Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 7/12/23: Trump, Dems Trash Cluster Bombs To Ukraine, Tuberville On White Nationalism, Zelensky Fumes At NATO, Hunter Biden Star Witness Indicted, Tucker Andrew Tate, Oppenheimer Barbie History, Congress Covid Origins Hearing, Sierra Leone Elections

Episode Date: July 12, 2023

Ryan and Emily discuss bipartisan pushback to Cluster bombs to Ukraine, Zelensky fuming over NATO's conditions on entrance, Senator Tuberville stumped by CNN host on white nationalist question, Hunter Biden star witness indicted, judge approves Microsoft-Activision merger, Tucker Carlson interviews Andrew Tate, Emily looks at the real history of Oppenheimer and Barbie, Ryan looks into Congress holding Covid Origins hearing, and we're joined by Chernoh Bah a journalist from Sierra Leone to talk about their recent elections.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.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Hey, guys. Ready or not, 2024 is here, and we here at Breaking Points are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that. Let's get to the show. Good morning. Welcome to CounterPoints. How are you doing, Emily? He's so excited to be back. I'm so excited to have him back.

And Ryan's back, which means the giant Lennon book is back, too. Just haunting every shot of CounterPoints. But really, it's great to have you back. And you were in Vermont. I was in Vermont, which is now underwater. Right. It's actually brutal conditions. People can search. They can't search threads yet, but they can search Twitter or search online or reach out to anybody in Vermont. Brutal conditions.

It's being compared to the flooding after Hurricane Irene in 2011 in Montpelier, the state capital, underwater, just devastation, like top to bottom, but really hitting the center and the south of the state. Just a couple of days or a couple of months of rain in the matter of hours. But what's scary is how fast it can happen. Right. Because it was already saturated, and then you had basically a day of super heavy rain in upstate New York and Vermont. And the next thing you know, the streets are turned into creeks. Yeah. Well, we'll be following that situation. We'll perhaps even be covering that situation in the days ahead. We're going to start by talking about the NATO summit, which has been going on for days now and some interesting developments just yesterday.

Then Ryan called this Tommy Tuberville story to my attention. So we'll be talking a little bit about him in a back and forth about white nationalism. He's also in a back and forth with the Marines over military confirmations and abortions. So we'll try to break down that story. What else we got today, Ryan? We've got the Hunter Biden informant, which is an incredibly weird story. It's such a great story because the guy who was saying that he's a whistleblower that has evidence against Hunter Biden found out to be a Chinese spy, which actually might buttress his credibility. I'm not sure that this is going't be a credible source about the whistleblowing he's doing on Chinese influence on Hunter Biden because he's a Chinese spy.

No, I think actually not good for him. No. Because now he's, as he says, he might be on the run for the rest of his life, but it's actually probably good for his case. We'll get into that. And then we have the Activision, if you see Call of Duty on the bottom of our prompter there.

The Activision-Microsoft merger has been challenged by the FTC. A Biden-appointed judge is allowing it to go through. They're going to appeal. We're going to talk about that and what it means for not just the world of video games and Call of Duty, but what it means for antitrust policy and also for union density in that sector, because there was just a big union win, all Sega workers becoming CWA workers, big CWA election that we'll talk about. Yes, there's a lot going on there. It's not going to be Ryan and me playing Call of Duty, but hopefully it'll be better. Andrew Tate sat for

a two plus hour interview with Tucker Carlson. We're going to be breaking down some of the highlights on that. I'm going to be talking about the meme of the summer, Barbie Oppenheimer. And in a way that I'm actually curious to get your reaction to, you're going to be talking about the COVID hearing lowlights. And then Cherno Ba will be on the show once again. Yeah, if you guys remember Cherno Ba, he was the Sierra Leonean reporter who wrote a book on the Ebola outbreak. He is going to talk, he's going to update us both on what he thought of the hearing yesterday, which had a mention of Sierra Leone and Ebola, and also the deep

irregularities going on in the Sierra Leonean election. We had promised we'd have him on after that election and make him good. Yeah, we're looking forward to that. Let's start, though, with the NATO summit and developments out of Ukraine. You can go ahead and put the first element up on the screen. This is quite interesting. I'm reading from NBC News here. Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday condemned President Joe Biden's decision to send cluster munitions as part of a new U.S. aid package to Ukraine, warning that it could lead to World War III. This is the Trump quote you see up there. Joe Biden should not be dragging us further toward World War III by sending cluster munitions to Ukraine. He should be trying to end, all caps, the war and stop the horrific death and destruction

being caused by an incompetent administration. Now, Biden's argument, of course, is that cluster munitions are going to be what does ultimately stop the war, that if you don't use cluster munitions, it's not going to give Ukraine the so-called sort of fighting chance that it needs right now in the middle of this offensive. And this is Biden's quote. He said, the Ukrainians are running out of ammunition. He told Farid Zakaria this earlier this week. This is a war relating to munitions, and they are running out of that ammunition, and we are low on it. So Trump says, responds more directly to that point, it certainly means we should not be sending Ukraine our last stockpiles at a time when our own arsenals, according to crooked Joe Biden, are so perilously diminished.

Trump also criticized Biden for potentially revealing confidential or classified information when he said that we are low on munitions and that Ukrainians are running out of ammunitions. Quite an interesting little back and forth as Sweden and Finland have joined NATO. Zelensky is in a back and forth with everyone seemingly right now with NATO. He said just yesterday that the United States and NATO allies are projecting weakness by not having a stronger approach to Ukraine joining NATO during the war as NATO signals that it's not wise to join in the middle of the war. It doesn't seem like Trump is necessarily divulging classified information because you can learn that.

Yeah. No. Oh, Biden releasing classified information. But either way, if anybody said that we're low on ammunition, you could get that just by watching this show or by reading the newspaper. Like it's also you can just get it by extrapolation. Like it's rather clear. And you're having people on background make the argument that one of the reasons they need these cluster munitions because they're running out of their regular munitions.

But the gnarlier argument, the more disgusting argument that you're hearing being made is that, look, Ukraine is already desiccated anyway. But all of this land is already covered with landmines that the Russians have used cluster munitions that are going to sit there and blow up kids for decades to come So what's a few hundred thousand extra cluster munitions tossed around the breadbasket? That's really the argument that it's being made and if I would just say to people That if you're making that argument like if you're working that through in your head Stop to think where you are. Mm-hmm that and and step back a, that if something's so bad that therefore your argument is we got to make, it's okay to make it worse. You've taken a wrong turn somewhere probably.

What will be interesting to watch is whether or not Trump jumping on this blunts the bipartisan momentum that was building against sending cluster munitions over to Ukraine. Just at the end of last week, Sarah Jacobs, a representative from California, and Ilhan Omar introduced an amendment to the NDAA to say there will be no cluster munitions transfers anywhere, not just Ukraine, but anywhere. You had 19 Democrats that on Friday, you know, sent a letter to the administration making basically the same point. In order to get onto the floor, they need Republican support. And so that started to come first in the form of Representative Matt Gaetz.

Let's roll Gaetz here. Democrat Congresswoman Sarah Jacobs, who we've criticized a great deal on this show for some of her views. She's probably criticized me a great deal for some of mine. But she has introduced an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that reads, notwithstanding any other provision of law, no military assistance shall be furnished for cluster munitions. No defense export license for cluster munitions may be issued, and no cluster munitions or cluster munitions technology shall be sold or transferred. And what I'm here to tell you

is that I'm going to be the Republican co-sponsor of the Jacobs Amendment before the House Rules Committee. We have an opportunity with bipartisanship to stand against the warmongering Bidens. And these cluster bombs will not end the war in Ukraine. Let's look at the countries where cluster bombs have been used. Laos, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria.

Cluster bombs are features of the world's bloodiest and most inhumane wars. Some of the longest. It's hardly the cornerstone of a path to peace. One side note on journalism today. So I was working Monday all day on reporting out this story. And I'm hearing from Capitol Hill sources, Matt Gaetz might be willing to co-sponsor this. And so I'm looking for extra sources, going to try to report this out. And then somebody's like, I think he's saying it on his podcast right now. What do you mean his podcast? What kind of world is this? What am I even here for?

