Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 7/06/23: Major SCOTUS Rulings, Judge Blocks Biden Censorship, Facebook Launches Twitter Competitor, DeSantis Runs Trump Anti-LGBTQ Ad, UPS Union Authorizes Strike, Cocaine Found At White House, Lib Twitter Profile Exposed, Israel Launches Attacks & MORE!

Episode Date: July 6, 2023

Krystal and Emily discuss the major recent Supreme Court rulings, reports that the LGBTQ website case was based on a fake scenario, judge blocks Biden from pushing for censorship on social media, Fakebook launches Twitter competitor, DeSantis runs wild anti-Trump LGBTQ ad, new data on 2024 odds, UPS workers gear up for historic strike, cocaine found on White House grounds, liberal Twitter account exposed as a fake person, Americans bail on marriages, and Israel attacks the West Bank.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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Sagar is still out getting married in India, so I'm here with you for one more day. Right, it's just so rude. No, he's excited to come back. Crystal, thanks for having me once again. Huge show because we were on a little bit of a break over the 4th of July. I hope everyone had a great 4th of July, but lots coming up on today's show. Yeah, for sure. We missed a few of the major Supreme Court decisions. So we'll dig into the remainder of what those rulings were, including one on student debt. So that'll be interesting. And one on LGBT rights and religious liberty. So we'll get into all of that. Also,

there is a whole lot going on in the social media space. So Threads, the potential Twitter killer from Mark Zuckerberg, that just launched. So I'll tell you about that. I actually tried it out, give you a sense of what's going on there. We also had another major ruling, a judge, a federal judge actually saying that the Biden administration can no longer flag tweets and other social media posts for censorship. So that is very interesting. We'll tell you about that. A lot going on in terms of the whole DeSantis Trump war. Pretty wild ad that the DeSantis team put out. They got a lot of reaction. Looming major strike from UPS workers. This could be the largest strike or near the largest strike in American history. So something we definitely want to keep an eye on there. Bit of a mystery unfolding at the White House as cocaine was found. Law enforcement saying we may never know how it got there. It's going to be like Clue.

We'll give you those details. Also, we have a great guest in the show to break down what is going on in Israel as they've launched the latest of their deadly raids on a Palestinian town. So we'll tell you about the fallout there. So lots to get to this morning. But we wanted to start with those Supreme Court rulings, the very latest. So to give you a kind of top line scoreboard of some of the major decisions that happened here, we've got some graphics from The New York Times about what some of the key rulings here were and how they broke down partisan lines or whether there was more overwhelming majority. Let's put the first one up on the screen. This one we did have a chance to talk about with our great panel. Thank you guys so much for the feedback on that. I

thought both of those gentlemen really offered a lot of insight and represented their views well. Firmative action, the use of race in college admissions struck down six to three. So this was a partisan vote. Let's go ahead and put the next one up on the screen in terms of rulings. This one we're going to get into more. So President Biden's student loan debt cancellation program also struck down six to three. So again, along those ideological or partisan lines. Let's put the next one up on the screen.

This is another one we'll talk about today. So it has to do with a creator, a business owner, who was requested maybe to create a website for a gay couple and did not want to do it because she said it violated her beliefs as a Christian. This one also was a partisan decision, six to three. And let's put this last one up on the screen. This was an interesting one. You had state legislatures and federal elections. This was the independent state legislature theory. A lot of concerns here that this, if the court upheld this idea of the independent state legislature, this could be used next time around if Trump tries to steal the election again, because this was some of the rationale that went into the last attempt to steal the election. So you had some liberals joining with conservatives here to say, no, we're not going in that direction. And also to maintain the power of the judiciary over state and federal

elections. So an interesting one there. But let's go ahead and dive into this student debt decision, put this next element up on the screen that I just mentioned. So as you guys recall, Joe Biden issued an executive order to cancel $10,000 to $20,000 in student loan debt for people below a certain income threshold. Major Biden initiative, you know, something that was promised on the campaign trail, something that was really pushed for by activists, now struck down six to three along partisan ideological lines here. So the details within this piece, they talk about how the court rejected the thinking because the language was not specific enough. You had Chief Justice John Roberts writing for the majority saying that the court's precedent, quote, requires that Congress be clearly before a department secretary can unilaterally alter large sections of the American economy. The context here is student loan repayments are

actually set to begin again at the end of August. That was part of that debt ceiling deal that was struck with Kevin McCarthy after having been put on pause during the COVID-19 pandemic. First payments not due, though, until October. So at a moment when student loan payments are about to restart and when obviously you still have this massive amount of debt hanging over many former college and current college students, this plan has been struck down. Emily, the Biden administration has already responded. They have a new plan in place. This is kind of the plan B approach, so to speak. Put this up on the screen. So as I mentioned before, they had chosen to use the HEROES Act, which was this pandemic era legislation. It was always a little perplexing to me that they went in that direction.

But as I mentioned before, they thought, all right, since Trump did it, maybe this is the easiest way to sneak one by the court. Now they're saying, all right, we're going to try it again. We're going to use the Higher Education Act of 1965. The language there is a little more clear. The act says that they can compromise, waive, or release student loans. So it's fairly direct. It says the education secretary has the authority to do that. The Higher Education Act of 1965 has been used in the past to cancel some student loan debt, although admittedly not as sweeping a program as what the Biden administration is pushing here. In addition, he has also announced a 12-month grace period to help borrowers who might struggle after payments restart. There's some indication

that there are quite a number of student loan debt holders who will have trouble making their payments. So there is a 12-month grace period. However, interest will continue to accrue. It will resume in September. So whether or not you are making payments, that interest is going to continue to mount. And there's another piece of this that I'll get into in a moment that's a little bit complicated. But basically, the bottom line is for this Higher Education Act, the new direction to go through, it's going to be a lengthy process that is going to push this out almost certainly beyond 2024 and beyond the next election. And that's exactly what Biden seemed to be struggling with. His quote on this was,

he said, basically, I think using the Higher Education Act is going to take longer than the original plan. But, quote, in my view, it's the best path that remains to providing as many borrowers as possible with debt relief. Now, the David Dayen piece that we had from Prospect up on the screen just a moment ago is fascinating because he makes a very persuasive case that this was always the way the Biden administration should have gone. And when you have people whose lives are on the line, and this is something I think conservatives get wrong a lot. They don't recognize how consequential the student loans are. They say well people made this decision and they can deal with the consequences of it. Well if you want people to buy homes and start families and join the middle class and be you know members of their communities constructively you don't want them to be saddled with tens of thousands of

dollars of debt just to get their ticket into the middle class. And so this is obviously hugely consequential. And Biden has left these people in the lurch for years at this point and will continue to be years in the future. So not only, I think, is that election date important for Joe Biden, but it's just another indication of how, I think, silly sometimes this administration has been when approaching these questions. I never understood why they went in the direction of the HEROES Act. Their justification to make the case that they would make is that it would be quicker and that since Trump had used it to justify some student loan debt relief, perhaps the court would look more favorably upon it. I've always thought that was a little bit foolish because, you know, I view the court as basically like a partisan operation, you know, to the extent that they try to like balance their decisions. It's because Chief Justice John Roberts is afraid

of they're getting more wind in the sails of something like court packing and, you know, completely undermining legitimacy of the court. So I find it sort of precious when people go in and like analyze, oh, was it correctly decided based on the Constitution? Because to me, the idea that they're just calling like legal balls and strikes here is completely farcical. But, you know, there's some real questions, I think, about how much Biden actually wants the student loan debt to be canceled based on his history, his ideological history. I mean, this is dyed-in-the-wool neoliberal. Debt cancellation, not really something neoliberals have historically been on board with. He was kind of drag-kicking and screaming to this.

The only reason he made this promise on the campaign trail is because he was facing pressure from Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and others to do something. His plan was always the least of the crew in the 2020 primary, but he did make a really clear promise here. And then even once he gets into office, this is something he had the unilateral ability to effectuate and still dragged his feet, dragged his feet, dragged his feet. Really reportedly was very reluctant to to undergo any of this debt cancellation, decides to do it using the Heroes Act for,ES Act for the administration justifications that you would give. But even with the direction that they're going in now, David Dayen points this out in his piece, they want to issue it as a rule. And part of the reason why apparently they have to do that is because they want to do all this complicated means testing and stuff. And so they feel like it may be on stronger legal footing. This is their justification. If you go through the rulemaking process, now that requires a public comment period. It requires this like negotiated rulemaking period. It takes a lot of time.

There is another way they could do it as an order, but it would be faster, but perhaps on less solid legal footing is the analysis. Now, again, I think it's sort of silly to really imagine that the Supreme Court is just looking at this and calling them balls and strikes and analyze, oh, this is on stronger legal footing and this is on weaker ground. So in my opinion, they should push the, you know, push the envelope, issue an order, cancel the debt as quickly as they possibly can. But if you want to be a little bit conspiratorial or, you know, consider or I guess a little bit cynical about this, you could also say, well, it's kind of convenient for them that this pushes it down past the next election when this is a

really critical issue for so many voters, very motivating for so many voters who feel direct, tangible material pressure and possible material benefit from this. So if you have this as a live issue going into the election, you can see how that might be appealing to them politically above and beyond their rationalizations about, oh, this is the best way legally forward. And they can continue to blame the court. They can continue to say Joe Biden, or I, if you're Joe Biden, did everything in my power to give you this relief, and yet the conservative Supreme Court blocked it. So right now what I'm doing is everything else that's in my power. I'm working really hard on it. And you can continue to make that pitch, continue to make

this issue part of that. Listen, I mean, I'm not, I think what depresses me most about all of that is, you know, one of the reasons I oppose categorical relief or relief in ways like this is because the system is a joke. It's, I mean, it is the neoliberal idea that you can take, you know, that college education is your ticket to the middle class. Everything's going to be OK. That was a lie. It was a lie from our politicians, the entire political class, the media.

