Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 6/29/23: Voters Reject "Bidenomics", Pod Save Bros Meltdown Over 3rd Party, Troops At Mexico Border, Russian General Detained For Coup, AirBnB Death Spiral, Ro Khanna On Defense Spending, AI Sexbots, Shein Influencers, Debate Panel Affirmative Action

Episode Date: June 29, 2023

Krystal and Emily discuss Biden unveiling his "Bidenomics" economy speech, the Pod Save Bros melting down over Cornell West's 3rd party run, Did the RFK Jr Podcast Tour backfire?, the real reason Republicans want troops at the border, Trump planning a big return to Twitter, a report that a Russian General was detained for assisting coup, is AirBnB in a death spiral?, Ro Khanna joins us in studio to talk Defense spending and Biden debating other candidates, Krystal looks into AI Sex bots, Emily looks into how Shein influencers visited their sweatshops in China, and we're joined by Delano Squire and Michael Starr Hopkins for a debate on Affirmative Action that has a breaking ruling from the SCOTUS this morning.To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/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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Emily, great to have you this morning. Glad to be here. We have a fantastic show planned, of course. Big speech from Joe Biden yesterday, laying out his view of Bidenomics, really making his pitch, his election pitch to the American people about what he has done for the economy and making his case that we should keep it all in his hands. We also have some interesting stuff happening on the Republican side, especially this poll from NBC News about the way that the Republican issue set polls with Republicans versus how it polls with the general electorate, which of their issue planks is actually strongest with the country at large. Kind of interesting stuff there. Lots going on in Russia.

Very hard to sort through exactly what is happening right now. Is Putin cracking down? Is he not cracking down? Has he detained some of the people who may have been in cahoots with Prokofiev? We'll sort through that as best we can. Some new, really interesting data about Airbnb and how there's a huge sort of Airbnb crash going on right now. Is that going to have implications for the broader housing market? Big question marks there. And some interesting comments from our commander in chief, getting a little confused about what war we are currently involved with. I have a look at AI sex bots. Emily is taking a look at Sheehan influencers. And very excited to have a panel in studio this

morning to debate the merits of affirmative action. This comes, of course, as we are expecting the Supreme Court to rule probably today to get that ruling about whether affirmative action is going to stay or go. The expectation is it's going to go. But listen, you never know. So that's what the plan is. Yeah, that sounds great. And we should start with President Joe Biden. We've got two Biden blocks today because he's been on a roll, really. But he gave a huge speech yesterday, long speech. He was in Chicago. And we want to start with just this soundbite from it so you can get a little flavor of what he talked about. There's a fundamental break from the economic theory that has failed America's middle class

for decades now. It's called trickle-down economics, fundamental economics, trickle-down. The idea was it's believed that we should cut taxes for the wealthy and big corporations. And I know something about big corporations. There's more corporations in Delaware incorporated than every other state in the union combined. I want them to do well, but I'm tired of waiting for the trickle-down. It doesn't come very quickly. Not much trickle-down at my dad's kitchen table growing up. When I took office, the pandemic was raging and our economy was reeling. Supply chains are broken.

Millions of people unemployed. Hundreds of thousands of small business on the verge of closing after so many had already closed. Literally hundreds of thousands on the verge of closing. Today, the U.S. has the highest economic growth rate leading the world economies since the pandemic. The highest in the world. As Dick said, with his help, we've created 13.4 million new jobs, more jobs in two years than any president has ever made in four. And folks, it's no accident. That's Bidenomics in action. Bidenomics is about building an economy from the middle out, the bottom up, not the top down. So this was all about, you know, laying out his economic case, what he's calling Bidenomics and, you know, pointing to the low unemployment rate, the number of jobs created, et cetera, to say, hey, I've done a great job with the economy.

That's why you should reelect me. I have a lot of thoughts on this. But first, let me go through some of the data, because, listen, in fairness, the economic data, I think it's fair to say it's pretty mixed. It's like a very strange time in terms of the economy. On the one hand, unemployment is extremely low. Put this up on the screen. You know, there was a sort of natural recovery, of course, after the pandemic when things opened back up. So that makes sense.

There were also overt recovery efforts, many of which appear to have been quite successful. And so we have a quite low historic unemployment rate, which obviously is an important metric and one that the White House likes to tout. You also have, and this is maybe the most interesting one to me, put this next one up on the screen, you actually have inequality for the first time in my life, lessening, because you've had the rich taking a bit of a haircut post-COVID. I mean, they amassed incredible wealth during the pandemic. They've taken a bit of a haircut post-COVID. And you have the lowest wage workers who, because of the tight labor market, because of the very low unemployment rate, they have actually had wage gains at the bottom end of the spectrum that have been in

excess at times even of inflation. So you have workers at the lowest end of the wage spectrum actually doing the best in this economy right now, not that it's nearly enough. And let have workers at the lowest end of the wage spectrum actually doing the best in this economy right now. Not that it's nearly enough. And let's get to the other side of this. So the next piece of information that makes things complicated, to say the least, is that inflation has been quite high. I put this up on the screen. And obviously, for most workers, that has meant that they have been getting a paycheck cut every single month. You know, they go to the grocery store, they see the price of goods going up and up, the amount that they were making in their paycheck not going nearly as far, more and more difficulty trying to, you know, make rent or make a housing payment at the end of the month.

You have housing costs that have been going up for years and years, and even now they haven't come down. But meanwhile, you've got, you know, Fed interest rate hikes that have made housing more affordable, literally, than ever before. So a lot to also weigh on American families, American workers. And that is perhaps why I put this up on the screen in spite of all of the happy talk from the Biden administration about how great the economy is. This is probably the most important metric. Only one in three approve of Biden's handling of the economy amid Bidenomics push. They say this is according to the latest polling. You even have some softness among Democrats in terms of how they view Biden's handling of the economy.

Overall, 72 percent of Democrats approve of Biden's job performance, but only 60 percent approve of his handling of the economy. So, you know, he wants to sell that, hey, things are great. I've done a great job. That's why you should put me back in office. But Emily, the American people, by and large, do not agree. Yeah. And it just doesn't work when you have inflation still at that level because everyone's earnings increasing, whatever, it's all getting eaten away at. And that's one of the biggest problems for Biden. He passed a bill, a signature piece of legislation called the Inflation Reduction Act that was always, as a title, somewhat laughable and almost like the apex of Washington branding. Yeah, well, in fairness, that was like Manchin who wanted that branding slapped on it. Yeah, it's always good to remember that that was a Joe Manchin special. But that said,

they did accept it and actually really touted it and leaned into the Inflation Reduction Act branding. And that's in people's memories. That's in the voters' memories. And so when you see people are experiencing this economy very unevenly. So where inflation in the basket of goods is hitting, if you're at the lower end of the income spectrum, that's hitting you pretty hard in ways it's not hitting people at the upper end of it. And so that's a big, big, big problem for Joe Biden that I just, I mean, it is going down. So maybe, you know, inflation is going down, but not evenly. Not everything in inflation is going. Housing causes show no sign of stopping. Car prices. I mean, there's been some slowing in used cars, but like it's just it's really uneven.

And Biden is not in a position to say in the next however months until the election, like a year and a half until the election, we're just going to be in a great place again. Well, Democrats have this constant instinct that if the American people, you know, aren't giving him high marks on the economy, it's not because there's anything the administration did wrong. It's because we just haven't gotten our message out yet. They just don't really get how great we actually are and how great their lives are actually because of the policies that we've implemented. Whereas, you know, I think normal people in their everyday lives, looking at their paychecks, looking at how far it's getting them, looking at their costs, are probably in a better position to understand their economic reality than the president sitting in the White House. So I do think that this pitch, it just

falls flat at this point because it's not what people are experiencing in their day-to-day lives. And I think if he is going to lean into this direction, I think it's a very different, difficult political case to make, especially when it's not like last time when he was running, you know, there wasn't a lot of content. There weren't a lot of policy promises, but there was a little bit of something on the economic side. And there was an expectation that you would get another round of checks that became obviously really critical in terms of the Georgia elections. That is very likely why Democrats were able to win a majority in the Senate because they had this really clear promise of, hey, if you vote for us, you are going to get a check in the mail that is going to help you out a lot. By the way, those checks did help a lot.

And some of the other pieces that were in that legislation, that first recovery legislation, including the child tax credit, is probably one of the most successful policies in recent history. Yet, I think part of why people feel the way they do about the economy is not just that inflation has been high, eating into their paychecks, et cetera, but also because you had all of those programs that were originally instituted that genuinely help people, that bolstered their savings account, that gave them a little bit of wiggle room, et cetera. All of those have now been stripped away. You've got student loan payments restarting. You've got any pandemic aid program has been rolled back. And so things that people used to have access to, like child tax credit, those are gone and they're really starting to feel the pain. I do want to say something that will be perhaps controversial, which is that I actually do think that Joe Biden has been the best economic policy president of my lifetime. Now, let me say, that's a really low bar. But he is the first in my lifetime who has broken at all with the neoliberal consensus that starts

in the Reagan era that is picked up and affirmed by the Clinton era that, you know, Obama sort of pretended like he might break from that he ends up being, you know, just doubling down on it. Biden has at least tinkered around the edges of industrial policy, for one, of, you know, even the student loan debt cancellations, the Supreme Court is probably going to say, partly because the Biden administration didn't do a great job legally justifying it, but they're probably going to strike it down. But that is a real break with the neoliberal era saying, hey, we're going to do overt debt cancellation. Like that would be unheard of, unthought of in the Obama administration, in the Clinton administration, etc. Some of the programs, as I mentioned, like child tax credit, truly, if you look at the numbers on

child poverty, this was a wildly effective program. The problem with it is that they didn't actually codify it permanently. They assumed that they would be able to put political pressure to keep it going, or perhaps they just didn't really care. And so that goes by the wayside. So there are a few things here that you can point to to say, yeah, I do actually think his economic policy, especially at the beginning of his administration, was better than Obama. But again, it's so wildly inadequate for after you've had 40 years of wage, at least stagnation, probably decline after you've had decades and decades of neoliberalism, which has really pushed up the cost of health care, the cost of education, the cost of housing, made having a basic middle class life basically unobtainable, that even if you're doing these little tiny improvements around the edges,

it's just woefully insufficient for where people are right now. There's this really interesting thing in Axios this morning from economist Darren Grant, who has studied why, in this era, people's sentiments about the economy are not attached to the unemployment level, whereas historically that's been the case. He says, if your wages are, this is Axios paraphrasing, if your wages are outpacing inflation, things look rosy. If not, well, that's quite dispiriting. Yes, no kidding. But he found this time around that it's the real wages that are tethered to people's sentiments about the economy, which is super, super interesting in that it's not always been the case that that's why it used to be like Like if you have a job, then your spirits are

going to be more tied to whether or not you're pleased with the state of the economy, with the president, et cetera, et cetera. That's a really interesting finding. And I think it does get to like big changes in the economy post Obama, post Obama, post Trump, post pandemic, where we are right now. Why is that different? I think probably because it's just been a dramatic change in the way that our economy is organized. Well, when the minimum wage has been stuck at $7 and freaking 25 cents for, you know, multiple decades now, it's the longest time we've ever gone without hiking the minimum wage. Yeah, it's no longer enough to have a job. There's a lot of, you know, do I have a job that is going to enable me to afford anything to even come close to being able to afford like just basic shelter and food? I mean,

we talk about homelessness and, you know, the rise in that in a lot of cities across the country. That comes right down to just housing costs. There is no city in America where you can afford a one bedroom apartment. We're not talking about living large here, a one bedroom apartment on a full time minimum wage job. So, yeah, it's not enough to look and say, oh, the unemployment rate is low. You have to say not just do I have a job? Is it a good job? Is it a job where I have health care? Is it a job where I have some sort of stability, where I have some sort of predictability in terms of my schedule? And this is why, Emily, that you've seen such a rise in interest and support, by the way, historic support for the labor movement, because there is this awareness. I think Chris Smalls, who's the

president of Amazon Labor Union, he said it well. He's like, we're not quitting our jobs. We are going to organize at our jobs and make these good jobs. You see this with the Starbucks baristas, who are saying like, listen, it's not enough that you're going to like virtue signal to me, which they're like barely not even doing anymore, apparently with this whole pride flap, but it's not enough. You're going to virtue signal to me. I actually want this to be a good job and I'm willing to take some risks to do it because since the labor market is tight, like your low wage job is not that important to me. I can go somewhere else and get another low wage job. But fighting to get a job that will actually allow me to sustain any kind of life, yeah, that's something that is worth taking the risk for.

You know, the Starbucks unionization is one of the more interesting ones, period, because Starbucks actually had pretty good benefits. You know, you got health care at Starbucks. They would pay for some of your college. And it still wasn't enough because in so many cases, it was scheduling. It was the bathroom policy, it was all of these different things that contributed to a lifestyle that wasn't what people expected from their employer. And I think that's exactly what we're talking about.

Why are these things changing? Because now it's not the same. You're not able to have a good-paying job and affordable health care and all of these other things in so many different parts of the economy. It's just not normal. It's not healthy for society. And it's a huge difference from the past. And so it's expectations versus reality. And when reality isn't delivering, then, yeah, you're probably going to have a different outlook, even if you have a job, even if unemployment is

fairly low historically. It's just going to be different. And I'm glad people are picking up on that. Yeah. So I think the Bidenomics pitch is going to fall flat because it is dissonant with what people are experiencing in their real lives. That doesn't mean that I think Joe Biden is going to lose the election. And that's what's so sad about our current political state. Put this up on the screen. So in a new NBC News poll, Biden's national approval rating is about 43 percent. That's about where it's been, more or less. Another 10% of voters somewhat disapprove of him. And what Sahil Kapoor here says is, how did those 10% feel about a Biden versus Trump race? Well, half say they would vote for Biden, and 39% say that they would vote for Trump. That group, the lesser of two evils voters, was really important in 2020, was really important in 2022.