Yeah, just go away. Yeah, my role here is done. He's just going to grab his mic and just break the news right there on his little podcast. I was still able to sort of break the news. I'm like, I went and found his podcast and quoted his podcast. But it's different than, you know, when reporters are in the hallway talking to people and getting news. It's just it's I don't know, man. What are we even doing anymore? This is the best news ever for people on Capitol Hill, like members watching this. They're like, Ryan Grimm gives up on journalism.

I can't anymore with this. But so so with Gates supporting Jacobs Amendment, that means that it has a better chance of getting through the Rules Committee, but it also needs Democrats on the Rules Committee. Good news for opponents here is that Jim McGovern is the ranking Democrat on the Rules Committee. We talked about him recently, and he was going a little bit wobbly on some sanctions positions, but here he came through for them. Let's roll McGovern. Either of you have an opinion of whether or not the House should be able to debate the issue of cluster munitions or not, but if you have an opinion, I'd love to hear it. I'm with me. I'm with me, too.

Then I hope it's made in order, and we'll be able to have that debate and that vote. Oh, no, I do have a role as a reporter here. I can tell you that the people on the other side of the camera there were Mike Rogers and Adam Smith, who are the top Republican and top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee. And so for McGovern to get them on record saying, you know what, we're fine with having this vote means that that it has a better shot of being quote, quote, ruled in order. They adjourned after about 11 o'clock last night, and they're going to allow all of the uncontroversial amendments to go through on an uncontroversial vote. And then for the rest of the week, they're going to hash out these controversial amendments. So it's unlikely that you're going to have a majority in the House that's going to be able to block the munitions transfer. And also it would be difficult to get the two-thirds you would need to override a Biden veto. But it is, I think, the biggest concentration of kind of opposition to any kind of Ukraine

arming policy that has that has threatened to develop since the beginning of the war. Yeah. And we can go ahead and put the next element up. This is Jen Psaki responding to questions, obviously, a long time ago, because Jen Psaki's been gone for a long time. This was about a year ago. Yeah. Yeah. Probably a little bit more than a year ago, I would guess. Like maybe spring. Early 2022. Yeah, early 2022. Take a look. Violence will be tolerated against civilians in this manner that's illegal and potentially a war crime.

It would be. I don't have any confirmation of that. We have seen the reports. If that were true, it would potentially be a war crime. Obviously, there are a range of international fora that would assess that. So certainly we would look to that to be a part of that conversation. It's Jen Psaki being asked about, and at the beginning the question wasn't there, but that's her being asked about Russia's use of cluster munitions in war. Potential war crime.

February 28th, 2022. February 28th, 2022. February 28th. And so will they still be looking to the range of criteria that she referenced just there to determine whether or not there was, to determine whether or not there's a war crime should this go ahead? And the funny thing about this is that there is a convention against cluster munitions that was signed in 1997. More than 100 countries have endorsed it. But I guess it doesn't count as the international rules-based order because we didn't sign on to it. China has not signed on to it. Russia has not signed on to it. Turkey has not signed on to it. Ironically, Turkey, playing every side in this war, has been sending cluster munitions to Ukraine,

so they have some of these already. So those countries have not signed on to the treaty, which makes it international in the sense that more than 100 countries have tried to ban cluster munitions because if people don't quite understand how they work, they launch exploding clusters and then hundreds and thousands of them in small numbers spread across the field. And the ones we're talking about sending have like a 6% dud rate, which means that with the numbers that we're talking about sending, there could be about 400,000 unexploded munitions in the ground, just as a result of what we send, not counting what Turkey sent to Ukraine or what Russia is firing. Well, and Turkey is a great transition here back to the NATO summit because Erdogan had quite a showing at the NATO summit, cleared the way basically for Sweden to join NATO, had a very friendly relationship with Biden on display over the course of the NATO summit. And that has been, the NATO summit over the last few days, I think it's obviously no coincidence that this conversation is transpiring at the same time because

there are new commitments. So this is Germany, France, Norway at the NATO summit announced new military aid to Ukraine. We can put the New York Times element up here. They promised tanks and longer range missiles. They so that I mean, that's obviously a pretty big deal just from their point of view. NATO put out a statement saying that, quote, Ukraine's future is in NATO. And, you know, this is just an attempt as a show of force to say, but without opening the way for Ukraine to be in NATO, as you see here on the screen, quote, conditions are met. When conditions are met, that's when Ukraine gets its membership. This is not good enough for Zelensky. But at the same time, NATO over the last few days has been making a very big deal to show solidarity and their alliance with Ukraine, stopping short of

what Zelensky wants, which prompted him to kind of lash out. Yeah, we can put his lashing out here. He posted on Twitter on the way to the thing, the next element here. And he says, basically, we're still going to go to the NATO summit. But then he says, but Ukraine also deserves respect. He says, now on the way to Vilnius, we received signals that certain wording is being discussed without Ukraine. And I would like to emphasize that this wording is about the invitation to become NATO member, not about Ukraine's membership. It's unprecedented and absurd when time frame is not set, neither for the invitation nor for Ukraine's membership, while at the same time, vague wording about conditions is added even for inviting Ukraine. It seems there is no readiness neither to invite Ukraine to NATO nor to make it a member of the

alliance. This means that a window of opportunity is being left to bargain Ukraine's membership in NATO in negotiations with Russia. And for Russia, this means motivation to continue its terror. Uncertainty is weakness. And I will openly discuss this at the summit. So Zelensky livid that there are conditions being put on even an invitation into NATO. But the problem here is that if you're in an active war with Russia and you become a NATO member, instantly all of NATO is at war with Russia. Right. And Zelensky has to understand that. Absolutely, he understands that. But he, like, again, this is one of the things, criticizing Zelensky, I think we criticize Zelensky rightfully here a lot. The man, you know, whether or not we can criticize him from

the Western perspective is mired in war. And so from his perspective, it makes sense that you would push for Ukraine to have NATO membership, although I would argue it doesn't really make that much sense because it's basically inviting even more death and destruction to Ukraine and to the entire region. So, you know, and especially, I think, the amount of support that he's gotten, not just from NATO, but particularly from the United States. Let's roll this clip of actually Antony Blinken, who was on the Sunday shows, made his rounds on the Sunday shows this weekend, and had some comments about this too. Well, it sends two messages. First of all, our alliance is stronger. It's bigger with two new members, Finland and now Sweden. And it's more united than ever. And in terms of Russia's

aggression against Ukraine, it's sending a very ever. And in terms of Russia's aggression against Ukraine, it's sending a very strong message to Putin that he's not going to outlast us. He's not going to outlast Ukraine. And the sooner he ends this war of aggression, the better. Okay, so I was wrong. That wasn't the Sunday shows. That was CBS this morning after the new members were admitted. Yeah, fake news. Sorry, I was thinking Biden was on Farid Zakaria on Sunday. But Blinken there saying he's trying to do exactly that. He's trying to say, you know, we're sending a strong message against Putin, but Zelensky's version of a strong message against Putin is Ukraine admission into NATO, full stop.

And I have sympathy here for Zelensky in this sense that, and we reported on this recently on the show, that if you go back to the March 22 negotiations that were going on in Turkey between Russia, Ukraine, and being brokered by Erdogan, the basic outlines that we understand now were Russia would claim territory that it had had prior to February 21st. So that includes a little bit of Donbass and Crimea. And in exchange, Ukraine would be allowed to have security guarantees from the West that would kind of lock in that status quo. But the West said, no, we're not giving you those security guarantees. And so without those, we want you to continue to fight and drain Russian power. Because the Western powers, according to this reporting,

liked the way that this was going for Russia, which was not as well as Russia had hoped. You know, this 72 hours, Kiev had not fallen, et cetera. And so this question of security guarantees, had it been answered in March 2022, may have ended the war at that point. And so I can see why this much further into the war after this much pain, misery, trauma, and bloodshed, that Zelensky would be throwing his hands up. What are we going to do here? When is this going

to end? When are you going to get off the pot? Right. Yeah. No, I think that's exactly exactly the way to look at it, because and again, that doesn't mean that Zelensky is completely correct on a strategic level to say X, Y and Z is best for us. But it does mean that that sort of line that they're trying to tell would be frustrating from his perspective. And also, I think it's abundantly clear at this point. You know, there were a lot of arguments made a year into the war, six months into the war that Biden was, you know, from a bipartisan perspective, you know, he was, he was doing all right. That is absurd to make that argument anymore. I think that becomes more clear every single day. All right. So we got some bizarre Tommy Tuberville news. This guy, good lord. So I have a clip that

I want to help that I think helps frame this conversation that we can get into in a second. But can you set up the fight that he's currently having with the military? Because I think that that is also some type of playing into this somehow. Yes. So Tommy Tuberville has establishment Republicans extremely upset. He has the Biden administration extremely upset because he's been blocking senior military promotions that are confirmed in the Senate over the Pentagon's abortion policy, which is they will pay for their employees to travel for abortions. And so Tuberville has for a very long time said, we are blocking these promotions. I'm not gonna allow them to go through as the Senate works.