It was a lie from the culture for years and years and years. And college education has just gotten more expensive. So there's no incentives to take down the cost of it. And for me, what's really depressing about that is nobody even has the will. Like, not only, it's interesting because the Biden administration sort of halfway approach, like, we're not extreme, but we're also, you know, not, you know, super, like, we're not that liberal, but we're also going to do stuff for our activist base. We're also listening to Bernie, et cetera, et cetera. It's the worst of both worlds. You know, like, go all in or go all out. Be honest with voters. Say, we're not actually

going to do this. Or, yeah, we're going to do it, and you're going to live with it. And a lot of people are going to like it, and a lot of people are going to hate it. But this, like, split the baby approach by Biden, which he does on not just this issue, but other issues, is the worst of both worlds, because now people's personal livelihoods, their material reality is on the actual possibility of debt relief is because, listen, I would love it if there was broader reform on the table. I would love it if there was free public college and trade school on the table. There's not. So at least if there's, you know, a little bit of relief that's on the table for a lot of people that would make a huge difference in their lives, I'm like, all right, let's do that because that's the best we can get right now. But the big picture here is a story of institutional failure. I mean, you have a White House that sort of bungled the direction of this from the beginning that dragged their feet, that could have provided a lot more relief. So you've got that. You've got

Congress is really the place where you should have broader legislation to deal with the fact that college education costs continue to skyrocket, that you even have a thing that is student debt and that it is crushing for multiple generations, sets them back in terms of families, which you're talking about marriage today, in terms of being able to buy a house, in terms of being able to start a business and be entrepreneurs if that's the direction that they want to go in. So this absolute crushing level of debt, that's something Congress should be able to deal with. That's the appropriate place to really formulate a comprehensive solution. No one has any expectation that that's

coming anytime soon. And then you have a court that has, you know, its own massive corruption issues and total loss of credibility that is not interested in calling balls and strikes, that is interested in advancing their own ideological agenda. So you just have like every branch of government kind of failures all around. And I think that's the big picture of student loan debt relief. I want to talk about this next decision, though. And Emily, I know you have some interesting insight into this one. Go ahead and put this next one up on the screen. This is this case of, you know, tension between, all right, where does where do religious rights turn into overt discrimination? And this is something that the court has wrestled with, of course, many times in its history. You have the Supreme Court, this is the AP headline,

ruling for a designer who does not want to make wedding websites for gay couples. Let me read you a little bit from this AP piece. They say, in a defeat for gay rights, the Supreme Court's conservative majority, and this was along partisan ideological lines, ruled on Friday that a Christian graphic artist who wants to design wedding websites can refuse to work with same-sex couples. One of the court's liberal justices wrote in a dissent that the decision's effect is to mark gays and lesbians for second-class status and that the decision opens the door to other discrimination. The decision to get into the specifics here suggests that artists, photographers,

videographers, and writers are among those who can refuse to offer what the court called expressive services if doing so would run contrary to their beliefs. But that's different from other businesses not engaged in speech and therefore not covered by the First Amendment, such as restaurants and hotels. So, Emily, I know you have actually spoken with this designer. So give us a little bit of the backstory on this particular case. Yeah, so this is, as a lot of conservatives see it, an attempt to really right the wrongs of the masterpiece cake shop. You know, the origin of the bake the damn cake meme that is so popular now. So Jack Phillips, who had a cake shop and, you know, said, I'll serve absolutely everyone. I'm not going to make a cake for a gay wedding.

I'll happily serve gay customers. This is a really similar situation, and it's basically a stress test of the laws that Colorado had in place after Masterpiece. And Masterpiece was decided in a way that conservatives weren't entirely happy with. Justice Kennedy wrote the opinion, and it allowed Colorado and states like it

to have laws that conservatives still felt, Christians still felt, allowed the state to sort of infringe on their beliefs. And so Lori Smith is a website designer. She does graphic design, basically. And because of Colorado's law, felt that she was going to be in a position where she would have to make or would be forced into the situation where she would have to make wedding websites for gay weddings. Now, this is where it gets interesting, because recently, I think it was the Daily Beast dug into the original request that was cited in the lawsuit, and the customer's request basically turns out he was surprised to learn that it had been cited

in the filing, the court filing. You know, his request for her to make, it was like through the form on a website, you know, when you go to somebody's website and you just have to go through the form, then you submit it. It wasn't ever, it looks like it wasn't ever validated or verified. He says he's not gay. He's married to a woman. He's been married for like 15 years. Right. And so there were a lot of laughs about that online. And it is quite interesting. But it also wasn't the basis for the original lawsuit. This is from the Associated Press. The would-be customer's request was not the basis for Smith's original lawsuit, nor was it cited by the high court as the reason for ruling in her favor.

The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, they said that Colorado had a history of past enforcement, quote, against nearly identical conduct, so masterpiece, and that the state declined to promise that it wouldn't go after Smith, so the state didn't prove that it would not go after her if she violated their law and said, I'm not going to make this wedding website for you. So it is funny, but also wasn't really the basis for the lawsuit. And that said, I actually really think this should have been a 9-0. I think if you flipped a 9-0 decision, I think, you know, in a saner world, the ACLU would have been all over this, just in a different direction.

I think if you flipped her, Lori Smith, if you turned her into a Muslim, or in a hypothetical world, or somebody who was Episcopalian, supported gay marriage, and was asked by a Christian to do an anti-gay marriage cake, I think we would have our ideological blinders off and think, you know, you would actually, we would have our sort of ideological blinders off and say, yeah, like, she's an artist. She's allowed to do what she

wants. It's not Michelangelo, obviously, creating wedding websites, but I think the left would be pretty defensive of her ability to create expressive websites, et cetera, if she weren't Christian. I think that just, like, kind of changed everybody's, you know, and I get why people are suspicious of that, you know, in recent history. But at the same time, I really think that they would be defending her ability as an artist to say, no, I don't want to make a website for an anti-gay organization, or I don't want to create a website for the event of an anti-gay organization. I'll make the people a cake for anything else,, I'll make the people a cake for anything else or I'll make the people a website for anything else,

but not for this anti-gay demonstration that they want to do. And that's where I think it probably should have been 9-0. So I also think it should have been 9-0, but in the other direction. Because, I mean, listen, the bedrock of the civil rights era was the idea that you cannot discriminate against people in terms of public accommodations. And so while I acknowledge that it can be tricky to strike the balance between, all right, where does religious liberty end and where does discrimination begin? I think at this point in American history, we've all acknowledged that, you know, discrimination against LGBTQ people is a thing that it should be prevented. This court has affirmed this multiple times. And so, you know, it's they're trying to draw this line of, oh, this is expressive and this is first speech. This is a First Amendment free speech issue. But, you know, there are a lot of things that could be theoretically construed

as speech, including baking a cake, including making a website, including, you know, printing up the programs for the wedding. Any part of that could theoretically be called free speech. And so I think this is much more about just you have an obligation as a business owner to serve the public and you cannot fall back on your religion as a justification for discrimination. Because, listen, the Bible has been used to justify overt discrimination many times in American history. I mean, it was used, arguments from the Bible were used to say, oh, this is, God is against interracial marriage. So to me, this is, you know, way over the line in terms of where religious freedom lies. But, you know, court sees it otherwise. So we will, I'm sure, have additional

probably legislation about what exactly the bounds are here. I do think the piece, you know, I hear what you're saying about this, the actual mechanics of how this request came to be didn't end up being central to the decision. But I do think the fact that, number one, she's actually never made a wedding website for anyone. No, she hasn't. She's never made one. She said, oh, I might. I'm thinking about theoretically maybe getting into the wedding website business is like, OK. And then the request itself is fake. I mean, this guy did not submit a request.

He's not gay. He's been married for 15 years. And this is the only request that they could cite. So, I mean, listen, this is the way that our legal process works. Activists, you know, have something that they want to test. They look for a test case in order to do it. It's actually embarrassing and humiliating for the court, though, that they never even did the basics, that this got all the way to the Supreme Court without anyone doing the basics of checking in on whether this was actually a real request or not. So it is embarrassing. And I think

also, if the reality of that had come out, I don't know that the case would have gone any differently. Because again, I think this is more ideological than it is actually doing, you know, any sort of real justified legal analysis. But it may have called into question some of the other arguments, it may have put it on sort of shakier ground, when you have a designer who doesn't actually making websites with a request that isn't actually a real request. There's, you know, a lot of those pieces that kind of fall apart. So she was represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, which has worked really closely with Jack Phillips. And my assumption is that so this is what's happened with Jack Phillips, Christian Baker, over and over again, that you have people on the left coming in and making obscene requests of him.

And it just like things that I won't even describe here, like just obscene requests of him to test the system and to test the law. And so I think it's really been happening in both directions. And my assumption is that, you know, that's sort of what we all understand is happening with these like speech laws in places like Colorado or Washington state where everyone's just sort of stress testing the system and seeing where they can come out. And I think it was Elena Kagan that said in this term, I think she was referring to the student debt case, but she said one of the interesting things, actually, is not the way the conservative majority ruled in the case, but their decision to take up the case at all. And I really think that's worth thinking about.

Yeah, that is true. Because we've had courts rule differently on affirmative action in recent years and sort of punt in different cases, you know, punt on Obamacare in a way that was really, really displeasing to conservatives, like, you know, Chief Justice John Roberts. And so I think actually part of what's really interesting about this is the cases that the court took up this session. Yeah, I think that that is very true. And, you know, just my last point on this is I really do agree with the dissent that this puts gays and lesbians on kind of second class footing because it's not like a gay couple that's looking to have a wedding website. It's not like they're trying to make some like activist ideological point. They're just trying to live their lives. Right. fact that they are entering into a gay marriage makes it political when, you know, a homosexual

couple that was getting married, it's seen as just like normal and nonpolitical. Well, these are all just people not trying to be activists, not trying to make ideological points, just trying to live their lives. And now if you're a gay couple, you've got to like sort through which vendors are going to be willing to serve you. And the Supreme Court has said that that is perfectly fine and that can be the law of the land. This is why my one remaining libertarian take on things is that I don't think marriage should be sanctioned by the government at all.

But anyway, we're going to be right along. As Crystal mentioned earlier in the show, we have social media on the docket today, speaking of the court, let's talk about the social media docket, because there was a huge ruling actually against the Biden administration when it comes to their meddling or their pressure on there's pressure on these major tech corporations to police speech. So a federal judge ruled on Tuesday that they're going to be restricting some agencies and officials, this is from Reuters, in Biden's administration from, quote, meeting and communicating with social media companies to moderate their content, according to a court filing. The injunction came in response to a lawsuit brought by Republican attorneys general in Louisiana and Mississippi who alleged that U.S. government officials went too far in efforts to encourage social media companies to address posts they

worried could contribute to vaccine hesitancy during the COVID-19 pandemic or upend elections. Now, the White House has said the Justice Department is taking a look at the order and is going to evaluate its options. But we actually got reporting just last night from The Washington Post that the Biden administration had canceled some of its meetings with these companies, which we learned from the Twitter files were regular. For instance, you regularly had Twitter meeting with the FBI in the lead up to the 2020 election. So that in and of itself is interesting that it's already has some teeth to it. But of course, this was not met with cheers by a lot of people in the corporate press. Let's run B2 right now. It's a pretty hilarious freak out from, I think this one's CNN, but it

might be MSNBC. Take a listen. If they find something that, you know, they're flagging this post and say, hey, this, they're not explicitly saying you need to take this down. Often there's sort of an implicit implication there saying, just, you know, bring this to your attention. And then the social media company can decide independently whether or not that violates their ongoing standards. But I mean, it's a really new area and a really complicated one, and one that there should be close guardrails on to make sure that the government is not overreaching. But the idea that the government can't have any communication with these social media companies, I don't think is really a world

that we would want to live in. It's not really a world we'd want to live in. I actually do want to live in that world. Doesn't it sound nice? It's sort of utopian at this point. Let's put B3 up on the screen. This is from Robbie Suave over at Reason. This is a great headline. The FBI frequently flagged, joked tweets, and asked for moderation.