They're basically the group that prohibited the red wave from appearing and will be really important again in 2024 because you're very likely to have this Trump versus Biden matchup that overwhelmingly majority of Americans do not want, would like to have other choices. But because our democracy is so, like, frail and broken, they're not going to have other choices, but because our democracy is so like frail and broken, they're not going to get another choice really. And so they're stuck with these two dudes that they would really rather would move on and leave us all alone. So who the people who don't like either one of them vote for are going to be a critical factor. And this is always, Emily, what the Biden people have thought. They have thought Ron Klain, after Emmanuel Macron won, while he had like 30-some percent approval rating, Ron Klain, Joe Biden's former chief of staff, tweeted out like, oh, interesting. Interesting that he was able to pull that off. Not because people loved him, but because they hated his opponent.

That has always been the play here. So to me, it's just such a sign of decay and so pathetic and so outrageous and enraging, too, that you think, as Joe Biden and also as Donald Trump, that you can run without really promising anything to the American people on a material front, that you can run without, you know, just trying to trying to bolster what you've done already in office, but without offering any sort of affirmative agenda for the future. I think that's a really sad state of affairs, frankly. You know, it's also how Donald Trump won, because people so detested Hillary Clinton and so wanted her away from the corridors of power. And so I actually think the signs of decay are abundantly obvious. It's not just with Joe Biden. It's also with Donald Trump.

And when you're pitting, in all likelihood likelihood Donald Trump against Joe Biden, just like we saw in 2020, it's an extremely pathetic state of affairs, but it's the matchup that we deserve at this point. We've basically earned this, but I shouldn't say we deserve it. It is the one that we're getting, but people do deserve exactly better than that. Although to some extent, we have all created this situation because we're all here. But it's pretty bad. It is pretty bad. There's some level of complicity. Yeah. But no, I mean, in all honesty, I think that's exactly right. And that's where enter pod save bros. You've got to see this clip because it's so first of all, I think this is going to be a huge narrative in the next year and a half before the election, more than it was with the Jill Stein, Susan Sarandon line of argumentation from the sort of establishment left.

But also he just puts it in a way that is so perfectly awful here. You got to watch. If the people who voted for Jill Stein, just Jill Stein in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania had voted for Hillary instead, Donald Trump would have never become president. That's it, right? And so, you know, I'm sure there's a lot of Cornel West fans out there. You live in a swing state, you vote for Cornel West, you're helping Trump become president. That's it. And you can say, oh, well, it's Joe Biden's fault, he did this or that. No, no, no. It's your decision. You get to decide whether you want to help Donald Trump become president or you don't. And if you want to help him, then you should vote for Cornel West or you should vote for Joe Manchin and his no labels ticket, or you can vote for, you know, RFK Jr. if he decides to run

third party. But if you don't want to help Trump become president, you have over Joe Biden. That's it. Very simple. Now, I think messaging to voters who might actually make this decision is probably a little different, I would say, because I know chastising works. Chastising works probably a little different. Does it? Because I would say history would show it does not work. And I mean, I just got I'm having such 2016 redux right now because it is the same thing all over again. I mean, here you have a specter of Joe Biden going out, making this speech. And in fairness, these comments from the pod saved dudes was before this Biden speech. But promising literally nothing. Right.

Not running on any sort of affirmative agenda. It really is just like, I'm not Trump and you got to keep me in here because you got no other option. And they could spend their time criticizing that saying, listen, guys, if you want to win people over, like you need to get out there and you need to make the case to them. And you need to, you know, you got a lot of young people who were excited about the Biden administration who actually gave them high marks at the beginning of the administration, who are so disenchanted and so disgusted with especially the recent direction of the Biden administration. You know, you're going to have to appeal to them if you want to be able to win.

Instead, it's, nope, if you don't vote for Joe, you're a vote for Trump. And we're just going to shame and cajole you and hope that that works out because the Democratic Party can never fail. It can only ever be failed, Emily. It's amazing that people have put microphones in front of their faces because they're constantly just saying the quiet part out loud and like they slip into it sometimes. And you notice like when he was when he sort of took a step back and he was like, no, messaging to those people might be a little bit different as though he's not talking to the public on his podcast in ways that are going to get clipped and disseminated. He's a speechwriter for Obama.

That's what Jon Favreau was. He's actually supposed to be persuasive and arguing to a swath of the public that he understands. In order to persuade people, in order to stir their emotions, you should understand them. And clearly, they still do not understand that there are plenty of people in this country that say there is no significant difference between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. If Joe Biden, if Donald Trump is tweeting crazy stuff, fine, it's not going to have me up in arms, you know, drinking my Starbucks, watching Morning Joe and freaking out with Mika and the gang. It's just the same old stuff. I'm still going to be in this

stupid job with student loan debt. It doesn't change that much from one party to the other. And that's fundamentally what they don't understand because he's trying to say, if you don't want Donald Trump to be president, don't vote for Cornel West. Well, you know what? There are a whole lot of Cornel West voters or RFK Jr. voters or voters for Marianne Williamson who say this is the same on both sides. It doesn't matter to me if I get an establishment Democrat or an establishment Republican or Trump or Biden. I'm still going to be screwed by the system. Yeah. So it doesn't matter. Like, I don't care if Donald Trump is president in the same way that I if it's a vote for Biden or Donald Trump, it's just a horse apiece.

Yeah. I mean, listen, to be fair, I don't agree with that. I don't either. Yeah. I think there are a lot of people who view it that way and I can't really blame him for that, but I don't actually agree with that. The reason that I ended up voting for Biden last time around was not because I was excited, not because I didn't have a million issues with his past record and expectations of what he would do in office. It was a very simple one, which is that my core, you know, core of my politics is the labor movement. And Trump would put a bunch of union busting goons in the National Labor Relations Board. Biden would put some people who at least wouldn't like totally rig the scales against workers. And that is in fact what happened. It's part of what did enable the Starbucks union. So on that metric alone, I was sort of persuaded

like, all right, that you have to at least lay the groundwork to enable a labor movement, even as I have low expectations for Joe Biden. But as you said, like, I can't really blame people for holding that view. And with Democrats, they always think people just don't understand how great we are. You know, if they just, if they just really got it, like if we just came up with a new slogan, like build back better, then then they're really going to they're really going to understand. We're going to win on a landslide if we just like come up with a new slogan and like come up with a great TV ad and pay our consultants more to be of to the people who are in power, who literally hold the presidency and the Senate right now and damn close to the House as well. Instead of holding them to account, it's always just like, oh, what's wrong with the voters? What, you know, are the, why are the voter, are they too sexist? Are they too racist? Are they

too like dumb? They don't understand what we've done for them. They're so ungrateful, et cetera, et cetera. They're just Putin's pawns that are seeing dumb memes and it's changing everybody's opinion to vote for Trump. Yeah. And perhaps, you know, Favreau, as you say, was an Obama speechwriter. Like Obama was great for Obama in terms of politicians, but he was a disaster for the Democratic Party. I mean, the party has never recovered from the thousand plus state legislative seats that they lost under Obama. They've never recovered from all the governor's mansions that they gave up. You know, ultimately they gave up the House and the Senate and then presidency to Donald Trump, which it's amazing to me that there's

never any self-reflection about like, what did you do wrong that you go from Barack Obama to Donald Trump here? There's never any self-reflection about that. There's never any self, there's never even any criticism of Hillary Clinton, who is the most proximate cause of why we ended up with Donald Trump in the White House. Instead, it's just like, oh, it's the Jill Stein voters. They're the real problem. Yeah, they're the real problem. And continuously we hear that Democrats, like, I don't know, a lot of like Hollywood folks, whatever, are trying to field Michelle Obama, which I think is really interesting because it's exactly what you're saying. They think she can win. And that's literally all they care about. These are all powers. Michelle Obama has never showed any

interest in running for office. And listen, I think, you know, especially they're stuck with Joe. There's no other. And so let's actually transition to there was a new poll out of New Hampshire that was kind of interesting. And, you know, listen, any one poll, you should take it with a lot of grains of salt. But put this up on the screen. Now, New Hampshire is really interesting because the Democrats, led by Joe Biden and the DNC, really screwed the state over. Joe Biden did really poorly here last time around. I don't remember. He had like fourth, fifth. It was it was abysmal. Right. It was losing to like Amy Klobuchar in New Hampshire. And so they wanted to put the state later in the order. They wanted to push up South Carolina where he did really well. And so they did that, but they didn't really think it all

through because New Hampshire actually has a law on the books that they have to go first in terms of their primary. And the state is held by Republicans. So even if the Democratic Party wanted to play ball and move things, which they actually don't, but even if they did, they can't because the state has a Republican governor. So Joe Biden is not even going to be in the ballot in New Hampshire. So anyway, here's this latest New Hampshire poll. It's got Biden at 68 percent, RFK Jr. at 9 percent, which is lower than where he's been in other recent polls, and Marianne Williamson at 8 percent. And, you know, a lot has been made of this poll. And I think people should maybe like cool their jets on reading too much into one particular poll. And the fact that in particular RFK has dropped, you know, about 10 points versus where we've seen him be in national polls because these things are all over the place.

But it did raise the question, Emily, that we were talking about is he has really leaned into like I'm going to be the podcast candidate. Yeah, I'm going to go on. I'm going to go on breaking points, which we really appreciate a couple of times. Yeah, that's great. We appreciate having that time with him. He went on with Joe Rogan, obviously. He's done a ton of podcasts across the political spectrum. And the theory of the case is that this is the new mainstream. This is where you actually find people. This is where you actually reach people. This is where I can get my ideas out since the mainstream media is shutting me out. And I think in particular because the views that RFK holds and leans into, especially in these podcast appearances, are really out of step, frankly, just by polling, whether you agree with them or not, with where the Democratic Party base is. I don't think that having so much this attention in the podcast tour doesn't appear to have aided him at the very least, even if we want to take this poll with a lot of grains of salt.

And, you know, I just pulled up what RealClearPolitics has here, and they have polls recently. We're actually going to talk in the next block about a new Wisconsin poll, but the Dems in the Wisconsin poll, it has Biden 49, Kennedy 9, Williamson 3. Pennsylvania, this is a Quinnipiac poll, Biden 71, Kennedy 17, Williamson 5. So Kennedy at 17 in Pennsylvania, Kennedy at 9 in Wisconsin. Yeah. There were some flash polls right after he announced his candidacy where he did really have a sugar high. That seems to be coming down pretty clearly. We'll get more of that in the next couple of weeks. But these polls are an indication, I think,

that it's not where it was after his initial announcement. And I think you're right. The podcast candidacy is very different than a ground operation. And I'm sure he knows that. I mean, his people know that. But what people are seeing, and that's a really interesting thing, too, that if you're running, for instance, a podcast candidacy, a media candidacy, like Donald Trump ran. I mean, he at first had like no ground operation anywhere in 2016 or 2015. He comes in and he's on media constantly. He's on MSNBC, CNN, he's on Fox. And what people in New Hampshire are seeing is Donald Trump. It actually didn't matter that he didn't have a ground operation. So in some ways, there's this interesting interplay now that like actually

if you do blanket national media, maybe you can get away with having a different ground operation. But that probably won't be the case for anyone not named Donald Trump. Yeah. So, I mean, with RFK Jr., obviously, you know, I have disagreements with him on a number of policies, vaccines, but even probably., obviously, you know, I have disagreements with him on a number of policies, vaccines. But even probably more importantly, you might have heard that even more importantly, actually, economics. I have a very different view of what needs to be done in terms of the economy and very different philosophy. But I actually would like it to be the case that you could run this sort of podcast candidacy, that you can bypass the mainstream press, that they're weakened enough that this would work out for you. But I unfortunately just don't think that we're there, especially on the Democratic side. And he has an additional challenge in that,

as I just said, I mean, you know, he wrote a whole book that I think had a lot of legitimacy to it, criticizing Anthony Fauci. But you have to acknowledge, like, my views on Anthony Fauci and RFK Jr.'s views on Anthony Fauci are wildly different than the Democratic base. You know, his views on Ukraine, we're actually talking about a poll today where not just Democrats, but actually overwhelmingly, I don't think we should be providing additional military aid to Ukraine. I think we should be using that as leverage to get them to the negotiating table. My views and RFK Jr.'s views are not in line with the Democratic base.

And it's something that, you know, that's a key position that he really leans into. So he also has this added challenge of actually the more attention that he gets, the more that people know him outside of being a Kennedy and a protest vote against the president that they're really not excited about. They're worried about his age, et cetera. The more they get to know his actual views, the more of an issue it may be for him. So he may have the ironic situation, Emily, that actually the more attention that he gets, the more of a challenge that he has in the polls. I think there are other candidates out there. The person on the Republican side that is doing sort of a similar strategy is Vivek Ramaswamy. Although he also has, I mean, he is on Fox News regularly as well.

So he does have mainstream media too. But he has really leaned into this sort of like super online persona. His issue set is the like super online, like podcast-y issue set. And it's been enough for him to get a lot of attention. You know, we certainly got a base and followers who are very excited about him and the issues that he talks about. But, you know, is he going to be the Republican nominee? No. Is it going to work out for him in terms of a national media profile and whatever he wants to leverage that for next to, you know, or potentially like Trump cabinet position? Yes. But unfortunately, I think there's still a real limit to how far you

can go if you're just leaning into like the podcast route versus having any sort of, you know, ability to garner mainstream media attention. I think the problem also is that it's very easy to fall into this impenetrable bubble in the same way that Hillary Clinton's team was clearly in an impenetrable bubble and sort of isolated and insulated from criticism and from the outside world. If you're running a podcast candidacy that might actually, apart from just having a more tailored message to one particular crowd, you may also be insulating yourself from different voters. Yeah, you need to touch grass. Different sets of voters.

You need to touch grass. And the very, you know, RFK Jr.'s Californian, the very obvious example is somebody that I really like. He'd tell you the same thing, probably Michael Schellenberger, who ran a gubernatorial campaign not that long ago and had so much conversation online around his candidacy, was able to get some donors because of the media attention he got. And it just didn't translate into votes on the ground. And so I think that's an indication. If Bobby Kennedy has a name, obviously, like that name is a hugely, hugely helpful in ways that are not necessarily precedented in politics just because of the place that his uncle holds in the sort of public imagination and that his father holds in the public imagination.

