Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 6/21/23: Tucker And Trump React To Hunter Charges, Obama Blames Economy For Rightwing Populism, Trump Trial Date Set, Impending Student Debt Ruling, Andrew Tate Charged In Romania, Venezuela Sanctions, Titanic Submarine Missing And New Lab Leak Evidence

Episode Date: June 21, 2023

Ryan and Emily discuss Tucker and Trump responding to Hunter Biden's charges, Obama blaming economic woes for the rise of rightwing populism, Trump trial date set a week before the first GOP debate, student debt SCOTUS ruling impending, Andrew Tate charged in Romania, Venezuelan and Cuban sanctions, a submarine visiting Titanic wreckage goes missing, and Justin Goodman joins to discuss new lab leak evidence.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 Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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The Hunter Biden fallout continues. We're going to start with that. We're going to talk a little bit today about what Barack Obama has to say. Ryan, I think you have some thoughts on this. He said wealth got concentrated. And that caused some problems. Wealth, it just got concentrated. We'll see. Ryan's been spending some time with Sagar this week. So I'm curious to see if he's been radicalized in the other direction. We'll see. Maybe I'll be on the left in that one and Ryan will be on the right. Maybe. And then we're going to get to Donald Trump. There's a court date that was announced for his documented trial and all kinds of stuff continues to happen

in the 2024 campaign because he sat down with Brett Baer for a pretty interesting interview. So that is coming up. We're going to talk about the ruling that is expected on student debt from the Supreme Court next week. We're going to talk about Andrew Tate's case. Ryan has a great monologue prepared for everyone on Venezuela. I'm going to talk a little bit about the tragedy unfolding at sea right now as the Titanic rescue efforts continue. And we're super excited to be joined once again by Justin Goodman from White Coat Waste, who's going to talk to us about more lab leak evidence that White Coat Waste and others have been uncovering. Ryan, that's a lot. That's a lot for one day, but the news doesn't- And the Supreme Court is possibly going to gut the administrative state.

Yes. Make sure you don't get student debt relief and eliminate affirmative action. We're going to talk about their upcoming cases. Yes, we're expecting Supreme Court cases next Thursday, I believe starting next Thursday, and that'll all be going on next week. So some big changes could be happening to the country in the next week or so. You wanted to mention a little bit about Virginia at the top here. Oh yeah, real quickly. So in Virginia, there were primaries last night. The Working Families Party endorsed seven candidates, which is a pretty decent proxy for kind of the progressive versus kind of centrist, moderate, pro-business wing of the party. And of those seven, five of them swept, including knocking out a couple incumbents who had been

there for a very long time, one of whom calls himself a Joe Manchin Democrat, another of whom had been a pretty right-wing Democrat. The Virginia Senate, Virginia House are going to be much different than they were before. Dick Saslaw, who's the, I think has been Senate president since Thomas Jefferson, like founded that state, probably even before that, is retiring. He had this amazing quote in the Washington Post where he said, why do you want to run these people out of office? He's talking to the voters about these incumbents that are getting beaten. And he says, why do you want to run these people out of office? He's talking to the voters about these incumbents that are getting beaten. And he says, vote for me. I'm different. That's their whole

thing. So he's angry that these candidates ran saying that they're going to do something different. Right. And that voters elected them on that platform. Yeah. It's confounding. It is confounding. Why people would want something new. It's so crazy. It just might work. I think Barack Obama might have an answer for him. Yes. We'll get to that in the next segment. But for now, the fallout from Hunter Biden, again, Brian and Sagar covered this yesterday, but he is going to plead guilty to two tax misdemeanors. He struck a deal with federal prosecutors where they are resolving that felony firearm charge. And that was all announced by the DOJ yesterday. They're going to recommend

a sentence, just a probation for those tax charges. That was in 2017 and 2018. He owed like some $100,000 in federal taxes in 2017. Or at least 100. And then, yeah, at least 100,000 in 2018 as well. So this is, you know, you have right off the bat, Tucker Carlson, he's got his new show on Twitter, comes out swinging with an episode. And we have some sound from that here. This morning, Hunter Biden pleaded guilty to pretty much nothing. Biden pled to two misdemeanor tax evasion charges, then entered a diversion on a federal gun charge. That's it. As far as Merrick Garland's Justice Department is concerned,

Hunter Biden is done. There was no pre-dawn raid carried live simultaneously on CNN. There was no perp walk, no handcuffs, no press conference. Above all, there was no felony. Hunter Biden, who broke federal gun laws, can still carry a gun. It's like it all never happened. In fact, the Justice Department just baptized Hunter Biden. A lifetime of sins washed away in an instant. It was a secular miracle. Most miraculous of all, Hunter Biden somehow escaped a FARA charge. FARA is the Foreign Agent Registration Act, and it is exactly what its name suggests.

Under federal law, if you are acting as an agent of a foreign nation in Washington, you are required to register with our government to let everybody know. So Paul Manafort was locked up on a FARA charge not too long ago on the other side of the aisle. I think Tony Podesta was hit with one but didn't get any time. And I want to say Gates did as well. Yeah. And I think somebody else, he mentioned somebody else from the Trump campaign who wound up getting hit with one as well. Oh, Elliot Broidy, who was a kind of Trump fundraiser. Entirely fair, fair charge in all of those cases. Some of these folks are, right. And it raises the question then, well, what was Hunter Biden doing other than kind of lobbying? The only possible defense I could imagine for him would be that he was such a bad lobbyist that he actually never did any lobbying and that prosecutors looked for any contact that he made between himself and

anybody in the government to actually do the things that he told his clients he was going to do and maybe couldn't find it because you do find you do see a lot of emails where he's sending notes to his colleagues saying hey get this meeting for this guy get this meeting for that guy it would be funny if the reason they didn't charge him was because he just shirked his job. Like, I mean, we know that he was on a years-long bender at this time that he was supposed to be doing foreign agent work. But literally, he was doing work for foreign governments and not just foreign governments, but like Burisma is not a foreign government, but it's linked to the government. And you still have to register as a foreign agent.

If you're just serving on the board and giving them advice on how to build a pipeline in Ukraine, then you don't actually have to register. But that's not what he's doing. He's not like an expert when it comes to natural gas. His whole thing is influence. Maybe it's just, look, we got his name. He doesn't have to do anything. I mean, that's an interesting point because he obviously was incompetent. But at the same time, there are photos of his clients on the golf course with his dad.

Right, they got there. They clearly got there somehow, and they paid him and got there. Yeah, and we have evidence of him email wise setting up meetings, the cafe Milano meeting, for instance, which is a super swanky restaurant in Georgetown that his dad was at the same place with his clients. So I just have a really hard time believing they didn't find any reason to charge him with a fair violation. They claim by the way, that the investigation is ongoing. So we'll see if anything else comes of that. I also think Tucker raises an interesting point of tension with the left's, I guess, stance on gun control laws and drug violations

and where it puts Hunter Biden right now. For instance, Joe Biden himself has lobbied for to have more of a stringent approach to if you are charged with a drug and a firearm violation. That's actually a huge swath of problems in the country, a huge swath of crime is that combination of violating both a weapons law and drug law at the same time. It's a combination that Democrats and a lot of Republicans as well would say should be a very big problem for someone who's being charged in court. And he's basically getting a slap on the wrist there. And if we can actually put up a four on this, you heard from Kodak Black's lawyer, and you heard from a lot of different people, Wesley. We mentioned Wesley Snipes on the show yesterday who went to jail for not paying taxes.

But here's Kodak Black's lawyer saying, look, you commit this crime, you're looking at several years in jail, in federal prison. It is extremely unusual. Now, I think that on the left, at least, now maybe among the kind of Democratic Party, there's a lot of resistance to seeing Hunter go to jail. But I think on the left, if you locked Hunter Biden up for a gun charge or for foreign agent, not registering as a foreign agent, okay, good. You got him. Try him. Try him. Lock him up. The real left. He's not our boy. Not the establishment Democrat. Yes, yes, of course. This is actually from The Federalist.

In 2021, fewer than 1% of cases filed by US attorneys in federal court resulted in the kind of pretrial diversion offered to hunters. So fewer than 1% of cases. This is from Brett Tolman. He says, if hunters were a typical case, we would have expected a much more aggressive DOJ response. Mixing illegal drugs and firearms is usually a quick trip to the land of five or seven year mandatory minimum sentences. And again, Hunter Biden is looking at probation, essentially. And I think the real story is that normally they wouldn't have prosecuted at all. They're only going after Kodak because he's like a famous rapper. And if Biden hadn't run for president in 2020, they probably never look at this even at

all. And so then when they finally had to look at it, they're so reluctant to bring charges that they get this thing, like you said, less than 1%, just absolutely appalling for anybody who thinks that there's kind of equal protection under the laws. Joe Biden, who has consistently said, my son has done nothing wrong. Right. Is now at odds with Hunter saying, I'm pleading guilty. I did something wrong. It felt like a lie so brazen that it wasn't a lie. It's like, we have photos of him doing things wrong all the time. And so for you to say, he wrote about it in his book, for you to tell us to our faces that he did nothing wrong, we know that you're either completely delusional or you're just saying this because it's your son.

Anyway, he was asked about it at an event about artificial intelligence yesterday. And here's what he said real quickly. This is A2. Donald Trump had a slightly different reaction. Yes, he did. If we can put up A3, here's Trump's truth social, mostly all caps. The Hunter Joe Biden settlement is a massive cover-up and full-scale election interference scam, in quotes, the likes of which has never been seen in our country before. A, quote, traffic ticket, and Joe is all cleaned up and ready to go into the 2024 presidential election. And this as crooked DOJ state and city prosecutors, Marxists and communists all hit me from all sides and angels with bull. Angels with bull.

Okay, he means angles with bullshit, but he said angels with bull. All sides and angles with bull. Yeah. Bleep, I see. Make America great. Make America great again. I would listen to like ASMR Ryan Grimm reading Trump social media posts. I just accepted truth socials cookies. I wonder what, I wonder what weird virus I'm going to wind up on my laptop here. I mean, this is bonkers stuff, but he's not wrong that this is not the kind of proportionate response that the Department of Justice is normally going to give to a defendant.