Again, we know that this is the case. And actually what's kind of interesting here is that CNN had a similar sort of freak out panel. I genuinely don't know if the legal analysts that are overpaid at CNN and MSNBC have read stories like this, have like truly thoughtfully combed through the Twitter files. One thing that's a little bit frightening is that they very well may have, and they may actually think, yes, that the FBI should be policing jokes on Twitter should be reporting parody accounts All of those things. I think one of them was like a parody account about Joe Biden's niece or granddaughter We need it down immediately and the entitlement that the government approached these corporations with though you listen to us We're bullying you into submission. That's part of what the judge is ruling on here

It's like this is not the appropriate relationship between government and these platforms. But I honestly, honestly don't know if they actually realize the full extent of the censorship requests as laid out there. Like we're talking about jokes. We're not talking about matters of national security in every case. Are there some legitimate reasons that the White House might want to flag something to Twitter? Sure. Is that really what they were doing? Absolutely not. Right. Well, because there's two levels here. There's like the amount that the government was communicating with Twitter in particular, but also we know, you know, Mark Zuckerberg has said things about their interactions at Facebook as well. That is very dystopian and should be really unnerving and, you know, really came into play during elections, during

the Hunter Biden stuff, also during COVID. You know, these social media platforms were trying to trying to really sort through fact from fiction during a pandemic when, you know, science was unsettled and there were a lot of things that they just blatantly got wrong and ended up with egg on their face and really proved themselves to be poor at being able to handle that function. So there's like the dystopian aspect of it. Then there's also just like the farcical, embarrassing aspect of it, which is that many of the tweets and posts that came out that they had flagged were obvious satire from accounts that had like three followers and clearly made no difference to anyone whatsoever. And it's like, what? Like, there's there's real crime. There's really actual bad stuff happening in the country and in the

world. And this is what you people are spending your time on. Like, that's just that's embarrassing. So to give you one example, the FBI had flagged a user named Claire Foster, who had tweeted, quote, I'm a ballot counter in my state. If you're not wearing a mask, I'm not counting your vote. Hashtag safety first. And also for every negative comment on this post, I'm adding another vote for the Democrats. Obvious satire, right? It was an obvious, like maybe potentially lame joke that did not even get a lot of interactions. But this is the sort of stuff that they were spending their time flagging.

But, you know, the more important part is just the when the government sends you a request, even if they don't, it doesn't have the force of law behind it. Obviously, that is very former like deep staters that they pay now at CNN and MSNBC, I don't think they did engage with the Twitter Files content. And listen, I have some issue with the Twitter Files content as well. Obviously, Elon was, you know, kind of selective about it and did not provide like a full picture of everything that was going on. All of that transparency into the previous regime has not continued into the current regime, I think is probably the biggest critique of all of it. But there were real revelations there that were actually important. And the fact that the mainstream press just completely ignored it means that, you know, they're ignorant of it and their audience is also ignorant of it. I also think you can see in the reaction here the way that so much of the public discourse is just completely rotted by partisanship. If this had

been during the Bush era, you would have had Democrats cheering on this decision and you would have had Republicans lamenting it and saying, this isn't the world we want to live in and national security, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Since it's the Biden era, you have the total reverse reaction where Republicans cheer it and Democrats are wringing their hands and they're very concerned about it. And this all does really go back to the Patriot Act and the type of surveillance that became mainstream during the war on terror era. So in any case, bottom line is you should have a consistent principle here. If you are concerned about freedom of speech, if you're concerned about the First Amendment, this is

a win for all of those things and hopefully will stand and push back on the government's ability to use a heavy hand to censor things that have no business whatsoever being censored, flagged, monitored, etc. And I was going to say, I mean, one of the best examples here is the lab leak. The conversation about the lab leak that people in our government and our federal government were using their power to talk to these social media companies, the Hunter Biden laptop story, all of these things, they were exerting their power, wielding it over these tech companies that have proven, they have gone from conspiracy theories, so-called conspiracy theories, to basically being substantiated by a lot of facts, a lot of reporting. And that's important because we have to be able to have those conversations to get to the truth.

Something may sound shady. It may sound like a conspiracy theory. And it may well turn out to be true, especially if people in power are telling you, look over there. Like, no, this really isn't real. And I just want to read from Matt Taibbi. He had a really good article about this in Racket, obviously, because he was doing a lot of the Twitter Files work. He said basically that the investigation, which was led by these two Republican attorneys, General Jeff Landry and Andrew Bailey, produced documents showing overt government requests to censor people like RFK Jr., a White House official expressing frustration at Facebook they weren't removing bad information from the search, and emails in which a Facebook official pleads with the White House to understand that they're already, quote, reducing the virality of often true content that might promote vaccine hesitancy, among many other

things. So again, just some of this stuff, it doesn't even have to be a partisan issue. It's just that, like, if we can't have these conversations, we're never going to get to the truth, and people in power will have a monopoly on what we believe is true and what we believe is not true. That said, there is a new platform that everyone is clamoring for. Everyone is just so excited about this. Got a new oligarchic run Twitter competitor that we can get on board with, guys. That's right. Get excited. There's more. Okay, so let's go to B4 here.

This is from The Guardian. You know, it's worth noting the cage match is probably canceled, but as The Guardian says, quote, the real battle between the two billionaires will begin on Thursday when Zuckerberg launches threads his company's Twitter competitor. Now, Crystal and I both jumped on threads last night. Pretty impressed with it aesthetically. The tech is good. Yeah, it looks good.

It looks good. Michael Schellenberger actually already was reporting this morning that people, conservative activists type posters are getting red flag warnings or people who try to follow them are getting red flag warnings that could be, I'm not ready to say that they are, but they could be, you know, sort of being applied with a double standard conservative versus liberal saying, are you sure you want to follow this account? They've posted a lot of disinformation in the past. Oh, interesting. Yeah. And remember, Zuckerberg obviously has talked a big game about free speech in the past and has not, sometimes he's reflective

about it after the fact, but he has not always followed through on that. Hunter Biden laptop is a great example of that. So again, there's a lot of reason to be suspicious about this, but Zuckerberg is coming in hard and saying, you know, a lot of people are really frustrated with Elon's version of Twitter. Twitter is a hub for very powerful people, a lot of very powerful liberal people who are extremely frustrated with the situation, and they've been courting influencers, like mega, mega popular celebrities, saying, if we get you over here and we integrate it with Instagram,

you know, we're not asking you to do something new like Blue Sky or something totally foreign to you that you have to, like, download, create an account, but it's just all of your followers will already be there. You can already follow the people that you're following. Can it work? I would say probably it can like actually mount some competition to Twitter. Yeah. I think you might be right about that. I mean, Leslie, I'm kind of a boomer at this point in terms of my social media uptake. Like I'm really not ready to learn a whole new platform, TikTok or whatever. Like I'm old at this point. But

I was able to, all you do is you download the app. If you're already on Instagram, I didn't even have to remember my password for it to like integrate. It was just like, is this you? And I was like, yeah. And then it asks you if you want to follow the same people you're following on Instagram said yes. And then you're off to the races. It looks exactly like Twitter. You know, I mean, it's just it's a total carbon copy of Twitter, basically. And I think the reason that I feel like this has more of a shot than other efforts is just because, look, meta is huge. Way more users on Instagram and Facebook than there are on Twitter. Way more orders of magnitude more. So the fact that it's so easy for people that are already there to pick it up and that they seem to have been pretty strategic about making sure some of those big influencers, not even like political people.

You know, I jumped on there and I saw Shaq on there threading or whatever. It shows you they put some strategic, savvy thought into this because the whole thing with a social media network is that you need people to be there. That's why they're kind of natural monopolies and why it's been hard to supplant Twitter, even as you had free speech concerns or, you know, concerns about Elon's management, et cetera, because it's just like, well, this is still where the people are and I'm still getting some benefit out of seeing breaking news tweets or, you know, elite journalists or whoever the, you know, political influencers that you find interesting, that's where they are. So I'm still getting that benefit.

I mean, the other reason that this might succeed is because Twitter didn't have a good last week. Let's put this up on the screen. You guys might know about this. I mean, first there was a shutdown, like it was not working at all. And then this is the headline here is Elon Musk tries forcing Twitter users to use less Twitter. And then people were getting these error messages that their rate limit had been exceeded. And they were like, what the hell is going on here? And then Elon tweeted that

apparently they had put in these hard limits of you couldn't view, not tweet, you couldn't view more than 600 tweets unless you pay for the blue check mark and then it was like 6,000. And then they upped the limit a bit. But this Twitter is really run, most of the content is created by this small percentage of power users. And so you're effectively cutting them off. In terms of revenue and business, this is the total opposite direction of what every social media company wants to go in because the whole thing is the money comes from advertisers. And for them to be able to serve their ads, you have to be on the platform. So every social media company, their whole goal is to keep you locked in on their platform scrolling endlessly. That's the whole goal.

Is that good for us? No. But is that the business model? Yes. And so Elon, and there's already a lot of reporting about how their revenues are way down, et cetera, et cetera. For whatever reason, and there's a lot of speculation about the real reason why these rate limits were put into place, maybe didn't pay his server bill, or they were having tech issues, or whatever the actual reason was, this is not a good direction to go in in terms of the business

health of the site. And for people who, you know, want to be able to scroll Twitter and want to use it for, you know, like us, use it for work, et cetera, this really hobbles the site. It makes it a lot less useful for those power users who, again, are like the core of the content creation and what makes the site useful and valuable? Yeah, that's a completely, like, one of the things to remember about Twitter is that not only is its user base dwarfed by basically like by Facebook and then Facebook's Instagram and TikTok, et cetera, et cetera, the vast majority of daily users are a

minority even of people who use the platform. So if you're one of the people that's on Twitter every day, you're in a small minority of actually even people that have an account on Twitter, let alone a small minority of the American population. And so for that purpose, like this is actually pretty bad timing for Elon Musk, right? When you have a competitor that's serious popping up. And by the way, let's, yes, it's, if we're going from a monopoly to a duopoly by, you know, one, from one censorious oligarch to another, you know, I guess that's how low the bar is for celebration at this point, that there's some measure of competition on one platform to be better or on another platform to be better. But, you know, it's the world that we live in.

Musk says that this is a, quote, temporary emergency measure, and it's aimed at getting rid of data pillaging by, quote, several hundred organizations who were, quote, scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively to the point where it was affecting the real user experience. I actually don't have a good idea of how it was affecting the real user experience in a way that is quite as conspicuous as the blocks, the content limits for people who, you know, are scrolling, didn't pay. You can't even go down their own profiles and look at their own property, essentially, their own thoughts, tweets, because they've exceeded the daily limit. And there's nothing you can do about that. So I think it's genuinely really bad timing for Elon Musk that Zuckerberg

comes in with his competition. And Musk has been doing this sort of startup atmosphere. He's been generating this startup atmosphere at Twitter where it's like, we're going to experiment with things. We're going to try to address some of the systemic problems in Silicon Valley that made this platform unappealing and that just drove this platform to a place where it was so much smaller than all the others.