You can have one person sort of gumming up the works like that. And his argument is that the Biden administration could drop this policy. They don't have to be funding abortion travel. So if they are clinging to this idea that they're going to be paying for abortion travel at the Department of Defense with taxpayer money, why are you blaming me? Why are you not blaming the Biden administration? And the head of the Marines was forced into retirement this week. I saw forced into retirement. I don't know what the circumstances are between going into, I think it had something to do with like, it was nothing like super interesting or nefarious, but retired this week and they needed to appoint someone to that position. And so that's

where this is all coming to a head this week because people are really frustrated that they can't name a new head of the Marines while Tuberville continues to block this. He says, it's not me, it's the Biden administration. Conservative movement is rallying behind Tuberville. Mitch McConnell, John Thune are not. They are really, really upset about it. And again, this is all coming to a head. And now that sets up the Tuberville CNN drama. And to me, it seems like if Tuberville or any other senator wants to unilaterally kind of set policy, that kind of intricate policy for the military, they should run for president and become commander in chief. To me, it's like, come on,

get out of here. This is not how we run a military. But anyway, so to the white nationalism question that he has now gotten himself tangled up in, I wanted to play one clip of him. This is from October of 2022. This is at a Trump rally, which I think puts into context some of the comments that he made recently. Democratic Party, they have a majority. They could stop this crime today. Some people say, well, they're soft on crime. No, they're not soft on crime. They're pro-crime. They want crime. They want crime because they want to take over what you got. They want to control what you have. They want reparation because they think the people

that do the crime are owed that. They are not owed that. All right. So listen to that as context for a recent conversation he had on a podcast where he said, some people call them white nationalists, I call them Americans. So he then goes on CNN, where Caitlin Collins presses him, you said this pretty crazy thing. Can you please kind of elaborate? What did you mean by this? And here he is on CNN. That's not identity politics. You said a white nationalist is an American. It is identity politics. You said a white nationalist is an American, but a white nationalist is someone who believes horrific things. Do you really think that's someone who should be serving in the military? Well, that's just a name that has been given.

I mean, listen. It's not. It's a real definition. There's real concerns about extremism. So if you're going to do away with most white people in this country out of the military, we got huge problems. We got huge problems. It's not people who are white. It's white nationalists. That have a few probably different beliefs. You see the distinction, right? That have different beliefs. Now, if racism is one of those beliefs, I'm totally against it. I am totally against racism. But there's a lot of people that believe in different things. Is racist, Senator? Well, that's your opinion. That's your opinion. But if it's racism, if it's racism, I'm totally against it. I am totally against any type of race or any type of racism. I don't care what it's in.

So he's okay with white nationalism as long as it doesn't involve racism. It's so bad. It's so bad. So bad Mitch McConnell got pressed on it at the sticks yesterday on Capitol here. Here's Mitch McConnell grappling with this question. Do you have any concerns that you have a member of your conference, Senator Tuberville, who seems to have a hard time denouncing white nationalism, especially as it pertains to white nationalism in the military?

White supremacy is simply unacceptable in the military and in our whole country. Get him, Mitch. Yeah. And so I saw Eric Erickson saying, you know, Tommy Tuberville is the hero we need, talking about his fight with the military right now. So how is this just horrifying moment of racism from Tuberville colliding and coinciding with this kind of stand he's taking with the evangelical movement to support their kind of

preferred abortion policy in the military? Is it causing consternation that, oh boy, like in order to, or are these things mingling together? What's going on on the right as people have to grapple with this guy's refusal to say, to just denounce white nationalism? I think it's an attempt, and I would imagine coordinated on Capitol Hill, to undercut his credibility. And if you can undercut his sort of moral credibility, then do you have the conservative movement?

Like maybe somebody leaked that podcast? Someone, yeah, I wouldn't be surprised by that. Which then brought him on to CNN, and then he refused to just put it out by, yeah, I wouldn't be surprised by that. Which then brought him onto CNN, and then he refused to just put it out by, say, apologizing. Yeah, and Mitch McConnell and John Thune have, or McConnell at least, you've seen that there, have taken the opportunity to jump in. But I would say this is actually kind of interesting. Some people might think this is a charitable read on Tuberville, but I think it is not charitable. I think it's the least charitable read on him. I genuinely think that he is trying to push back on this definition inflation in a way that this is not defensible. And that's my point. He like

genuinely doesn't understand that white nationalism is inherently racist. He actually thinks that it's just a label Democrats are throwing around because, let's be real, that does happen. There are labels that are thrown around ridiculously willy-nilly in a way that cheapens it, but he genuinely seems to not understand what white nationalism is. And I think, obviously, for any Republican senator right now, you should have a pretty clear understanding that white nationalism is absolutely racist. And I honestly, I think that's what explains this bizarre clip of him saying, listen, if it's racism, I denounce that. Racism is terrible. He's aggressively denouncing racism

and then shrugging out white nationalism. I think he is genuinely confused. And I think that's fairly shameful. It is. It is interesting that if you get down into the fever swamps of the white nationalism and white supremacy world, you will find all sorts of people who self-identify as white nationalists who say that they are not racist because they are not white supremacists. Right. Exactly. And they will point and they will say, actually, we think Asians are, like, they literally,

like, this is a very common, you'll vouch for me that I'm right. Yeah, no, he's right. This is like a common thing. I'll say, well, on the right, so much as like super fringe, like racist favors. Right, whatever,

whatever you would want to call that. And so I actually thought it was interesting. I'm curious if McConnell was doing some weird code switching there when he was asked about white nationalism and answered about white supremacy, right? I guess he whistling to people to say that I I know the difference and I'm willing to denounce white supremacy Yeah, but not white nationalism there like as somebody and like did you notice that code switch to yeah? I did and I think it's exactly what Caitlyn is getting at with Tuberville.

And he comes out and again, it's this weird thing where he's saying, if it's racist, no, it's bad. And this is, again, this is not a charitable defense of him because I think it's shameful that a Republican senator or any senator would be confused on that level about white nationalism. I just think it's insane. Ryan, though, you're correct. White nationalists will say we're not racists, we're separatists, essentially. We believe that homogenous, sort of like ethnically, in ethnic homogeneity,

it's always, I would argue, it's always pretty racist. It is baked into the cake of white nationalism. I think it also exposes how victimized that element of our politics is becoming. Because what they'll often say is that, well, what about black nationalism? Right. You often hear that from them. That's, if we are racist, isn't that racist? Yes. Well, black nationalism arises from hundreds of years of oppression and a way to try to reclaim an identity

into the melting pot of the United States. When it is predicated on going into the melting pot as opposed to like separatism. Yes, I agree. Right. And it's right. But otherwise it could just be separatism. Right. Yeah. And so that means that these folks are claiming the same amount of oppression. And I think in their hearts. Oh, yeah. Like they feel it. They look around and feel that amount of oppression. And the rest of the world is like, you guys have lost your mind. Yeah. You're not the oppressed class here. What is like your what is like? How did you get to a place? Where you can justify that feeling? Despite like all of the abundance that is like, you know within within your reach but

So I I think you're right. That's and I don't think Tommy Tuberville is equipped to kind of discuss it. He then did the incredible version of some of my best friends are black. He was asked if he's racist and he said, I used to be a football coach and I dealt with more minorities. It's like dealt with? Like the contempt is seeping through when you say dealt with. You deal with it. Like, deal with? And in one of the interviews, he caught himself after he said dealt with. Oh, he did.