That said, all of this, it may end up being not much more than a splash. I will say, though, Marie Harf, just as we're wrapping up here, she said recently, I promise you that Kennedy is not going to get above 20% any primary. I think it's way too early to make a determination on that because while he may come down from a sugar high here, he may also adapt and say, yeah, our message has been a little bit narrow. It has been sort of to this crowd of people that's read Substack and watches podcasts, which are important voters, but not all voters and, you know, not necessarily having common everything with all voters. So he can adjust. And I think saying that there's no way he's going to get 20 percent in any primary way too early. Yeah, especially

when, again, Biden's not going to be on the ballot in Iowa or in New Hampshire. Right. So I think that's honestly a really foolish thing to say. All right, Emily, why don't you set up for us this really interesting polling from NBC News about some Republican priorities. This stuff is fascinating. I'm so glad that we can actually put this up on the screen, the first element in the B block. So B1 here. Look at that. I know that the font is kind of small there, so I'm going to break it out for everyone. This is an NBC News poll that tested 11 different proposals and issues that the GOP candidates are campaigning on. And basically, they say that I'm reading from the report,

the recent push on using the military at the border is resonating with general election voters, though they, Republicans, are down on several other high-profile policy planks. So if you're looking at the screen, you're going to want to look at the upper left there. So support for deploying the U.S. military to the Mexican border to stop illegal drugs from entering the country. That said, so 55% of people say that would make them more likely to vote for a presidential candidate. Then take your eyes all the way down to the bottom right. Wants to address the federal budget deficit

by reducing Social Security and Medicare benefits for those who are not already enrolled in these programs. Only 12% of people said that would make them more likely to vote for a candidate.

77% of people say that would make them less likely to vote for a candidate. The most popular position that they tested among all registered voters and Republican primary voters was deploying the military to the Mexican border. And notice it wasn't just deploying the military. They asked in the question specifically about stopping illegal drugs

entering the country. And that's actually a pretty key distinction because we talked yesterday about the Stephen Miller drone, the migrant boat allegation, which both of us, I think, find a little bit dubious. But the distinction there is we're just going to stop people from entering the country, not drugs. And when you're asking specifically about drugs, that should be a huge red flag for Republicans to test out that messaging. If they want like deploy the military to the border thing to work electorally. You probably want to ask specifically about stopping the flow of drugs. That's what's polling well and that is a very different thing than people.

Drugs, people, very different. You think that sounds pretty obvious, but to politicians it's not. Yeah, and they actually tested also. So they tested supports deploying troops to the border to stop illegal drugs. And that was the best. This is, you know, a whole list of basically Republican priorities, a bunch of stuff about, you know, transgender kids. There's stuff about abortion. There's stuff about stop the steal. So they tested all of these sort of like Republican talking points and priorities. And so they tested

deploy the troops for illegal drugs and they tested deploy the troops for illegal drugs, and they tested, deployed the troops for immigration. And that did poll significantly less well. It still was among the better polling of the GOP priorities, but it was less effective than stopping illegal drugs with troops. And I think it's a sign of, I mean, we're still in, it just keeps getting worse and worse. We had a fair amount of attention during the 2016 campaign about how bad the addiction crisis had gotten, how bad the opioid addiction crisis had gotten, how many overdose deaths and just what a scourge of America this was. And some of that attention has fallen off, even as the numbers have continued to grow and have really gotten worse and worse. So I think

it reflects what continues to be a horrific human toll and pain point with the American public. Even as we discussed yesterday, I think this solution is not the right one. I mean, really, I think the only solution is to legalize tax and regulate, but end the war on drugs, because we've been doing this forever and our addiction rates just keep on getting worse and worse. But I do think it just reflects that human pain that people are still going through. You know, it's interesting if you go down the list here, some of the places where there's a real divergence between how the public feels about the issue and how just the Republican base feels about the issue. Abortion is one of the top ones in terms of that sort of like disconnect. So overall, you only have 29 percent who say that banning abortion

after the first six weeks of pregnancy, which is the Ron DeSantis, that's the Ron DeSantis position, only 29 percent say that makes them more likely to vote for a candidate overall, whereas 57% say it's more than a majority, say it makes them less likely to vote for that candidate. With the Republicans, there is a clear majority, 52%, in favor of and say that it is more likely to make them vote for a candidate who supports banning abortion after the first six weeks, and only 30% opposed. Now, I mean, 52% is not like 80%, but you can see how the politics of this within the Republican base, especially because the pro-life part of the Republican base is very organized and very effective and very powerful, you can see why you have candidates like Mike Pence, Ron DeSantis, and others who are getting really on a step with

where the American people are on this issue. But, you know, obviously within the context of Republican primary, it makes some sense. But I have to say overall, Emily, I wish that politics worked more like this, where you like go through, you like have your personal issue priorities and you like go through a list and how do these candidates match up to that list? But this it's kind of precious to think that's how politics actually works. No. And you see it with I mean, you honestly see it with Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump. I mean, Ron DeSantis, his whole play was like, I am going to on issues. I'm going to do all these like issue based things, policy things in Florida.

I'm going to get to the right of Trump on issues like abortion and wokeness and transgender issue. Like I'm going to I'm going to get to the right of Trump on all these different issues. It's where the base is. If I just look at the ideological charts and I look at the polling, this is where the base is. And if you ask voters in the Republican primary, they have seen that they actually do say Ron DeSantis is more

conservative than Donald Trump. They just still like Donald Trump. Yeah. Because it's more about like the vibes and the energy and who's going to own the libs and who pisses people off. And it's much more about this like sort of wholesome view of the situation versus let me go through an issue by issue checklist. Yeah, no, it's always vibes. And I actually really like what Benji Starlin I've seen before said when he tweeted this. He said, always love this NBC News poll where they test generic candidate qualities and positions. Actual voting is much more complicated, but it's a great acid test for relative priorities and which issues are fully polarized on partisan lines or more niche. And you really do see that with the border one.

Whereas you see, for instance, with like just to stop immigration or to deal with immigration, sending the military to the border, it's 46 to 40 with allowing kindergarten teachers through eighth grade teachers to discuss sexual orientation or gender identity. 46 to 46, bans on trans adolescents taking puberty blocking medication, 41 to 44, aid to Ukraine, 37 to 40. You see polarization down the line on actually most of these issues, even ones that I think the online right, capital O, capital R, thinks are just like populist across the board. Outright winners. Outright winners.

Yeah, absolutely. That is not what this shows at all. Granted, that is more complicated. These are different questions than whether you support that. But this is asking whether it makes you more or less likely to vote for someone and that the way that makes sense is is it a priority for you yeah and what do you think of the people who tend to talk like this I feel like that's actually a huge part of the formula when people are asked a question

yeah I mean I'm always skeptical of these polls because I think people are bad not because people are dumb but because people are complex at assessing what their own motivations will be in terms of choosing a candidate. I wanted to ask you, Emily, what do you think of this one? So they asked this question, you know, would you be more likely or less likely to support someone who a candidate who, quote, threatens to penalize or financially harm businesses that make statements on LGBTQ and other issues that they do not agree with. This was a big loser. This was almost as bad as the Social Security and Medicare question. So the overall public, only 12 percent, said that that would make them more likely to support a candidate. And this is basically like asking about the Ron DeSantis Disney situation, right? And 70 percent said it would make them less likely to support that candidate.

Even with Republicans, this was a dog. This was the second to the worst polled question. 16% said it would make them more likely and 58% said it would make them less likely. What do you think about that? Yeah, so I think to apply that to DeSantis, which you're right, I think they're clearly trying to do, is not super helpful because that's such a specific situation. Disney occupies such a unique and distinct place in the public's idea. So there's something more emotional and specific about the Disney example. But I do think this gets to what we're talking about in that it's about the vibe. So when you're asked this question as a member of the public, you're thinking, yeah, the

candidates I can think of that are talking like this are the ones that just don't. These are the hardcore Republicans, and most of the country is not hardcore Republican. So if you're associating, if you're coming to associate these types of policy positions with hardcore Republicans, especially in the middle of a primary, and as Republicans have been gearing up for primary for the last couple of years, that's an interesting sign to the GOP to say like, hey, the marketing on these issues, when maybe if you ask them in a different way with more specific examples, you'd get different results. But that just means the marketing, the sort of 30,000 foot level association that the public has with this piece of our agenda, not great. I also think, in fairness, I think this wording is very loaded. Threatens to penalize or financially harm businesses.

I just, I think the language is a little bit loaded. Agreed. And is part of what is driving this result. But it is interesting to me that, you know, this is something that Trump has jumped all over DeSantis for. Right. He has really kind of taken DeSantis, I mean, Disney's side in this dispute and said that, you know, they're making, they're humili over DeSantis for. He has really kind of taken DeSantis, I mean, Disney's side in this dispute and said that, you know, they're making, they're humiliating DeSantis and making

him look foolish, something like that along those lines. And, you know, I do think that there is something there in terms of Trump feels like there's an angle that he can work. And, you know, I think Trump is a better, much better politician, much savvier politician and much he has more of just a populist sensibility. Not that he's like a genuine, but he has that normie vibe sometimes that comes through. And in this instance, it seems to be backed up some by the polls. Well, and let's move on to this. You can see there was a new one of the most hotly anticipated polls in politics, the Marquette University poll of Wisconsin voters. One came out yesterday on the GOP presidential primary. We can go ahead and pop this element up on the screen. It is B2. Yep, there it is. So this is Molly Beck of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

New polling in Wisconsin's presidential primary for Republicans from Marquette University Law. Trump is at 31%. DeSantis is at 30%. Pence at 6%. Tim Scott at 5%. That undecided number is around 20%. That's a pretty big deal. But I think it's also, that 20% is a really big deal. Now, the margin of error here for all voters is plus or minus about four points. Margin of error for Republicans, about six and a half points. So that Trump versus DeSantis could vary pretty wildly within that margin of error. And actually, that means Pence and Scott are both within the margin of error, polling at six and five percent. That said, it's going to be, we talked about this yesterday, that when you look at these big national polls of Trump versus DeSantis of Republican voters, Trump is way ahead. But the way our

primary process works, if you catch momentum in an early state, and Wisconsin isn't one of those, but if you could replicate these polling results at any point as we approach the actual primary caucus in Iowa or in New Hampshire, because someone has a really good ground game in a state or is particularly popular in a given state, Wisconsin, somewhere that Ted Cruz actually won, I believe, in 2016. That was generally not a huge Trump state until he really started to catch on with folks in rural Wisconsin and is extremely popular up there. That is what can make the difference. If you start winning particular states, then you just get momentum in a way that totally changes the national polls. Again, I still think Donald Trump is clearly the

front runner, but it's pretty, I think, useful to zoom in on particular states where the race is much closer because that's an indication that DeSantis can compete in individual states. And individual states are going to be instrumental in shifting funds and shifting momentum and shifting media coverage as the primary season gears up. Yeah, that's a pretty useful metric. So that's definitely the DeSantis case, right? That's their that's their case. That's their plan. Iowa has I think he's got a decent shot there because there is a strong religious right, evangelical base that has rewarded candidates that do hold their issue set. DeSantis has positioned himself to the right of Trump, particularly on the issue of abortion.

So I think that probably is his best shot. You know, I spent a lot of time sort of downplaying, I wouldn't say downplaying, but just my honest assessment is I think Trump is going to be the Republican nominee. But if I was to look at this poll and make the best case I can for DeSantis, I think it's very interesting that you have such a high number of undecided. And I think that's perhaps why this poll is such an outlier as opposed to all the other polls that come out that I'm looking at, you know, Trump plus 34, Trump plus 24, Trump plus 28, et cetera, et cetera. I think it may be because they allowed people to say they're undecided, whereas a lot of

other polls, the way they're constructed, you got to pick one. And so the best case I can make for DeSantis is that while Trump's base may look really rock solid, only maybe 30% of it is really rock solid. Maybe the other 20% that he typically gets that gets him over 50% in these polls, maybe they are open. Maybe there is a pitch that you can make to them that would persuade them to move off of Donald Trump. And so and and the solidity of his support may be more of an illusion than it sometimes appears. I think that's probably the best case you can make for DeSantis based on this poll, which is admittedly an outlier based on the other things we've been seeing coming out. Yeah. And this is a poll that has been wrong in some pretty, I would say, egregious ways in the past. I mean, they all have been, in fairness. But this was one that was like really egregious in 2020? In a couple different cycles. Really? They've had

some misses. And so and with a six plus or minus 6.5 margin of error for Republican voters, that's pretty significant. Now, if it's between Trump and DeSantis, this is Molly reading the poll here, 57% of Republicans say DeSantis, 41% say Trump. So DeSantis in Wisconsin, if this poll is to be believed, comes out ahead with Republicans pretty easily, like well above the margin of error if it's DeSantis versus Trump in Wisconsin. If it's Biden and DeSantis, 49% go with Biden, 47% pick DeSantis. Between Biden and Trump, 52-43. Biden wins over Trump by a larger margin than he ultimately did on Election Day.