But at a certain point, you can't say, well, it's going to take another year, it's going to take another two years. When you're a year in, you have to actually have really, really conspicuously improved the user experience and you have to be able to put your, you have to be able to walk the walk and say that the product has genuinely been transformed.

And I think he's coming up really closely on that sort of deadline or de facto deadline with the public. Yeah, and obviously with threads launching, like, the sharks are circling, you know, and there's clear weakness to exploit here. And, you know, also it just bears repeating that all the promises of this is going to be a free speech platform, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, even like putting these kind of limits on users is kind of antithetical to free speech. One of the theories about why they put these rate limits in place is another ploy to sort of force people into paying for the product. But he's also been so antagonistic towards the Twitter user base that it makes people out of spite not want to pay for the blue checkmark and get your expanded rate limits and your whatever, you know, whatever else you get with paying and your primary tweet placement and algorithmic benefits, etc., which,

again, is also sort of contrary to the free speech thing. But listen, I can't say I'm like celebrating the idea that, oh, we've got another potential billionaire savior for us, because as I've said a million times here before, whether it's Elon or Zuckerberg or Jack or whoever it is, no billionaire oligarch is going to secure our First Amendment rights because that's not what they're in for. They're in to make money. They're in for, you know, their own ego or narcissism or whatever. It's all about, you know, them, their bottom line. It's not really truly about any sort of free speech or public town square, et cetera. Many of the factors that shaped the current censorship regime at places like Meta are also applied to Twitter because it's not really about

the laws. It's about the advertisers and what they are willing to accept. That's why so many of these censorship regimes end up looking basically identical, no matter which particular oligarch is in charge. But just in terms of a business story, I think it's going to be fascinating to watch and see whether threads can actually make a run at it, whether they could actually, you know, have a chance at reaching parity with or even taking down Twitter. And Elon has certainly left himself vulnerable to that kind of challenge. I guess that's what I'll say. Yeah. I mean, libertarians have said for years that Twitter's competition is Facebook. You know, like these places have competition because there's Facebook and Instagram. So Twitter is not a monopoly. This proves that completely wrong,

by the way, because Twitter is a very particular product. People go to Twitter for very different reasons than they go to Facebook or Instagram or TikTok. So it's never been true. That's always been a very dubious argument to begin with. But actually competing on the very same ground in a way that, you know, if you have this natural monopoly on people's time, attention, and in this very specific way, that actually I think we could be looking at a duopoly if this has legs. And I haven't seen any competitor, you know, whether it's Parler, whether it's Truth Social. And Truth Social, by the way, it's hard to find somebody who is as popular with a segment of the public than Donald Trump.

I mean, you can maybe talk about like Michelle Obama. And Donald Trump is extremely polarizing. But with some like 20 percent of the population, the general population, he's really popular. And if he can't mount a successful competitor to Twitter, where you have people like actually coming over there in big enough numbers to give something legs, it's again, like between parlor, true social, blue sky, whatever else has tried to do exactly what Twitter does, nobody's been able to do it. And so I think, again, if Zuckerberg is able to say, I'm going to do exactly what Twitter does and we're going to become a duopoly, that again, like really shows a lot of those arguments

were wrong from the very get go. Zuckerberg claims that they got 10 million signups in the first seven hours. Obviously, that's a pretty impressive number, you know, remains to be seen. A lot of those people just be like me, like trying to not see if I, you know, I have yet to thread. So it's not like I'm an active user. I'm a full on lurker at this point. But, you know, I just think we'll see what happens here. My fear is that like the rest of our media ecosystem, we will increasingly separate into ideologically like safe spaces in terms of our social media preferences as well. You know, the right will stay on Twitter, go to true social or whatever. The left will migrate over to Meta or Blue Sky or Macedon or whatever. And we'll have a duopoly, but it'll be purely like split down along ideological lines,

sort of the way that the cable news ecosystem or other media ecosystems are. That could be the direction that we're going in. And I think that would be a loss. And then also just in terms of enjoyment of the platform, I mean, part of the fun of Twitter is seeing what other people who disagree with you say. Sometimes like they're hilarious, stupid, hilariously stupid things that they say, or like the memes that they're sharing and what's going on in their little ideological niche. And so if you lose that, I do think it takes some of the, um, some of the importance, some of the, some of the power out of the site and some of what made Twitter a compelling place for some

subset of the population to start with. Yeah, agreed. Well, if you haven't seen this Rhonda Santus video, you're really missing out. We're going to talk here about developments in 2024. Fourth of July weekend is always a big weekend for presidential candidates. Lots of parades. In general, yes, lots of parades. Lots of parade outfits, which is another fun thing to just sort of analyze what this person's team thinks is a relatable 4th of July parade

outfit. It's like, how should we dress Ron DeSantis for a 4th of July parade? But before we run this clip, because it is, let's say, in a word, homoerotic. But before we run it, I want to say, a lot of people said this was an ad created by the DeSantis campaign. It's slightly more nuanced than that. It doesn't necessarily make it better, but it was an ad that DeSantis wore room. So their

rapid response Twitter, which, gosh, I don't even know why that's a thing that has to exist. They tweeted this video out from like a random user who made it, which may explain, I guess, the production quality. But they still made the decision. The DeSantis campaign still made the decision. They embraced it. They embraced it. Let's just play the video and we'll there'll be a lot to unpack. I will do everything in my power to protect our LG BDQ citizens. If Caitlyn Jenner were to walk into Trump Tower and want to use the bathroom, you would be fine with her using any bathroom she chooses. Is that as good?

In the future, can transgender women compete in this universe? Yes. Make America great again. It's fake! This is just offensive for being so online. They're putting Christian Bale, Patrick Bateman, and American Psycho juxtaposed with pictures of Ron DeSantis in a way that only works if you're like a thoroughly irony- Twitter using Zoomer, but not if you're an average. You're like, why are you comparing Ron DeSantis to a fictional serial killer? There's nothing that's politically palatable about that. Before we, I think, unpack that, let's also run, and we can talk about these two clips together, let's run C2, because this is a reaction from CNN. A couple of women who are on CNN talking about their approach to DeSantis and maybe some places where there's a red line for them as moms when it comes to, you know, the balance between DeSantis pushing back on what they see as the excesses of wokeism, but also being sort of a conventional conservative.

Let's roll C2. I'm wondering if you think that DeSantis' very public, more on woke distracts from the message that you like about him. A little bit, I do. Yeah. Because I mean, to be honest, I do feel like it would be really good to have a big public debate about what did we get wrong in COVID.

The left doesn't want to have that debate. They did sign a law that restricts transgender care for adults as well as kids. I have greater concerns about the six-week abortion ban. Tell me about that. You know, I think if he made it clear that he's a state's rights person and that he's not looking to kind of pass a national law in this regard, I think that's dangerous.

That's something that I cannot get behind. looking to kind of pass a national law in this regard. I think that's dangerous. That's something that I cannot get behind. And I don't think that's going to bode well for his presidential campaign. I think that that might be a real impediment to bringing in moderate women. Okay, so the first woman you saw there is Jennifer Say. And CNN has this chyron that says, you know,

suburban moms, et cetera. I love Jennifer Say. She's a former chyron that says, you know, suburban moms, et cetera. I love Jennifer Say. She's a former executive at Levi's. She's great. People should read her book. Whether she's representative of the average suburban mom as an executive at Levi's

who now has a really big public platform, I don't know. But I do think she's speaking to something, again, like, her book is really interesting on this,

how, like, during COVID and the way that people were talking about things, she sort of ended up getting pushed out at Levi's and has had a very, very interesting career. But I think she's speaking to something that is real for a lot of women who look at, for instance, some of the things, this is why these two clips belong together, some of the things that the first video is attempting to address, right? Like some of policies that your average mom probably does have a real problem with when it comes to locker rooms or bathrooms,

whether you agree with them on those issues or not, the country is pretty divided on them. So some of the things that video is trying to address will also be just completely off-putting and in ways, again, I'm not saying DeSantis, I'm conservative, I'm, you know, anti-abortion. I'm not disputing what DeSantis did with the six-week ban. But on the political level, that is a huge question mark. And whether or not he's able to sell it in a way that's politically popular is a huge question mark for him. And I think especially when you have a team that is so insulated in the online meme culture. That's just the perfect example. If you're putting out ads like that, if you're reposting videos that are so deeply online that you're juxtaposing DeSantis with a serial killer, your team actually might have very legitimate prize.

Your ground game in Iowa can be really, really good. And you can be putting a lot of money there, which the DeSantis campaign is doing. And you're going to have this stuff go viral. You're going to have certain things that if you just aren't on top of them and you aren't speaking to the average voter, it's going to not balance in the way that's politically viable for you. Yeah, there's, I think, a lot to say about this. So starting with the like anti-gay, anti-trans video, you'll recall that when DeSantis was doing the, you know, what's been called the Don't Say Gay Bill, they were adamant that this wasn't actually about gay people. That this was about parental choice. Yeah.

For those of you who are just listening, if you watch that video, they're actually celebrating headlines that are like DeSantis passes the most extreme anti-trans legislation in history. Things like that. So instead of keeping their political framing of like, this is about parental choice and this is about making sure that, you know, parents know what's going on in their schools, et cetera, et cetera. This isn't an attack on gay people. This isn't an attack on trans people. They're actually pulling the mask off and saying, no, no, it is anti-trans. And not only that, we're really proud of that. We're going to celebrate that. Yeah. And it's funny. Right. And, you know, this is something that we're leaning into. So I've talked about this before on questions of, you know, kids transitioning, public pretty divided on questions of girls, trans, trans girls

in sports. You know, this is an area where conservatives actually have the majority. However you feel about that question, conservatives have the majority. So when you're staying on that ground, you're in a decent place politically. Although I would say that leaning into that as a central issue is just not the core priority for most Americans. So I already think you're a little shaky there. But let's grant that those are areas where you have a majority of the public that might

get behind what your position is. When you get into, I'm just against gay people, I'm just against trans people having equal rights, you are wildly opposite public opinion. On gay marriage, you're actually opposite public opinion, even within the Republican Party. So that's an example of these issues have become an absolute fixation for the online right. The fixation is at odds with the public and the actual policy position is wildly at odds with the American public. So when you talk about being way too online, like that's the specifics of the rub there. And why this video was, I think, such a problem for him is because it took away, it stripped away any pretense of moderation on the policy. So there's that piece. The other piece that I got from the quote unquote suburban moms, which was anytime you interview like two people, like take it all with a grain

of salt. We are very careful about not taking anecdotes and extrapolating a ton, but there is some polling to back this up. And I got a distinction that I hadn't really made a connection that I hadn't really made before, which is that when Ron DeSantis was really rising in popularity and when, you know, he was winning reelection and his approval ratings and floor are really high and he's rising and rising in the Republican primary, it wasn't so much when he was leaning hard into the culture war stuff. It was based on his COVID policies. And it was based on the fact that, you know, at the time there was, you know, a stance that was taken from him, a public stance that was taken, and they decided to keep the schools open. And especially for parents, I mean, in retrospect, the school closures, especially the length of the school closures, just it's an unmitigated disaster.