But Trump also wants two tiers of justice for, I'm sure, Jared Kushner and I'm sure himself in different cases and people associated with him in different cases. And by the way, there are two tiers of justice in the sense that we've talked about this last week. There are charges in violations of the Espionage Act that Donald Trump is being hit with that you could technically also probably hit Joe Biden with. Whether the case would have been brought without the obstruction is another question. So in that sense, yes, sometimes there are two tiers of justice. The entire Russia collusion narrative was spun up, the FISA warrant, the lack of punishment for people. You basically just have Kevin Clinesmith getting in trouble. But that's – sure.

We can all agree that's wrong. But that doesn't mean that people in positions of power who are hit with partisan justice really want there to be one tier of justice. Everybody wants there to be two tiers. They just disagree on who belongs in which tier. In which tier, right. And they all agree that they don't belong in jail. Yes. Yes. Yeah, that's true. The New York Post, I think, raised a good question. They actually wrote an editorial and they raised a question about the timing. So they say, again, this investigation began back in 2018 and we know the feds soon had enough evidence to convict them. The charges finally brought

perhaps before and surely soon after the 2020 election are we supposed to believe they held off so long because they were looking into more consequential crimes um only to suddenly decide that they couldn't prove anything else i think this coming a week after the trump charges um down but from from jack smith it it is you know you were in the new election cycle it eerily, Jonathan Turley predicted last August, so August of 2022, that the Hunter Biden charges would end in, quote, controlled demolition. That's exactly what this feels like. What's so frustrating is their added statement that the investigation remains ongoing because I don't really believe that it's ongoing. If it were ongoing, great. You know, continue to prosecute because there's a lot of stuff, like you said,

the Cafe Milano meeting, like check that one out. Did he arrange for that? If he did, if you can prove it, foreign agent registration act violation. But by saying that the investigation is still ongoing, what it allows them to do is not comment on that, that 1023 that, that Comer23 that Comer and Grassley are all fired up about and anything else that involves the case. Well, we can't comment because, you know, ongoing investigation, what can I do? Yeah. And on that note, that's another interesting point because it's this entire question about Joe Biden, 2024 election, Hunter Biden, the controlled demolition question, like all of this is not improving anybody's faith in our institutions, in our law enforcement, in the FBI. And so now you have the like very obvious

controlled demolition of Hunter Biden. And the real question over and over again, and Republicans that are sort of thirsty for the bloodlust for the Biden family, they're not even great at doing this themselves. This is about Joe Biden at the end of the day. And right now, all we're talking about is Hunter Biden. And that's fine because there's good reason to talk about Hunter Biden. But the Cafe Milano meeting, all of these different things, the 10 for the big guy, that's about the sitting president of the United States. And all of that is first and foremost and should be first and foremost on our mind. But Hunter is such an easy sideshow because we have the pictures from the laptop. And it's much easier for the media to talk about Hunter Biden and for Joe Biden to say he's proud of his son. And that's fine. He's a father.

Then actually focusing on what the sitting president of the United States might have been doing. It's a sideshow, I think. The silver lining from all this, though, is that all of the existential angst of and anxiety of going through this process is going to help Hunter produce some of the greatest artwork that he's made in his career. Maybe. So. Let's hope.

And then it could be. And those prints will be available for sale for the low, low price of $75,000 each. We should get one for the set. We're going to do a fundraiser from the audience. We're going to try to raise $75,000 so that we can get at least one Hunter print. And maybe some access to Ukrainian oligarchs. That's right. Oh, it'll pay for itself many times over. Well, let's hope.

Absolutely. Well, let's move on to new comments made by former President Barack Obama, who is on, obviously, the podcast circuit right now. Because what else do you do? What's he slinging? His Netflix documentary? I don't even know. So he's obviously not doing a good enough job peddling it. And why isn't he here? He can't be far. He must be in DC. He's certainly close. I'm sure he's doing this by Zoom. Yeah, well, that's, well, I guess, yeah, you're probably right. So on that note, speaking of which, if he is doing it by Zoom, his audio is fantastic. Let's listen to the soundbite of former President Barack Obama on David Axelrod's podcast.

The crisis in democracy that you're seeing, not just in the United States, but around the world, huge economic disruptions, the speed with which wealth got concentrated, the speed with which people's lives were disrupted, made people worried and scared. And when people are worried and scared about not just their future, but their kids' futures, then the appeal of right-wing populism, the appeal of sort of a more cynical view of the social order and it's dog-eat-dog and you got to kind of choose up your tribe because it's a zero-sum game. All that stuff accelerates and expresses itself in our politics. Okay, so he just said right-wing populism there, by the way, which is really interesting from the man who, when he was leaving office, his own

party rigged a primary and And still you have the surge of a populist like Bernie Sanders that is able to nip at the heels of the former Secretary of State, former First Lady, who has basically the entire apparatus of the party behind her. And he's just talking there about the concentration of wealth accelerating a rise of right wing, as he says, populism, and not looking at the other side of the coin in that analysis at all, which I actually think is pretty interesting. And what's interesting too is that, and I cover this moment in my last book, is that he sounds a lot like Elizabeth Warren in roughly 2011 talking to Barack Obama. Right. Occupy Wall Street is happening at that point.

Occupy Wall Street. He brought her in to set up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and then she left to go, after it was set up, to go run for Senate in Massachusetts. And so Obama and Warren had kind of an exit interview. First time, really, that she gets some actual time with Obama. And she says basically this to him, that wealth, the wealth concentration, wealth got concentrated. The concentration of wealth that he's allowing and engineering to happen is going to produce an inequality that is itself then going to express itself in our politics in the form of right-wing populism. That's the kind of thing she was saying. And she zeroed in on housing because this is at the height of the eviction crisis, the foreclosure crisis. And that has been the thing that has ripped the fabric of our society the most completely, is the inability of people to live that American dream.

The social contract has always involved being able to own a home and grow your wealth through that home. And then the American people then look the other way on all of the other terrible things that are happening because that's the thing that is kind of the promise in return. You're going to be able to retire on that. You can pass it down to your kids, whatever. Now you can't even afford rent. 10 years on from her warning. After that meeting, and and she said you've got to do something policy-wise about about where this is headed and he's like love to hear your ideas we're out of time um here email me yeah and uh and we'll and we'll talk you know and uh you know my uh my secretary will give you my personal email as she as she leaves she tells the secretary what he said. She's like, yeah,

just email me. I'll make sure he gets it. And they basically never talked about that ever again. But so it's funny to hear him say it now. But I'm curious for your take on this, because I feel like you somewhat disagree with what he's saying here. There are a lot of Democrats who also disagree and feel like he is downplaying the role of kind of racism and hostility to immigrants and migrants that fueled right-wing populism around this time. And I get beat up every time I point to economic cataclysms as producing some of these anxieties that, as he says, express themselves in our politics. So I'm curious where you come down on that.

I think it's definitely the combination. I think you would still have it. Without one, you would still have the other. You would still have, I think— Without the economic crisis, you'd still have right-wing populism. And without the cultural changes, you would still have populism because both are pretty severe. I see. Because the rapid concentration of wealth happened very quickly and especially hit certain areas in the Rust Belt, for instance. And Obama actually was reacting to that in 2000. I actually

thought in this clip he was going to go into clinging to guns and religion, one of the most famous quotes that he had. It's basically the same thing. Almost exactly the same thing. He's saying that he's on the same theme. Yeah, almost exactly the same thing. And interestingly enough, he was the other side of that coin back in 2008 when he was sort of casting aspersions at right-wing populism. He was doing this populism that was left-wing, but really more palatable to everybody, kind of across the board, like a very sort of centrist, hope and change type populism, talking about ending the war, things that everyone was

in agreement with at the time. And then on the other side of this, you can just look at the mergers that were allowed to happen under his watch that as Stoller, Matt Stoller, I think really appropriately points out, this was not just an economic disruption to borrow the president's word. This was also a cultural disruption. So as you have wealth concentrating via these mergers, you also have power over speech concentrating and you create ideological monopolies. So both are happening at the same time. You know, when you create economic concentration,

you're also, when you create wealth concentration or you allow it to happen just sort of passively, as he says, it just happened. I wouldn't have had anything to do with that. When you do that, you're also concentrating power. And I think, you know, when I look at the culture war, for instance, those dear colleague letters on Title IX that created basically kangaroo courts on college campuses that were these, I mean, those were sparks of the culture war flame. That's where you end up hurtling into Gamergate. That's where you end up hurtling into the dear colleague letters on Title IX that said gender identity would be conflated legally with biological sex.

And that was just via a letter from the Department of Education under Barack Obama. That was his policy. Camille Paglia, at the time, said she was like, that's when I knew that Hillary Clinton was losing the election, when I saw the Obama administration did that. Because it's just so divisive. There was his immigration policy where he basically just waved a magic wand and used executive powers in a way that a lot of people on the left encouraged him to. I mean, I would argue you probably disagree with this, created de facto open borders. The Beer Summit, which was, I think,

a way that handled the Skip Gates, the Henry Louis Gates thing, an incredibly divisive way. I think he really fanned the flames on a cultural level. Why is that divisive, though? It's like a summit, bringing people together over beer. He didn't have to weigh in on it. I mean, I think that's why it was. Oh, like the entire weighing in on. Right.

But it wasn't an easy position for him to be in. I actually was just talking about this yesterday. He was in one of the least enviable positions as the first black president. And there was never going to be an easy way to sort of weigh in on those issues. I think a lot of what he did was counterproductive, but, you know, I don't begrudge him.

