable news before.

I mean, cable news is still fairly new, creation of the 80s mostly, makes it very difficult for us to have honest versions of these conversations because how many tens of thousands of people, if not millions of people, saw the that's not how white men fight line and didn't do what we have to do because it's our job and spend five minutes thinking about this whole story and read the whole context. It just, it makes it impossible to have that conversation when, you know, some section of the public just, you know, not through any fault of their own, they have busy lives and they care about these issues, so they bother to read about them. But, you know, if we're not all on the same page with information because social media is putting us on dramatically different pages based on where its incentives are. And I think maybe if Tucker

were here, I think maybe he would agree that cable news is just like a really bad format for him to have a conversation like that on. So I think it's interesting that this is something that was never meant to be public, was leaked by his enemies. And again, like his rant about Fox Nation just not being a product that's up to what the audience deserves and he's putting all this work into it, et cetera, et cetera. I continue to think these leaks are just like bizarrely flattering to Tucker because it just makes him look more sort of thoughtful than I think often comes across for anyone on cable. Now, if, right now, so if this is some type of a caricature, implicit caricature of a racist and racialized view of how white men fight, how black men fight, how brown men fight. Or just where a white man's head goes when he's thinking about this, like the Liamis and the... Yeah, I'd have to... I'm skeptical of that.

I mean, maybe it is. To me, it struck me as racist in the sense that there's something different about the honor of white men and how they fight versus other races. And that just isn't true.

Like as somebody who grew up in a rural area with lots of white people, like white men are just as likely to jump somebody and probably jump a white guy as anybody else. And so the idea that he could have just said, it's not how honorable people fight. So if he was caricaturing a view of of white people as particularly honorable and then

connecting that to his overly politicized kind of prism through which he's viewing all of these interactions then okay but then like I said, it would also be nice to see those epiphanies expressed publicly. Yeah, I agree. If that's really what they are. Well, and I guess maybe I misspoke. I didn't mean that he's caricaturing the sort of like average white man's mindset

so much as he's talking about where we naturally go as like tribalistic individuals, where our brain will naturally go, which is not how white men fight, which is like obviously a terrible impulse and instinct to have. That's, yeah, absolutely terrible. And if he recognizes it as that,

then that can be an interesting kind of self-exploration. But it requires that self-examination. Well, and I think where he lands is what makes that context important, like where he lands in the thought process. And so the bottom line is that neither of us can get into the head of— Maybe he'll come on and we can ask him about this. We'd love that. And neither of us can get into his head, obviously.

But I continue to think there's just absolutely no truth to the story that this is why he was fired from Fox News. I actually think the Vanity Fair report is the closest to the truth that Rupert Murdoch was uncomfortable with the fiance he just broke up with, loving Tucker. Said that Tucker was the voice of God. He's having this sort of like, right, this evangelical attachment to Tucker. Tucker goes to the Heritage Foundation that Friday after signing off his show saying, see you next week. Just having had a great meeting with Rupert Murdoch, Lachlan Murdoch. Rupert Murdoch sees he gives this very sort of spiritual Christian speech at the Heritage Foundation. And it's like there's this kind of, you know, when you're a 92-year-old eccentric billionaire, you make impulsive and bad decisions business-wise.

And he'd had enough of Tucker Carlson. Obviously, I'm sure the lawsuits have been such headaches for Fox that it contributed to his exasperation with Tucker Carlson. But they have had these videos. They have known about these videos for a very long time. It was not just that they got this information over that weekend, as Megyn Kelly has pointed out. I think that's a really important point, and it goes to the fact that this is a line

that Fox is pushing to the media, and that is why they are leaking these videos, because they think it makes them look good for having said enough is enough. And it's not that different than the types of things anyway. No, like, yeah, no, I agree. Yeah, so anyway, so what are you looking at today?

I'm going to talk about the Southern Poverty Law Center. I think, frankly, this is getting basically no media attention, but the Southern Poverty Law Center, as you know, Ryan, is like an extremely powerful left-of-center nonprofit. Basically, everybody who's listening to the show and watching the show knows about the SPLC because the media cites them constantly as the go-to source on tracking hate groups. There are actually, I pulled a CNN article from right after Charlottesville all the way back then. They said, here are all the active hate groups where you live.