And rephrase it to had the privilege to be around. Because he could hear, like, what had subconsciously, you know, crept into the conscious. Had how it sounded to people. Deal with. I agree that he's just fundamentally not equipped to have that conversation at all. But, you know. Maybe he is, and we're hearing his real thoughts,

his real feelings. If you say that you're denouncing racism and you don't seem to be convinced that white nationalism is racism, but not even with the like potential nuance of a white nationalist who claims that they're also not a racist that you just described. He said, hey, I'm a white nationalist and blah, blah, blah. It's like, okay, well, that's terrible and awful. Yeah. But you're at least saying that he's, he's, I don't even say.

The last thing I want to say is just, it is a very serious problem on the left of inflating the definitions of terms like racism and white nationalism. And that is not an excuse for Tommy Tuberville here. But it is a point about how sometimes it has allowed people to get confused like this. And sincerely, again, I think it is shameful for a United States senator, if he is confused and not genuinely trying to do code switching or whatever, then I think it's shameful either way. But I do think that it has caused a lot of confusion in the country. I think it has been because it is sometimes so objectionable where you have decent people who are being smeared as white nationalists simply because they're conservative. That allows more of this to happen. And I do think it's a really serious problem.

I don't think that's an excuse for Tuberville. And I think a parallel to that, if the left ones help understanding, would be the way that some reflexively pro-Israel forces have weaponized anti-Semitism to the point where they're going to the UN and trying to redefine anti-Semitism as criticism of Israel. Like not even doing it in like a kind of just subtle way anymore, but just saying like, no, this, we are literally redefining it. That if you criticize Israel, that you are anti-Semitic. And so as a result, people on the left have started to take anti-Semitism less seriously than they ought to.

Agree completely. And you'll see people dipping into genuine anti-Semitism because they feel like that there is no anti-Semitism anymore because it's been so kind of destroyed as a concept by people who've cynically weaponized it when it's like, no, you gotta be, no, it's still a real live malign force in the world. And there are people who can, who criticize the definition of inflation on behalf of the left

from the right and do exactly what you're talking about when it comes to Israel. Yes, they do. Yeah. Let's move on to Hunter Biden. I want to start by reading from the Daily Beast here. We can put the tear sheet up on the screen because I actually think to the point we mentioned as we were opening the show, this framing is really amusing. So the Daily Beast writes, the quote, missing witness long touted by Republicans in Congress as the missing link to their probe into alleged Biden family corruption was accused Monday of being an unregistered foreign agent for China an international arms trafficker, while violating U.S. sanctions on Iran and lying to investigators, among a laundry list of other federal charges. This is about

Gal Luft. It's a name you may have heard, who, and this is a continuation of the Daily Beast article, quote, had already skipped out on his bail while in Cyprus, awaiting extradition to the U.S. for a separate case in March. So he alleges that the sprawling case against him represents political persecution and retaliation by the Biden administration against a potential witness. So these charges against Luft, he's accused of this 2016 plan to quote, recruit and pay a White House advisor to support pro-China stuff without registering under Farah. I mean, this is just extremely convoluted. There's a million different countries that are in the mix, UAE, Kenya, Libya, China. He's in Cyprus right now. But I do think the tone

of the Daily Beast article that is sort of smug as though this is a real L for Republicans when in fact, actually, what we're learning more and more, like this guy, Gal Luft, was working with the former CIA director, James Woolsey. He was basically the head of Woolsey's think tank after he left the CIA. This is not some crazy person. I mean, he may be crazy, but he's not some fringe internet weirdo. He was working for the former CIA director and is now making these claims. Other way around, it seems like the former CIA director was working for him. Yeah, that's an allegation of the plan.

So federal prosecutors, I'm reading from the Washington Free Beacon now, they say that CEFC, China Energy, so this is a Hunter Biden connection. Hunter Biden was working with CEFC. They funded a scheme to, quote, recruit former CIA director James Woolsey. This is where Luft comes in. He was the co-director of Woolsey's think tank. And again, when you put all of that in perspective, not such an L for Republicans yet, because to the point you were making earlier in the show, it's really not tanking the credibility of Luft that he's being alleged to be compromised by foreign interests. And the irony here is that what we're talking about is basically, I think,

something that everybody stipulates across the board, which is that Hunter Biden absolutely traded on his name in order to cash in with foreign governments. There still remains questions about whether or not Joe Biden knew anything about it, met with anybody, did anything that was furthering of this kind of business enterprise that was going on. And this is 2017, so this is when Biden is out of office. But CEFC is the company where the big guy quote comes from, like 10% for the big guy that everybody loves. And so the fact that Luft was involved with CEFC puts him at the center of all of this. Exactly.

Rather than kind of undermining his credibility. The irony that Hunter defenders would say, well, this guy's now discredited because he's been indicted as a Chinese spy for working with CFC. They missed the fact that, well, okay, Hunter Biden was also working with CFC. Yeah. As part of its influence operation. Yeah. So why wouldn't Hunter Biden be indicted for failing to register? Because this is paperwork stuff but like this is paperwork that

matters like if you're representing a foreign government when you're writing in the washington post or uh you're sending out emails to reporters or your whole or you're hosting events uh we we want to know uh like now uh these think tanks come in um and this and this could become interesting if it ever went to trial. It sounds like this guy is going to have to be brought in by Jack Ryan or something out there. So there may never be a trial. But funding think tanks to get around Farah is foreign influence 101, which is – and then there's a constant push and pull around disclosure versus, versus, you know, opacity there, where with the think tanks constantly kind of muddying things and trying to not, you know, say when they testify, you know, whether or not their think tank gets any funding and on and on. So to me, the fact that this guy is indicted for being involved with CEFC,

the company at the center of this, actually makes me a lot more interested in what he has to say. Final point, he says in a statement that he released that he voluntarily reached out to the FBI in 2019 to warn the FBI that there was this influence operation that involved a presidential candidate, Joe Biden. And he says that after that, that's when they started coming after him. The FBI says that he made false statements at the time, said he was not involved in arms trafficking, etc., which I'm ready to believe that. Okay. You're sitting down with FBI agents in a cafe in Brussels, and they ask if you're an arms trafficker, and you actually are, and you're also a spy. And in this nefarious world of brokering all of these different arms. The chance that he lied about that, high. So here's where...

But does that mean that, like, he's not an interesting source on this? No. No, I mean, he's a hugely interesting source because, as you say, this really puts him at the center of all of this. Prosecutors are also saying that... So Patrick Hull, that's a name that some people may have heard. He's, you know, infamously, when he was arrested by the FBI, his first call was to James Biden. James Biden tells the New York Times he thought that Ho was, it seemed that Ho was trying to contact Hunter because Hunter agreed to represent

Ho, like actually signed an agreement with him. Who's this guy, Patrick Ho? Ho was involved with CEFC. I'm halfway down the rabbit hole, but I'm not all the way there. Well, and that's the thing is like, it's not even a rabbit hole in that this is all conspiratorial. It's just so convoluted and intentionally. That's how this stuff works. Yeah. Like these lobbying agreements and legal agreements are intentionally super convoluted. But Ho also asked Gal Luft to recruit Woolsey so that Woolsey would write, according to prosecutors, articles for Chinese state media promoting Belt and Road. And that's where- But she did, right? Yeah, CEFC ended up paying Woolsey $6,000 a month, according to the indictment. So Woolsey, Luft, and the Bidens are looking really bad in all of this. And the more we learn about Gal Luft, the more we're going to

learn about both the Woolsey influence here and the Biden influence here. And none of it is good, but you can see, I think, sadly, the media taking the bait from the White House and just being like super smug about Luft getting stuck in Cyprus. And I don't know whether his allegations that he's under political, he's being blocked for political reasons, that he's being kept overseas for political reasons. I don't know if those are true. They sound at this point plausible given the extent of what he knows. But maybe he actually did genuinely engage in wrongdoing and they're suddenly super eager to crack down on everyone involved in Farah, you know, violations, et cetera, et cetera. The way that he could have gotten caught doing this with absent a kind of I'm a whistleblower

being persecuted claim would be that the China desk over at the CIA all of a sudden starts seeing Woolsey writing op-eds about Belt and Road. It's like, what on earth is going on here? Anybody who sees that happening knows that Woolsey is not sitting at home in retirement just pondering the beauty of the Belt and Road initiative. And it's like, what friends do I have over in China that would run my freelance pieces celebrating this stuff? So as soon as you see that in print, you're like, okay, this is an operation. Who's paying for it? $6,000 a month.