I think that was a pretty difficult position to be in. But on a lot of different levels, he fanned the flames of both, I think, wealth concentration and that sort of ideological monopolization that came to dominate elite circles by the end of both, I think, wealth concentration and that sort of ideological monopolization that came to dominate elite circles by the end of his presidency. And you have both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump as a reaction to both of those things. You know, Bernie Sanders did not go on Broad City, unlike Hillary. But that would be my takeaway. And I don't want to defend Barack Obama, but on the question of kind of Black Lives Matter and racial justice and the way that he interacted with that rising energy, I feel like you're giving him a bum rap there in the sense that for the first like four or five years of his administration. And I was critical of him at the time for not saying enough, for being somebody who, and as he's talked about since, because he was the first black president, he felt like he couldn't say things that perhaps even Joe Biden would have said. And then some

things just get to a point where you're just being irresponsible if you don't weigh in on it. Or you get asked about it and you answer the question. Like this, you know, there was this famous case, if people want to go back and look it up, where Henry Louis Gates, Harvard professors in Cambridge, he's coming back from a trip. He's got his luggage on his porch, and he had locked himself out. And the Cambridge police arrest him, which to people like Barack Obama who have been followed through a Macy's for doing nothing different than white people walking through a Macy's, they hear that and are like, enough of this. Let's say something about this. Maybe we're at a place where we can actually talk about this and move beyond it. And a lot of people on the left, like,

ridiculed the whole idea of a beer summit, like, that it didn't even deserve that level of like, why are you coddling this kind of attitude rather than just denouncing it? But yet, and it shows how intractable this stuff is, that if it's the case that from the right, that was viewed as, like, how dare you? Like, why are you instigating?

Just leave well enough alone. No, I mean, I think, so we definitely don't need to relitigate the beer summit, so I'll probably just take it. That was, what, like, 2009. I remember it was Blue Moon I respected that because it's like

like often times a politician who's like trying to be working class but really wants a Blue Moon isn't going to do it, not going to put fruit in their beer but if you're confident about your social status and your working class status, give me the Blue Moon it's paid for

by the White House. I'm getting the blue moon. Yeah, 100%. You have the mud light. Enjoy. You can't have the bud light anymore, though. I don't like indulging. I don't think that there was, what we learned, I think, was that basically there was no racial animus in that situation. As entirely understandable, as you said, for people who have been followed through Macy's, Henry Louis Gates or Barack Obama, as entirely understandable as that is. I think having the commander in chief indulge charges of racism for a cop who was just doing his job as representative as that actually is, that you have, you know, sensitivities on both sides from people that were defending the police and people who were defending Skip Gates. I completely get it. But I think elevating that to the level of the White

House was a telling mistake that Obama made early in his presidency. And again, I don't envy him at all. That was an incredibly difficult position to be in. But when I look back on that, I think there was sort of indulging the language that has come to be really divisive. Not an easy thing for him to do, though. I don't know. It just doesn't seem fair to say you just can't talk about this. That it's like, you know. I think the way he talked about it on the campaign in 2008 was really unifying.

And then I think something shifted after he was in office and he was being forced to respond to cultural things that were happening, the people that he wasn't in charge of in the media, for instance, who spread abject lies about what happened in Ferguson for a really long time. He was then forced to grapple with that in a way that was unfair to him. But I think he made some tactical errors that did inflame tensions. It's also the case that the country is often willing to speak about kind of racial harmony in general terms, but then when it gets to specifics, everyone's like, eh, not so sure about in this case. But generally speaking, I was listening to that Axelrod interview, and one thing that struck me about it was they start the conversation going back over his 2004 convention speech with the famous lines, you know, there's no liberal American, conservative America, there are no red states and blue states, there's the United States we all worship, blah, blah, blah.

Today, on the left, you would get canceled for saying that, to say that there's no white America, no black America, no brown America. That would be erasing identities. And it reminded me of how close to the 90s Obama's kind of rise was. Obama was a creature of the 90s, which very much did have that attitude. Sort of the bridge. This is 2004 that he's given his speech. But you wouldn't have a presidential candidate talk that way on the Democratic side anymore. Now that would be much more kind of Republican rhetoric. Right. Cynically kind of weaponizing that Martin Luther King.

Yes. Famous Martin Luther King line. Yes. Well, Martin Luther King has some lines that would get him canceled from the left as well. And probably, well, I'll probably also had some lines that got him killed. Yes. But anyway, Supreme Court or do we have Trump next? We've got Trump next because we have to keep talking about Trump. Otherwise, as people in the media, we shrivel up and die if we don't get our Trump fix.

Speaking of which, Donald Trump has a court date. August. August. Judge Eileen Cannon, I'm reading from the Washington Examiner right now. We can put that element up on the screen. Set the date, the first court date for the former president's classified documents trial a little over a week before the first GOP primary debate. It's in the U.S. District Court

for the Southern District of Florida. That is going to begin on August 14th, 2023, per a court filing that hit on Tuesday. She said in the filing that the deadline for both parties to submit pretrial motions and motions in Lameen, am I saying my Latin correctly? That means in the beginning is July 24th, 2023. Now, CBS News makes a really good point and says, quote, that date is likely to change as Trump's legal team files requests with the court that could result in the trial's delay. So that July 24th pretrial motion deadline is really important because they are expected to file before that. They're expected to file before that. They're expected to file a motion before that, which would change the date from that week before the first debate.

So the trial date is August 14th. This is actually, it sounds counterintuitive, but this is, if you're Donald Trump, this is a blessing. Going into the first debate, this is such a gift. You're like, I'm going to be in court a week before the first debate? Bring it on. That puts me front and center in the conversation. Nobody else will be able to get any oxygen. And I am going to be, once again, the avatar of normal Americans. As he says, they're not coming

after me. I'm just, they're coming after you. I'm just in the way. What gives him a better sort of platform to make that message than coming out of court and into the debate. But it actually looks like that debate, that date before the debate probably won't happen because they'll probably be submitting pretrial motions. Right. And also the process for these cases is, first of all, wildly unconstitutional but has never been tested at the Supreme Court because it is so slanted against defendants that defendants always take plea deals in these situations. But basically, because there are classified documents involved, the jury is restricted on what it's able to see, even though the jury has to then make its decision based on

what it's not able to see. And so the process to allow attorneys to view the documents, to allow the judge to see the documents, to then write their briefs from secure areas, ends up adding exponential complications to this process, which is another reason that this could get punted well into the future, particularly since this judge, Judge Cannon, doesn't have much experience doing trials, period. I think like five days or something of criminal trials. A Trump appointee, by the way. Right. Trump appointee at the very end of his term. So therefore has very little experience with criminal trials and none with these kinds of trials. So Donald Trump has been, the Fox News has been airing in two parts parts Donald Trump's interview with Brett Baier. He sat down with Brett Baier for a pretty long interview and some new clips came out last night. Hard to pick from the best.

It really is because one, we're going to play in a minute, is almost unbelievable. Oh, the death penalty for drug dealers? That's a fun one. Right, yeah, he weighs in on Alice Marie Johnson and Brett Baer pushes him a little bit. But let's start with Donald Trump being pushed on the nickname DeSanctimonious. We can roll that. Because he has better PR than other governors, but other governors did a better job than Ron DeSanctimonious. So look- Why do you use that name? Because I got him elected, and I thought he was very disloyal when he said, yes, I'd run.

I got him past two races. I got him past the primary because he was losing by 30 points or more. So it's a loyalty question? Yeah, it's a loyalty. I'm a big loyalist. You know, some people say, some people right here in this room have told me, sir, don't worry about loyalty. Loyalty doesn't mean anything in politics.

I said to me, it does. I got the guy elected. He came to see me, let's say weeping because he was dead. He was getting out of the race. He was looking for jobs already, probably at law firms or wherever he's going to look. He was totally dead. He ran a horrible campaign. He was running against Adam Putnam, the agriculture commissioner, who was running for that position for eight years. Putnam had $38 million back. Ron had nothing, zero. Putnam was at 40%. Ron was at 3%. It was like a wipeout. The election was going to be

very soon. I said, you're dead. If George Washington endorsed you, you're not going to win. He said, sir, if you endorse me, I think I could win. And he fought for me along with Jim Jordan and hundreds of other people, in all fairness. He was fine, but he fought. But I would see him every once in a while fighting on the impeachment hoax. So I didn't know Adam Putnam. So I said, let's give it a shot.

I endorsed him, and it was like a bomb went off. As soon as I endorsed him, he won the primary. It was over. He won by a landslide. But then I had him to get him past Gillum, who is a rock star. He was going to be the next president of the United States. He was the biggest guy in the party. Him and female version Stacey Abrams, right? These are the two hottest politicians in the Democrat Party. And Ron said, there's no way I can beat him. I said, you're going to beat him. I did three rallies. God bless you. Thank you so much. We had big, massive rallies for Ron, three of them. I said, you're going to win. He ended up winning. He ended up winning. So it makes you mad. And then three years later, they say to him, then I didn't deal with, I didn't know him that well.

Three years later, but I got him elected. But I did that with other people too. But you know what, just out of respect. So I said, three years later, they asked him, are you going to run against the president? He said, I have no comment. I said, no comment, no comment means he's going to run. I said, this guy's going to run. So Donald Trump is actually 100% accurate in saying that his endorsement was crucial to Ron DeSantis. I'd be off on the numbers slightly, but. Maybe slightly, but Ron DeSantis knows that because he ran ads at the time emphasizing over and over again how close he was and how MAGA he was. Basically, there's that famous ad of him with his kids in his living room.

Isn't the kid building a wall with blocks? Yeah, the kid's building a wall. Yeah, it's very clearly Ron DeSantis endorsing the argument that Donald Trump just made about the Trump endorsement being absolutely critical. The loyalty part is really interesting because I would say Trump doesn't hold up his end of the bargain on the loyalty question. And people in Republican politics learned that lesson the hard way that when Donald Trump says loyalty is really important to him, he does think it's important to him. I think very clearly Donald Trump thinks loyalty is important to him. But it seems like a one-way street when you look back on his history with certain advisers. What did you make of that clip? One quick ironic interlude here, which is that the DeSantis and Gillum election,

one of the great hinge points in American politics, because this came down to just 30,000 votes, like an extremely close race. The only reason that DeSantis ends up winning this election is because of FBI election interference. There's your irony. And where is Trump in denouncing this? The FBI came in and leaked that there's an investigation into Tallahassee, but that it was focusing on Gillum because Gillum got some Hamilton tickets through his brother, and that Gillum said he thought his brother had reimbursed the person that he got the Hamilton tickets from, but apparently his brother did not, or cousin or whoever, did not reimburse. So they went to Hamilton and they didn't pay for their tickets. And this became a gigantic scandal in like a week

or two before the election. And you can see his momentum kind of dampen. And you can imagine that the tiny margin, 0.4% that DeSantis won by, was made up entirely by the FBI creeping in and flipping that election to DeSantis. Now, later, Gillum has had a lot of personal problems. We wish him well in those. You can Google those. We don't need to get into all that. But Trump is right that he was next president of the United States level rock star. And that if not for that last minute FBI election interference, he probably wins. But broadly speaking, yeah, Trump is just, he's just shocked that somebody would challenge him.