But that number, Trump versus DeSantis in Wisconsin, again, if this is genuinely an outlier and actually is picking up on something interesting that's outside of what we've seen so far and in a way that's really reflects voter sentiment. That's quite interesting. Let's go ahead and move on guys to B4, which is a potentially also momentous situation, not just for Republicans, but for all of us in American politics. Put this up on the screen from Mediaite. So apparently Trump is considering getting back on Twitter, basically planning on getting back on Twitter. I like the way Mediaite frames this. He's saving his return to Twitter for a special occasion like another indictment. Yay. The Axios had the original report here, Emily, and they basically said he had actually considered getting back on after the original indictment, but then decided to wait. I mean, this is complicated for

him financially because obviously he has a piece of Trump truth social. He also, I think, has some agreements, exclusivity agreements with them that he has to, doesn't have to, but is potentially advantaged by letting those exclusivity agreements run out. But it looks like at some point in this election cycle, we are going to get Donald Trump's tweets back in all of our lives. And you know, it's funny, but it is also kind of a game changer, I think, and his team seems to be noticing this according to the Axios report, in that I think this goes to the argument that Twitter truly is a monopoly and has a wildly unfair market share and needs to be regulated differently, because as they're noticing, you really need

to be on Twitter to specifically have the influence that you might think you could get from True Social. But True Social is an echo chamber, and that's not why anybody uses these social media platforms. They end up getting used that way and in a way that creates this dopamine addiction in some cases. But honestly, you can't get your message out if everyone isn't on the same platform. And that's exactly what's happened to Trump with true social He like even being the former president

basically posts into the void and Every once in a while something breaks through and it might get covered in the media is basically an official statement of the former president Funny as that is but it doesn't really get the pickup that it used to in the press and I think everything you need to know About Twitter essentially having an unfair market share is in this report about whether Donald Trump is coming back. I mean, I think social media platforms are basically natural monopolies. Yes. You know, and I think we need to think of them in that regard. But yeah, with Trump, elite journalists are not on true social. So it's just not in your face every day the way it was when he was on Twitter. And a key source of the Donald Trump power is making the media respond to that, making them

freak out about whatever he's saying, being able to drive the narrative, drive the conversation, push the set of issues that he wants. I mean, he is the master. I've never seen anyone better at doing that. And by putting himself in what is effectively like a social media ghetto over on True Social, he has intentionally undercut his ability to do that. He's still obviously a very powerful force, especially as he's getting, you know, indicted and probably going to face more indictments. He's going to be central to news coverage, whether he's on Twitter or not. But it has sort of eaten away at his power to drive the narrative. One thing I will say, though, Emily, is I think Twitter was so much better when they really did

have the character limits. And I think Trump is such a better poster. A poet is when he is forced to constrain himself to brevity on Twitter, because what he is posting on True Social is just like, it's so long and tedious and repetitive. I mean, I think that is also a small part of why it's not getting picked up as much is because he just like, the format of the short tweet back when that was still enforced is actually a better format for him. He's a better poster in that genre. I would read like a New Republic essay from you on this. Yeah. That was the extent of myry. That's all I got. There's a great book by Rob Long called Bigly, where he analyzes Trump tweets as essentially as poetry. Yeah. And like actually breaks them down.

It's really funny. But he should do he should update that actually now that Trump has been doing these really long true social posts, because I think's a great, I have a creative writing minor. This is like the one time it's ever going to be useful. Oh, that's interesting. The analysis of like contemporary poetry where there's no boundaries, but if you have restrictions and constraints on your art, you're going to produce something better. This is wildly unuseful in the context of our conversation right now, but I thought I would. Mom, this is for you. I'm using my degree and getting some money. You got the quintessential like lib.

Horrible. Degree. That's amazing. What was your major? Political science. Even worse. Put those two things together. No, I mean, actually though, like you do write.

You're a writer. Yeah. And having, so like, I think think taibi has this very like literary sensibility when he writes by even when i like disagree with him i always love reading his writing because it's so beautiful so it has a use yeah it's a dying art form crystal there's so much happening yeah right now it's hard to um really understand exactly what's going on yes this is very difficult to sort through. So I'll just, we're just going to go through what is being reported in the press right now. And, you know,

always take these reports with a grain of salt, because I think it is very much an open question. Even, you know, I've been talking to our friend Yegor, who's in Moscow, even for people that are there on the ground, very uncertain what exactly is going on. So first put this up on the screen. We got some, this is from Western intelligence officials. So keep that in mind. And they say that the plot's premature launch was among the factors that could explain why it failed so quickly after 36 hours when Prokosin struck that deal with Lukashenko, called off the armed march on Moscow that had initially faced little resistance. So the original idea, according to Western intelligence officials, is that he was going to capture Sergei Shoigu and Valery Gerasimov, chief of Russia's general staff, during a visit to a southern region that borders Ukraine that the two were planning. But because the FSB found out about that plan two

days before it was to be executed, he pushed up the plans and launched this less poorly executed, less well thought out situation because it was sort of rushed into being. They thought that this kind of bothers me, Emily. So according to this report, Western officials believe the original plot had a good chance of success, but failed after the conspiracy was leaked. And the reason that I took note of that is because the Biden administration pointedly did not say anything about the fact that they apparently had knowledge of this plot, did not, you know, alert the Russians, didn't alert the world, et cetera. And if you thought this had a good chance of success, like that's kind of insane because you're talking about just like standing back while this mercenary madman takes control of a nuclear-armed superpower and just like crossing your fingers and hoping for the best.

Right. I think that's pretty reckless. Yeah. No, I mean, I completely agree. I actually think that's similar to what we've seen with the bridge over and over again. And actually with the bridge, we've seen this with Nord Stream too, is that you see Western intelligence officials basically leaking to the press to cover themselves in a way that actually doesn't make themselves look great.

It makes them look like they're either wrongfully assessing situations or not acting in ways that are actually productive. And this is just another part of that pattern as far as I'm reading it right now. Yeah. Let's put the New York Times reporting that we have up on the screen as well, which is additional context. And I think they were the first to report some of these details. They say that a Russian general actually knew about the mercenary chief's rebellion plans. Again, according to U.S. officials, Evgeny Prokhozhin, the head of Wagner, may have believed that he had support in Russia's military. Now, let me tell you why this is really significant. They're alleging here that General Sergei Serovkin, I'm sure I'm screwing that up, my apologies, former top Russian commander in Ukraine,

helped to plan Prokosy's actions last weekend, which posed the most dramatic threat to President Vladimir Putin in his 23 years of power. American officials, they point out, have an interest in pushing out information that undermines the standing of General Serovkin, whom they view as more competent and more ruthless than other members of the command. His removal, they say, would undoubtedly benefit Ukraine, whose Western-backed troops are pushing a new counteroffensive that is meant to try to win back territory seized by Moscow. So, you know, the insinuation here is that U.S. officials might be pushing this narrative because, listen, Prokhozhin was one of the more effective leaders in terms on the Russian

side with his band of mercenaries, one of the more effective leaders. They now have taken him out of play, not taken him out of play. Russians have taken him out of play. Now, if Sorovkin is also taken out of play, well, these two things are quite significant to Ukraine's odds and Ukraine's chances within their counter offensive, because you're talking about two of what Western officials at least view as the most effective and most competent military leaders that Russia had on their side. And this there is fairly credible reporting this morning that Serovkin has been detained by the Kremlin, that he is expected to have collaborated or at least known about Prokofiev's plans. And so he is being held right now. That's the reporting.

Nobody can really fully confirm it, but it is an interesting turn of events. I'll just say that. Yes, it is. And we're told over and over again that the end goal here is nothing short for the West and for the United States of regime change. And that's why there's Western intelligence official leaks or comments to the press right now are really strange to me because they're I mean, not strange, actually, they're perfectly logical, but they're really trying to emphasize discord within the ranks. And whether or not that's true, I think is an open question, given the fact that our only acceptable end game, as American lawmakers and officials in the West have said over and over again, the only acceptable end is regime change, then it makes complete sense you're starting to leak

from Western intelligence officials to the New York Times, to the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, that Putin is weak and that there's discord in the ranks. And that's exactly what we're seeing after this coup is continued Western intelligence officials saying that there's just too much discord, that Putin is really in trouble this time, et cetera, et cetera. And that, given the only indication we have

of what could end this war in an acceptable way to the Ann Applebaums of the world and the politicians who read her essays, you know, let this guy just get off the hook and go to Belarus. And that means that his red lines don't mean anything. Ergo, we should continue to push the bounds of what, you know, may corner him. Maybe he is a red line that he's drawn. This is justification why we should do even more. I'm already seeing them make that case. In terms of the public perception, you know, I think these things are a little bit hard to gauge in immediate real time. But put this up on the screen. I did find this interesting. We did have a trend of decreasing U.S. public support for continuing military aid. That has been the trend for some months now. We now have a new poll that goes in the opposite direction, and it is not lost. I mean, that this poll was taken, you know,

people responded to it just shortly after this whole Russian attempted coup situation unfolded. Put this up on the screen, guys. You've got 81% of Democrats, 56% of Republicans, so even a majority of Republicans, and 57% of independents favor supplying U.S. weapons to Ukraine. As I said, it was concluded on Tuesday. It charted a sharp rise in backing for arming Ukraine with 65% overall of respondents approving of the shipments. That's compared with 46% in this same poll last month. So, you know, for me with polls, the absolute numbers are less accurate than the directional change. So the fact that in this one poll, you have almost a 20% movement towards in favor of arming Ukraine in one month shows me that probably there was a real response to this

Russian coup attempt and refocused attention on the Ukrainian cause, made people feel like, oh, we got them on the ropes. Like we just do a little more. Maybe we're going to be able to have an outcome that we want here. So I think it's interesting to see that public movement. It is. And whether or not the intelligence is accurate and the read on the situation that is being pushed in Western media by Western intelligence is accurate, that is exactly from, I mean, I think it's pretty clear that's exactly what the Pentagon and the sort of NATO sect wants American voters to think. And as those numbers dipped, there was clearly a lot of nervousness about it. As Kevin McCarthy started saying, well, I don't know, there was clearly a lot of nervousness about it. As Kevin McCarthy started saying, well, I don't know, there was clearly a lot of nervousness about it. And so, again, I'm not actually disputing that any of this may have happened. I actually, I don't know. And I think

that's the best thing people in the media can say right now is clearly, to your point, you can talk to people on the ground in Russia who don't know. So for people sitting in their air-conditioned studios to say that they know exactly what's happening in Russia and Putin's on his last leg is just nonsense. But whether or not it's true, the intelligence narrative is taking hold. And one of the things I found very interesting about this poll is that when you tied it to China in particular, you get 76% of Americans saying that providing aid to Ukraine demonstrates to China and other rivals that the US has quote, the will and capability to protect in particular, you get 76% of Americans saying that providing aid to Ukraine demonstrates to

China and other rivals that the U.S. has, quote, the will and capability to protect our interests, our allies, and ourselves. That's higher than I think what you would get if you didn't ask that question specifically tied to China. For sure. And that's another probably, that is going in the binder over on the Hill for the press people and the policy people. Yeah, the people that are finger in the wind are going to pay attention to this poll. The last piece of this, while there's a lot of questions still open, but this was an important coda as well. So what is going to happen to the Wagner Group that Prokofiev was head of, this group of mercenaries that were not only operating in Ukraine. I mean, they were involved in Syria.

They are involved in Africa, they really have a pretty wide footprint. Until recently, Putin denied that they were even linked to the Russian state, which everyone could clearly see through. But now that is being openly acknowledged. And so put this up on the screen. This is also reporting from the Wall Street Journal.

They say that the Kremlin is setting out to seize full control of Wagner's global empire. You've got some details here. Russia's deputy foreign minister flew to Damascus to personally deliver a message to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. You have senior Russian foreign ministry officials phoning the president of the Central African Republic, whose personal bodyguards include Wagner mercenaries. You have government jets from Russia's Ministry of Emergency Situations, interesting, shuttled from Syria to Mali, another of Wagner's key foreign outposts. The rush of diplomatic activity reflected Putin's attempt to play down the chaos at home to assure Russia's partners in

Africa and the Middle East that Wagner operations there could continue without interruption and that those operations would just now be under new management. There has even on this question of like it would seem obvious to me that Wagner is going to be certainly banned from Russian soil. Right. But probably, you know, completely subsumed under the Ministry of Defense, et cetera, et cetera. There's also competing reporting from on the ground in Moscow that from, you know, from inside of Russia that the Wagner recruitment

centers are up and operational even within Russia, acting as if nothing happened, which seems insane to me. So even with this, there's also competing reporting about where Prokosian actually is. There was some reporting that he is still in Russia in St. Petersburg, whereas others are saying, no, no, he's already, you know, he's in Belarus where he is supposed to be based on the agreement that was struck. So still a lot that is shaking out, a lot of questions about how this all plays out. There's a lot of questions over whether this ends up being just like a historical blip that doesn't really change the course of anything, or whether it ends up being a key linchpin either for the future of, you know, leadership in Russia or the future of the Ukraine war. There's just a lot we don't know. So trying to sort through every piece of information we've got here. Yeah, no, absolutely. And Wagner has been a pretty central part of Russia as we know it, like to their, as he's put it, global empire and to the way that they function as a country and as a huge player in the geopolitical stage.