It's one of the worst public policy decisions just it's an unmitigated disaster. It's one of the, you know, worst public policy decisions that's been made in quite a long time. So that was quite compelling. But we have now left the COVID era. So that stuff becomes less relevant. It's less, you know, central to how people are making their political decisions, even among the Republican base that is most animated by COVID at this point, by, you know, litigating COVID policies and what that looks like. Even for them, this is not a top priority. So as he's moved into, OK, I'm going to lean into anti-wokeness, I'm going to lean into anti-trans, I'm going to lean into anti-abortion, that has been much, that has not worked as well for him.

And we see the way that the polls are falling off in the Republican primary, certainly the way that the public image has changed and the questions that, you know, some of these moms at least were raising to CNN, I think is reflected in also some of the polling of how Rhonda Santus is doing and on how those various issues actually land with a general public. So this is a huge point because one of the things when you look at the COVID policy, when you look at, for instance, Glenn Youngkin, who people compare Ron DeSantis to a lot, they say, you know, these are two people in purple states. I know Florida, it looks like solidly red right now, but the demographics and like the way Florida has voted for a really long time, it's a purple state. I mean, Andrew Gillum almost beat Ron DeSantis. I mean, it was really,

really, really close. And people say, well, look at what Ron DeSantis has done. He's turned Florida into a red state. And the big question was, he was doing these anti-woke policies. And it was more that it wasn't hurting the COVID sugar high that he was on for having sane and reasonable COVID policies, just like Glenn Youngkin having sane and reasonable COVID policies. You could also do this sort of anti-woke, pro-family, or however they want to pitch it legislation, and you're not going to suffer. In fact, in some cases, you may go up a little bit because people really like it, but it was always that way, that you can run a sane and reasonable economy, you can run a sane and reasonable COVID regime, and still do this other stuff and be okay. And that, to the right, was what was really interesting, is that you're

not going to tank your prospects if you craft these policies and talk about them in a really particular way. Well, that really particular way is not Patrick Bateman and not sort of being cruel towards, you know, in a country like they're getting dragged into this fight because they think it helps them against Donald Trump to be like, we are more anti-trans than Donald Trump. We are more reasonable on these policies than Donald Trump. But just going full and using those headlines that make Ron DeSantis sound cruel, I understand they're probably like, this is about the media. We're showing that we don't give a damn about the media, blah, blah, blah. It doesn't come across that way to the average person whatsoever. I mean, this is like political malpractice on another level for the

rapid response team to tweet this out, because meme culture is really not the way when you still have a huge chunk of the voting population that are baby boomers and are right now sitting at home trying to figure out how to use threads. And we love you guys. No, they haven't even heard about it yet. So anyway, just a I think a really representative early misstep from the DeSantis campaign that gets symbolically to some of these other problems where they have this legion of online influencers that I think are going to do more harm than good in the long run because they start to generate headlines. Like this video was covered in corporate press. The fact that it got coverage in legacy media. And so as normal people see stuff like that, they're just like, what the hell are you doing?

I don't even speak this language, but it looks really dumb. Right, like I literally don't even know what is going on in this ad, but I don't like it. Why are there shirtless men? The DeSantis piece is, the Youngkin piece is actually interesting to me because I always thought at the time

when he won and beat Terry McAuliffe, first of all, the downsides of Terry McAuliffe were undersold. But second of all, I thought the critical race theory piece of Glenn Youngkin's victory was really oversold. And it was more about the fact that schools had been closed and parents wanted their kids to be in school. And it was more about the positioning on COVID policy. And I think as time has worn on and as Republicans have been unable to repeat the success of Glenn Youngkin and Ron DeSantis in Florida was an outlier in terms of the midterms, I think it has become clear that that was the piece that was really energizing. That was the piece that appealed to a lot of suburban moms who they had lost during the Donald Trump years, much more so than the cultural pieces, because there was a lot of leaning into anti-trans legislation. There was a lot of

leaning into anti-CRT legislation in the midterms. There was a lot of money put behind it, school board races, all the rest, and it sort of fell flat. So I think at this point we've got a pretty good read on how the public feels about this landscape and which pieces are more appealing and which pieces are less appealing. The final, final thing I want to say here is that, you know, this is also an example of, like, Trump can get away with things that other politicians can't. Yes, yes, yes. Because it's not like Trump— It's so true. I mean, remember Trump, after the DeSantis failed launch thing, he posted something, again, that some other person had made.

But he, I think he directly reposted it, not even like his warm room. Yes. That was like a Twitter spaces with the devil and Adolf Hitler. Yes, yes. I mean, it's just like ridiculous. It was actually hilarious. But it was also totally over the top, totally ridiculous. And he can somehow get away with it because in addition to doing those things, he also sometimes has more of a normie sensibility where it's like he moderates on Social Security and Medicare.

He moderates on issues like abortion where actually Republican activists and elites are at odds with a good part of the Republican base and certainly with the general public. And he just has, he's one of those people that just has the charisma and the skill to be able to pull some of these things off that Ron DeSantis can't. And he spent the vast majority of his career outside of politics and isn't pretending to be some sort of like extremely competent, like average politician, whereas that's like part of the tension between DeSantis and Trump here. He was going full boomer grandpa over the weekend.

I'm sorry to keep harping on boomers. It's just funny when we're talking about meme culture. He posted pictures of himself photoshopped onto George Washington's body. All kinds of good stuff going on there. And just like an F Biden flag that, again, the media was very upset about. But again, if you're Donald Trump, you can do it. If you're Ron DeSantis, you really need to be a whole lot more careful because you did not host The Celebrity Apprentice, which I still miss to this day. Now, one person who was not doing the sort of schlep, the sweaty schlep down parades,

although I think he did do a rally this weekend, is Donald Trump. And this raises an interesting question that we wanted to talk about which is First of all, let's put up c3 Predict it which I think is kind of a shameful company. I don't think we should be betting our politics I don't like that to begin with. Oh, really? Yeah, I don't like that I'm free market on this one. Definitely not not really for the free market on gambling period but You see here that the odds of DeSantis on predicted. So maybe you just predict it, maybe you don't.

It's like a New Zealand website that lets you bet on the outcome of elections and politics in general. They put the odds of Gavin Newsom getting elected ahead of Ron DeSantis based on where things are right now. That's, you know, people right now, the people who are predicted bettors, the group of people who are betting on that website, they're saying Newsom has a better chance. So DeSantis numbers dropped three cents, and Newsom's have gone up a penny in recent betting. But on top of that, the question of Fourth of July parades,

you have Trump, as Axios says, we can put up the next, I think this is C4. Axios says Trump is, quote, not campaigning at the pace of previous cycles, preferring to spend most of his days at Mar-a-Lago and Bedminster, that's in New Jersey, rather than gripping, grinning in Iowa and other early primary states. Their headline is Trump's basement campaign. The Trump team vigorously denies this. Axios says, though, that Trump campaign officials have said part of the reason he is not holding many rallies is because they are expensive. Quote, they said something like half a billion dollars a rally or not billion, half a million dollars a rally or something like that. Like some crazy, crazy number. But Trump was he's held four events in Iowa,

five in New Hampshire, two in South Carolina, and none in Nevada. DeSantis has had 55 events. Nikki Haley has had 59. Tim Scott has had 36. And Vivek Ramaswamy has had 102. But Trump has been at 30, despite being in the race longer than other people.

So even so, Donald Trump running what Axios has dubbed a basement campaign still has a really healthy lead over Ron DeSantis, who has a decent chunk of money and is hitting these states really hard, and everyone else. In fact, everyone else, you can split up the votes, and it's the opposite. We've talked about this before. Trump is still healthily in the lead, as opposed to in the past.

If you had combined all of those votes into one candidate, Trump would lose. It's the exact reverse of that this time around. And the guy's done 30 in-person campaign events. I mean, I think it's a sign of the sclerotic decline of our nation that you've got two old men that the majority of the country don't want, that don't even feel the need to campaign or probably subject themselves to debates. And they're likely to win the party nominations. That's a good point. I mean, I don't know why Trump would do more events. He doesn't need to.

Right. I don't know why he would debate if he doesn't have to. He doesn't need to. I don't know why Biden would debate it. You know, he feels like he doesn't need to for all their talk of democracy. Like when it comes down to it, they don't actually believe in it. None of them do. So, yeah, I think it's I think it's just a pathetic sign of the times. And probably Trump is correct in his analysis here. You've got Vivek Ramaswamy running all over Iowa. If you look at that map, you know, he's been there like 80 times or something like that. But, you know, Trump just getting out, like getting indicted and CNN doing lots of lots of panels, outrage panels about him, which, you know, listen, there's plenty to be outraged about.

But that's all he really needs to do in order to secure the nomination. So, you know, on the the predicted thing is also just sad. It's sad for Ron. It's obviously embarrassing for Ron DeSantis. But even the fact that people are floating Newsom, they must either think like, no, they really can't just go with Biden. Come on, this guy can barely put a sentence together. Like, surely they're not going to stick with Biden. But guess what, guys? They are going to stick with Biden. Or they think it's likely enough that he would suffer some major health event or actually pass away.

Not something anyone is cheering for here, they think that is a likely enough outcome that they're like, and then I guess Newsom's in like the driver's seat. So yeah, it's kind of amazing. I mean, I don't think that Gavin Newsom has a better shot at being president than Ron DeSantis, but I also don't really think either one of them has much of a shot at this point. I wonder if actually it's not even a statement so much on DeSantis versus Trump as it's a statement on Biden's health in the predicted odds. There's a real question there. And I genuinely think that's also why you have a lot of Republican candidates who thought it was a, and a lot of Republican candidates, and we talked about this last week, a bunch of them are in the race, more than people

even like predicted would actually pull the trigger and jump in into the race and like have a super PAC get the money whatever I think that's partially the reason even on the Republican side Donald Trump is also pretty old He's facing a ton of legal challenges right now I don't think anyone sees any one of those legal challenges individually as being something that could tank his campaign He could do a Don Blankenship right and probably still keep Prison if any of these trials like progressankenship, right, and probably still campaign for prison if any of these trials, like, progress to that point. Right.