How dare he? Right. And it's not even so much a lack of loyalty as it is in politics. People obviously have different reasons for, I mean, running against someone, I guess, How dare he right? Well, and it's it's not even so much a lack of loyalty as it is in politics people Obviously have different reasons for I mean running against someone I guess is a breach of loyalty But people believe in their own Careers and their own missions and that's obviously baked into politics and Trump is sort of rejecting that when it comes to him Interesting enough now this next clip we teased it you're gonna enjoy it It's wild it's wild. So this is, so just to set

this up because we, the whole exchange with, between Bayer and Trump on the question of capital punishment for drug dealers is, is worth watching. It's way too long to play the entire thing. So to set it up, Bayer is, they're, they're, they're into it a little bit. Trump earlier had been talking about Alice Johnson, who he loves to bring up because, you know, helping get her freed. She was facing a 50-year sentence for drug dealing. Kim Kardashian, Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump all team up, get the first step back. First step back. And so it's this weird exchange between Bayer and Trump where Bayer is pointing out to him that he's getting criticized from the right for being too soft on criminal justice because of the First Step Act, while meanwhile he's sitting there calling for the people that

he freed to be executed. And so let's see how he sorts this out in his mind. So even Alice Johnson in that ad? She can't do it, okay? By the way, if that was there, no, she wouldn't be killed. It would start as of now, so you wouldn't go to the past. No, but your policy. No, starting now, yeah.

But she wouldn't have done it if it was death penalty. In other words, if it was death penalty, she wouldn't have been on that phone call. She wouldn't have been a dealer. Now, she wasn't much of a dealer because she was sort of like, I mean, honestly, she got treated terribly. She was treated sort of like I get treated. But Brett, she was treated very unfairly. But she got 48 years. And that was bad.

Now, today, if I did what I say that you have to do, and again, I'm not sure the country is ready for it. You know, China was hugely, 150 years ago, China was taken over by much lesser countries because they were all drugged out on the opium and all the problems. It's a communist regime. They dropped the hammer. They were all drugged out and they were totally, they were a disaster. They were taken over by other smaller countries, large sections of China.

And then things happened and they had strong leadership and they put in the death penalty and they've become, they've been able to build. But if you speak to President Xi, he will tell you without the death penalty, we would have a non-functioning country. So the earlier part is wild where he's talking about capital punishment

for the drug dealers and Brett Baer's like, even Alice Johnson, he's like, hmm. He starts to think like, oh. And then he's like, well, she wouldn't because she'd be so scared of me that she wouldn't deal the drugs in the first place. And then, as you see, he transitions into the most praise that anyone has given Chairman Mao from either party since the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, I would suspect. Say what you will about Mao. He had control. He did have control. That's the argument, basically.

Yeah, and it's funny because she uses this phrase, change is not seen in 100 years, change is not seen in 100, 150 years. And what he is saying there, what she is pointing to the exact same thing. Yes. That China was getting beaten down by the world stage, pieces getting taken by Japan and this, that. Everyone's high. Everyone's high because the British forced opium onto the population. And when the Chinese resisted it, the British went to war, opium war, to force them to continue to buy opium to fund the kind of British imperialism, British colonialism.

And so then Mao takes over and they return to the place and they're on their way to return to the place that they feel like they've always belonged on the stage. So to hear Trump kind of celebrating that all the way through and linking it to the death penalty for drug use, just kind of wild. And so I'm curious on the Republican side. We're, what, eight years into Trump on the national political stage. So we're used to this sort of stuff. But this is whiplash of kind of an even greater degree. Or does it not matter? How does it matter that he's, on the one hand,

defending the First Step Act, and on the other hand, saying that maybe if the country's ready for it, but they're probably not ready for it, but if they are, maybe we should execute drug dealers. I think it matters only on the other hand, saying that maybe if the country's ready for it, but they're probably not ready for it. But if they are, maybe we should execute drug dealers. I think it matters only on the margins. So I think there's a chance that seeing Donald Trump look so unfamiliar with his own legislation and touting Alice Johnson's story. And Brett Baier, who I think conducted a great interview, pushing back and saying she was running a cocaine ring, essentially. And that doesn't reflect on my stance about her sentence. But that's what

Donald Trump is being confronted with. Right. And that might not have been what Jared was telling him, or what Kim Kardashian was telling him. But by his own sort of standards of death penalty or not, it just made him look like he lacked leadership skills because he wasn't even familiar with his own laws and how they would be applied. And then got really, and that's when people do interviews with Donald Trump that aren't policy focused. It's such a disservice to the public because you can really learn so much about Donald Trump when you ask him specific questions about policies.

And that's what Brett Baier does in this interview. I think it really gets to the bottom of the way Trump sees drug policy, for instance. And it's very useful. The DeSantis team definitely thinks that the First Step Act is a vulnerability for Donald Trump. Now, I believe DeSantis actually voted for the First Step Act. He was still in Congress. But because Donald Trump made a big deal of it and had Kim Kardashian there and has touted it for a long time and was really the person who, his administration shepherded this through Congress, because crime has become a really huge hot topic for Republican voters, they believe this is a

vulnerability for Donald Trump, that if they can get him to talk about the First Step Act, this is Pedro Gonzalez talking about, this is someone who- And who is he? He's with the Claremont Institute, I believe. And he says, quote, this is someone, Trump, who has no idea how to govern and cannot accept the fact that he made mistakes. And if Trump cannot admit fault on something like the First Step Act, he is completely incapable of leading. And so Trump critics see the First Step Act in particular as a vulnerability. I would say expect it to come up more often during the primaries. And because it freed what, a thousand, it barely freed anybody.

The frustration among criminal justice reformers was that all of the energy that went into passing this act could have just been spent on commuting sentences of individual people one by one because it freed so many people. But it sounds like somebody who got freed was in the Latin Kings or something and went on and committed a crime, killed somebody in a bar. But he had been in for drugs. Because if you free several thousand people from prison- Statistically. Statistically, out of thousands of people, some people are going to commit crimes in the future, whether they were in prison before or not. If they were in prison, they're probably slightly more likely to commit crimes, not necessarily because they are criminals, but because they have just spent years in an institution surrounded by criminals. And so, yeah, so I guess you're going to see like Willie Horton style stuff of like, look, individual crime happened.

The criminal was in jail, wouldn't have happened if he was still in jail. Therefore, Trump is responsible for this. That'll kind of be the argument. Yeah. So here's Pedro. He's with the Charlemagne Institute and Chronicles Magazine, not Claremont. But he said he brings up this old Tucker Carlson report in 2019. Of the 2,200 roughly inmates, 2,243 inmates released under first step, only 960 were incarcerated for drug-related offenses. On the other hand, 496 were imprisoned for weapons and explosive-related crimes, 239 for sex offenses, 178 for fraud, bribery, and extortion, 118 for burglary, larceny, and 106

for robbery. According to the data, another 59 were imprisoned over homicide, aggravated assault, 46 for immigration-related offenses, nine for counterfeiting embezzlement, and two for national security reasons. So that is, again, like expect to hear more of that for sure because I think Trump opponents see that in particular as crime has risen in some cities unevenly, of course, but as that has happened and as you have had, you know, the sort of left-wing prosecutors respond to it in a way that you see maybe a cause and effect in places like San Francisco and the pivot from London Breed, that's where folks that are running against Donald Trump, I think, see a real soft spot. And he thinks he can harden that up by saying, well, I'm just going to kill them all. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, by the way, I forgot to mention at the very top of the show, in Fairfax, they went after the reformist prosecutor and lost. So another case of the media kind of blaming criminal justice reformer prosecutors for people being anxious about crime,

and then voters going to the polls and re-electing those very same people in blue areas. Yeah, exactly, in blue areas. It's not always the golden ticket that I think people on the right believe it to be, depending on the location and depending on the messaging, obviously. Speaking of crime, let's move on to the news about Andrew—oh, I'm sorry. Supreme Court. Supreme Court. We're going to get to crime and entertain in just a moment. But the Supreme Court, as Ryan said, on a crime spree.

From a conservative perspective, this is why Ryan says crime spree. There are a lot of decisions that could be coming out of the Supreme Court basically in the next week on student loan debt, on the Chevron doctrine, which is something you'll hear tossed about in beltway circles or ivory towers, but is hugely consequential for the executive branch and on affirmative action. So as Supreme Court decisions from this last term are announced in the coming days, this is a hugely consequential moment for people, obviously, who have outstanding student loan debt. It will be a big deal for the executive branch and probably a very big deal for people in college admissions offices and students around the country. So let's start with student loan debt. We can put up the tariff sheet C1. This is from CBS News. The finances of about 40 million Americans with college loans are hanging in the balance as borrowers await the Supreme Court's ruling on the legality of President Biden's plan to forgive

up to $20,000 in student loan debt. Borrowers could face a double whammy this summer. Supreme Court rules against the debt forgiveness plan as the court's decision is likely to land just before the pause on debt repayment lifts in September. The court is scheduled to release its next decisions on Thursday morning. In the worst case scenario, CBS continues, borrowers will face restarting their loan payments in September without any debt release. This is being challenged in a couple of different ways. And you'll remember back when oral arguments happened in the winter, the Supreme Court was very hostile to what the Biden administration did. As far as you can read the tea leaves from the questionings in the hearing, it was pretty

unfavorable. It seemed to be pretty unfavorable to the Biden administration. But they're being challenged on basically this question of you're using an emergency declaration to pass the student debt forgiveness and to sort of wave the wand and say it was going away. And you have states, Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and South Carolina. You have a lawsuit from the Job Creators Network Foundation, their conservative group. They're saying basically this was illegal. This was extra constitutional. And those Republican states were saying it was a financial setback for them because you're going to get, quote, a reduction in business, this is from CNBC, among the companies that

service federal student loan debts in their states. So that would be, for instance, the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority. Couldn't meet its financial obligations to the state, is the argument, because of that decreased revenue. And there's also a question of standing that could hurt. Which is related to that. Right, yes. So this is, there's a lot on the line, basically. And the Supreme Court decision is imminent. And what this really shows is how BS all of the kind of legal arguments are on both sides. Because to me, just objectively speaking, if you step back and look at the HEROES Act that this was written under,

this was a kind of post-9-11 law that said in the event of a national emergency, the Department of Education has the ability to pause, suspend, or cancel student debts. And so we had a national emergency, COVID. It was declared as a national emergency. And as a result, as a policy response, the Department of Education under Trump paused the student debt. And then the Department of Education under Biden determined that the smartest policy would be to cancel a certain amount of it using the authority that was created in 2001 or after the 2001 attacks. And to invalidate that to me says that you're requiring then Congress, you're basically telling Congress that they're not allowed to anticipate future events and put laws in place to allow a government to react to those events. If you can't say in the event of an emergency, you have this authority because you have to come back 20 years later and say, no, no, no. When we said emergency, we actually meant all emergencies, like not just

this emergency, but other declared emergency, even though the law says, you know, declared emergencies, like it's very clear, But I don't think it matters. The Supreme Court, if they don't want to allow it, they're just going to not go ahead and allow it. To your point on standing, there's been this fun whack-a-mole between people who are trying to strike down the law or the executive action for political purposes because they don't like it, and the problem that they need to find somebody who's harmed by it.