Right. And so, which is also peanuts. Yeah, although they're just slapping his byline. In this elite world. That's true. Right. That's actually a good point. Woolsey, come on, man.

$6,000. You're worth more. Lean in. $6,000. And so, you know, the CIA is always looking to roll up these foreign intelligence operations. So they see that. Then they're like, okay, let's figure out who's Woolsey working for. It's like, oh, it's this think tank.

Who runs this think tank? Oh, it's this guy. Who's this guy in communication with? And so I think you could get yourself busted that way. Absent everything else. But like I said, it doesn't actually bear on whether or not there's some credibility around the Hunter allegations, other than maybe actually making them more credible. I was going to say, it actually increases their credibility. It does bear on it.

But it bears on it in that direction. Moving on now to the Call of Duty block on our screen, which again doesn't mean that Ryan and I are going to use these giant screens behind us to play Call of Duty. Although that would be kind of cool. That would be kind of cool. For like hours, right? Isn't that what streamers do? They just do it for hours? I think that's what Mac and Griffin do when nobody's taping in here.

Yeah. They just come in and play Call of Duty. Well, they should put that on Twitch. Yeah. Well, we can put the tear sheet up on the screen. This is from Politico. I'm reading from this article. Microsoft's fortunes and its hotly contested takeover of video game company Activision Blizzard dramatically improved Tuesday after a federal judge sided with the companies over the FTC's attempt to block the

deal and after a UK antitrust regulator signaled its receptiveness to reversing its own decision against the merger. That's a ruling from US District Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley, who you can imagine Matt Stoller has some harsh words for. We'll get to that in a second. Politico calls this a stinging rebuke for the FTC and kind of a rebuke against Lena Kahn as well. I think that's probably fair. Now, the FTC is trying to determine whether Activision is going to give Microsoft, so say Microsoft merges with Activision, an unfair advantage in the world of video games.

The Xbox is three behind PlayStation and Sony, and so according to Politico, the Xboxes 3 behind PlayStation and Sony. And so, according to Politico, the agency FTC. Sony, PlayStation, and Nintendo. Right, so the FTC is arguing Sony and other video game companies would be significantly disadvantaged if Microsoft made hit games like Call of Duty exclusive to its platforms.

This is part of the ruling. Corley gets into what Microsoft and Activision or Microsoft in particular says is going to happen in that situation and enter Matt Stoller. I'll read from some of those. Put up Stoller here, a friend of our show. I'm sure he's going to do a segment on this soon. He said, I guess this one's going to get appealed. It became very obvious at trial that Judge Jack Will and Scott Corley is your standard boomer moron. Hard to imagine she didn't make significant legal errors. So as always, subtle analysis from Stoller. So he then does actually go through and finds a lot of these errors. And she even,

in the ruling, Stoller noticed, said, hey, I was rushed on this. So there's going to be citation errors in this. As Stoller rightly points out, she wasn't rushed. You know, she could have delayed it. She decided to go on Microsoft's schedule. So, you know, the, the errors are her own fault. But the favorite thing for me that he, that he flagged in this ruling is this next element, if you can put this up. This is basically accepting as fact that don't worry, they promise that they're going to behave. So they write, fourth, Microsoft witnesses, this is the judge writing, Microsoft witnesses consistently testified there are no plans to make Call of Duty exclusive to the Xbox. Mr. Nadella testified he would 100% commit to continuing to ship Call of Duty on the Sony PlayStation. Mr. Spencer testified my commitment is and my testimony is to use that word.

Basically, I'd be humiliated if I didn't do it. And then he said, seventh, Microsoft anticipates irreparable reputational harm if it forecloses Call of Duty from PlayStation. Spencer testified, us pulling Call of Duty from PlayStation, in my view, would create irreparable harm to the Xbox brand after me in so many public places, including here, talking about and committing to us not pulling Call of Duty from PlayStation. Activision CEO Bobby Kotick confirmed Microsoft concerns are not unfounded. If we were to remove Call of Duty from PlayStation, it would have, you know, it would cause problems. So basically, they're saying trust us. And the judge took their trust us quote and put it in her ruling and said, look,

they're not going to make Call of Duty exclusive. Because they told us that they're not. Why would they ever do that? Now, will they go to Nintendo? Will they go to Sony and say, you have to pay us extra for this, including whatever your profit margin is on it, or we will do this. And separately, you can't make a legal argument based on, I promise I won't do this, this time, because there will be other games. Now, hopefully. Now, if they become too much of a monopoly, there might not be other games. They'll update present games and continue to produce some. But they would have much less incentive to produce more and better games because this is what you get. You're going to get it here or you're not going to get it anywhere else.

So Installer does have something up on this at thebignewsletter.com. That's actually the name of the newsletter, thebignewsletter.com, where he's talking about how Corley, whose son, by the way, apparently works for Microsoft, which is a little bit of a conflict of interest to begin with. Maybe she shouldn't have been hearing the case. But that she essentially had to rewrite the Clayton Act in order to narrow, he says narrow the stakes, for the merger. I think the law says may cause competition problems, but they should change it to, well, probably. And you can see, yeah. And so you can see actually in, for example, the Call of Duty question, exactly that. She's reading, she's sort of being credulous. Well, Microsoft says- Yeah, they're good. This is what they're doing. You can keep getting Call of Duty, they say.

Right. Whereas the FTC is saying, there's plenty of evidence here that Microsoft is intentionally buying up competitors to be like a Netflix so that they can then exclude people that they don't want to and have more control of the market. I'm with Matt. I think this is a pretty obvious case. But even actually, and this is an interesting find yesterday because part of this conversation we wanted to have was about the fact that you have now a union at Sega. This is a new decision. We put up D4 here. So Sega of America, their workers voted to form a union. Ninety-one employees voted yes out of 212. 2012. So the Allied Employees Guild Improving Sega, that's known as Aegis CWA, is now the fifth

video game union in the United States and the largest multi-department video game union that is all according to The Verge. At the same time, CWA, the communication workers, announced that this is the next element. Claude Cummings from Houston won a runoff election over Ed Mooney to become the first black president of CWA. CWA then, interestingly, actually supported Corley's decision against the FTC and cheered the merger, essentially, which was an extremely, I thought it was extremely interesting. Let me see if I can find the quote here. They say, by accepting Judge Corley's decision and allowing this merger to move forward, the FTC has an opportunity to transform the video game and tech labor market by providing a clear path to collective bargaining for almost 10,000

workers. Yeah, and I think what people need to understand is that a union exists to represent the interests of the workers in that union. And that's it. Now, when union density gets to a big enough place in our economy, often they exert positive influence, sometimes deliberately, other times just by kind of driving up wages for the rest of the working class. And that's one of the great things about kind of the union movement. But ultimately, you have to remember, like, they're looking out for their union. And there's nothing wrong with that. That's what a union is. And so it is in their benefit to have bigger businesses.

Big business, yeah. And this goes back to the kind of economic orthodoxy that reigned supreme in the mid-20th century, led really by Keynes and John Kenneth Galbraith. That was about kind of the combination, the working together of kind of big government, big business, and big labor. Like a gigantic bargain to make sure that everybody is taken care of and nobody gets too powerful. And you'd have these countervailing forces that would be able to check each other. Now, eventually big business was able to kind of defeat in the 1980s both big labor and government. And then that's what produced the kind of neoliberal era. But this reminds us that unions are not just out here supporting every

kind of progressive idea. They don't care if you can ship Call of Duty. If they can get more high-paying union jobs by you not getting shipped call of duty anymore, then they're going to be for that. CWA is one of the most progressive unions in the kind of AFL-CIO, but famously was a huge enemy of the of the left on net neutrality in that in that big fight over Internet freedom because they were with the telecoms. They wanted more power for the telecoms. More power for the telecoms meant better wages for union workers. And people need to understand that there are always

going to be those contradictions in there. Quick word on that election. It's really interesting to see it unfold this way because this was a two-person race that Claude Cummings was not even a part of. Like he was considered, he's 71 years old. He's considered to be retiring. Like this is cool. He's going to run for president. Everybody likes him, but he's not going to be president. Like he's just running. It was really between Sarah Steffens and this guy Ed Mooney. Sarah Steffens and this guy Ed Mooney.