But all that is to say, I actually think that's the reason why you've seen so many Republican candidates jump in, too, because, to your point, this is a really depressing sign of how sclerotic and just counterproductive our politics are right now. Yeah. All right. Let's get to something that, you know, we really want to keep our eye on here, which is potentially the largest strike in American history is looming in the next couple of weeks. This has to do with UPS workers organized under Teamsters. 340,000, I believe, is the number of workers who could potentially be going on strike. Let's put this up on the screen. So they've been in active negotiations with UPS. This is the largest private labor contract in the country. So this is huge. And I don't have to tell you guys how critical UPS is to the workings of our economy at this point. You know, huge carrier, huge potential implications, and really huge for not just these workers, but also for really all of labor to see what kind of conditions they would be able to secure and whether they can

push back on years and years of neoliberal labor union decline. Okay, so leave this up on the screen. Let me read this here. This is from the Teamsters. They say, after marathon sessions, UPS negotiations collapse around 4 a.m., and I believe this was on Saturday. UPS walked away from the bargaining table after presenting an unacceptable offer to the Teamsters that did not address members' needs. The UPS Teamsters National Negotiating Committee unanimously rejected the package, put the next piece up on the screen. This was a Twitter thread. They go on, following marathon negotiations, UPS refused to give the Teamsters a last, best, and final offer, telling the union the company had nothing more to give. This

multi-billion dollar corporation has plenty to give American workers. They just don't want to, said Teamsters General President Sean O'Brien. UPS had a choice to make, and they have clearly chosen to go down the wrong road. I think we have one last piece of the thread that we can read here for you. They say the UPS Teamsters contract covering more than 340,000 full and part-time workers expires July 31. So we're coming down to the wire here. No additional negotiations are scheduled. The Teamsters have repeatedly made clear UPS members will not work beyond the expiration of the current contract. In June, rank and file UPS Teamsters authorized a strike by an overwhelming 97%. Now, some of the context here is the last contract

that Teamsters signed with UPS was really concessionary. So it created a two-tier wage system. There were all kinds of problems with it. Rank and file workers actually voted it down. And leadership at the time went over their heads and said, no, we're going to take this contract anyway. Sean O'Brien, the new general president, was elected on a promise to be more aggressive, more militant, and more adequately reflect the needs and desires of rank-and-file workers in these very negotiations. We also know that they have already extracted some concessions out of this deal. One thing that we reported on here is a huge problem for delivery workers, UPS workers, parcel delivery workers in general, is heat. And UPS trucks have never

had air conditioning. And we're talking, you know, you're in the summer in Arizona, you're going in the back of that thing. They're showing temperature readings over 120 degrees. You actually had a UPS worker die because of heat-related injuries. You've had heat exhaustion, major problems. So they were able to secure some air conditioning, at least in new trucks, new fan installs. So that was reported out. They also were able to do away, we know, with that two-tier wage system. That is a huge deal because the whole reason that they try to get these two-tier wage systems in place is to break the solidarity of the workers. So getting that was a huge deal. However, it appears that UPS was still not willing to go far enough to provide adequate wages, adequate benefits for what these Teamsters workers actually wanted out of the negotiation. So now you're in a place where it's kind of a

staring contest and a game of chicken. And we see who if anyone blinks or whether we are actually headed to this huge um very consequential strike that could come at the end of this month and i think the teamsters are acting as they are because they have an enormous amount of leverage right now so ups says it covers about or it delivers about six percent of the gdp in the united states of america and i'm reading from cnn here so they're they're reflecting on that UPS strike back in 1997. Obviously, this would be the biggest strike, as you said, since 1959. Quote, the company was able to recapture 90% of its business once that strike ended back in 97. He said it might be able to only recover 70% of its business in a strike this time because of a greater number of alternatives.

FedEx did not have a lower cost ground service in 1997, and the Postal Service was not set up to handle as many package deliveries. Amazon, of course, also has its own delivery service now. So when you see, I think, you know, the UPS has said, actually, it's the Teamsters that have walked away from the negotiation, et cetera, et cetera. But even just looking at that thread, the union is really throwing its weight around here. And I think that goes directly to the extreme amount of leverage that they have. UPS has had a lot of profits. They're asking for more of those to be passed down to workers,

perfectly reasonable thing to ask. And again, when you have 6% of the GDP, way more competition with FedEx, with Amazon, actually now the Postal Service, good luck letting this go into a strike position because it's immediately catastrophic. It's not, there is no like gray area here. It's black and white. It will immediately in one day be catastrophic for UPS. They know that and the union knows that. And this is going very well, I would say, for the union at this point. And not only that, so you're 100% correct on that aspect of leverage.

You also have a National Labor Relations Board under the Biden administration that is, you know, much more worker-friendly than the Trump administration. The Republican administration has always put in, like, you know, union-busting lawyers on the National Labor Relations Board. So you have a National Labor Relations Board that is likely to be in your court, and that's critical. You have record-breaking profits for UPS and other companies. So they can't cry poor. They can't pretend, oh, we just can't do it. No, you can do it. Like, it's really clear you could do it. So you've got that. You have a tight labor market where, you know, there's a lot of issues, inflation eating into wages. People don't feel like they're doing that well. But there are a lot of jobs. Those jobs may not be good jobs, but there are a lot of jobs. And the fact that you have a tight labor market also helps to provide

them with some leverage. And then, of course, if you're Sean O'Brien and you were literally elected to this position on a mandate to take it to the wall and to be militant and be aggressive in these negotiations, yeah, they feel like they have some room to work. And again, I'll just reiterate, last thing I'll say on this is that this matters obviously for these workers, and this is a lot of people, so it matters a lot. But when the labor movement was at its height and at its peak, and hopefully what it could get back to, and I think why this would be impactful, is because, number one, it shows to other workers, like, this is why you want to be part of a union. Because if you don't have this solidarity and

this collective bargaining, you're not getting your air conditions, you're not getting your paid time off, you're, you know, you're not getting increases in wages, you're getting these two, you have no recourse, basically. And then you also have, this is going to cause competition among the other parcel carriers and among the broader workforce. They're sort of lifting the floor for everyone. So that's why this fight really matters. So we'll make sure and keep an eye on it. Next, cocaine in the White House.

I feel like Ron Burgundy right now. But it's true. You've probably heard the story by now that there was cocaine found in the White House, actually in the West Wing, on Sunday. Now, we can throw this tear sheet up. The story continues to get complicated. From Politico, Dan Lippman reporting here, quote, Law enforcement officials confirmed on Wednesday that cocaine was found at the White House over the weekend,

so the confirmation came on Wednesday. But one official familiar with the investigation cautioned that the source of the drug was unlikely to be determined, given that it was discovered in a highly trafficked area of the West Wing. Now, you may think that sounds counterintuitive because surely any highly trafficked area of the West Wing would also have a lot of surveillance. But no, this anonymous law enforcement official says, they said, quote, it's going to be very difficult

for us to do that because of where it was. Again, Politico says that it was found in a cubby area. A, quote, small amount of cocaine was found in a cubby area for storing electronics within the West exec basement entryway into the West Wing, where many people have authorized access, including staff or visitors coming in for West Wing tours. Quote, again, from the senior law enforcement official or the law enforcement official. Even if there were surveillance cameras, unless you were waving it around, it may not have been caught. It's a bit of a thoroughfare. People walk by there all the time. Now, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre responded to reporters' questions

about this yesterday. She said, quote, let's let the Secret Service do their job, which we believe and have all the confidence that they will get to the bottom of this episode. OK, so the White House is also saying the Biden family was not in the White House. They were they left Friday and returned Tuesday. So if the cocaine was found Sunday again, I feel like I'm playing maybe a game of Clue. It was Hunter in the library with the whatever. With a bag of cocaine. With a bag of cocaine. But actually, that's one of the things that's interesting about this is at least Miranda Devine in The New York Post has reported that it's rumored Hunter Biden, this was at least as of a couple of weeks ago, was living in the White House, perhaps to dodge papers in his child support case,

which has since been settled. So and Hunter Biden has been at Camp David with the president recently, has been traveling with him recently, has been at state dinners recently. So there's a genuine question as to whether Hunter Biden, who we know has sadly suffered from serious substance abuse issues, is living in the White House and the cocaine belongs to him. I think also Naomi Biden and her husband are living in the White House. Obviously, there's a lot of staff and guests that are coming in and out. I do, however, think the idea that Secret Service or that a law enforcement official anonymously got cover to speak to Politico and say, listen, to sort of lay the groundwork for nobody being caught on this is rather hilarious because I guarantee you, like that sounds to me very, very strategic to say, listen, it just doesn't make any sense. We're not going to be able to find it. That excuse makes no sense

because there are cameras all over the West Wing, even in the visitor areas. There are cameras everywhere. Yeah. Well, as someone who supports legalization of drugs, I support no one being caught and turned in for this. Except the Biden administration has also, like, not hired people. We just legal in D.C. Well, that is true. They are total hypocrites on the issue, aren't they? I mean, and I've always thought this about Joe Biden is like, you know, your own son struggles with this and you're still like this moron drugs dude. It's disgraceful. A hundred percent. So they say the small amount of cocaine was found in a cubby area for storing electronics within the West exec basement entryway into the West Wing,

where many people have authorized access, including staff or visitors coming in for West wing tours. So I guess this is an area where like, you know, people are coming in through tours. They go through this area. They stick stuff in the cubby. I don't know. I haven't really spent any time in the white house. So I don't know how all this works. Um, it's sort of the story kind of sent me on a mental journey though. Then I started, I Seriously, because I started wondering like, I wonder how often there is cocaine in the White House. Like I wonder how often various residents of the White House are, you know, doing various illicit drugs. And then it got me thinking about Joe Biden and how he could use a little bit of a pick me up and maybe it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. If he was actually partaking, maybe that would help him.

It was like president's house. So the national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, who had, I believe, like 24-hour security protection, including at his home, a drunk dude got into his house, passed the security agents that were outside, and basically nobody knew how that happened. And so I, again, like, listen, when you have issues like this, that if you shouldn't probably be able to bring cocaine into the White House, if the White House says you're not supposed to bring cocaine to the White House, right? That means they're failing at their own security protocols. And I don't think that's great, like all around, like, I don't really care about there being a small amount of cocaine in the White House. But if it's a pattern of, like, security failures, there's, like, a basic question of competence. I don't think anybody in the United States of America wants to see something happen to the NSA or to the president or to anybody in the White House.