Because it's like, how do you find somebody who's harmed by other people just not having to pay their debts? And so at first they found somebody who, because they got their debt waived, now they owed some taxes. Yeah. They're like, oh, I hate taxes. So I'm suing so I can pay the debts instead of the taxes.

Right. And the Biden administration quickly said, nope, that's moot because now it's optional. Yeah. You don't have to take this free money that we're giving you. Therefore, you have no tax obligations. They're like, ah, dang. Yeah. I forget.

There was another one. And then they wound up with this one where they went to this Missouri company, which has not paid its quote unquote obligations to the state of Missouri for 15 years. And so the state of Missouri is saying, well, now it's not going to be able to pay its obligations to us. But they haven't paid for 15 years and you haven't cared. And the company itself, there's a great story if you can put up the second tear sheet here. Employees at this company are all furious that they've been roped into this. Mojila itself is not participating at all. Amy Coney Barrett said during the trial or said during the oral arguments, if Mojila was here, they would have standing. Mojila is very conspicuously not here.

Like they are not interested in this. One of the employees probably in their slack or whatever said, are we the bad guys? Like how on earth are we being used? And so basically Missouri's argument, this like triple bank shot, is that Mojila would have more business if you keep more people burdened with debt. And if Mojila has more business, then there's a better chance that Mojila then kicks money over to Missouri, even though Mojila has not kicked money to Missouri for 15 years. So it's all completely fake and just political. So what's actually really interesting about that is it's not entirely dissimilar from what's on the table with Chevron. And the Chevron doctrine is a huge— Explain that.

What's Chevron? This is a huge—first of all, it was a huge boon to the left. Like, this was a really big gift to—and I don't mean that in a sort of pejorative sense. Like, this basically created the administrative state. This basically allows the administrative state to use executive powers in a very broad scope to do some really everyday governing at, for instance, the EPA or the Department of Education, because this I'm reading from Cornell Law School, which has a lot of really helpful legal information, but just so we have a precise definition from them. In Chevron, the Supreme Court set forth a legal test as to when the court

should defer to the agency's answer or interpretation, holding that such judicial deference is appropriate where the agency's answer was not unreasonable. And here's the key part, so long as Congress had not spoken directly to the precise issue at question. This is where the HEROES Act is actually pretty interesting as well from the student debt question. You see the executive branch using that deference, that question of deference to the Secretary of Education that was granted in the HEROES Act. And you see people on the right saying, well, this is clearly extra constitutional.

This was never a constitutional power that should have been delegated to the education secretary. And this is an inappropriate use of it anyway. But because we have, for instance, we've talked about this a lot, the vaccine mandate requirement that Joe Biden implemented was he used an obscure provision from the OSHA legislation, the legislation that Richard Nixon passed that essentially created OSHA, you can sort of pull out from these things and stretch them to meet different authorities from the executive. And on the left, mint the coin, for instance. Like there's all of this sort of creative ways that you can get from point A to B with executive power and actually do things in the absence of Congress's ability to do anything anymore because of tribalism and partisanship that has a deadlock, maybe a Madisonian deadlock, but a deadlock nonetheless.

And so that's why Chevron is, I would say, in terms of conservative efforts to target the administrative state, that is number one. Chevron is, this is like a gift. You're putting Chevron on a silver platter for the Supreme Court with the divide that it has right now, the division between conservative and liberal justices. This is a really big deal. It's a very big deal for agencies that have been doing sort of business as usual for a long time, taking these authorities where Congress, to borrow the phrase from Cornell, had not spoken directly to the precise issue at question. They've been taking that authority upon themselves. It could be tied up in tons of legal battles. The everyday functioning of these agencies is on the

table in a way that, you know, I think we've dramatically expanded the scope of regulatory power of the administrative state in ways that, why we're talking about gas stove bans, why we're talking about the way Title IX functions in very specific ways in very specific schools has been harmful. But the way this is on the table is vast. Do you think they're going to do it? Yes. My guess would be yes. They're going for it? There's a question as to whether they go all the way or they just sort of nibble around the edges of Chevron as we know it. Whether they want war or

they want guerrilla war against the state. I think they want war against the state, but I think that they're not sure if they have the troops for it. Yeah. I mean, this would be a big change to the everyday function of Washington, D.C. I mean, these administrative agencies have exploded really because of Chevron deference. And it would hasten, I think, the constitutional conflict with the court. Yeah, like the court is already teetering on the authority that it kind of spent on overturning Roe v. Wade. Yes. And so if they then say, oh, and also, by the way,

the EPA is not allowed to function. Right. You're going to take Democrats who are just normie rank and file folks. We're like, you know what? Forget the Supreme Court. Ignore it. We're done with the Supreme Court. And I'm reading.

What's the line that Andrew Jackson said? He made his ruling. Now let him enforce it. Let him enforce it. Well, I'm reading here from a Federalist Society blog where they call Chevron, quote, the most notorious decision in administrative law. And this is, remember, the Federalist Society had a lot of say in the judges that are in the Supreme Court. The makeup of the court. in the judges that are sitting in the Supreme Court. And I don't mean that in a Sheldon White House sense where it's like he's doing the Charlie Kelly on the white board.

Like this is all a grand conspiracy of federal society money going in the Supreme Court. It's this ideological milieu that the federal society, I think, has the right stance on Chevron. But I imagine if we're trying to guess where the Supreme Court's gonna land on Chevron, but I imagine if we're trying to guess where the Supreme Court's going to land on Chevron, I imagine it's going to go in one very particular direction. And that ideological milieu is basically at a consensus on affirmative action. And that's on the table

as well. So some really consequential- I think they'll win that one. Absolutely. Absolutely. Because Sandra Day O'Connor herself, in a pretty important decision on this question, said it is a temporary, it's meant as a temporary measure to achieve, you know, to get from A to B. And so when you have that as precedent, yeah, I think it's very vulnerable. And again, they're coming from an ideological milieu where there's basically consensus on Chevron and affirmative action. And there's an interesting argument made on the left, I think it's by Richard Kallenberg, people can search that up, that argues that if affirmative action is overturned, because it is still a value held by so many institutions and universities, the value of diversity, that they will be forced to rely on

class diversity in order to achieve Identity diversity. Yeah, because we are so far away from an equitable society that it is the case That black students are much more likely to be poor and working-class than white students And so if you then use a class lens, which is constitutional and legal, in order to increase the number of working class and poor people that you have in your institution, you will also, as a function of that, increase the number of black students that you have as well. It's a more just mechanism to get to the point anyway from my perspective.

But a lot of these institutions don't want poor and working class people. No. So it'll be the values that they have intention and we'll see how they sort that out. Yeah, they meet their quotas through, for instance,

boarding schools. You know, we're going to take, you know, people from this boarding school, but we're going to make it diverse. Matthew Iglesias jokes that he went to Harvard, and one or both of his parents are Cuban-descended. And so he's like, they were able to check a box because of Matthew Iglesias. And as he would acknowledge, nobody pretends that that is the goal.

Right. Yeah. No, that's absolutely true. So I am looking forward to it, but you may not be. Moving on, we're going to talk right now about Andrew Tate. There's been some developments in Andrew Tate's situation. This is from the Washington Post. Romanian prosecutors announced Tuesday that internet personality and self-described misogynist Andrew Tate and his brother have been indicted on charges of human trafficking, rape, and forming an organized crime group. I'm gonna keep reading from the post here because it's very specific and it's useful

to be precise. The indictment marks the end of a criminal investigation into Tate and two Romanian associates. As prosecutors referred the case for trial, the prosecutor's statement said the injured parties were, quote, sexually exploited by group members and forced to produce online pornography through acts of, quote, violence and mental coercion. The legal team for the Tate brothers described the move as, quote, undoubtedly predictable. They're putting forward this basically stance that they're kind of excited and eager to confront these charges because, quote, it will undoubtedly substantiate the brothers' claims of innocence. Remember, they were arrested in Romania in December. They do have dual British and American citizenship. They were moved to house arrest back in March.

Prosecutors are saying that they've these four, Tate and his brother and the other two, formed a crime group for human trafficking in Romania, Britain, and the United States. Here's more from the prosecutors. The injured persons were recruited by the foreign nationals by misleading them about the intention to establish a marriage slash cohabitation relationship and the existence of real feelings of love that one of the suspects charged with rape in relation to two incidents back in March of 2022. So over a year ago, according to prosecutors. What do you make of it, Ryan? It's important to keep in mind the whole idea of innocent until proven guilty, but these guys look guiltier than Trump even on the classified documents charge. We'll see what evidence comes up, but we have their own testimony kind of through their videos

that they do where they talk about ways that they groom young women and traffic them basically over to Romania and then persuade them into staying and becoming basically sex slaves. Now, they're arguing that that is all done consensually. Prosecutors also have, what, at least seven witnesses. And so depending on what you hear from those witnesses, if they can add even one notch to what they have already said publicly, then you have a pretty slammed down case. So there are messages where Tate has explained to one of the women that he used a webcam business to, quote, launder money and that he'd been teaching men to start their own. Quote, it's all a cover he wrote. The Washington Post said assuring her she could trust him.