Sarah Steffens represented the newspaper guild, which has seen the most growth, basically the most growth of the CWA has come from the news guild and from grad students and some other kind of elements that are not directly related to the core kind of work that you see people doing on the streets that you associate with the CWA. And so you saw the rise of this element of CWA, and these are also the most left-wing elements, the News Guild, the grad

students, the others. And so they rallied behind Steffens, which apparently ran an awful campaign. Ed Mooney is kind of the right-wing old school building trades type of candidate, who I incidentally and strangely had, actually, never mind. We don't need to get into that. The amount of drama in this race would take like an hour to get into. Basically, what ended up happening, it seems like, is people were like, you know what? Claude Cummings is great. And we're sick of both of these people. And he ended up winning in a landslide. Stephens didn't even make the runoff. And then he crushed Mooney in a landslide. And he pledged only to serve four years. And I don't see it as like a gigantic win

for, say, a left-wing union democracy movement. But it is definitely a rejection of the old guard. And it's an opportunity over the next four years for the CWA to figure out kind of what it wants to be and where it wants to go from here. Especially with so many changes happening in their industry. Right, because these unions are all constantly figuring out how they're going to continue to grow members. Like the UAW organizes a ton of grad students too. Like it's not, it's the auto workers.

So it's not just, you don't stick to what you're into. You got to pivot in the parlance of Silicon Valley, right? Got to pivot to video. Got to pivot. Okay, so let's talk about Andrew Tate. Tucker Carlson dropped a very long interview. We're talking more than two hours long with Andrew Tate from Romania. Tucker Carlson flew to Romania and dropped this for Tucker on Twitter because he was assured.

Sounds like directly from Elon Musk, that it wouldn't be censored at all. I imagine if he had uploaded this full two plus hours to YouTube, there would be some real problems. He's been banned from YouTube, right, Tate? Probably. I think he has. I don't know if interviews with him have been though. So like, is it different if you're actually interviewing? I don't know. But I would imagine that it would have been more difficult. That's an interesting question. I don't know. Right. So let's just get straight to some clips here because, again, we're talking about a two plus hour long interview and there's just a ton of breakdown. They talked about a lot of different

stuff, as you can imagine. So let's roll E1 right off the bat. Up until this point, never really commented too heavily on politics. Yes. But I understand very well, I like to believe what's happening with Ukraine and Russia. And what I will say to the people who are watching this at home is that if you are naive enough to believe that there are good guys and bad guys in wars, and it's as simple as good and bad, and that the bad guys are crazy, the good guys want freedom, then you need to do a little bit more investigation into what's really happening.

And when you look at the vested interest of any country or any person- Can I just ask you to pause and just comment? That's the truest thing, what you just said. That is the, and anyone who doesn't understand that should shut the fuck up. And I mean it, having seen war. Looks like they're wearing matching loafers.

Do you think they planned that? I hope not. That would be a little too weird. It would be. One fact check, though. What he seems to be saying, what Tucker's saying, is that the Ukrainians are not the good guys in this war. But hasn't Tucker said that the Russians are the good guys in this war? That he was rooting for the Russians? You can't have it both ways. If there's no good guys, then is Tucker finally acknowledging that the Russians are the good guys in this war? That he was rooting for the Russians? Like, you can't have it both ways. If there's no good guys, then is Tucker finally acknowledging that the Russians are also not the good guys?

Well, yeah, so he said at one point, I'm trying to find the exact quote, he said, like, it almost makes me root for Russia or root for Putin, something like that. And it was sort of a rhetorical thing where he was, you know, back and forth. I think he walked it back. There's an element that calls itself anti-war that is legitimately straight up just rooting for Russia and calling Russia good guys in this war.

So now I guess you're crosswise with Tucker and Andrew Tate, if that's your position. No good guys. So not only did they talk about Russia versus Ukraine, they kept going. That was actually even later in the interview, I think. But we can roll SOT number two here, E2. So what is it about your message do you think that infuriates certain people? My message is traditional masculinity. My message is to stand up and say what you mean and mean what you say.

And even going to the gym nowadays is an act of defiance. Because when you have a man who's built with any degree of principle, you say no to things. And I think if I have to analyze my message and why I'm so disliked by the people who dislike me, it's not the things I'm saying. It's the fact that if you adhere to my principles and you adhere to the things I say, you end up being the kind of person who will resist certain ideas. You say no. What kind of man never says no? Name a man who never says no. Men say no, right? Men wake up and say, no, I don't think that should be done this way. No,

my children will not be taught that. It's the father's primary job. Absolutely. So when you say to men, listen, you're allowed to have an opinion. You're allowed to have standards. You're allowed to have boundaries and barriers. You're allowed to get up and become important and work hard and try hard and become the kind of man who can't be controlled, then you're seen as an enemy. And especially with the massive influence I've gained, I think they look at me and go, ah, he's helping men resist the slave programming. We don't need him around. We need to empty their brains so we can inject the slave programming and convince men to be eunuchs. Because once you're eunuched, then you're not a threat.

Every time you say no, I'm going to think of it in a different context now. That's what men say. What do you make of this guy? There's so much to say. Why don't we roll the next clip and then we can break it all down. This is E3. It's one of those charges that kind of sells itself oh absolutely and it doesn't matter if you're found guilty or not right you're

a human trafficker forever but i do think that public consciousness is changing i think with things like the uh there's been some very large court cases recently involving some very famous people in which women were caught lying trying to slander men's names for rape and these kinds of things and i don't think people believe it anymore. But that scares me to a degree, because I think that the typical weapon, the standardized playbook is now failing. And I don't know what the new playbook is going to be. It's almost like better the devil you know. You're too famous. You're too successful. We don't like you. Call him a rapist or a human trafficker. Put him all over the news. Slander his name. Try and wreck his life. Now that nobody believes it, what's the next move? What are they going to try next? Wouldn't it just have been easier to commit

like a massive financial crime and defraud people of billions, come up with like a fake cryptocurrency, call it like, I don't know, FTX or just give a name to it. Yeah, something random. You know, steal billions and get your parents involved and buy a bunch of real estate in the Bahamas. And then like, you'd be sort of a hero, right? Oh, absolutely. And I would have certainly made a lot more money than TikTok because I don't think TikTok even pays you for views. And if it certainly does, I never got a single transaction from it. So it's a very interesting scenario. But if I was accused of a financial crime, my name would not be slandered. No, of course. Well, of course not. First of all, he's talking about Sam

Bankman Freed. And I keep hearing this from the right that it's so unfair the way he got treated. Guy's under indictment and might spend the rest of his life in prison. That Bankman Freed is being treated too. Yeah, Sam Bankman Freed. Aren't they going to update that talking point at some point based on the fact that he very likely might spend the rest of his life in jail? I assumed what Tucker meant was... He'd be celebrated by the media or whatever. Yeah, that he was being fetid and had Bill Clinton and whomever else at the FTX conferences before,

even though it was sort of transparently a Ponzi scheme. And you've got that Bankman-free quote where he told Wired, you say, or maybe it was a reporter at Vox, that you say these shibboleths so that people will say, so it's basically saying that, but okay. So the last clip is on the charges, and this does not feel like a very hard-hitting interview on when you have someone who is charged with rape and human trafficking in front of you, he just sort of is like, so you didn't do this stuff, right? And he's like, no, I didn't do this stuff. And then, oh, well, if you didn't do that stuff,

then there must be a conspiracy about, and then let's unpack this conspiracy. What is it that has them coming after you? Rather than pressing, according to the news reports, there are women who say that you rape them. Beyond the foul, nasty kind of recruiting that he has openly said that he does, where he would recruit women to come over, get the boyfriend, get him to fall in love, and then kind of turn them out into porn stars. He's said that he does that. But beyond that, there are people accusing him of straight up rape and that he's been charged with in Romania. And so everyone's innocent until proven guilty. But these are very serious charges that Tucker just seems to kind of just wave away and then work to kind of explain as a conspiracy

among a feminized world that doesn't like him standing up for traditional masculinity. I think there might be a little bit more than that going on. Tate reportedly tells Carlson that the women who accuse him actually don't, that the government has trumped up the charges. I think it's possible that some of the charges against him are trumped up. And he's saying that the government can't find women who truly claim that this was nonconsensual. And the government is reading into it by using the human trafficking charge. But I think the broader point is that the legal questions of Andrew Tate

are different than the moral questions of Andrew Tate are different than the moral questions from Andrew Tate. I actually have zero problem with Tucker engaging with him. I think some of those questions should have been a lot tougher. Right. I think Peter Bergen interviewed Osama bin Laden. Right, right. Maybe for NBC News or Wall Street Journal, I forget who. And it was celebrated for landing that interview. Like, it's Osama bin Laden, one of the most evil people of the last 50 years. Megyn Kelly interviewed Putin.