That was just the headline. And in the story it said, since the FBI doesn't keep track of domestic hate groups, the SPLC's tally is the widely accepted one. And you know what? That's true. I went back. They actually changed that line in the article to distance themselves from the SPLC and to make it less like a full endorsement of the SPLC where they're outsourcing their hate group tracking to the SPLC and to make it less like a full endorsement of the SPLC where they're

outsourcing their hate group tracking to the SPLC, which is good that they made that correction, but very telling that they wrote about it this way in the first place because the SPLC has long been seen as the authority on these things. Now, you can read Harper's, you can read the work of liberal journalist Ken Silverstein, who has been writing for decades now about all of the problems at the SPLC. The co-founder, Morris Dees, as people might remember, might even recognize his name. He was ousted back in 2019 for workplace violations. So there have been a lot of problems inside the SPLC for a really, really long time. But they still have a $731 million endowment.

They have almost a billion dollar endowment. The level of power that comes with that kind of money is unfathomable to most other nonprofits. But on April 24th, I think there was finally a really serious indication that the SPLC might be coming into a more difficult season in its existence, especially since it has been basking in positive media coverage for several decades now. So this 55-page opinion from federal judge William Keith Watkins, he's from Alabama's Middle District Federal Court. F2. F2, check this out. It's really, really interesting. He says, he concludes, because the SPLC motioned to dismiss this lawsuit from a group called the Dustin Inman Society.

It is an anti-immigrant group. It's probably the best way to put it. The SPLC calls it an anti-immigrant hate group, as you can see up on the screen. He says, plaintiffs have nudged their defamation claims premised on SPLC's designation of the Dustin Inman Society as, quote, an anti-immigrant hate group across the line from conceivable to plausible. Other claims and issues are deferred until summary judgment as discussed. Okay, so that means this lawsuit, I believe it's the first time that the SPLC, a defamation lawsuit against the SPLC, has gone into discovery. And it comes down to the SPLC's designation of this anti-immigrant group as an anti-immigrant hate group. And the SPLC makes, I think, an absolutely crucial admission

in its effort to dismiss the case. Its defense of itself is that these are only opinions. This is a quote from the decision that was rendered or the opinion that was rendered by Judge Watkins in Alabama. The SPLC argues that labeling the Dustin Inman Society as an anti-immigrant hate group is, in expression of opinion protected under the First Amendment. That is a quote from the SPLC because the term anti-immigrant hate group, quote, is not capable of being empirically proven true or false. This is going to be a fascinating suit because it puts to the test that designation of opinion. And the SPLC, I mean, well, duh, right? We have known for a very long time. Ken Silverstein has written for a very long time. Let me pull up a quote from one of his great

Harper's pieces. This is something he wrote in 2010, reflecting on something, a very long investigation he had written in 2000 into the inner workings of the SPLC and some of its unethical fundraising practices. He writes, I feel that the Law Center is essentially a fraud and that it has a habit of casually labeling organizations as hate groups, which doesn't mean that some of the groups it criticizes aren't reprehensible. In doing so, the SPLC shuts down debates, stifles free speech, and most of all, raises a pile of money, very little of which is used on behalf of poor people. Key, key point, the SPLC was fueling this definition inflation that has come to dominate our politics and is the source of a lot of rancor. That instead of saying people who oppose illegal immigration are mere opponents of illegal

immigration, you say because you oppose illegal immigration, you are necessarily also racist and bigoted. The SPLC has long fueled that. It has laundered those designations into the corporate press as objectively true. And that CNN headline where it says, here's all the hate groups in your area, is a great example of how the impulse among journalists for years has been to outsource, you know, not just to the FBI, but to see the SPLC because, you know, the FBI doesn't do this, the FBI doesn't do this, to see the SPLC on the same level as like law enforcement. And the judge talks about in this 55-page opinion how any reasonable person looking at the investigations and the resources that the SPLC itself promotes its hate maps and its hate designations as being rooted in would say, oh, well, this is not punditry. This is

clearly an effort to be objective. This is clearly an effort to some like version of objective reporting on where hate groups are. So again, this is another great quote. First, the SPLC does not advertise itself as a political pundit. This is from the judge. To the contrary, SPLC self-proclaims that it is the premier U.S. nonprofit organization monitoring the activities of domestic hate groups and other extremists. And that it possesses, quote, key intelligence, offers expert analysis to the media and public, and publishes investigative reports,

and trains law enforcement officers. That is not a description of punditry. So again, all of this is going to be put to the test finally when it comes to the SPLC. What I think the big takeaway from the story is right now, I mean, for years, I mean, I've written about how reprehensible I think it is and fraudulent it is for the SPLC to label, as it does, a lot of Christian groups that have views on traditional marriage, that we used to just say constituted disagreements about traditional marriage, calling that hatred and bigotry. The same thing with immigrant groups. There are a lot of active hate groups in this country, but it is not in any way helpful to the cause of eradicating hate to conflate mere political disagreements, even though you may find the opponent, you know, to have a reprehensible viewpoint in themselves,