He told the victim that he'd meet her in Romania after taking care of some work in Prague and spoke about the prospect of marriage. This is from a tape message. I want to know that you are determined, serious about marriage. So all of that is obviously very critical to the case. The boyfriend method. Yes.

There's some question about if that's all it is, if it's just hideous and disgusting or if it's a crime. I'm fine with these guys getting locked up for even just what they've been saying publicly, but it does appear that it goes even beyond that, that there's, you know, the charges talk about, you know, violence. So not just mental coercion, but also violence. And, you know, this is going to be a real, going forward, and we've already seen it happen, but the proliferation of hardcore pornography

has made this a real problem for the, so both the proliferation of hardcore pornography and the proliferation of sort of text message based sexual relationships and relationships in general brings this evidence in. And then the Tate brothers can claim this is consensual and that in some sense it was part of the sexual relationship to have- Right, but if the women claim otherwise, then they're in a lot of trouble. And it appears like that's likely that the women will claim otherwise. Well, and that's what's so, I think, disturbing is that you can have evidence of something being on its face problematic and people can claim

that it's consensual. And if that is popularized and becomes sort of normalized, it's a very serious problem for both men and women as that kind of stuff happens in the future. It's a big problem for courts in our legal system. It's a big problem for courts in our legal system. It's a big challenge for courts in the legal system. But it's not great for men or for women because it makes it really, really hard to get justice. Related to this, I wanted to get your thoughts on a new piece,

if you can put up the second element here. There's a tweet from my colleague, Murtaza Hussain, who's sharing a new article in New Lines Magazine, which is headlined, How Andrew Tate and the Far Right Made Common Cause with Islamists. Subhead, Western groups find in Muslim communities what they believe is a prototype for a social contract free of wokeism and women's liberation. A story by Rasha al-Aqidi and Lydia Wilson, I suggest people check it out. But it opens with a couple examples of things

that we've probably all seen kind of as we've watched online culture evolve, which is dudes who started out as like proud Islamophobes, whether in post 9-11 or more recently, burning the Koran, you know, warning of the kind of the Muslim hordes are going to take over Europe and the United States and the Hamas is coming through the southern border. And those same, not just that political tendency, but that too, but those same not just that not just that political tendency but that too but those same dudes now completely lining up with a kind of much with a very conservative uh interpretation

of islam and going to uh protests where our quran is being burned and protesting that, saying how dare you? And seeing in their warped vision, as they describe, a prototype of a society that's free of wokeism. And the dudes over at Chapo Trap House and elsewhere have been predicting this arc that a lot of these right-wing influencers are like, why don't they just cut out the middleman and go straight to kind of far-right Islam? And here we're seeing it develop. Yeah. Well, this is another really interesting tweet from Murtaza. He says,

when I first moved to the US, I was actually surprised how many Muslims were sympathetic to the GOP, even in post 9-11 years and in places like Chicago and Michigan Suburbs they were just waiting for a moment They became 10% less hostile to return and the Michigan suburbs have been interesting Dearborn area because we've seen the sort of conservative Muslim communities in in the Dearborn area make common cause with Christians pride fight recently recently the pride fight but also the books in schools. It was in the fall around an election coming together and making a very robust protest. And I think a morally correct protest would

probably disagree on that against books in schools. And then you had the American Federation of Teachers on the other side of it, siding with the schools. And it's just like, yeah, these things getting mixed up is completely fascinating and blended together. There's some talk in sort of conservative circles about the phenomenon of young men following Andrew Tate. I don't think it's Tate specific. I don't think it's Islam specific. I do think you're going to see healthier, this kind of two sides of the coin, like people's angst, especially young men's angst and anguish in this world where it's actually very difficult for young men and young women too. We're seeing depression rates increase. We're seeing all kinds

of really bad metrics increase when it comes to mental health and physical health. Some people are going to take that out in a healthy way. Some people are going to find really unhealthy ways to channel it. And misogyny is going to be one of those ways. And I'm not saying that's affiliated with religion at all. I'm saying it's affiliated with, in this case, Andrew Tate, and that sort of version of a masculinity that's less than healthy, we'll say. Toxic masculinity is a real thing. It's not masculinity itself, and I think that's a mistake the left often makes when they talk about toxic masculinity. They act as though masculinity is necessarily toxic. There are, of course,

expressions of masculinity and femininity that can be toxic. And I think the more we see people try to find relief from the pains of living modern life, they're going to go in both unhealthy and healthy places. And Andrew Tate would be an unhealthy place. Right. And Islam, just like Christianity, lives on a spectrum from liberal to almost secular, all the way over to the far right. here because it has always struck me as an odd alliance that you had so many kind of secular borderline atheist liberals allying with explicitly conservative Muslims in ways that they would not align with explicitly conservative Christians. And I feel like maybe they felt comfortable making that alliance because the numbers were so small. Yeah.

That's because it was politically convenient. Right. And they could be for pluralism as long as the conservative Muslim portion of their coalition stayed below 20% or something like that. And pluralism's fine. If they're 50 plus percent and have voting power, and you saw some liberals in that Michigan town saying, wait a minute, when we were in power, we were pluralistic. You know, we made sure that there were ordinances that allowed for the call to prayer

to happen five times a day. Now you're in power and you're not operating in a pluralistic way. But what is pluralism? They're like, well, I think pluralism is fairly, pluralism is kind of like. I don't know because you can't have pluralism if you're saying that it's hate speech to refuse to use compelled speech. So like preferred pronouns, for instance, and disagree on what that is. That wouldn't be pluralistic intolerant. Yeah, based on our interpretation of civil rights law and where that conversation is going.

So it's almost like you can't have this concept of pluralism that in the aughts made a little bit more sense, the formula made a little bit more sense when you start to have what I would argue is sort of an intolerant approach to religion or an intolerant approach to- It becomes more tribal. Yeah. It's hard to do. So you try to have a coalition of tribes, which is, those are not very stable. This is like the biggest, deepest problem in our politics right now.

Coalition of interest groups is one thing. Coalition of tribes, it's only going to last so long. Well, Ryan, what is on, what's your point today? Can I put my glasses on here so I can read my point? There's long been a saying in American politics that our elections begin in Iowa and end in Florida. And the result was that our political system disproportionately handed out goodies to just those two states. It didn't make much sense, but it did make us obese, with massive corn subsidies for Iowa and sugar subsidies for Florida. And, of course, whatever the bloodthirsty diaspora in Miami wanted was theirs from both parties with no questions asked about whether it was actually in our regional or national interest.

How else can you get a counterproductive embargo of Cuba to last this long? But Iowa and Florida are now both solidly Republican states. The silver lining for the rest of the country is that we can now start to make policy decisions based on whether or not something is a good idea, rather than pandering to a few votes in South Florida. Now, if you remember back to the last State of the Union, Joe Biden was caught on a hot mic buttonholing Bob Menendez, who's the Cuban-American chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the chamber's most aggressive Cuba hawk on the Democratic side. He said he wanted to talk.

Bob, I've got to talk to you about Cuba. Okay. I'm serious. Now, there's movement in Venezuela, too. Late last month, the newly restored Brazilian president, Lula da Silva, made a big shift in foreign policy toward the South American country. Instead of recognizing this guy, Juan Guaido, the man the U.S. sort of pretends is president of Venezuela, he invited the guy who actually governs the country, whether we like it

or not, Hugo Chavez's successor, Nicolas Maduro. Yet Venezuela, hit with some of the toughest sanctions in the world, remains an economic basket case. The result has been a staggering outflow of refugees, with nearly 200,000 winding up at our southern border last year. Former Obama National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes, now with Pod Save America, responded to Lula's recognition of Maduro recently. And when it comes to sanctions on Venezuela, the Biden administration has clearly lost the Pod save bros. Take a listen. Clearly, the U.S. has to make a pretty big shift in its Venezuelan policy because the idea of just not recognizing this guy as president doesn't work. And meanwhile, we've exacerbated the humanitarian crisis through their sanctions that has contributed

significantly to people coming to our border. A quarter of the population has left the country. We need some agreement that lifts a whole bunch of sanctions, that sets an election that we promised to actually respect the result of, even if we don't like the results, and hopefully we do like the results, but that allows for kind of a reset of what's happening between the US and Latin America generally, Venezuela specifically. I would hope, again, that Cuba is a reset of what's happening between the U.S. and Latin America generally, Venezuela specifically. I would hope, again, that Cuba is a part of this. Lula also, I think, could be a source of useful tension. But keep in mind, a lot of people want to say, oh, this is just Lula. Ben also made the point that the U.S. isn't just out of step with one leftist leader in Brazil,

but we're basically losing the entire region. A lot of people want to say, oh, this is just Lula. It's not. It's Lula in Brazil. It's Boric in Chile. It's Petro in Colombia. It's AMLO in Mexico. It's all the major Latin American countries. There is nobody with us in this kind of weird Miami-driven hardline policy. So this meeting somewhere in the middle of between where we currently are and where Lula is, is I think the smart way to go. And honestly, this kind of pressure is not the worst thing to try to shake that loose. So in Congress, four Democrats are circulating a letter that I obtained that sort of calls on the Biden administration to lift sanctions on Venezuela. The letter is written by Jim McGovern, Greg Meeks, Joaquin Castro, and Barbara Lee, and it reads, because we share your view that human rights should be at the

center of U.S. foreign policy, we have been deeply troubled by the extensive reporting on the indiscriminate and counterproductive impacts on the Venezuelan people of the secondary and sectoral sanctions imposed by the Trump administration. These kinds of sanctions have often been found to be ineffective in achieving their objectives and are profoundly incoherent from a human rights perspective. In our view, to purposely continue contributing to economic hardship experienced by an entire population

is immoral and unworthy of the United States. That is why many of us have previously called on your administration to pursue a better strategy to address the rollback of democracy and the severe violations of fundamental rights committed by the Maduro government. Now, all that is good, and it makes a strong case to immediately and unilaterally lift the sanctions, which makes a line in the last paragraph of the letter strange when it adds, quote, overcoming Venezuela's multifaceted political and human rights crisis and facilitating the country's desperately needed economic recovery

must go hand in hand, unquote. Now, typically what a sentence like that means is that sanctions will only be lifted if Venezuela makes political concessions. Yet the lawmakers just acknowledge in the same letter that sanctions are inhumane and don't actually work to pressure political change anyway. It's a measure of how addicted to sanctions the US is that language like this shows up even in a letter designed to move in the right direction and one signed by people like Barbara Lee and Jim McGovern who've spoken eloquently about the cruelty of sanctions. Now the letter appears to be something of a response to pressure that McGovern has been getting from anti-war activists back home. He has not taken action.