Right. You should interview bad people. Yeah. Like bad people are part of the world and it's important to know and get insight into their mentality. And I also don't have a problem with one person in the media taking Andrew Tate seriously and saying this is a guy who has a ton of sincere followers. And we obviously have a masculinity crisis. There was a great Christine Emba essay in the Washington Post actually about that very topic this week. What can I learn from a good faith engagement with him? And there were some interesting parts of it, but I do find it, I don't know if strange is the right word. I don't know what is the right word, but it's very obvious.

I mean, this is a quote from Andrew Tate's website. I've been running a webcam studio for nearly a decade. I've had over 75 girls work for me, and my business model is different than 99% of webcam studio owners. Over 50% of my employees were actually my girlfriend at the time, and of all girlfriends, none were in the adult entertainment industry before they met me. The moral element of that is very clear. That's sort of all out on the table. That's immoral, especially I think from the perspective, I say this as Tucker's fellow Christian table. That's immoral, especially I think from the perspective, I say this as a fellow, Tucker's fellow Christian conservative, like that's absurd. And if you want to engage seriously in a good faith conversation about that,

I actually think that's constructive. Not a whole lot of family values going on there. No. But the masculinity question, we were actually talking about this earlier when we were talking oddly enough in the Tommy Tuberville segment when it's like, why is Tommy Tuberville flirting with this question? Like, why is he even taking white nationalism seriously? Well, there are probably a lot of places in rural Alabama, to your point about, you know, why are so many white men in America, like, suddenly seeing themselves as victims on par with people who were trafficked into slavery and kept in bondage for hundreds of years. It's not comparable. If you go to places in rural Alabama that have been hollowed out by NAFTA and WTO, that people are dying of fentanyl overdoses, addicted to pornography, numbing themselves with weed. Tucker actually prefaced his interview with

Andrew Tate with a sort of a monologue on that. I think you can understand why Tate is appealing, why then ideologies like white nationalism are appealing. And the problem is that too few people in the media take any of that seriously. The problem then becomes that to balance it out, you end up getting Andrew Tate. Yeah. Well, the left has long had a critique of this, quote unquote, family values, traditional conservatism as simply a mask for misogyny and racism. Right.

And I think both the Tuberville and the Tate clips here help pull the mask off of that and say that there is a lot going on there. And I do think it's really important to try to understand Tate and the tens of millions of people behind him. But on the other hand, I think some of it is simple. And I think it's misogyny cells. We are still a very misogynistic world. It's an easy pitch to men to say the way to feel better about yourself is to do stuff that makes you feel really good. Right. Control women.

Women are your problem. Girls are your problem. That's it. Yeah. Control women. Use them as sexual objects, et cetera. Right. So I think that he gets a little, I mean, obviously there are a lot of people selling misogyny.

And he's selling it better than anybody else in the world at the moment. So in that sense, he's a talented misogynist. But I don't think there's any creativity in the idea of, wow, I can get rich by telling men that women are awful. Yeah. There's something, I think, interestingly reactionary about what he specifically gets into, his turn to Islam. We talked about that on a previous edition of the show and had an interesting conversation about it. So I think he's – Has he fully made that turn yet?

I'm not sure. It's coming. I think he has though. If it hasn't come yet, it's coming. All of these influencers who root their stuff in traditional values and misogyny, I think they're just bound for their own twisted version of some weird sectarian Islam. I mean, the Tate direction, the Tate trajectory supports that. I do think, you know, actually Jordan Peterson,

there are other people who were unfairly... So he'll wind up there. Well, Jordan Peterson, I think Jordan Peterson, no, he's not. Jordan Peterson... He'll do some mystical version of it. I think he's been studying Christianity really closely. But he, people can watch his speech,

his commencement address at Hillsdale. It gets into some interesting stuff on that. But he is someone who was so unfairly, I think, torn down. He was sort of a center left, like academic, who was pushing him back against these things. And that, I think, nudged him in a direction where he does occasionally, I think, dip his toes in waters that are probably not great. But on the whole, I feel like he actually has been good for so many men. And the fact that he gets attacked over and over and over again in ways that are unfair, there's always fair criticisms of people who

speak so much in the public domain. But he gets attacked on things that are so unfair so many times that this is how you end up with just Andrew Tate. Like he becomes the influencer, not that we need, but the influencer we deserve because we can't have constructive conversations anymore since we're all doing it on Twitter and Instagram, whatever else, which incentivizes the worst of human debate. Well, either way, we can put this up here. It's getting an insane amount of traction on Twitter. As of this morning, it's 42.8 million views. I'm seeing now a ton of that is inflated, but if it's 10% of that, that's still 4 million more than I'd want absorbing this, what I consider to be just deeply kind of toxic way to think. And an opiate, a soothing message to men that they can find their problems outside of themselves

by just identifying them and the women around them. And that's, if they just understand that, then they're gonna feel better about themselves. I am the problem with this show. That's right, yeah. There you go. What's your point today? Well, if you watch an old movie, especially one before the Second World War,

you'll have a hard time spotting one particular thing. Plastic. Look around you now. Don't even think about technology. Think about things like clocks or cookware or furniture. We are drowning, drowning in plastics. Our suburbs are designed around the freeway system, and then without cars, they wouldn't work. All of those things have one particular thing in common. We'll get to that in just one minute. Cars and plastics help usher in a new era of convenience

and prosperity. That much is clear when we look back at United States history over the last 100 years or so. But without access to vast quantities of that one thing, oil, none of that would have happened. That's why our politics now revolve around it, and unlike in previous eras where politics revolved around other commodities, this time there's another really big difference, and that would be nuclear weapons. That's basically the latest chapter in human history in a nutshell. The Cold War was hyper-modern in the sense that it forced these desperate alliances between cultures and countries and peoples who had previously been separated

by major journeys, months, weeks, in some cases years, around the world. And they were all then, in the Cold War, tied together under the threat of instant destruction. That's very new in human history. And this is why Barbie Oppenheimer is more than just a hilarious meme. And the meme is truly hilarious. Two of the biggest movies of the summer coming out on the same day, but with laughably different subjects. It's funny. I get it. And it's actually already on Wikipedia as Barbenheimer. We can put that up on the screen. And also, yes, you can see it there. They did the little side by side. We can also put up on the screen my personal favorite of the Barbenheimer memes.

This is a really good one. If you're listening, I will do the very cool thing of describing a joke to you. It's a pink cloud, like a pink mushroom-looking cloud hovering over a freeway, and it says the Barbie-Oppenheimer crossover has begun. Is that a real picture? I think it's a real picture. I don't know. Is it gender reveal? I don't know. I didn't do the due diligence. I didn't do the journalism of verifying the picture in the joke, but maybe I should have because it is a good meme. But the punchline is, again, obviously

about Barbie and Oppenheimer being completely different. You have this sort of like hot pink comedy and very dark biopic. Same day, they're coming out on the 21st. Totally different in tone and subject. But actually, they're tied together in a really, really important way that explains basically all of the last 100 years. Our victory in World War II paved the way for American consumer culture. Plastic makers who had been working on wartime supplies shifted to consumer goods, plentiful oil supplies secured by the post-war American dominance in the Middle East, particularly in Saudi Arabia.