to say that that is necessarily rooted in bigotry is obviously not helpful to the country. But more importantly, I think it's fascinating to see, or it will be fascinating to see how the media handles this now that they have for years been using the SPLC as an objective source of what is a hate group, for them to reckon with the fact that the SPLC, in its own defense of its activity, is saying, hey, it's all opinion. I think this really puts a new burden on media coverage because they basically just rely on the SPLC to talk about hate groups. So as that comes to the forefront of media coverage in the future, it's going to be, I think, really fascinating to see how media covers that. Ryan, SPLC has been around for a really long time. They especially in the early days did some really good work now Ryan this is a polarizing question apparently, but I just like tossing it to you with what's your point today?

Something extraordinary is happening in Haiti though. You wouldn't know much about it watching the news here in the United States That's impossible to know where this is heading But it looks like potentially the stirrings of a new revolution. Over the last few months, after the last elected officials in Haiti left office, leaving only completely illegitimate rulers, the de facto government began openly admitting that it had lost control of entire areas of Port-au-Prince, ceding them over to gangs. That only increased the gang warfare as rival groups jockeyed for supremacy. Kidnappings and killings skyrocketed. Getting kidnapped had become a risk of daily life in the city in a way it hadn't been before. And the immediate target of this new revolution is the gangs, and gang members are bearing the brunt of the violence. But the public's ire has also been directed at U.S.-backed

Prime Minister Ariel Henry, who is credibly accused of playing a role in the assassination of the previous President Jovenel Moise. Now, the pushback has played out in brutal fashion. As the gangs tried to extend their control last week, something they didn't expect hit them back. That's people. The first major event came after police arrested just over a dozen gang members and were transporting them back to the station when a crowd stopped the vehicles and surrounded them. It's unclear yet if the police coordinated

with the neighborhood residents, and we're not going to play images of what happened there. But the gang members were pulled off the vehicles, beaten, and burned in a pile of tires. From there, the fury has spread, with civilians realizing that the poorly trained gang members may be more heavily armed, but are badly outnumbered and could be overpowered. It's every government's worst nightmare, and now it's becoming the gang's worst nightmare.

Here's one video that we do want to play because it gives spontaneously when video of this woman ricocheted around the island. Bois Calais! Bois Calais! Bois Calais roughly means chop wood, which resonates with Haitians who still take pride in the gathering of enslaved people on August 14th, 1791, in an area of the forest known as Bois Cayamane, where they plotted a successful revolution, overthrowing slavery and freeing themselves. There have been multiple uprisings since, as colonizing powers have repeatedly tried to force Haitians back into submission and have impoverished them in the process. The current crisis dates to July 7, 2021, when Colombian mercenaries assassinated the Haitian president. Joseph Barrio, the man accused of orchestrating it, made two calls early that morning in the wake of the assassination to Ariel Henry.

A new investigation published yesterday by the Center for Economic Policy and Research, which does great work when it comes to research in the Caribbean and Central America, reported that Joseph Barrio had also ridden in the convoy on the way to the president's home the early morning of the assassination and had been in touch many times in the preceding two weeks with Ariel Henry and then called him after the killing. Henri has fired judges and prosecutors who have tried to expose his role in the killing as prime minister. He was not in line to become president, but in the wake of the assassination, the United States, with its European partners, put out a statement saying they would recognize him as the official leader.

U.S. envoy to Haiti, Dan Foote, soon resigned in protest, saying that the U.S. only anointed Henri leader because Henri was willing to accept plane loads of Haitian migrants from the Biden administration. Six months ago, in an interview with us here on CounterPoints, Foote warned that Haitians might soon take matters into their own hands. I believe that the Haitian people are going to not take kindly to that. And we may wind up fighting the Haitian people who believe that we're supporting a dictator who's not in their interest. And is the U.S. not supporting a Haitian-driven solution

because they rely on having Ariel Henry in there so that the Bideniden administration can continue uh its deportation policy that's my best guess ryan it's almost uh unfathomable that all haitians are calling for a different solution yet the u.s and the u.n and internationals are blindly stumbling through with Ariel Henry has got to be because he has promised to be compliant. But we're going to have a civil uprising in Haiti similar to 1915 when we sent the Marines in for the first time and administered Haiti for almost 20 years. In 1950, Haiti, 15 Haiti was in a similar position. And they went up to the French embassy at the time or legation

and they dragged the president, President Sam out and they tore him limb from limb on the streets. And I fear that you're going to see something similar with Ariel Henry or with a foreign force that's sent in there to propagate his government and kind of keep him in power. Ariel Henry, perhaps not surprisingly, has come out against the Bois Calais movement. The Miami Herald predictably called for outside intervention. But the mistake there is thinking that the problem is that the U.S. has neglected Haiti or not paid it enough attention when in fact U.S. attention has been Haiti's biggest problem. So far the movement appears to be largely leaderless and it involves a small number of police who are trusted by the community working in tandem with them.