He has not signed this letter calling for an end to these sanctions after telling us for years he's committed to stopping endless and needless deaths in Venezuela. Again, this is confusing and it's also inexcusable. So Emily, these activists have been calling on him to sign on to a... What point are you looking at? All right, well, we're going to talk about the tragedy unfolding at sea because there's, I think, maybe an interesting lesson in all of it. And to be clear, this is a story that's changing minute by minute. And as we're recording this, the latest is that some of the folks on the rescue mission

have heard sounds that are like a banging noise coming from the area that they're searching. They actually, efforts to sort of pinpoint, target the location of that sound have been unsuccessful. And this is the story of five people being lost at sea in the Titan submersible that was on a tourist expedition to view the Titanic. It costs about $250,000. And these folks right now are entirely lost at sea. They have about, from what we know, 24 hours at most until about Thursday morning. We're here on Wednesday, until about Thursday morning with the amount of oxygen that people estimate is in that submersible before they run out and are not able to survive. So the window is narrowing. Experts say the longer

it takes to locate people, the less chance that they have of survival, which is tragically logic. But it's not really a good time to play armchair scientist from inside an unfortunate, I would say, opportunity to reflect on humans evolving, ever evolving relationship with risk itself. So just, again, some quick facts from what we know right now. Within about two hours, Ocean Gate Expeditions, that's the company that puts together these excursions, they lost contact with the Titan. It's a 21-foot submersible vessel. As far as we know, it's about 900 miles east of Cape Cod. They're searching an area that's roughly the size of Connecticut, about 900 miles east off the coast of Cape Cod

and about 13,000 feet deep. You have four passengers that were on board and the pilot that are now lost. The New York Post says that this rescue, if it is successful, would be the deepest recovery mission in history, the deepest recovery mission in history. So they're about 12,500 feet below the surface. And that's obviously an incredible task, not only to take people down to that level for the viewing of the Titanic but to then have search and rescue crews basically trying to find a needle in a haystack in this vast expanse of the ocean. It seems maybe like it should be very easy because

we know where the submersible went down, we know when it went down. And that seems like it should be easy to kind of pinpoint the location. But, of course, it's not. And people have at this point been running or have been trying to find it for days. Safety concerns had been raised in the past. This is CNN. They write, in 2018, the Manned Underwater Vehicles Committee of the Marine Technology Society penned a letter expressing concern over what they referred to as OceanGate, again, that's the company, their, quote, experimental approach with the Titan, the vessel that's now lost,

and its planned expedition to the site of the Titanic wreckage. Quote, our apprehension is that the current experimental approach adopted by OceanGate could result in negative outcomes, from minor to catastrophic that would have serious consequences for everyone in the industry. That's a quote from the letter. And of course, tragically, that seems to have been prescient. We're going to find out more and more in the days ahead. And this story is evolving again very much. But if we put up an archived version of the website, again, I think this is at the very, at least as of now, an opportunity to reflect on, as human beings, our relationship with risk. That's from the archived version of the website.

You can go now and actually look at how they advertised this Titanic expedition. There they say right there, explore the Titanic. And it cost, in their FAQ, they say it cost two hundred and fifty thousand dollars we can also roll some footage from an ad that was on their website as well you hear them say quotes like this is not a thrill ride for tourists quote it's not a ride at Disney and quote it's very engineered and very safe again it's eerie to reflect on all of this now. And no matter, you know, you can be the safest thing in the world. There's always some risk involved in even driving a car or taking a bike.

There's always risk that's going to be involved. And so, you know, when you're taking, when you're viewing something like the Titanic, some 13,000 feet under the sea, of course, you're always going to have to accept that there's a level of danger. And we do that every single day with everything that we do. You can never fully eliminate risk. But this is a lot of risk to take, and it's a lot of money to spend on a risk. So it's more than what an average American makes in a year by far, much, much more than what an average American makes in a year. And, much, much more than what an average American makes in a year. And just for a brief window of time, so out of curiosity, after I saw that $250,000 price tag, I looked up what the most expensive ticket was on the Titanic itself.

And this is really interesting. It's kind of hard to nail down an inflation-adjusted price for that most expensive ticket, but none of the estimates that I saw put it very far north of $100,000. So in 2023, people are paying more than double the price of the people who perished in the Titanic to tour their graveyard. It's a really strange arc of history right there. They're paying more than twice the price to see something that is broken, to see something that has failed. It's like an inverse, a weird inverse. And it's especially interesting when you consider what one economist calculated back in 2021. Yahoo Finance reported at the time on those numbers. I'm reading from this report in 1913, so that's at the end of the Gilded Age and the year after the Titanic sank in 1912,

the Rockefeller, Frick, Carnegie, and Baker families, names all tied to monopolistic power, held 0.85% of the country's total wealth. The richest 0.01%, around 18,000 U.S. families, have also surpassed now the wealth levels reached in the Gilded Age. These families hold 10% of the country's wealth today. By comparison, in 1913, the top 0.01% held 9% of US wealth and a mere 2% in the late 1970s, 2% in the late 1970s. So that's a swing from the Gilded Age to the late 70s and then a swing from then until now.

Now, Ryan and I would probably disagree on the morality of these different levels, these varying levels of income inequality, but compared with 1912, financialization completely dominates our economy at this point. And so, so much of that wealth isn't even tied up in industries that actually build and create, but industries that sort of shuffle data and shuffle money around. Now, morbid curiosity is a very real thing. It's inevitable and sort of understandably so. Whenever it's monetized, it can be really gross, but it's not sort of categorically bad or new. What's different now is our daily levels of comfort here in the West.

That's different in the history of human existence. I don't mean that psychologically either. I think it's pretty clear as Arthur Arthur Brooks has calculated, that as we have gotten more materially comfortable over the last half century or so, we've actually gotten increasingly less happy. But we need certain things that we're now rich enough to avoid in many, many cases. So physical labor, natural sunlight, fresh food that we grow ourselves, we labor to grow ourselves. And losing these things is driving us crazy in some respects and we're so desperate for relief, we're so

desperate for meaning and for purpose that we're looking to really unhealthy solutions. Speaking about risk, my colleague Molly Hemingway almost 10 years ago now back in 2014 wrote a column with this very arresting headline quote, we need to get more comfortable with people dying in space. I'm gonna read this quote. Part of the reason why the American public was so upset by the loss of the Columbia crew back in 2003 is because they were perceived to have died for something trivial. The trip was mostly known for performing children's science fair experiments, she wrote. A private or public exploration and settlement program based on larger ideals, national security, advancing the human

condition, fleeing from religious persecution, or even just to test the limits of human accomplishments would change the risk calculus. Now, she was clear that that wasn't to downplay any of the tragedies involved and that it would be absolutely wonderful if we made every new discovery, not just in space, but here on Earth, without losing anybody. It's obviously unrealistic. We need bravery. We need a thirst for adventure. We need a healthy relationship with risk to advance forward. We always bravery. We need a thirst for adventure. We need a healthy relationship with risk to advance forward We always have but our comfortable current risk averse society could very quickly become a risk-hungry Society and that can go in very different direction. So the ultra wealthy elites who shelled out

250 thousand dollars to take part in an experimental excursion to the mass grave of prior adventurers, that could be a sign that we're not prepared to channel the restlessness of modern life here in the West in a way that is healthy at all. We are now four days after a deadline has passed in which Congress had statutorily required the Biden administration to declassify all information that it has related to COVID origins and specifically the Wuhan Institute of Virology. We're joined today by Justin Goodman of the White Coat Waste Project to talk about the reporting that his organization has been able to do over the last couple of weeks related to COVID origins and also this surprising delay on the part of

the Biden administration and what that may mean given the fact that he is, as we sit here, in violation of a statute. So Justin, thank you for joining us. Pleasure to be here. As viewers of this show know, Matt Taibbi and Mike Schellenberger, maybe a week and a half ago at this point, were able to identify the names of three researchers at the Wuhan lab who U.S. intelligence believe were hospitalized with COVID-like symptoms in November 2019, which not only kind of upends the timeline of the Hunan seafood market argument that it spilled over from some type of a pangolin or bat or something else, whatever the claim was at the time, that would require there to be a time machine involved. And so pushing it back to November, if that's confirmed, eliminates that

possibility. And if these workers themselves were the ones sick, and that also increases the circumstantial evidence that it had something to do with this lab. And the specific identity of one of the researchers, Ben Hu, has been the focus of subsequent reporting, both by me over at The Intercept and also at The Wall Street Journal since then, because Ben Hu was a researcher on projects that involved manipulating coronaviruses so that they would be more infectious toward humans. And so can you talk a little bit about what you found in the paperwork that you had gotten from the federal government through FOIA work and how that became much more important given the revelations of the names of these researchers? Absolutely. You know, the wet market proponents who've been pushing that fake news for three years have been saying to follow the science.