And that's, like, bad, period. I mean, it's bad for the individual and the families involved, but it's also bad for the country. It makes us look like people who can't perform basic functions, which we increasingly know is true. And so if this is part of a pattern of security breaches on the part of Secret Service, that's pretty bad for Secret Service. Well, Secret Service has had a lot of scandals in recent years as well. I mean, I think that those points are fair because when this first was reported, they didn't know it was cocaine. You know, they're like, oh, a powdery white substance was found. And immediately you're like, oh, is this like anthrax? Like, right. Like what's going on here? So the fact that you, you know, can willy nilly like bring your drugs into the White House,

apparently seems like a somewhat of a security risk there. When they say they're trying to prevent you from doing it. Right. Yes, exactly. So I mean, I do like I just want to know the backstory. I do actually want to I don't want anybody to get in trouble, you know, I don't want them to be, like, thrown in prison for their infraction against our stupid drug laws. But I do want to know the backstory of how it ended up there. Like, whose was it? Why did they bring it? How did it get left behind? Did they notice it was missing? Did they know it was in their bag? You know what I mean? Like, was it intentional? I just, I do want to know the details. I find it very creatively interesting to imagine the sequence of events that led to this situation. Maybe it could be really basic, too, because I think, like, both Snoop Dogg and Tommy Chong and maybe Willie Nelson as well, I think this was under the Carter administration, said that they've smoked weed in the White House. Like, there are people, many people have said that they've smoked weed, a handful of people who say they've smoked weed in the White House.

So, obviously, there's a way for people to get illicit substances into the White House, especially if they're sort of privileged, if they're a very important person, a VIP. Yeah, they're not getting the full pat down or whatever. Maybe. And if that's the situation here, I also do think there will be a lot of people who have relatives locked up for, quote, small amounts of cocaine, who the Biden administration pays zero attention to, despite the fact that Hunter Biden himself has suffered with this and has not been prosecuted on different drug charges. The other reason that they might be laying the groundwork is that there's a real question

as to whether if it is Hunter Biden's, his settlement, his recent settlement gets upended because he has a drug offense or a recent drug offense. So there are legitimate reasons that you could have an anonymous law enforcement official who's speaking in the present tense and referring to us as like Secret Service, apparently implicitly in the Politico article, going out and talking to the press and saying these things that could be really shady and nefarious behavior on part of the White House. We don't know that. It could be the case. And I do think there are a whole lot of people that if this belongs to someone in the Biden family or one of their rich friends, people are going to want to know. And I just don't think we're going to get answers to it,

despite the fact that, give me a break. You found the cocaine in a very particular area. You have cameras focused on that area. You can look at the people who've gone past that area, taking stuff out of their bags, things falling out of their bags. I just think that entire excuse is nonsense. And it tells me that they know and that they're protecting something else. I just want everybody to get the forgiveness and forbearance that Hunter Biden has got with regard to his drug problems. That's it. Crystal, what have you got for us? Shortly after the Supreme Court issued their ruling striking down affirmative action in college admissions, a frequently viral liberal tweeter named Erica Marsh offered up this very eyebrow-raising analysis.

Quote, Today's Supreme Court decision is a direct attack on black people. No black person will be able to succeed in a merit-based system, which is exactly why affirmative action-based programs were needed. Today's decision is a travesty. No black person can succeed on merit? Yikes. Talk about the definition of the bigotry of low expectations. The tweet was almost perfectly calibrated to validate conservative arguments that liberals are the real

racists, looking at minorities as a faceless blob in need of charity to assuage their own white liberal guilt. And so naturally, the tweet took off. It was quote tweeted tens of thousands of times, viewed over 27 million times. Prominent Republicans, people like Matt Gaetz, stoked this fire. And for some group of people who saw the tweet, it undoubtedly served to harden in their minds beliefs about what liberals really think, who they really are. It came a minor building block in their little mental caricature of Democrats or liberals or the left that is constantly being chiseled out by partisan media and these sorts of viral social media posts. But in a plot twist that should surprise no one in our current era of kayfabe pretend politics, the account? Probably a fake. The Washington Post did a little investigation into this Erica Marsh

character and found that she does not appear to actually exist. The quote, proud Democrat in Washington, as she described herself on Twitter, doesn't show up in any local phone or voting records. The Biden presidential campaign where she said she worked as a field organizer has no record of her. Neither does the Obama foundation where she claimed to have volunteered. The photos that she used appeared to be digitally altered. She refused to respond to the post or provide any evidence of her existence as a real human being and not a character being crafted by God knows who with the goal of accomplishing God knows what. The account has since been suspended from Twitter, but in her

relatively short time there on that platform, less than two years, Erica had amassed a really large following by tweeting the most hilariously stereotypical liberal drivel that you can possibly imagine. One tweet proudly declared that she still wears two masks whenever I go out and support Ukraine. She also had a habit of copying verbatim viral tweets from other users to attention farm her own cloud. You get the idea. Now, we have no clue who's behind this account. The Washington Post floats some sort of foreign malign influence campaign, maybe. Other Twitter users have posited it could be a right-wing op to make Democrats look as dumb as possible.

It's also possible that Erica Marsh is a pseudonym adopted by a real person to share their actual views under a cloak of anonymity. We don't know. And in a certain sense, who really cares? Is sleuthing out the real identity

of some random lib Twitter account a worthwhile use of the journalistic resources of the Washington Post? Almost certainly not. And the instinct to hunt down the truth of Erica Marsh is almost certainly from the same reflex that led reporters to credulously believe that some bad Facebook memes from a Russian troll farm were determinative in electing Donald Trump. To me, the bigger puzzle, though, is what this one fake lib stereotype rage

bait account says about us, about our political dialogue. The weird ways it turns in on itself and becomes increasingly estranged from reality, but then also somehow leaks into that reality. After all, Erika Marsh is a fake person. But politicians and journalists who very much do exist engage with this fake person, genuinely crafting reality out of the fakery. The real question to me is, how much of what we're doing in politics at this point is the equivalent of having arguments with Erica Marsh? Fake debates with fake people or political ideologies crafted to respond to fake cartoon character ideological stereotypes that we have allowed propagandists and algorithms to build up in our own minds.

What exactly are we really doing here? I'm genuinely puzzled by it. When Biden ran in 2020, his campaign's best and most effective insight was that Twitter is not real life. They didn't respond to the reactionary online discourse of the day. They read the normie mood pretty well, did enough at least to scrape together enough votes to win the White House. Ron DeSantis, as we discussed earlier, polar opposite of that spectrum.

Hyper online, rolling out campaign videos that would be downright incomprehensible to the overwhelming majority of Americans who do not spend their days tilting at Erika Marshes. The politicians who are too online, too enmeshed in the fantasy world of the Erika Marsh type, they're hobbled when trying to win national elections, at least today. But it is a surefire way to attract clout. So yeah, Twitter is not real life. But some parts of Twitter escape into the wild, into real life, smuggled out by the politicians who build brands and chase clout in that world. And so we can't

just dismiss the Erica Marshes as inconsequential when politicians and their most devoted followers and thinking and speaking and legislating, they're all doing this as if this is all actually real. And the truth is we're easy prey. We're easy prey because we spend less time actually engaging in real life with people who are not ideologically aligned with us. We believe the caricatures because they don't have to bump up against reality very often, and because we've been persuaded to largely abandon politics as a real thing done in the real world with real people to achieve a real objective. In Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam tracks how we have receded from the active part of politics.

We treat it more like a spectator sport. And of course, spectator sports, a lot more exciting, with great villains to play great heels. Even the real people, though, on Twitter and on social media, we are also playing a part, responding to the rewards generated by algorithms and platform design in terms of service, treating ourselves on a daily basis to great moral conquests and pitched battles and getting a sense that we're really doing something, approaching civic duty, playing our part in the great story that is our democracy, or at least so we imagine. Meanwhile, the big decisions are being taken at the Fed or the Treasury or on Wall Street or in corporate boardrooms, where very real people take action to achieve very real goals, most often at our expense. In other news,

this July 4th was the hottest day in recorded human history. The ocean, hotter than ever. Scientists are warning that the Earth's vital signs are flashing code red. Wonder what Erica Marsh might have said about it. Emily, this one really, really got me thinking. All right, Emily, what are you looking at? Well, there's new research on marriage, and I guess people not getting married, that's probably the best way to put it. I want to start by actually a Washington Examiner article

by Brad Wilcox with the University of Virginia and the Institute for Family Studies on this new Pew research. We'll get to the Pew research in a second, but I first wanted to read the way Brad put it, because I think he adds really, really important framing, not just that the left misses, but also that the right misses and has missed for years and years and years. So Brad writes, a record high 25% of 40-year-olds in the United States were never married in 2021. According to sobering new statistics from

the Pew Research Center, that statistic, and this is really important, compares to just 6% of never married 40 year olds in 1980. So 25% now, 6% in 1980. Now Brad goes on to say, digging further into the Pew data reveals that this retreat from marriage and family has hit vulnerable populations and the hardest, including minorities, the working class, and poor Americans. The upper classes continue to marry, forge stable unions, and enjoy reasonably happy family life, while the lower classes drift into a world of relational chaos. So some folks might not agree that marriage is essential to happiness and stability, and we'll get to that in just a second. But first, let's zoom in on Brad's framing about who's being hit the hardest

by this decline in marriage, at least at the age of 40. So let's put Pew's data up on the screen. So this is as of 2021, according to a recent, a new Pew analysis of Census Bureau data. As of 2021, 25% of 40-year-olds in the U.S. had never been married, as Brad said, but that was just from 2010. You get a 5% increase. Now, look at these demographics. So black 40-year-olds were much more likely to have never married than Hispanic,

white, Asian, and Asian 40-year-olds. Education level, 40-year-olds without a four-year college degree were much more likely to have never married than those who had at least completed a bachelor's degree. One-third of those with a high school diploma or less had never married, compared with 26% of those with some college education and 18% of those with a bachelor's degree or more education. Now, the overall decrease in the share of 40-year-olds who have married is especially notable, Pew says, because the share of 40-year-olds who had completed at least a bachelor's degree was much higher. So there's more people in that position in 2021 than in 1980. That went from 18% to 39%. So that's huge. That's a bigger group

in a really powerful way. Pew does conclude their article on this new analysis with some note of caution. They say, we can't assume that if someone is not married by age 40, they never will. In fact, they continue about one in four 40-year-olds who had not married in 2001 had done so by age 60. If that pattern holds, a similar share of today's never married 40-year-olds will marry in the coming decades. That is a really big if. So while I appreciate Pew, especially the social scientists at Pew, putting that in there, it is a really, really, really big if because of where we see the trend lines going. That said, it's still, even if people are simply delaying marriage to 40 or later, that can come with serious complications for their life and less than ideal complications

for their life in ways that we're going to talk about right now, because that's what's really important. So education by social scientists is used as a really helpful proxy for class. And you can see that borne out in a whole lot of data. And so what we're really looking at here is exactly what Brad describes. Wealthy people who have taken to the pages of, and I did a little look yesterday at some recent articles where marriage has been disparaged as an institution, disparaged as outdated and not of much use anymore. Business Insider, The Atlantic, Teen Vogue, The New York Times, the people who are taking to the pages of those elite media outlets are actually getting married at higher rates and really always have been. My old boss Tim Carney over at the Washington Examiner wrote a great book called Alienated America, which is always behind me on the shelf here on the news set. He wrote about what he calls the Lena Dunham fallacy, which is just a wonderful turn of phrase, but he also defines it in a really important way as, quote, the tendency to attribute to decadent elites social phenomena really located among the working