I'm told one SWAT officer in particular, who everybody calls sniper, has become something of a folk hero and has taken the lead in a lot of these actions. There's also one commissioner, Jean Mouskadine, who has previously taken an aggressive approach to gangs in his district, accused of involvement with extrajudicial killings. He's since become associated with Bois Calais, with people warning gang members they need to either turn themselves in to Mouskadine or they're going to face mob justice. So I think it's useful for us to do this coverage without judgment, to just lay out, like, this is what we're here for.

Well, happy Press Freedom Day to all who celebrate. Here is how President Joe Biden celebrated the day this weekend at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. Tonight, our message is this. Journalism is not a crime. Evan and Austin should be released immediately, along with every other American held hostage or wrongfully detained abroad. He left out an Australian held hostage and wrongfully detained abroad at the behest of the United States. And so we're joined now by Anne Wilcox, who is head of DC Action for Assange, because

to mark Press Freedom Day, there will be rallies across the country, here in Washington at the Department of Justice at noon, but also across the country, calling for Merrick Garland to drop the charges, to drop the extradition effort against Julian Assange. But Anne, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for having us. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for having us. Thank you. So what was your reaction when you heard from President Biden saying that journalism is not a crime?

Oh, the hypocrisy is just so obvious and stark. We were actually outside the press dinner, the correspondence dinner at the Hilton, with a huge free Assange banner that many of them saw when they came in. So we were there before the environmentalists sort of showed up in large numbers. So we were actually talking to them, you know, people like Martha Raddatz, who's a national security journalist. We said free Assange. So the hypocrisy of his statement, talking about Evan Gershowitz and also Austin Tice, who's been, you know, missing for 10 years. But we do want freed, absolutely.

We want a free journalist and have them be protected. But the press should be supported. And for him to make that statement just showed the depth of hypocrisy while his Justice Department continues to try to extradite Assange back to the U.S. for trial. And it's a really fascinating quote because he says journalism must be protected. And this comes down to the definition of what is journalism. And when he was part of the Obama administration, we know that they had a very big debate about the so-called New York Times problem, about how you legally, if you go after Assange, then you have a real problem with the New York Times itself, one of the biggest papers in the world, if not the biggest paper in the world. So maybe just if we go back to that basic question of why Julian Assange is a journalist who deserves protection and why what he is doing is journalism, what would you say?

Right. Well, he is a journalist. He was presenting documents which were in the national interest, which showed war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. This material is released to journalists all the time, every day. They used sort of leaked information. But there's also an over-classification of information. So you say these documents are classified. What is the definition of that? He's now charged under the Espionage Act. And when that was enacted, there was no such thing as classified information. So they're really kind of having it both ways in terms of what journalism is. And Marjorie Cohn, who's the former president of the National Lawyers Guild, wrote an excellent article on Truthout just after the dinner showing the absurdity of what Biden says.

And, you know, they continue to press for Assange's extradition to the U.S. for this trial, which would be in the Eastern District of Virginia. It would be kind of a show trial. It's funny because the press doesn't cover our actions now, but once Julian Assange is here and on trial, I think it'll be on the news every night. And so help us understand the disconnect. How is it that A, the president felt comfortable making that claim in front of a room full of journalists who could have booed, who could have chanted at him, who could have said, you know, demanded that Julian Assange be freed, but felt comfortable enough that that would not happen, that he went ahead with it. And what were your conversations like with the journalists outside? Right. Well, the problem is we think, first of all, institutions like the National Press Club have not supported Assange. And that'll be

one of the places we visit today on our little march. We're going from the DOJ to the National Press Club to the Washington Post, which also has not spoken out strongly for Assange. But the fact is they talk about Austin Tice. They have briefly called for an investigation into Shireen Abu Akhla's death, which is important. But the establishment has not supported Assange. And so they could ignore us. they heard what we were saying when we came in but there You know we think that during the Pompeo and Pompeo was CIA director the National Security establishment turned against Assange They didn't like what the vault seven releases although the indictment doesn't you know include that material It's earlier material, but that's when the CIA turned against him and they just seemed like a dog with a bone. They do not want to let go of this indictment. And so we're out in front of a, we go to Merrick Garland's home twice a month on a Sunday with huge banners that say