But what we've been doing since late 2019 is following the money. We followed the money from the NIH to the Wuhan lab. We followed the money from the NIH to gain a function of the Wuhan lab. And now we follow the money from NIH to possible patient zero. Ben Hu, who, if you look at the preceding years leading up to the pandemic, basically had laid out the blueprint for SARS-CoV-2. The documents we have directly tie Ben Hu to two different U.S. grants that we know are funding gain-of-function experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, one from Dr. Fauci's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and one from USAID's PREDICT program. Ben Hu was listed as a co-investigator on those grants, paperwork that Peter Daszak personally filled out, describing his collaboration with the Wuhan lab, identifying Ben Hu as

a co-investigator on those two U.S. grants that totaled $41 million in taxpayer funds. Now, a government accountability office report that came out last week detailed that about $1.4 million of that $41 million in taxpayer money went to the Wuhan Institute. We're trying to figure out exactly how much went to Ben Hu specifically. But if Ben Hu is determined to be patient zero, then our documents are the smoking gun. Yeah, no, absolutely. It sounds like that. And there are critics who would say, for instance, this money, even if this money was going to Ben Hu, Ben Hu's research couldn't have possibly created a lab leak that spreads COVID. And Justin, you study this very closely and you have been now for years. What do you say to that argument? So actually the thing that first tipped us off to the Wuhan lab's relationship with the

National Institutes of Health back in late 2019, and remember we met with the Trump administration in January 2020, before there was even a pandemic declared, to point out that there was this relationship between the NIH and the Wuhan lab and that they should look into it. There were crickets at that time from the administration, just for the record. So we were first tipped off by a 2017 paper that Ben Hu was the lead author on, with Peter Daszak and others, detailing they were collecting wild bat coronaviruses around China in remote parts of the country and then bringing them back to the lab and engineering them. But not only that, not only is there this published paper trail of Ben Hu's

involvement in bat coronavirus experimentation and creating these super viruses, these chimeric super viruses, he was one of the people involved in the infamous diffuse proposal that was denied by the Defense Department in 2018, which was a blueprint for exactly creating the exact virus that caused the COVID pandemic, SARS-CoV-2, by inserting the spike protein onto the wild bat coronavirus. Ben, who was involved in the creation and conception of that virus, got denied by the Defense Department, gets sick a couple years later, and then a virus is unleashed in the city of Wuhan at his doorstep that resembles exactly the virus he described in this proposal that he wanted to create with U.S. tax dollars.

So, I mean, at this point, there is not a doubt in my mind that a lab leak is the cause of this pandemic. I mean, there's literally no evidence to support a wet market theory unless, as Ryan suggests, there was a time machine because all the wet market theories propose that the virus broke out in December 2019. Here we have Ben who and others sick in November 2019, possibly before that. Yeah, I think it's worth lingering on the diffuse proposal for a moment because as we await the declassified information that we're hopefully going to get, and we're going to continue to put pressure on the administration until they release this information, you're going to start seeing kind of a battle royale, I think, between multiple different camps within the United States, but then also camps within

China, each trying to blame each other for the research that ended up leading to this leak. Let's say everybody eventually stipulates that, okay, it was actually research that we were doing over in this lab, you're going to see Americans, I think, saying, well, this was a Chinese kind of military project. And it is the case that there was Chinese military funding of Wuhan lab. And so there's some evidence, there's some plausibility to that argument. At the same time, you have Ben Hu, you have Peter Daszak, others applying to the Pentagon for money. So I'm already kind of finding it rich that we're going to see the arguments that, well, this was military funding. How dare you? When they were actually trying to get U.S. military funding and did get USAID funding, which is kind of the kind of sketchy agency that is always

involved when you sort of want to layer between what's going on and what's actually going on. And so can you talk a little bit about this DARPA, this attempt to get DARPA funding? Sure. I mean, I'll start by saying, I mean, shipping tax dollars to a military-linked animal laboratory run by a foreign adversary was a recipe for disaster from the very beginning. Not well thought out, perhaps. Yeah, whether the money was coming from the DOD, the State Department, or the NIH, or anybody else for that matter. I think you guys just questioned the science.

The scientists. Question the scientists. Yeah, that's right. That's right. So, I mean, going back to the diffuse proposal, I mean, to me, this was just these experimenters kind of being honest about what their intentions were to create this super virus.

And I think, you know, the fact that they did apply to the United States Department of Defense to create, depending on what your point of view is, a bioweapon gives some insight into the nature of these programs. American government might agree that, OK, let's do this together because if something goes wrong, there's mutually assured destruction and also mutually distributed blame. You know what I mean? Exactly. Because right now, U.S. and China are going to be equally to blame if it's a lab leak. And you're not really going to be able to hold anybody accountable. And I think that's exactly why the Biden administration is dragging its feet right now. I mean, all signs point to a lab leak. And if it's true, it's their fault. And the fact that Democrats are in the White House and running the Senate right now, I mean, no one really has an appetite for beating up on the NIH or the State Department. So I think that the timing of this is unfortunate, but I think the timing of

this is also, it was designed to be this way, that this information came out at a time where it really doesn't benefit anybody at this point. It's only going to cause harm to China-U.S. relations. And that's, again, I think part of the point of all this. And I think it looks like increasingly the Trump administration was dragging their feet as well, because they had information implicating our government. And we didn't get any of this information as much as Republicans are posturing now back then, probably because our intelligence agencies were aware of some of this. Justin, over at White Coat Waste, you guys are tracking sort of money being sent with no accountability for crazy projects and labs around the world.

And on that note, I want to ask what we know about gain of function right now, the state of US funding for gain of function research, especially in places like the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where we don't really have a lot of oversight. We're not seemingly even interested in providing oversight. After all of this, where is this money going right now, if anywhere? Right. Great question, Emily. And I just want to start by saying one more thing that I forgot. We have emails, actually the same tranche of emails that gave us the Ben Hu records tying him to these grants were also the original emails showing that Fauci's division at the NIH were actively conspiring with Peter Daszak and the Wuhan Institute in writing in 2016 to

bypass the gain-of-function ban that was in place by the Obama-Biden administration. So again, there's a lot of evidence that we were very intentionally trying to make this project happen in China, bending over backwards to send money there and get approvals to do this dangerous animal experimentation at the Wuhan Institute. In terms of where things stand now, there's lots of legislation out there looking to crack down or outright ban gain-of-function research. Here's what we've done to date. We've spent the last three years trying to find, expose, defund these foreign labs, China and otherwise. In the federal spending bill last year, we were able to cut funding for gain-of- function research in what they call countries of concern, also known as foreign adversaries, Russia, China.

Really, those were the only countries that were receiving money at that time. So we've also now disqualified the Wuhan Institute from getting any future funding from the NIH. We're hoping to make that permanent. So Wuhan is disqualified. The Wuhan lab itself is disqualified from future taxpayer funding. No gain-of-function funding is going to go to foreign enemy laboratories. However, there are still 27 other laboratories, including other CCP-run laboratories, animal laboratories in China that are eligible to receive money from the NIH and that are receiving money from the NIH.

We also just finally cut off money to Russian laboratories. Until recently, taxpayers were funding laboratories in Russia as well. So we've cut the money for gain of function in foreign countries, but there's no restrictions on gain of function here in the United States beyond what existed already that allowed some of these projects to go forward. So we're working with Congress to permanently defund all animal experimentation in countries of concern like Russia and China. Obviously, we know what happened in the Wuhan Institute should be a signal that this is a bad idea. And we're also trying to crack down on gain of function in the United States because some people are arguing that instead of offshoring it, we should bring in here where we have better oversight. But again, that's just as bad. I mean, that's basically looking to create a Wuhan of the West out here in the United States,

and it's going to happen. It's just a matter of time. So we're doing everything we can to make sure that taxpayer funding is not going to these foreign countries that don't have our best interest in mind and for dangerous experimentation that can cause a pandemic on our shores. And it's good that NIH funding to the Wuhan lab is being cut off. And it's good that there's kind of big pressure being applied. But I'm curious, are those labs going to keep running? Because let's say that the NIH doesn't fund the Wuhan lab anymore. But if the CCP is like, you know what, we actually kind of think that that research is still useful to us for whatever reason. Like, as people who have respiratory systems, like, we don't really care. I mean, we want to know the answer to who

funded this. And one reason we want to know is so that we can kind of target it and there can be accountability. But we also don't want there to be pandemics. Like, we don't, it doesn't really matter, you know, who paid for that day's work of labor for the lab worker who then, you know, sneezed at the wet market or whatever and ended up with, you know, 20 plus million people dead and lives upended and immense trauma and the world changed. Like, so what, what are, what's the path toward just stopping that research globally? Because the, you know, we have to be lucky every single time. The virus only has to be lucky once. Yeah, that's right. I mean, I think there's been conversations about weapons conventions and things like that covering these type of, you know, this, I mean, I would argue that this, this, you know, crosses the line into bioweapons research. Again, it's all in the eye of the

beholder and what their intentions are. And I think we need stricter rules. Certainly in the United States, we shouldn't be funding this stuff. But certainly globally, we should probably agree that this is bad for everybody. But if you have ill intentions and you want to create a bioweapon, there's going to be plenty of opportunities to do it. It's very inexpensive to do. You can do it very secretively. And to be totally honest, I wouldn't be shocked if the U.S. is secretly trying to figure out ways to fund this stuff overseas. There's already dangerous loopholes that don't track subgrants. So after EcoHealth gives money to Wuhan, Wuhan could regrant that money somewhere else and we would have no idea. So I think there's also a lot of spending accountability and transparency that has to happen in the United States to make sure we can follow the money where it's going and ensure we're not funding these projects like Fauci did did secretively in Wuhan in the first place, that brought us this pandemic that we're

still dealing with. Ryan reported a great story out over at The Intercept on all of this. Justin, we really appreciate you coming on as well, Senior Vice President, over at White Coat Waste. Your insight is always so appreciated, and so is your FOIA acumen. You guys get everything. We've got a good attorney on retainer. Yeah, without an attorney nowadays, you get zero from FOIA. Yeah. Just nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Unfortunately. Well, Justin, thank you so much. We always appreciate it. Thank you both. That does it for us on today's edition of CounterPoints, the second edition of the show in the new studio. Again, big thanks to McGriffin. I heard someone in the comments refer to Mac and Griffin as McGriffin, and I think that's really beautiful and adorable. So they are McGriffin from now on, and we are very grateful to them

and very grateful to all of you for your help and for watching every week. Programming note, I'll be gone next week. That's why I was here yesterday. He's just never here anymore. He's just never here anymore. I'm just never here anymore. You should see his notebook right now, by the way. If you've ever wanted a glance

inside Ryan Grimm's famed notebook, it just says Obama. It's just a page of his notebook open to Obama. What was I going to say about Obama? Nobody knows.

I don't remember. It's not important. Anyway, Crystal will be here so you'll have a ladies day on Wednesday. That's right. Sounds fun. We'll do the Today Show fourth hour thing with two glasses of white wine on. Excellent. All right. Well, Ryan, we'll see you the week after that.

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