class and the inclination to, quote, blame cultural shifts away from the traditional norms on highly educated, wealthy, white liberals. So, you know, we're typically people on the right, especially if you look at sort of the narrative and the language around like welfare queens, you say, oh, these welfare queens and welfare communities are destroying American culture, et cetera, et cetera. It's just a completely ridiculous argument because what you have actually are elites who are conditioning all of us over and over again with cultural messaging in media and elsewhere to say, oh, marriage, not really that important. But it is. And this is where, again, maybe some folks agree, but I think

it's really important to zoom in and realize that the bulk of research suggests that marriage and happiness actually are coordinated. They actually are. They go together. Marriage actually is a source of great happiness for people, even though people have been told for a really long time that you can find happiness outside marriage, etc., etc. That's true, but the research shows us that marriage is one of the best predictors of happiness and also one of the best predictors of stability for children being raised in a household with two married parents, especially upward mobility. People who grow up with less money but in a household with two married parents, especially upward mobility. People who grow up with less money but in a

household with two married parents are more likely to experience upward mobility and escape the cycle of poverty. And that's another essential element of all of this in the class framework that, again, the right misses and the left definitely misses. This is also from the Institute of Family Studies. Quote, the story is straightforward. They're obviously pro-marriage, but taking a look at the sort of research here, they say married respondents are much happier and consistent with prior research. Parents are a little less happy than non-parents provided they are unmarried. So parents are a little less happy than non-parents when they're unmarried. And again, like this is sometimes very logical. It's really, really hard to single parent. It's really hard to deal with the complications of, you know, that entire system and to deal with, you know, in so many cases, you know, the pain that women experience when they delay marriage to the point where, as Lyman Stone has demonstrated for IFS as well, they're not having as many kids as they say they want. It's one thing for women to have fewer kids and to say, you know, women are able to exercise choice and are making these decisions on their own,

and they're able to plan it thanks to technology and in ways that makes them happier, sure. But it's also a problem when you get to the point where women want to have more children than they're actually able to have, in some cases because, let's talk about it, student loans, something the right doesn't want to talk about about being saddled with tens of thousands of dollars Of debt in student loans by a system that lied to you and said this was your ticket to the middle class You graduate college with tens of thousands of dollars in debt. You're not able to buy a home. You don't feel stable And in some cases as polling suggests you're putting off marriage Specifically because you're saddled with a crazy amount of student loan debt.

All of these things are contributing to a place where, you know, if Pew is correct and this trend picks up, you know, people are marrying after 40 at a rate that's similar to in the 80s or even before that. We'll see. That's yet to be determined. But even that is barely a positive metric because you'll end up, again, worsening the cycle of women having fewer children than they want to and people experiencing a lot of really unhappy years unnecessarily so because of the cultural and social conditions that they were basically, like you said, these are the waters that we swim in, as Crystal used that phrase in an earlier segment.

This is not a culture, this is not a political system that incentivizes these things. It's not a political system or a culture that has created healthy conditions for any of it. And I think what's absolutely essential to realize is that this is a system being rigged by elites who are not themselves practicing what they preach to absolutely everyone else, which is marriage isn't all that important. It's not essential to happiness. You can find your happiness in work. That's a huge Sheryl Sandberg line. That's what you hear all the time from corporate executives. And you see that even in Jacobin had a review of a new Pixar movie this month that talked

about how Pixar often depicts people finding their happiness in work. They compared it to like a Rand novel, which I think is maybe a little bit far, but the point remains. This is a culture that talks excessively about finding your happiness in work and not in family life. And that is the pendulum swinging way too far back in the other direction.

And again, it is hurting the working class more than elites. And elites know that because they're not following the same patterns that they prescribe for everybody else. Crystal. Yes. This is frustrating from the right. The nation of Israel just completed a deadly assault on the Palestinian city of Jenin. Let's go ahead and put this up on the screen from Common Dreams. Their headline here, catastrophic Israeli forces unleash humanitarian disaster. And Jenin, let me read you a little bit of this.

They say thousands of people who live in that city in the occupied West Bank are reportedly fleeing the poverty-stricken refugee at least 10 Palestinians dead and scores more wounded that the refugee camps, quote, streets are all dug up and uprooted by bulldozers used by the Israeli forces. We're lucky to be joined by a great guest this morning who can help break down the situation and what we know at this point. Omar Shakir serves as the Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch. He investigates their human rights abuses in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. Welcome, Omar. Glad to have you. Thanks for having me. So just tell us what we know so far. Sure. So what we know is in this two-day military incursion into the Janina refugee

camp in the occupied West Bank, Israeli forces killed 12 Palestinians. Scores more were injured, including children. Children are among those killed. We know that more than 3,500 Palestinians were displaced from their homes in the refugee camp. We know that thousands more had their access to electricity and water cut. And we know that for long stretches, ambulances were blocked from entering the refugee camp to provide health services. Hospitals were struck by tear gas canisters. And this isn't some one-off event. Jenin has been for much of the last year and a half frequently targeted by the Israeli

army. In fact, we're seeing unprecedented numbers of Palestinians gunned down in the West Bank. And this is in year 57 of an occupation that's been going on for far too long. So I want to ask about the counterpoint here. This is from Lisa Daftari, who is obviously a very vigorous defender of Israel. Her publication reported that Israel revealed details about an underground terrorist route that was uncovered in a mosque. Lisa said the mainstream media only chimes in now to tell you about the so-called war crimes Israel has committed by going into Jenin. They leave out these small details. So the argument is that this is on the heels of a sort of broader assault on Israel and its retaliation, etc., etc.

What is your response to that line of argumentation? I'm sure you disagree with it, but what are people who claim there's validity to that line of argumentation? I'm sure you disagree with it, but what are people who claim there's validity to that getting wrong? Sure, I think part of it is like, we see this argument being used all the time in Gaza, for example, and it's been 17 years of continuous rounds of assaults and escalations, right?

The reality here is this is part of a methodical policy. Human rights organizations, including Israeli human rights organizations, including Israeli human rights organizations, Palestinian International have said that the Israeli government is committing the crime of apartheid against Palestinians. There is no security justification for Israel expropriating Palestinian land to build settlements. There is no security justification for giving building permits to build settlements, which are illegal, and denying them for Palestinians to add extensions to their home. There is no security justification for policies that deny residency rights for Palestinians to live with their Israeli

partner in Israel, but allow it to foreigners of any other nationality. Security is frequently invoked. It's often pretextual. And even when security is part of the consideration, and of course there have been Israelis who have been killed, the Israeli government goes so far beyond what international law authorizes, right? Actions that affect thousands of people,

that displace them, that they no more justify these actions than torture invoked in the name of security would justify those particular actions. Talk to us a little bit about this current Netanyahu government, which has been described, I think justifiably so, as the most far right, especially some of the coalition partners that are part of this government, the most far-right government in Israeli history. Do you see this action as in character different from some of the assaults that have gone on under previous administrations? So you're right to highlight the continuity of these policies. I mean, the difference is one of scale, not kind, right? So

I think this government has been very explicit. The founding text that created the coalition sets out that their primary objective is ensuring the exclusive, and that's in quotes, right of the Jewish people to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The problem is half that population who lives there are not Jewish, they're Palestinian.

And the government has been very explicit about expanding settlements, about demolishing Palestinian homes, about relaxing the use of force standards that make it more easy to kill Palestinians. They're not hiding it. They're saying that the current reality is the final solution. There is no sort of peace process. There is no plan. There's just a transparent policy to ensure the well-being of the Jewish people at the expense of Palestinians. And more and more people are calling this out as apartheid.

And that's sort of where the conversation is shifting. I think in the U.S., that conversation is not caught up with where it is in the rest of the world, but it's the transparent consensus within the human rights movement and by more and more voices from the former UN Secretary General to leading former Israeli government officials to governments like South Africa and Indonesia, governments across the world. So what's the immediate future look like for Janine on the heels of all of this? In the coming days, the coming weeks,

the coming months, what can observers expect to see out of the region? I'm afraid I don't have much optimistic to share with you because this situation is in some ways unprecedentedly bad. And the problem we have here is that when these cycles of violence take place, when war crimes and other abuses take place, when war crimes and other abuses take place, and by the way, not just by the Israeli government, sometimes these abuses are committed by Palestinian actors, there is systematically no accountability. So that fuels a cycle of impunity. So we see the same kinds of things happening again and again.

People forget that the Jin refugee camp 20 years ago was the site of an Israeli incursion that left scores of Palestinians killed. So until you actually address the lack of accountability and you deal with the root causes to this systemic violence, which include at its core Israel's apartheid against Palestinians, I'm afraid you're going to continue to see cycles of these violence take place. More raids, more killings, more limited collective punishment that amounts to less access to electricity, water, etc. The solution is to recognize the reality of systematic rights abuse and complicity in it and ensure accountability for those serious abuses. And Omar, finally, we tracked closely here huge protests across Israel, bringing together a lot of different groups in reaction to what was widely seen, and I think

justifiably so, as a sort of judicial takeover attempt from Netanyahu and his government. Do you see any signs of similar pushback against these types of deadly assaults? Is there widespread public support for these type of actions from the Israeli people? So look, there's a minority, but there is a contingent of Israelis that show up every week at these protests with signs that make the linkage between the judicial overhaul and the repression, apartheid occupation of Palestinians. There's still a minority. The majority protest movement has largely focused on the issue of the judiciary. But more and more people are drawing the connections that understand that what's happening in Israel is the inevitable result of decades of illegality

in the West Bank, of impunity. And many of these forces that have risen to power that are pushing the judicial overhaul actually come from the settler movement, actually want to import these values there. So some linkages are being drawn. It's not enough. And I think it's quite important that we continue to make the connection, you know, between these issues. Because ultimately, yes, the judiciary has been a rubber stamp on many of the abusive policies of the occupation, you know, but at the same time, obviously, removing even that limited check, you know, could make the situation dramatically worse. And always Palestinians receive, you know, could make the situation dramatically worse. And always Palestinians receive, you know, the brunt end of those kinds of changes. Omar, thank you so much for taking the time to join us and break down this

complicated and very tense situation. Thank you. Thank you. All right, guys, thank you so much for watching. Emily, thank you for filling in for Sagar. You did a fantastic job. It was a lot of fun. Thanks for having me. It's always a pleasure. And as a viewer of Breaking Points, I'm honestly really excited to have Sagar back. Sagar will be back, we think, at least on Monday. He'll be a married man. And we should have a normal week of shows next week with all the, you know, normal hosts in the normal places, et cetera, et cetera, as far as I know. Even Ryan. Yes. Ryan is allegedly

going to be back as well. Drag him back from Vermont. Thank you guys so much again for making all of this possible. If you are not a premium subscriber, we would love your support there. That is what enables the set and the show and all of the things we're trying to do for 2024. BreakingPoints.com.

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