Merrick Garland free Assange. And he and his guests and his family members see this. It hasn't, so far it hasn't moved them to, you know, withdraw, drop the extradition request. Can you talk a little bit about Vault 7? Because I think that people don't appreciate the importance of Vault 7. Because when it was published, there was so much going on in the world that most people, I don't think, even remember the revelations, you know, seismic as they were. And that is my understanding as well, is that that was the thing that was kind of the last straw for the national security establishment. Yeah, well, again, I'm not an expert. You should get our colleague John Kiriakou to come in and talk about this or Jesslyn Radack. But it's my understanding that it also released sources and methods, you know, ways that there was cyber hacking going on.

There were ways that the CIA was listening to our signal phones, which we think are secure, and other websites. And so it just revealed a little bit too much about what the CIA was doing. And to me, my understanding is that it was more embarrassing than anything else, that the CIA for a very long time had been internally mocking the State Department, which couldn't keep track of its cables, mocking the Pentagon, which couldn't keep track of its cables, mocking the Pentagon, which couldn't keep track of its evidence of war crimes.

But we over here at the CIA, nobody's going to get our stuff. And then somebody inside the CIA leaks what they end up calling Vault 7, which in WikiLeaks' defense, they did not release the kind of underlying code so that it wasn't as if other hackers could use any of the code and then deploy these powerful tools around the world. But what they did do is expose what the CIA was doing that previously had been kept secret. And it was almost more embarrassment, I think, than anything else.

Yeah, they didn't like being embarrassed. And Pompeo kind of took it seriously or took it personally, let me say that. While I have a moment, I just want to really quickly point your viewers to the Assange Defense website for events so that they'll know what the events are that are going on today. You know, we're doing our little march around Washington, D.C., from the DOJ to the Press Club to the Washington Post from 12 to 2. But also in New York, there will be a rally at MSNBC, which, of course, is part of this monolithic press. Yes, at 30 Rock. Some of the CIA and FBI guys coming out of the MSNBC building might see. If you want to find spies in New York, go to 30 Rock.

Yeah, they'll be comfortable with that. And Chris Hedges is going to be their great speaker. And also in L.A., they're going to do a die-in outside one of the press headquarters. And finally, in Chicago, Kevin Gostela, who's written a new book called Guilty of Journalism, he's doing a webinar. It's sponsored by the Chicago Group,

and that'll be online for everyone to view. So go to assangedefense.org slash events, and you can see all of these events. Did you get any engagement with the Martha Raddatz types? What did they say? Right. Well, they heard us. They knew what we were talking about because again, we were there when it was still, you could still hear what we were saying. And we had this huge red banner that said Free Assange. So they heard us. They tried to ignore us and walk past. Lester Holt, NBC news anchor, at least looked over and acknowledged us.

We even saw Kellyanne Conway. It was kind of funny. But, you know, we got a few thumbs up, but not many. But we knew they knew what we were talking about. It's interesting because of that letter that they all sent. What was it? At the end of last year, it was in November, the New York Times, Der Spiegel, The Guardian, Le Monde, they signed that joint open letter calling for dropping the Espionage Act's charges against Assange. But there's still just this disinterest in the case overall that characterizes their approach. Absolutely. And one other thing to keep in mind is we're also trying to pressure Congress to step up more. There was this letter, which you may have discussed on your show, that only seven members of Congress,

the so-called squad, signed and that was submitted on April 11th, which was the anniversary of Assange's arrest in London. And it was accompanied by parliamentarians who also sent letters from Australia and the European Union and so forth. But we need to get members of Congress to support him. The Progressive Caucus and the Black Caucus should have stepped forward as a group and said, you know, this is about press freedom and the truth. This is what we support. And we couldn't get, you know, Pramila Jayapal, Ro Khanna and their group to go along with that.

So that's really a travesty. Yes. Yes, indeed. Yes, indeed it was. And so, again, if you're in D.C., Department of Justice at noon. What's the website again for people to find the other ones around the country? Right. AssangeDefense.org.

Great. So wherever you are, there may be one. Anne, thank you so much for joining us. And also thanks again to our premium subscribers on Spotify and people who subscribe on YouTube because you guys are paying for this an upgrade to our studio which you're going to very much like it's really cool it is they've been working out for months going away yeah we're we're tearing down the brick wall yes that's right Mr. and Jetty this wall tear down this wall excellent well thank you guys for joining us and thank you for all for all the support.

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