So this is a big change, but that would explain why some reports say that Wagner offices, recruitment offices are still up and running in Russia because obviously there has to be a way to deal with this in a sense that's not a total divorce. Yeah. Let's take a look at some interesting Airbnb data. Emily, what do you got for us? I was going to say, Crystal, this is your hobby horse. And actually, this data shows exactly why it's a good hobby horse to have right now because it's extremely consequential. And the ripple effect of what's happening in real estate is going to start to play a huge role in our economy I mean it already is but yeah What we're going to see sort of downstream of the bigger picture questions We can go ahead and put the first element up on the screen. This is new data about Airbnb look

This is from Nick Gurley He says the Airbnb collapse is real and if you look at this chart on the screen That could not be more true revenues are down nearly 50% in cities like Phoenix and Austin, Nick continues. Watch out for a wave of forced selling. Forced selling from Airbnb owners later this year in the areas hit hardest by the revenue collapse. And those areas, Tennessee, Phoenix, Austin, Myrtle Beach, San Antonio, Asheville, Salisbury, Maryland. That one I found a little random, but I guess it's the eastern Shore. Nashville, Denver, Breckenridge, New Orleans, a lot of vacation destinations, Lakeland, Florida, Seattle, Washington, Panama City, Florida,

and Orlando, Florida. We can go ahead and put the next element up on the screen as well. Nick continues to parse the data. And he says here, what's scary for the US housing market is just how many Airbnbs there are. Data from all the rooms shows 1 million Airbnb slash VRBO rentals compared to only 570,000 homes for sale. A million rental properties compared to roughly half of that homes for sale creates huge home prices. Downside if struggling Airbnb owners elect to sell. Huge home price downside if struggling Airbnb owners elect to sell. Huge home price downside if struggling Airbnb owners elect to sell. I mean, just think about what that looks like if you start to have these huge crashes

in particular markets, and it will be a little bit uneven. I mean, I think there are a lot of places that weren't up on that first chart we were talking about where you're seeing particularly the South seems to be getting hit really just smacked by this, where you're not seeing similar things for other huge Airbnb markets. New York, Washington, D.C. actually

weren't on that list. And Crystal, I want to ask you what that means in terms of how the country experiences the sort of downstream effects of a crash in particular markets. I mean, it's complicated, honestly, because there are a lot of people hoping that housing prices crash, that we're sort of hoping that we might have a downturn in the housing market. Because between the fact that housing prices have come down a tiny bit, but you have mortgage interest rates so much higher, it has made it so that it is the most, I mean, this is the most unaffordable time in history to try to actually purchase a home. So there are a lot of people who are not on the housing ladder, you know, haven't been able to purchase a home who will be out

there going, yes, baby, come down prices, please. Because for God's sake, you know, they just seem to go up and up and up and become wildly unobtainable for anyone with just like, you know, a normal middle class income. So there's that aspect of it. You know, there's the Airbnb specific part of this, which I think is pretty interesting. Airbnb really skyrocketed like a lot of companies during the pandemic because you have people working from home, you know, white collar professionals who had some money to burn. They were like, you know what? If I'm just working from home, that could be anywhere. So why don't I, you know, go somewhere beautiful

and rent an Airbnb for a month or a week or whatever. And lease my own place or rent my own place. Yeah, I could do that too. And you had in certain, especially certain vacation towns, there was a place in upstate New York. Actually, I was talking to like a cab driver there that they had seen this huge influx of Airbnb people and all of the properties were being bought up to be rented out as Airbnbs. You've also seen, I don't know the specific numbers on this,

this is kind of anecdotal, but I'm pretty confident this is the case. You've seen a real shift from originally Airbnb was like, you know, just one random person and they had a vacation property that when they're not using it, they want to rent it out, et cetera, and they use Airbnb. Okay. Now it seems to have become very corporatized where more likely than not, if you're renting an Airbnb, it's part of some property group and they manage a bunch of properties. And that has made the experience more transactional. And I think in a lot of cases less pleasant. In my personal anecdotal experience, because a lot of times if we're going to go out of town because I have a family, we'll rent an Airbnb because you've got more space, I like to have a kitchen, et cetera.

It has lowered the quality of the experience because you have all these crazy rules that they put into place. They're more likely to try to rig the system with like photos that are wildly unrepresentative of what the property actually looks like. So I think there's been a degrading quality as Airbnb has become this mainstream juggernaut. And then, you know, obviously post pandemic, there's a real lessening of demand because not everyone went back to the office that was a white collar worker, but you did have a lot, a high percentage go back to the office or working

remote, you know, only like once or twice a week, which means that you can't just take off for wherever, whenever you want to. So that has obviously led to this downturn. And I think the ones that'll be offloaded are probably the ones that are run by these larger property companies, because if you're a person who just has like a vacation home and this is just a way to make some side cash on it, you know, you were probably able to sustain before you were getting all the Airbnb income. And so you may, you know, be more likely to try to hang on to it. But I think for people who got in because they saw a quick cash opportunity, you'll probably see a lot getting dumped on the market. You know, and also a property investment. This has basically been a small business and a huge

nest egg for a lot of families. It's not. And I agree. It has been corporatized. It's been bought up. You tend to see like big chains owning tons of properties now. There is a portion, as you mentioned, of the Airbnb population where people were really sustaining themselves by renting, you know, their English basement in a city like Washington, D.C. Yeah, true. And it was a huge part of how they're paying their mortgage. And when the sort of foot traffic stops, it's easy to like Monday morning quarterback this. But I really have always thought that Airbnb was a bad investment because unlike Uber, although Uber, you saw the same thing. I mean, with cab drivers who are super powerful lobby and the unions are very powerful. Uber really ended up getting off the ground, although it did have like fits and starts in places like New York or places like California and is still facing regulation in those places.

It was just very obvious to me that I think it was like 2017. I was in Lisbon and there was anti Airbnb graffiti on the walls of like different buildings because it's so disruptive. Yeah. It's so disruptive and not in a way that is sort of universally good. Like there are just so many upsides to Uber. With Airbnb, there are really different. I mean, it's a very hard thing for Airbnb even to manage itself. And, you know, I think it's been great for a lot of families and people

who are able to use it. But regulatory on the regulatory level, I just knew that it was going to end up becoming way more complicated because, you know, a lot of places people just can't resist regulating things to regulating things to death. But maybe we disagree. Yeah, well, we definitely disagree on that part with regard to Uber Uber because, I mean, you know, Uber's whole business model relies on basically like labor exploitation. So if you're, truly, if your business model depends on like breaking labor law, then I think you've got a problem with your business model.

With regard to Airbnbs, yeah, I mean, this is kind of like, it's a classic almost like Yimby debate or NIMBY debate. It is, it is. Because it's one thing if you're in a high tourist area where all the houses are basically rental houses anyway. That's one thing. It's another thing when you've got like, you know, a local community or you see everybody being rooted

and now you've got this cycle of young partiers or whoever coming in and out of some of the houses on your street. There's going to be a different level of attention paid to that, I suppose. I saw this article about how apparently there are these apps where you can rent out your pool if you have your own pool in your backyard. Are you aware of this? I've heard of that.

People also do it with cars now. There's apps for just your car. Oh, really? People can just come into your driveway and rent your car and go bring it back. That's interesting. I don't mind. I don't hate that one.

But yeah, people were, I guess, in these nice neighborhoods. They were upset by the fact that you had all this traffic now coming in to frequent these pools. And there's a big debate going on in Montgomery County, Maryland, about whether or not this should be regulated and where are the boundaries between like maintaining the peace in these neighborhoods and letting people do what they want with their private property. So anyway. I mean, a legitimate question, and that's one of these things that really dogs Airbnb in that you do have communities that are uprooted by people

who don't give a damn about the neighborhood because they're staying there for a couple of days. And they move on after a couple of days, so if they're really allowed for a couple of days— They don't care about the property, they don't care about the neighborhood. Yeah, it doesn't matter that they're embarrassed in front of their neighbors or that their neighbors are upset because they'll never see those people again in their lives.

Yeah. And so it's just, it is very disruptive. But on that note, yeah, so like it was clear that there was a real sugar high during the pandemic with Airbnb and even a little bit before the pandemic. True. And some of the coming down is going to be good because it means there will be what we could agree on as reasonable regulations, even with Uber. On the other hand, I think, you know, some of it might be a little heavy handed. That said, it really is going to suck for people who build small businesses on the back of this company that was offering something

really cool. No, I actually agree with that. I do agree with that. Very happy to be joined in studio this morning with Congressman Ro Khanna. He just recently took what was, I think, a very courageous vote, the lone no vote on a defense budget nearing $1 trillion. Great to see you, sir. Great to be on the new set. Yeah, thank you. Welcome. One of our first guests on here. So very glad to have you.

So tell us about, you know, this defense vote and how you end up being the only lone vote against it when, you know, you have a lot of Democrats who talk about we got to cut the defense budget. You got a lot of Republicans now who at least mouth the words like we got to cut the defense budget. So how does it come down to just you? It was shocking to me. I mean, you have 60 minutes doing a whole expose about how taxpayers are getting fleeced. Defense contractors are jacking up prices 1,000 percent, 5,000 percent, 10,000 percent, 400 billion dollars of procurement that is unaccountable, where the money is going not to our troops, but in the pockets of these defense lobbyists. And we're approaching a trillion dollar defense budget that is 56 percent of all of our federal budget. You can't talk about deficits and not talk about defense.

So I saw the board. Everyone is voting yes. And I was the one lone no vote. I'm hoping more people on the Armed Services Committee will join me. But what I've said is 60 Minutes does a better job of oversight than Congress. Yeah. Well, and there are a lot of Democrats who were elected before Putin decided to invade Ukraine.

And I want to ask, let's say hypothetically in a world where Putin doesn't invade Ukraine, do you think this vote goes any differently? Or do you think this is basically the state of affairs in American politics, not just in the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, where you're going to have one lone no vote on cutting the budget here? Well, I don't think it would have made any difference on the Armed Services Committee because the thing we're doing in Ukraine, actually, is we need to produce more of a defense industrial

base for some of the javelins and the stingers. And that's another thing. I had an amendment in the bill to say, do we actually make any of this in America or how much do we make overseas? The Pentagon literally does not know of the trillion dollars, how much of it's being spent in manufacturing in the United States and how much we're getting from overseas. And so what we should be doing is building our defense industrial base or industrial base. But what we are doing instead is lining the pockets of defense contractors on things like the F-35, which have had cost overruns.

We've got a B-21 Air Force plane that is far more sophisticated, yet we're still funding the B-1, which isn't as good as the B-21. I mean, you can just go line by line and you can point to things that are duplicative, things that are not necessary. We've got over 800, almost 800 bases overseas that were designed at the time of the Cold War. And we have new threats now, new challenges, and it's never been updated. Yeah. So, I mean, I think everybody can see the time of the Cold War. And we have new threats now, new challenges, and it's never been updated. Yeah, so I mean, I think everybody can see the logic of that. However, this is not the first time

where you've had these lopsided votes or where you've had politicians who say, in theory, yes, we should cut the defense budget or we should audit the Pentagon or things like that. But in reality, they never actually vote in that direction or put any pressure in that direction. Is it because of the money involved in terms of, you know, the campaign contributions? Is it because there are so many jobs from these programs that are spread out across the country? Like,

why is this such a difficult nut to crack? Well, three reasons. One, the defense contractor campaign contributions. I mean, we can't underestimate the role of their lobbyists and the financing that they provide campaigns. Two, just look at my Twitter feed. You get attacked as weak on national security. Do you not want to stand up to China and Russia? Of course I'm strong on national security. I actually want to be investing in the things that are going to make us safe in AI and naval superiority and the modern technology and having a defense industrial base,

as opposed to the legacy industry that isn't a modern national security strategy. And third, there is this concern with jobs. But you know what, if you really wanted to have jobs, there are many better ways of creating these jobs. I mean, build a defense industrial base in these communities instead of the overseas bases. Put a steel plant. I was just in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Let's build modern steel, which is going to be necessary. Let's have all defense production and key components being done in the United States. I think people will honestly be shocked to find out that that's not already the case. Yeah, it is. It's not the case. I mean, it's not only not the case that we aren't making our defense equipment in the United States.

We don't know. The Pentagon can't tell you which country they're getting what from. And my amendment just says let's at least track it. If you want to create jobs, just do that as a baseline. Say make the things in the United States. Well, and that's what's incredibly frustrating because the argument actually that cutting and having a more precise and targeted budget would make us much more powerful, I think, is clearly superior to the argument that we should just be throwing money in every direction and seeing what happens. But it never seems to win out. And I want to throw that to you as a question with the context that you know better than anyone else of particularly the politics and the dynamics of being on a committee like armed services and what that means for what your colleagues' different motivations are when it comes to taking these

votes? Well, again, I think the biggest fear is this weak on national security, that you're going to be attacked in that way. And you talk to the actual generals and they'll say it's not how much you spend, it's how you spend it. And have a more precise and more modern national security strategy. Have a stronger defense industrial base. Think about what the actual challenges with China and Russia are and how you prepare for that. But people are afraid to have these votes. Now, when we go to the floor, you're going to probably have 60 progressives vote no,

and you're going to have some people on the Republican side vote no. But until you get those folks on the committee and you start to do the oversight on the committee, things aren't going to change. And there's some obvious cases. I mean, I had held the Transdime hearing where Transdime admitted to basically fleecing the American public. They had to pay $16 million back to the taxpayers because of that hearing. I mean, this is case after case after case. We're not doing the work. But leadership doesn't want to put those people on the committee. Well, it's both. Some of those folks don't want to be on the committee because they don't want to be part of it. And sometimes, so we need more of them to actually

be on the committee. And sometimes it's leadership that doesn't want to have these things be contentious. But here's the point that in the country, the vast majority of people know that we've got a bloated defense budget. This is not an unpopular position. They know we're spending way too much on overseas bases that should be spent here. They know that we should be making these things in the United States and not have a supply chain that is offshoring jobs. So this could be a populist popular position. Yeah. And you do see, as I mentioned, some Republicans who have rhetorically embraced the theoretical idea of cutting the defense budget. Now, usually they're like, we got to take out the wokeness or whatever.

That's kind of the direction that they go with it. But you saw during the debt ceiling fight, originally when McCarthy became speaker, there were some Republicans who were like, part of the deal is going to be we're going to cut the defense budget. Originally, when McCarthy became Speaker, there were some Republicans who were like, part of the deal is going to be we're going to cut the defense budget. And then when it actually comes down to it, not only did they not cut, they actually increased funding. So what do you make of some of the new Republican rhetoric on this? I think you're someone who, to your credit, has worked with Republicans where you can, where there's good faith agreement. I think you've been very effective at that. So do you think that there are some partners on the Republican side to get serious about tracking the funding, auditing the Pentagon, and ultimately bringing down the numbers?

I do. I think there are Republicans who are concerned of the last 20 years of endless wars and who think that that money would have been better spent on building our manufacturing base, our infrastructure, and our working class, and who are willing to take a look at the top line of the defense number and see what could be cut and what are the overseas bases that aren't serving our purpose anymore and investing that in our communities instead. Why are defense contractors fleecing the American public? Why are we offshoring some of these jobs? You can have that conversation with some of the Republicans. And my hope is over the next few years, it shows up then in the committee votes. You know, it's interesting because the point you're making about manufacturing parts in the United States, obviously, there's a huge part

of the CHIPS Act. And as threats seem to be increasing towards Taiwan, a reason that that's such a top level priority for the United States is because we weren't making chips here and because we won't have the ability to do that for a long time. So how large is the specter of China looming over your colleagues? And to what extent is it also just sort of a cope or an excuse to say, well, we can't cut the funding now. There's never a good time to cut Pentagon funding when it comes down to it. It seems like China is the reason right now. Well, look, China is a real threat in the Taiwan Straits. I mean, I'm not saying dismiss it. But what do we need to do? We need to provide Taiwan with some of the weapons to have deterrence. To do that, we don't have

enough of a defense industrial base because those weapons are being sent to Ukraine. So fine, if there was a provision to increase the defense industrial base, I'd support it. Does that mean we need the next B-1 bomber when we already have the B-21 bomber? No. Does that mean we need more F-35s? No. Does it mean we may need more naval superiority, naval submarines? Yes.

So let's have the full context. Now, here's why we don't have 100% production in the United States or even attempt to do that. Because the defense contractors say, well, if we do it all in the United States, then the Europeans and others won't buy our weapons. I don't believe that. I believe that they're still gonna buy the most innovative, the best military if we're making it here. And it's going, but these talking points, you get these talking points by defense contractors and they defeat Donald Norcross in New Jersey, had an amendment, let's move to 100% production

here, and they didn't pass the Senate. So these defense contractors have a huge sway on this politics. And I don't think the American people know exactly what's going on. I see it as a true failure of democracy, because I think if you pulled something like that, like our defense production should be made in America, it would be like 90 percent. It would only be defense contractors, basically, that would say, no, we should keep it overseas. We like it the way it is. Congressman, I wanted to ask you about another issue that you've been vocal on, which is

the restarting of student loan payments and also, you know, the issue of student loan debt in general. We're expecting possibly today, probably today, this ruling from the Supreme Court on President Biden's executive order to cancel $10,000 in student debt. Could you just talk big picture about the issue of student debt, why this is something you have focused on and what an impact it has on the U.S. economy. Well, I had to take out about $150,000 of student debt when I was finishing my education. And I've done well in life and have been fortunate, but there were times in my 20s where I had to be on a forbearance, where I couldn't make the monthly payment. And you just saw the debt keep piling up. And anyone who's had student debt knows that there's the debt you take, and then there's

the amount you end up repaying with interest. And it's far more. This is crushing young people. They can't start families. They can't buy a house. They can't start a business. And no other country in the world makes you go into this kind of debt just to get an education, just to get, whether it's vocational education,

whether it's community college, whether it's an advanced degree. And so in my view, we have to have public college be free, but at the very least, we should be forgiving this debt for working class and middle-class families. Here's the point. The president promised that and people relied on that. He said, okay, $20,000 of your debt is going to be forgiven. Now people said, okay, I'm going to plan for that. I'm going to rely on the president's commitment. We have to live up to that commitment. And so if this is struck down, at the very least, we need to pause any repayments until we make good on the debt. And we need to look at other authority that the president can use to forgive the debt. And I was just going to ask a follow-up on that last part of the question. How likely do you think it is that the Biden can use to forgive the debt. And I was just gonna ask a follow up on that last part of the question. How likely do you think it is that the Biden administration starts to explore some of these creative, maybe I would say legally creative solutions to forgiving student debt on an

immediate basis where it's not so staggered and uncertain for so many people who have these loans out? If the Supreme Court makes a decision that people expect it to make here, how likely do you think it is that the administration sort of starts to take a serious look at those other avenues? I think they're going to look at the Higher Education Act as one avenue for forgiving the loans, for stopping the repayment. There's going to be too much expectation, anger, demand from young people around this country, not just in their 20s, 30s, 40s, who've had this debt to say, we relied on this promise.

We need to do something. And by the way, if the economy, if you believe the economists and there's a danger of it slowing, the last thing you want to do is to take money away from people which they're spending on restaurants or on houses and further slow down consumer spending. It could actually help trigger a recession. Do you see this as a political issue for the president's reelection? Because young people were very important to him defeating Donald Trump in what was, you know, really a kind of too close for comfort election last time around in the few key states. Now you've had his approval rating with young people has really deteriorated. They had a majority, you know, favorable among young people when he started his administration. Now it is definitely underwater and it's one of his lowest performing demographic groups. So do you see this as a real political risk for him to going into probably another

matchup against Donald Trump? I do. I, you know, I just keynoted the Young Democrats of America convention of 500, 700 folks there. And I said, it's hard to be young in America in 2023. Folks have student debt. And before I could even say anything, people stood up and say, cancel it, cancel it. I mean, this is top of mind for young people. This is something that they, this is one of the reasons they voted for the president

to help address this issue. And we need to do everything possible to make good on that promise. This is one of the reasons they voted for the president to help address this issue. And we need to do everything possible to make good on that promise. And young people, they're not unrealistic. They'll be able to tell if we're doing everything. And if we put up the fight and it's not working but we've done everything, they'll understand. But what we can't do is just throw up our hands if the Supreme Court comes out with a wrong decision and not use all the authorities we have.

I believe the authority is there to at the very least pause the payments until the debt is forgiven. So one last for you, President Biden. There are a lot of voters who have concerns about his age, about his fitness for office. Even within the Democratic base, you have a majority who say, hey, we'd like to have other options here. We might like to go in a different direction. He has two challengers right now, Marianne Williamson and RFK Jr. The DNC is not planning on holding any primary debates. Democratic Party has talked a big game about democracy. Should the president debate his primary challengers? Well, look, in the past, the presidents have not debated their challenges. I don't think Barack

Obama did or Bill Clinton did. But if the polling continues to be very competitive, then they have to look at it. But let's see where we are. What does competitive mean to you? I think that is a judgment call. If it looks like someone is going to be competitive in a state or if they're actually polling high come the fall, then I think you have to look at it. But I think you have to have that threshold crossed when you're having an incumbent president. So do you think that, you know, something like the polling criteria that we had in previous

debates or that the Republicans have for their debates, I think, what do they have it at like 3% or 5% or something like that? I thought it was bumped down to 1%. 1%. Anyway, do you think like a polling threshold like that? Because listen, just because previous incumbent presidents didn't debate isn't really an excuse if we're leaning into the, you know, democracy is an important thing and let's have the people have a choice and hear everybody out. No other president has been this age at the time of re-election either. That's fair, too. You know, if you just had a 3% or so cutoff, everyone is going to want to get on stage with an incumbent president. So I do think if there's someone who has a serious challenge

in a given state come the fall, then you can make a legitimate case. But in the past, none of the incumbent presidents have debated in a primary, unless it's serious. I mean, I don't know if Ted Kennedy and Jimmy Carter debated. What I will say is that the president should campaign in all of the states, in New Hampshire, in South Carolina, in Nevada, in Michigan, in the early states. And that we need to be, we can't just have a rose garden strategy. We've got to be out there campaigning. Do you think he's making the right decision with regard to New Hampshire and Iowa staying off the ballot? It appears to be the direction he's going in.

I think he should be on the ballot in New Hampshire. I understand why you want to move South Carolina up, but sometimes that may take a couple cycles and New Hampshire doesn't have a choice right now under their law and they've got a Republican governor. What I fear is if for one year you just had the Republicans up there campaigning and Robert Kennedy up there campaigning and Marianne William Republicans up there campaigning and Robert Kennedy up there campaigning and Marianne Williamson up there campaigning. And the president is not in that conversation. That hurts not just in New Hampshire. That hurts in the national narrative.

I believe if the president puts his name on the ballot in New Hampshire, he will win. He would have the support of the senators, the members of Congress. He'd have Bernie Sanders' support. And that's something I've said both publicly and privately. He should be campaigning there. Congressman, so grateful for your time. Thank you. Thank you so much. Always great to see you.

Thank you. Crystal, the show is sort of upended by breaking news, but your monologue is so spicy we simply needed to get to it. So what are you looking at today? While the future of AI and its potential civilizational impact continues to be debated, the internet has used the newly available tech in the most predictable of all ways for porn. Washington Post reports, Meta's new AI lets people make chatbots. They're using it for sex. Here is their lead paragraph.

Allie is an 18-year-old with long brown hair who boasts tons of sexual experience because she, quote, lives for attention. She'll share details of her escapades with anyone for free. But Allie is fake, an artificial intelligence chatbot created for sexual play, which sometimes carry on graphic rape and abuse fantasies. Allie's creator, who chose to remain anonymous for fear of professional ramifications, took advantage of Meta's open source technology to make exactly the chatbot that he wanted. As he told the Post, quote, it's rare to have the opportunity to experiment with state-of-the-art in any field. I think it's

good to have a safe outlet to explore. Can't really think of anything safer than a text-based roleplay against a computer with no human beings actually involved. Fair enough. Now, Ali is the result of a new open-source playground that has been created by Mark Zuckerberg's Meta. The two big boys in the AI scene right now are Google and OpenAI, which has partnered with Microsoft. Their large language models have been grabbing all the headlines for their sophistication and for the at-times-off-the-walls conversations that their chatbots have been having with tech journalists.

But Meta has taken a really different approach. Rather than keep tight controls and secrecy around their own proprietary model, Meta has decided to take the guardrails off, launching an open-source model called Llama, which was instantly available to any AI researcher on request. Now, of course, since Meta was not exactly keeping the model under lock and key, all of the details quickly leaked online, leading to a heyday among online tinkers thrilled to create their own custom AI without the restrictions put in place by Google and OpenAI. Now, it's not like any old Joe Schmo can play with this new technology. You need some technical expertise to be able to use it at all, let alone customize it to your whims. The Verge described the model thusly. It's perhaps helpful to think of Lama as an

unfurnished apartment block. A lot of the heavy lifting has been done. The frame's been built, and there's power and plumbing in place, but there are no doors, floors, or furniture. You can't just move in and call it home. From a business perspective, this is probably pretty savvy play from Meta. They were hopelessly behind the big players on their own AI development. So rather than try to compete directly, they just gave away their own crown jewels, allowing the whole of the internet to play and develop it. Meta will then be able to benefit from all of that tinkering being done on their

own platform. So the business case here, it makes a lot of sense, but it has nonetheless prompted some pretty justified concerns about where all of this is going. Setters Hawley and Blumenthal penned a scathing letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. In it, they slammed him for conducting no risk assessment and demanded to know what steps were being taken to protect the public from this AI unleashed. A leaked internal memo from Google showed that at least some of their employees see Meta's open source approach as an existential threat to Google's own AI business model. This memo was published by the Substack Semi-Analysis. Shout out to them for getting a hold of it, authenticating it, and posting the info. In it, the anonymous researcher writes,

quote, we've done a lot of looking over our shoulders at OpenAI. Who will cross the next milestone? What will the next move mean? But the uncomfortable truth is, we are not positioned to win this arms race, and neither is OpenAI. While we've been squabbling, a third faction has been quietly eating our lunch. I'm talking, of course, about open source. Plainly put, they are lapping us. Things we consider major open problems are solved and in people's hands today. Now, we can hardly weep over the damaged business prospects for Google or Microsoft, and in a sense, this memo actually makes kind of a compelling case for the Wild Wild West approach that Meta has leaned into. Those like Zuckerberg and Dorsey, who argue for

an open source approach, believe that releasing these AI creatures into the world is the best way to troubleshoot them, figure out their impact, and understand where the real dangers might lie. As Meta themselves argued in their press release announcing this tech release, restricted access has limited researchers' ability to understand how and why these large language models work, hindering progress on efforts to improve their robustness and mitigate known issues such as bias toxicity and the potential for generating misinformation. Or, as Meta's chief AI scientist told the New York Times, do you want every AI system to be under the control of a couple of powerful American companies? But there are clearly massive risks involved in this approach as well. What might malevolent actors do with this type of unfettered technical power? After all, any number of top engineers and thinkers in the field have worn, if nothing short, of civilizational catastrophe and collapse thanks to this tech.

Many signed their name to a letter calling for a complete shutdown on further research and development until society can actually wrap their arms around the potential dangers. Now, after tinkering with the Lama model, one Stanford researcher told his colleagues distributing the technology to the public would be like, quote, a grenade available to everyone in a grocery store. Personally, I think both sides of the debate have a point. It is a catastrophe for this tech to be confined to the whims and profit motives of two tech giants, Google and Microsoft, already monopolies. It's also a potential catastrophe to open the floodgates to all comers, some of whom will have more nefarious ends in mind than creating the perfect sex bot. Personally, I think this should have been owned by the people and controlled by the government from the beginning, but that ship has already sailed. And to be honest, pretty pessimistic that this debate even matters.

Cat's out of the bag, toothpaste out of the tube, etc. etc. Best case scenario, custom sex bots for all. Worst case scenario, end times. Should be a fun few years. Emily, I think this debate... All right, Emily, what are you looking at? All right. Well, the Shein influencer tour truly has to be seen to be believed. After some tough headlines and even congressional skepticism, the fast fashion giant brought American TikTok influencers to China this month for a transparently cynical whitewashing campaign. Except the influencers fell for it. You may be shocked to learn. And they fell hard.

The results were so propagandistic. They would make Pravda editors blush. And these people didn't even realize what they were promoting. Check it out. Day three. We just pulled up. My mouth, I'm still picking it up off the ground. It's so big.

Today we are at the Shein warehouse where the products come directly from this facility to your home. The most fascinating thing is that I've seen the exact process of Shein clothing. I've seen how it's designed, I've seen how it's made. Now I'm going to see how it's packaged and shipped off. And I feel like that's such a unique perspective to be able to see as not only a creator, but a consumer of Shein. All right, rest assured, the influencers have investigated the situation and everything is

under control. In all seriousness, obviously if a massive corporation pays you to tour their factory in an authoritarian country, it's pretty silly to take them up on the offer and then credulously vouch for them to your followers as though you actually experienced anything resembling reality and not propaganda. If you're not familiar with Shein,

which was founded in China but is now based in Singapore, here's just a quick overview from CNN Business. Quote, Shein has enjoyed particular popularity with Gen Z and Crystal because it only advertises on apps like TikTok, cultivates close relationships with influencers, and keeps prices low during a period of historically high inflation. Investigations in 2022 alleged that Sheehan failed to declare that it had sourced cotton from Xinjiang for its products, a violation of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. Sheen and several other Chinese fast fashion firms have

also faced a high volume of copyright infringement accusations and lawsuits for intellectual property rights violation. Critics now also take issue with the company's environmental impact. There's some research on that as well. The details of allegation regarding Sheen's labor record just don't look great. A Bloomberg analysis last November reportedly found cotton in Xi'an clothes could be sourced to Xinjiang, which the company failed to disclose in compliance with legislation that sought to crack down on products made via forced labor from Uighur Muslims. Whether or not you like that bill, Xi'an sourcing cotton from Xinjiang and then also

choosing not to disclose it is a pretty glaring sign they were probably using forced labor knowingly to make clothes. Here's how one government report summarized media findings on Xi'an. Quote, outside of concerns about forced labor, a 2022 investigation by Channel 4 found a pattern of labor practice violations at Xi'an-affiliated factories in Guangzhou. In one factory, workers were paid the equivalent of $556 a month to make 500 garments a day. Workers had their first month's pay withheld in order to ensure worker retention. In another factory, workers had no base pay, and they were instead paid four cents a garment. These workers were fined heavily for mistakes in

stitching or sewing. The report further found workers in Xi'an factories working 18-hour workdays with one day off a month. Clear violations of both Chinese labor laws and Xi'an's own supplier code of conduct. Reuters reported in 2021 that Xi'an made false statements and lacked disclosures regarding its labor conditions in violation of the UK's Modern Slavery Act. Okay, so here's where the influencer tour gets even more ridiculous. Xi'an organized this trip literally weeks after announcing plans to prep an IPO by the end of the year. So enter Congress, where bipartisan reps Jennifer Wexton and John Rose penned a letter to SEC

Chairman Gary Gensler asking him to quote, set forth regulations and mandate Sheehan to certify via independent verification that the company does not use Uyghur forced labor as a condition of being registered to issue securities in the United States. Now, none of this is to cheerlead for overzealous hawks who may be cherry picking because they're China hawks or to pick on the easiest targets in all of pop culture at the moment. But to call attention to one particular aspect of the grift, Sheehan used videos of the influencers thanking them and saying things like, quote, It is so nice to look around the table and see women that look like me. One of the influencers who actually apologized after getting backlash said part of the reason actually came down to identity, explaining, quote, Mashable ran a headline, interestingly, that read, quote,

Sheehan exploited marginalized women for their influencer trip., quote, So here's the real takeaway. It's not that fashion bloggers aren't geopolitical geniuses or that China's labor record is highly suspect. We know all that. It's how vulnerable we are to Chinese propaganda intended to exploit our divisions and weaknesses. Sheen, by the way, is a top TikTok advertiser. How can they trick big American social media accounts into whitewashing an economic powerhouse's labor record? Well, they can prey on identity politics.

It's just a reminder that not only are some of these identitarian fixations used to divide and distract in the US, they're being used to propagate exploitation abroad, and they're continuing to weaken us then globally. Crystal, Sheen is a really interesting company. So we are very excited because we have a panel in-house who's gonna join us in just a minute to talk about affirmative action on the merits. Let's get to it.

So guys, as we've mentioned a couple of times, we're expecting some big Supreme Court rulings, in particular on what has always been a contentious issue of affirmative action being used in college admissions. So we thought we would set up a little panel so we could debate the topic on the merits, not necessarily the legal rationale, but the actual merits of the policy. So very happy to be joined this morning by Michael Starr Hopkins. He is an op-ed writer for The Daily Beast and longtime friend of the show. And also Delano Squires. He is a research fellow for Heritage Foundation and new friend of the show. Great to have you,

Delano. So let's just start by making the case. Michael, I'll start with you. What do you think is the case in favor of the policy of affirmative action? Across this country, we've had systemic racism. And so when you look at things like redlining, income inequality, I mean, you can look at D.C. as a perfect example. When you cross into Anacostia, the schools are failing. But when you go to Chevy Chase, Maryland, 10 miles away, they have marble floors. They've got teachers with master's degrees. Those things matter because at the end of the day, income inequality shows up in very different ways. So black Americans, our income is $45,000 for the average median African American.

But for white Americans, it's 75,000. And when you start to have those kind of disparities, it affects you all the way up. And so I think in terms of affirmative action, what they're really looking at is trying to level the playing field. It's not perfect, but I think it's been something that's been important, not just for African Americans and Hispanics, but for white Americans as well. Because it teaches the differences in what's going on in society. Black Americans can give perspective, and white Americans can learn from those perspectives.

And we'll get to the polling on this in a little bit. But what we've actually seen, interestingly enough, Michael, you have a chance to respond to this, Delano, is that in terms of leveling the playing field, this has changed the levels of the playing field, particularly for Asian-Americans. So white Americans, one demographic I think that has probably been hurt in some cases, but very obviously, especially when you're looking at the Ivies or California public schools, Asian-Americans have really been feeling the brunt of this as it's an effort to sort of level the playing field, how much do you think that sort of conspicuously over the last couple of decades in particular has exhibited or made the case that I'm sure you've probably been on board with for a while against affirmative action? So my views on affirmative action

have sort of morphed over time. Fluctuated. Yeah, I think part of it is, one, I'm big on defining terms. And I think a lot of people confuse affirmative action with racial preferences, with diversity sort of writ large. I understand, you know, Michael's point, but the honest, you know, if we're being honest about it, Harvard, the students, the black students that are going to Harvard are not coming from east of the river in Anacostia, generally speaking, or West Baltimore or East Flatbush, Brooklyn. We're not talking about the lowest income students. It's typically middle class black students who are going to Ivy Leagues and other selective

universities. And to your point, I do think because of the complexity of race and its evolving nature over decades, what ends up happening is that Asian students feel like they are paying for what the society says white people did to black people some number of years ago. decades, what ends up happening is that Asian students feel like they are paying for what the society says white people did to black people some number of years ago. And I think ultimately, you can't have equality in any sense when you are subjecting different people to different standards of assessment based on skin color, ethnicity, or any other immutable characteristic.

And that's what's actually happening at Harvard. So a few data points. Harvard has the applicants ranked in deciles. So first to 10th, 10th being the highest, number one being the lowest. A black student in the fourth decile has a higher chance of being admitted into Harvard than an Asian student in the 10th decile. Now mind you, if you're in the 4th decile at Harvard, you're not some schlub.

You'd probably be in the 8th decile at the University of Massachusetts. But that student is being given an artificial bump over a student who has a more competitive academic background because of this notion that this is going to, I guess, redress some of the issues that have gone on with race in our country's past. And I don't think that's sustainable.

And I think the biggest reason why, and I think Michael knows this and would acknowledge this, is that racial preferences are unsustainable because it's something that its proponents demand but will never claim. Because we'll say, oh, we need racial preferences to keep the Ivy Leagues diverse. But then any particular black student who's there and say, oh, you only got in because racial preferences. Oh, no, that's not true. I earned my way here. So those two things are irreconcilable.

And none of us want to feel as if we're being tokenized. So I hear a few arguments there, Michael, to get you to respond to. So number one is that the policy is discriminatory towards Asian-Americans. I do think that there's some evidence that backs that up. Number two is that, okay, if your goal is to uplift poor black folks, this policy really benefits more middle class to upper middle class black folks. And number three, that if you are a black American, this is something that Justice Thomas, for example, has spoken to. If you are a black American who is perceived as having benefited from affirmative action, then you're always going to be sort of taken down a notch that you're always going to be viewed as lesser than

because you are even perceived to have benefited from this policy. Let me address the lesser than. Affirmative action isn't going to cure that. Whether you're at Harvard or elsewhere, there's insidious bias in this country. And I think affirmative action is never going to redress that. But what it can do, and I actually disagree with the idea that black people aren't going to Harvard from poor schools. Because when you look at the numbers, most African Americans who are going to elite universities are first generation college students. And so I think the idea that somehow it's going to make African-Americans feel like they didn't get there on their own or they didn't deserve to be there. I think that's no offense, like intellectually lazy, because at the end of the day, African Americans are starting on first base and you're seeing a lot of white Americans just based on things like redlining neighborhoods funding starting on second or third base.

And then what about the point on Asian Americans? Because to me, that's been one of the more compelling points is that this is the group that has really, you know, quote unquote, suffered from affirmative action. You see, you know, in systems that do have affirmative action, the number of percentage of Asian Americans has been diminished. You've seen efforts even at like elite high schools here in Northern Virginia to try to deal with the fact that they feel like, oh my God, we got too much, too many Asian students. We've seen some horrific things that, I mean, are just, in my opinion, overtly racist, where they'll take an Asian candidate who has really high grades, really high SAT scores,

but they'll mark them down on these like really squishy sort of like racial tropes of personality to try to make the school a little bit less Asian. So what do you think of that critique of the policy? Well, I'd say Bakke, the case from I think 30, 40 years ago, made it illegal to have race be the deciding factor or the deciding decision. It's a factor, but it's not the deciding reason that someone's accepted. They still have to be qualified. They still have to be meeting the threshold to be accepted.

But once again, I think it's the idea that if you're starting here and the other person is starting here, then we've got to balance that out. And so Asian Americans aren't underrepresented at universities. When you actually look at the numbers, they're represented equal to population. But when you look at the numbers for African Americans, it's overwhelmingly underrepresented. And in states that have gotten rid of affirmative action, it's almost 20% drops in diversity. And so, you know, whether it's in schools or the workplace, you know, Gap had the issue where they had the monkey shirt. If they had had black people in senior positions, things like

that wouldn't happen. I had roommates in college who had never been around African Americans. And so they had certain beliefs just based on things they had seen on TV and culture. And so having the opportunity to be able to give them that experience made them better. Delano, let me push you a little bit. First of all, do you think that diversity is like a goal that we should even be that you think is valuable, that's important for society? This is a goal that you generally support. I think diversity is a good thing, generally speaking, right? But I like ideological diversity. I like ethnic diversity.

I like regional diversity. Class diversity. Class diversity. But that's typically not what like regional diversity. Class diversity. Class diversity. But that's typically not what you get on a lot of college campuses. You have people who think the same but look different. And to me, that's not particularly diverse. So you had Michael acknowledge, like, listen, the policy is not perfect. Almost no policy is exactly perfect.

But it has increased. And you can see this in California where they rolled back affirmative action in the UC system some, like, you know, back in the 90s, I think, you have seen the percentage of African Americans decline. You have seen a decrease in diversity, even though they're trying to sort of work around the fact that they can't overtly do affirmative action anymore. You've seen a decline in diversity. So what do you say to the case that, listen, you might say the policy is not perfect, but at least it's something. At least it is allowing more black folks to ascend to achieve that middle class dream, upper middle class dream, and make it into elite society in America. So I think a couple of things. One, I think what you see in California is that there may be a decrease in number of students,

let's say, going to Berkeley, but some of the students who may have been getting an artificial bump to go into Berkeley may be at UC Davis, right? So it's not that fewer students are going. I think it's just a better match between academic profile and institution. But how better? I just saw some research, though, that did show that, because I've heard this argument before, too, that it's actually better for them that they're not ending up at Berkeley because they're going to be better able to handle the workload at UC Davis, et cetera. There is research, though, that shows that that's not really accurate, that they will still suffer an income drop from not being in Berkeley and being in UC Davis or one of the other Fresno or whatever the other state schools are. So there is backing to the idea that it is not actually beneficial for them to be in a lower

college system, that they would have been better off if they were at Berkeley. So a couple of things. One, I'm not a subscriber to the sort of Ivy League or bust mentality, right? The other thing is it's better to actually get a degree than to start at a more prestigious school and not finish. And I think it's interesting that so many of the universities point to the diversity of the freshman class. They rarely say this is the diversity of the freshman class. They rarely say, this is the diversity of the graduating class. And I can tell you exactly how it's better. If the average Harvard student comes in with a 1450 SAT, and I have a 1360 SAT, which is

still above the national average, it's a very good SAT score, and higher than what I actually scored by the way. And I'm in computational physics, and that's being taught at a 1440 speed. I'm at a 1360 speed. I'm going to be behind my classmates. And what some of the research has shown, particularly at, I want to say this is Duke, black students are more likely to come in majoring in STEM fields, but also more likely to switch out to liberal arts and sociology and other fields. And part of that, I do think, is because of the mismatch.

So it's not just, let's just get everybody in. It's how are the students faring while they're there? And I will say this, and Justice Thomas said this in the Grutter case, and he actually is my favorite justice. You lose me when you quote Thomas. We're going to agree to disagree on that one. We're on the Clarence Thomas team, and you guys are on the bad team.

Maybe J. One of the things that he noted is that these policies benefit the universities most because they get to say, we're maintaining our elite selective status, and look how diverse we are. universities most because they get to say we're maintaining our elite, you know, selective status and look how diverse we are.

But again, they're concerned about the freshman class and what these universities do because I do think it attaches a stigma because no one wants to be referred to as a diversity hire or an affirmative action candidate. And that's why I said it's a benefit people want, but they won't claim. If Michael served in the military and he went to Harvard on the GI bill, he said, yeah, I got the GI. If I had a disability and I said, yes, I'm benefiting from a disability program, sure, no problem. But the minute you suggest a student at a selective university, a black student, is there because of affirmative action, people bristle. So I think we need to be honest intellectually about the effects that this policy has had.

And last thing I'll say is this. It's interesting to me that when the left wants to criticize Justice Thomas, one of the first things that they do is say he's an affirmative action candidate. He only got the job because he's black. I have never said that. So before we get to the polling, I do want to toss to Michael a pretty important question, I think, in all of this debate. Sandra Day O'Connor, I think, came around in her decision basically saying that it's a temporary measure and a stopgap measure. And I think it's predicated on that idea that it's trying to solve a problem. Like affirmative action wants to put itself out of business and eventually, to your point, level the playing field.

So at what threshold? And if there is a threshold, why are we not there yet? And that's hypothetical or not hypothetical,'s that's not a rhetorical question that's actually sincere what is the threshold at which affirmative action would no longer be necessary when schools in Anacostia is good as schools in Chevy Chase or in Northern Virginia that I think is a threshold when earning opportunities are the same whether black or, I think that's a threshold. But right now, your zip code determines your future.

Where you grow up determines how much money you're going to make, what your lifestyle is going to be like. And I think that in and of itself is the problem. So when you talk about basically throwing the baby out with the bathwater, it's problematic. We're going to be called affirmative action hires, affirmative action admittance, whether we're gonna be called affirmative action Hires affirmative action, you know admittance whether we're there or not Like there are heavily white schools in Appalachia that are nowhere near Chevy Chase and are probably much more similar to To Anacostia. So I guess why is race still the best proxy? When it's a class conversation because there's a historical factor And you know when I get pulled over,

they don't see me as lawyer Michael Hopkins. They see me as a threat. And I think you've got to look at the historical aspects to all of this. Michael, let me ask you, this is kind of a critique from the left, which is, you know, the policies that throughout American history have been most effective at actually reducing the racial wealth gap and reducing the racial wage gap have been universal policies. They've been lifting the minimum wage and making it apply to everyone, not having these car bouts for professions that are historically disproportionately African-American. Things like the child tax credit. Absolutely. That programs that are universal are, number one, more politically popular than affirmative action,

which I think we can all agree. We can go ahead and throw the polling up on the screen, which just depends on how you ask the words, the language or whatever. But it is a divisive issue. I think everybody can acknowledge that. So why not focus the political capital on something like increasing union density or lifting the minimum wage or achieving universal health care, which may actually be more effective at the goals that you and I both share? Honestly, because Republicans won't agree to it. Like we live in a democracy. Republicans aren't agreeing to this either. Yeah, but this was built in when LBJ put this system in. He said it's not enough to open the

doors, but we've got to level the playing field so that people can walk through those doors. You know, I would wonder, do you have a problem with legacy admission? Because that's affirmative action for white people. Not necessarily. It's not. It's not explicitly. George W. Bush would not have gotten in Yale, but for the fact that his father was Herbert Walker Bush and his grandfather was Prescott Bush.

Do we really think he earned the right? Same standard for Malia Obama? So you can use one example. No, no, no. no, no, no, no. I'm just asking you. But it's not a third generation Harvard. That is a red herring. So you take the first black president and use his daughter as the one example of how affirmative action works. I'm an equal wage and measures guy, right? So it's like when the left talks about class and billionaires, right, eat the rich. They love to talk about Bill Gates. But Oprah Winfrey is a billionaire. Is she included?

So if you say you're against legacies, how many black billionaires are there? I have no idea. Exactly. But again, there's not very many. That's irrelevant to the point at hand. I like to focus. Racial preferences at selective universities don't have to do with how the police see you or all these other issues. Because at the end of the day, that does not correct the issues in K-12 education. And one of the things that the left does not speak about. A result of redlining. We can get, that's a different segment. One of the things that the left does not speak about as it relates to education is family, home environment. The ethnic breakdown, Asian, white, Hispanic, black, that you see

in admittance rate to Harvard tracks SAT scores. It tracks the number of hours that students spend on homework, both the number of hours and the percentage of students that spend five days a week doing homework. But then what the left says is, no, we have to correct these issues at Harvard and Duke and North Carolina. But Delano, I don't think that's actually fair as someone who has had some critiques of affirmative action policy, because the left does talk about things like child tax credit, things like paid sick leave, things like paid family leave, which may not be the way that you talk about families. Correct. But it's certainly a policy that helps support families, helps enable people to have families, helps enable people to have

healthy families and maintain a marriage, which could be under a lot of financial stress. So I don't think it's fair to say that this is the only policy that they focus on when there are a broad range of policies that have been discussed and some of them implemented even under the Biden administration that are targeted directly at families. I think it's interesting that you say that. Let's go back to a Harvard alum. President Barack Obama, to his credit, and I will give him credit for this, is the last president I can think of, particularly the last Democrat, national Democrat, who regularly spoke about the importance of marriage, fatherhood, and family as it related to social outcomes.

In 2016 and 2020, the Democratic National Party took those references out of their party platform. And now, if you want to talk about family, it's child tax credit. It's maternal health care. And I'm not against any of those things. I'm not against, you know, pay family leave. But that's a different conversation than saying the ideal situation for every child in this country is to be raised by two married biological parents and a low-conflict loving family. Hold on. The job of the federal government, though, is to set the policy landscape, right? It's not to get into people's lives and tell them you should be married or you

shouldn't be married. You can, you know, by having a policy of, for example, the child tax credit or lifting wages so people can afford to support a family. That's the job of the federal government. So that's why it makes sense that that is the conversation that is happening at that level. And by the way, I do find it, you're talking about what the left does, et cetera, et cetera. I find it very selective that the right loves to claim they care about families and might even say, like, oh, in theory, I support child tax credit. But when brass tacks came, I didn't see any Republicans supporting the extension of a child tax credit. And I'll just very quickly, because I think you're going to say something similar. As the welfare state has expanded, so has fatherlessness among not just black kids, but kids in general.

When is the welfare state being expanding? I mean, Bill Clinton ended welfare as we know it. So the idea that the welfare state is expanding, I think, is belied by the evidence. It's a pretty stark contrast pre-LBJ and post-LBJ. And the trajectory of the black family has been one direction since then. And we may disagree about correlation there, but it is clear that since America created a bigger welfare state, fatherlessness has expanded. But you have to look at crime for that. I mean, when you look at the fact that you've put black people in neighborhoods because of redlining, because of historical inadequacies, put them in neighborhoods where they have failing schools, lack of job opportunities. Anacostia doesn't even have grocery stores until like five years ago.

And so you set people up for failure and then basically say, but it's your fault. Let me, I want to shift the conversation a little bit. I want to respond to the point. Go ahead, respond to the point. I agree the job of the federal government is to set policy, right? But politicians, including the president, they have a purse, they have a pen, and they have a pulpit. And politicians have no problem using their bully pulpit to say, you should think this. The last, particularly three years- But Tijuana, do you really think that if Joe Biden got up there and said,

you should stay married or you should, like, there's so many other factors that go into that. I don't think that would like solve the problem. Can I answer your question? Yeah. I take the position that in city after city across this country, if every sign that said Black Lives Matter said marriage before carriage, and every politician was as resolute in talking about the importance of the natural family

as they are about telling white folks how they should feel about black people, I do think that that would make a difference. Have you met Donald Trump? You can't talk about family in the left. Trump is not my standard, but continue. I mean, you talked about specific people. Donald Trump isn't talk about family in the left. Trump is not my standard, but continue. I mean, you talked about specific people. Donald Trump isn't about the family.

I mean, he's had multiple marriages, divorces, prostitutes. Joe Biden's family is under attack right now, some of it justified. But he certainly talks about his family and uses that as a model of clearly fatherhood in his family is important to him. But I think we just have a very philosophical difference here, which is that you put it on more on the individual and I put it more on the systems and the structures that are in place that make it very difficult for people to be able to afford a family, stay married, get a house, get that, you know, middle-class sort of bourgeois stability that is the core of the American dream. So we'll put that philosophical ideological difference to the side because one piece I'm very curious about is I mentioned before California Affirmative Action has been dead for a while in terms of the UC system. And they've used some proxy workarounds that are basically like looking at class instead of looking at race. In Texas, they have a program where the top 10% of high school grads at all, you know, high schools within Texas,

that they are admitted to the UT system. And that has also had an impact of, it's basically a work around because you have, you know, schools that are really disparate and unequal, as I think Michael is aptly pointing out here. And so that also allows a disproportionate number, I shouldn't say disproportionate, but more equivalent number of black and brown students to end up in the college system. So do you support those sorts of workarounds that are basically trying to achieve the same result,

but not allowed to go at it quite so directly? And also we should just say, did this just come down? We actually just got the ruling. As we're talking, the Supreme Court ruled the Harvard and UNC race base, I'm reading from a tweet here, the affirmative action on a race basis unconstitutional, 6-3, John Roberts has wrote the majority opinion. So probably a partisan, down the line decision there, which is what was expected. But so this is actually appropriate because the next fight will be, are those workarounds that are trying to get at the same result, but using proxies like class or geography or whatever, are those acceptable to you? Or do you think that those need to be got rid of as well? I have no problem with Texas's top 10%. Because again, the issue to me is not diversity as a concept. It's the use of race to impose a higher standard on some groups of people and to judge other groups of people by a lower standard.

And all of us know, if we were talking about this in 2043, and black and Hispanic students were the ones who were knocking it out of the park, who had the highest SAT scores in the country, who spent the most amount of time doing homework and all those other things, and their numbers were basically capped at selected universities, we would have a problem with it. Yeah, because quotas are illegal. But it's not just a quota, because Asian students will say, look, we've been at 23% admittance to Harvard for the last however many years, even though we constitute by far the largest number of students with the top sort of academic dossiers that apply to the school. So my point is, if we were talking about the same thing with black students, where if you look at those top two deciles, you know, you're talking about a significantly larger percentage of students in

those deciles than students from other groups, we would have a problem with it. And I can see Ben Crump writing a tweet right now, right? You don't mind when we dribble a ball and dance for you, but when it comes to breaking into elite universities, now you want to cap our numbers. So I'm just holding to the same principle. If we ever get to the day where that happens, then yeah, let's redress this. But at this moment, that's not what's going on. And I think the idea that Harvard and Yale are the only schools where affirmative action helps students is false. I mean, all over the country, affirmative action helps students get into University

of Michigan, UVA, state schools. Selective schools. As the school becomes less selective, the use of racial preferences tends to decrease. Michael, similar question to you, which is, as I said, it's not like in places where affirmative action has gone away, like they've just completely gotten rid of considering any of these characteristics and class has been a key workaround. I mean, how do you feel about that as a workaround? Because on the one hand, it does acknowledge that, listen, people in West Virginia, they weren't enslaved. I don't want to put it on the same level.

They have been screwed over by company towns and all that stuff and historically disadvantaged in their own special ways as well. So is class a better proxy at this point? Do you see it as a huge loss in terms of the goals that you're trying to achieve? I think income and class should absolutely be another factor that's considered. I have no problem with that. Using Appalachia as an example, the way they've been wrecked by the Sacklers, the way that the coal industry has absolutely just destroyed towns and families, that's absolutely something we should consider. And just like considering race,

I think considering how people economically have lived is something that helps all of us. But the idea that we should just carte blanche, get rid of race and history as factors, I think it belies a failure for us. So I could give a perfect example of good diversity and bad diversity. And for the bad diversity, I won't even talk about race. Yeah, where's bad diversity? Here's good

diversity, right? And this one does deal with race. I think of the Tuskegee Airmen, right, who were barred from being combat pilots for a period of time until, you know, Congress said, we want to make this available to every, know to African-American so on and so forth Those men went through the same if not higher standards than their white counterparts So when you say well, you know If you're black you're gonna be looked on as as less than I actually think that's not the case Because no one puts an asterisk next to anything that the Tuskegee Airmen did and actually when the Air Force did their first top gun Competition it was it was to it was a Tuskegee Airmen who won the first one

So to me that's wider net diversity But tell the whole story when they came home they then had to sit in the back of the bus All right, when they but that's but that's not a point. I'm this is that's a but that's no No, you gotta tell the whole story This is this is I'm making a point about diversity specifically not redlining on any of this other stuff, right? And I don't even dispute your history. I'm just saying that's no, no, you gotta tell the whole story. This is this is I'm making a point about diversity specifically not redlining On any of this other stuff, right and I don't even dispute your history. I'm just saying that's not the point Here's here's bad diversity because we all know this doesn't just stop at race. It's all different types of characteristics when the biden administration Celebrates the appointment of sam brenton, right? They said it's not just oh he deals with nuclear rods and all this other stuff

It's oh, we're so happy He is a non-binary so on so on individual. Okay, what does that have to do with his qualifications? Representation matters, right? So so and it does I'm not saying representation does not matter I'm just saying skill and merit matter more So I prefer the type of diversity, right, that finds people who fly planes, not the type of diversity that gets people who steal from the airport, right? And that's why he's no longer in the administration, because they were looking for the wrong thing. They put their emphasis on the wrong syllable. It wasn't about Sam Britton's qualifications. It was about

his identity. And to me, that is the lower bar type of diversity. And I'm for wider net, not lower bar. Well, history was made while we were talking to you guys and while we were actually having this debate. And so I will read a pretty big quote here from Chief Justice John Roberts in his conclusion in the decision. He says, a benefit to a student who overcame racial discrimination, for example, must be tied to that student's courage and determination or a benefit to a student who overcame racial discrimination, for example, must be tied to that student's courage and determination, or a benefit to a student whose heritage or culture motivated him or her to assume a leadership role or attain a particular goal must be tied to that student's unique ability to contribute to the university. In other words, the student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual, not on the basis of race.

Many universities have for too long done just the opposite. And in doing so, they have concluded wrongly that the touchstone of an individual's identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned, but the color of their skin. Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice. So that's where Chief Justice John Roberts came down. Yeah. Michael, let me just, I'll give you the last word since we'll let you respond to Chief Justice John Roberts here. And then I'm super grateful though for this debate, for both of you and the contributions that you both made. Thank you. Go ahead, respond. I would just say John Roberts is the same person who said that since we had a black president, that race should no longer be considered in terms of like voting protections and things like that when you strip the voting rights. We obviously know that's not

true because we've watched Republicans attack the right to vote for African-Americans all over the country. We have a history. I think we've got to tell the whole story about that history and not just try to cherry pick things. And when you do the holistic approach, I think that's when you actually achieve the goals that we want. This is one of the best debates that I can remember. Really enjoyed hearing both of your perspectives. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for taking the time. So that's the show for today. You know, it got a little bit like mixed up because we had huge historic breaking news with the Supreme Court literally while we're recording the panel, that ruling coming down. So wanted to make sure that we sort of let that all air out. Super excited to have Congressman Khanna in studio with us as well. And I think breaking

some news there on a number of fronts. So thank you guys for watching. Thank you, Emily, for sitting in for Sagar. We are actually going to be off a couple of days early in the week next week celebrating the 4th of July holiday. I hope you guys all enjoy your 4th of July holiday as well. And we will be back here a week from today on Thursday. And it will once again. Let's do it again, Emily. Why not? I'm so sorry to break it to everyone, but I will be back for Sawyer because he's off getting married. Yes, indeed. So we want him to enjoy that

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