The groundwork to that was laid by FDR, in particular, even before the war had ended. That kept the tap flowing. And flow it did. Soon we were so dependent that these military relationships became essential and nuclear threats loomed large. That's still where we are today, basically, even if it's not at the fever pitch of different points during the Cold War. I want to read an anecdote actually from PBS. Quote, a few days before the nuclear explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, J.W. McCoy, a DuPont vice president, addressed a manufacturer's workshop on converting factories from military to consumer production after the war. Business would be good, he predicted, due to, quote, a great backlog of unfulfilled wants. Satisfying American consumers' desires for cars, washing machines, radios, and other products would create, quote, an upward

spiral of productivity, raising the standard of living, increasing the national income, and making more jobs. But, McCoy warned, a satisfied people is a stagnant people, and suggested manufacturers would have to ensure that Americans were never satisfied. Well, that turned out to be incredibly prescient. And again, it explains why when you have Cold War proxy battles in oil-rich regions, you have both of these things inextricably tied together because we are now completely dependent. Syracuse University, which actually has a whole plastic center, I think it's funded by some people in the industry, you'll be surprised to learn, but has some interesting research on the history of plastics, which is fairly new as we're talking about. They go on to have a really

interesting particular observation about the post-war period of plastics. They say, quote, the development of durable and easily modable plastics and the metal shortage of the 1940s triggered the plastic toy revolution of the post-World War II the metal shortage of the 1940s triggered the plastic toy revolution of the post-World War II years. When deprived of the military market, producers shifted production to consumer goods. The baby boom then provided millions of children as potential customers accessible through the new medium of television advertising. And Syracuse goes on to name Barbie as one of the toys that benefits from this huge trend. Barbie was not

wooden. Barbie was debuted in 1959 made of plastics. In 1996, this is another interesting observation, the LA Times described Barbie's peripatetic multi-country path from her raw material source in a Saudi Arabian oil field to aisle 12C of a Southern California toy store. According to Mattel, the LA Times article continues, all Barbie dolls are made in four Asian factories, this is of 1996, two in China and one each in Indonesia and Malaysia. Barbie has never been made in the United States. The first doll was produced in Japan in 1959 when that country was still struggling with its post-World War II economic recovery. The first Barbie, again, was made in Japan in 1959, in the years after atomic weapons and World War II changed that country forever. We could also talk about Barbie

and the Barbie movie's connection to feminism and the women's movement that got a boost from World War II. Absolutely, that parallel could be drawn. But the Oppenheimer connection here is really, really direct, and it still undergirds basically every moment of our geopolitics. It all comes down to nukes and oil, in particular the the combination of those two things every day, economically, militarily, and even culturally. And that's why I think that as funny as the Barbie Oppenheimer, the Barbenheimer memes actually are, it's also to me sort of telling that we see these things as so completely different when in fact, they're really part in some very fundamental ways of the same chapter in human history. And again, even today, our relationships with so many countries around the

world are dominated, actually with basically every country around the world because the nuclear threat and our utter dependence, I mean, basically the complete and utter dependence on both oil and the plastics that are downstream of oil, that completely controls our geopolitical relationships. And the nuclear threat that looms large over them changes the way, for example, even if plastic was just a commodity, think like gold. And we were in years past. When you add nuclear technology to that sort of commodity dependency, that changes the way, for instance, that the United States sees, let's go back to the Cold War, Iran, the Shah of Iran. That changes all of these different calculations in ways that still today, they're not just sort of like, these aren't stretches, like gymnastics to get from point A to point B. They're direct connections that are driving our regulations in ways that still today are, they're not just sort of like, these aren't stretches,

like gymnastics to get from point A to point B. They're direct connections that are driving our geopolitics right now. So it is somewhat interesting. We see both Barbie and Oppenheimer as like these two completely different things, so much so that it is funny, and I'm with you, it's funny, when in fact they are so closely tied together in the post-war period. Ryan, what have you got for us? Well, I'm looking at the COVID hearing yesterday. The House subcommittee on COVID origins met and invited every author of the Proximal Origins paper, that's the influential paper that effectively discredited the idea of a lab leak early in the pandemic that stemmed from a conference call conversation with Anthony Fauci and a variety of international experts in the field. And so I wanted to play one clip that I thought was fairly representative

from that rather disappointing hearing, because every Democrat that got up basically just yelled about how this was a partisan witch hunt and gave evidence for why they supported the zoonotic theory, the natural origin, while being clear that they believed that this is still an open question, which was not okay to say a year and a half or so ago. And every Republican got up, you know, strongly argued on behalf of the lab leak theory. And the idea that, like, every person on their own just happened to arrive at this completely, you know, separate partisan conclusion is just impossible to believe. And it highlighted once again how absurdly partisan this has gotten. Republicans, meanwhile, focused heavily on China, which I thought kind of

overlooked a lot of the global and U.S. problems that are interrelated with this. But because of the way it works, everybody gets five minutes and then there's very little time for questioning. A lot of the questioning just went, everybody gets five minutes, and then there's very little time for questioning. A lot of the questioning just went like this. This one from Representative Michael Cloud, a Republican in Texas. It was maybe one of the kind of cleanest back and forths that we're going to get. He's talking here to Dr. Christian Anderson. You said it was because of some new data that came available on the pangolin. And Dr. Anderson, you agreed with this in an

interview in the New York Times. You said, for example, we looked at data from COVID being found in other species such as bats, pangolins, which demonstrated that other features first appeared unique to COVID were in fact in other related diseases. But during the peer review part, you said that was not data That was included that the Pangolin information had no in leaning into the conclusion Jumaid. Is that correct? so The timeline keeps changing here first. It's two days since three days. It's four days It's actually 45 days when we talk talking about the period. It's 45 days before the draft was published. But there's a peer review period.

And within two days, the conclusion had changed from, oh, this is not going to, to, oh, it's impossible that this could have happened. All right. Anderson, Gary, and others saying that the way that this emerged seemed clearly to them to have come from a lab. After this conference call, they do a 180-degree pivot and wind up concluding the opposite and then writing their proximal origin paper. And you see a little deceptiveness on the part of Dr. Anderson there saying it was, no, it's 40. He's saying, look, because what he wants to ask is, how did you change your mind so quickly? What happened in just a couple of days that changed your mind? He's like, well, no, it was 45 days. But of course, as Representative Klout says, it was not 45 days that you changed your mind. 45 days when the paper was published. But in that time period there's

peer review, there's revisions, there's writing it. So it's actually only a day or two during which you change your mind. And the Pangolin theory is a thing that these virologists had cited as a reason that they had changed their mind so quickly but as the as the hearing got into later it later emerged that this this claim that there was a virus that was 99% similar to SARS COVID-2 in pangolins turned out to be untrue and so if that's the case the thing that got them to change their mind was actually fake news. Now, the hearing also spent a lot of time around the question of whether or not there were financial incentives at play. And I want to dive deeper into this. But first, here's Anderson kind of refuting the allegations that there was financial pressure from the NIAID, from the NIH,

on them to get in line with a natural origin theory. Some have alleged that I have received a federal grant in exchange for the conclusions made in our proximal origin paper. There is no connection between the grant and the paper. Funding decisions on the grant were made before the pandemic, months before the February 1 conference call. So that's a pretty clear assertion that he's making to Congress there. Funding decisions for the grant were made months before the conference call. What he turns out to be referring to are preliminary reviews of a funding application, not the final decision.

And we know that because the NIH, to its credit, is fairly transparent about the way it issues these awards. So if we can put up this element, this is the award he's talking about. Now, I don't have my glasses on, so Emily, can you read that? May? 21st of May, 2020. Okay, May 21st, 2020. You guys can pause this and take a close look at that if you want to fact check my reading of this document.

You can also go to, you can search, you can easily find the website here to search this. Type in Anderson 2020, and this will pop up, the West African Emerging Infectious Disease Research Center. This is the center that he was hoping to get, that they were hoping to get this millions in funding from the NIH for. And so they had been preliminarily approved. This is true. But they were at a crucial junction. The staff had recommended that this money go through. It was now up to Fauci and Collins whether or not to actually deliver the money. And if you hear from Anderson in this hearing, he's saying, well, that's just a formality at that point. It was baked in. But if you talk to scientists who have also applied for monies of this size, that's not at all the case. If this was a $30,000 grant for a grad student to do a

project and the staff approved it, NIH, NIAID, they're going to sign off on that, no problem. This is a multi-million dollar, you know, multi-country grant. They're going to take in other considerations. So we can put up this other element. You can find these all over the NIH saying the main NIAID advisory council must recommend an application for funding before we can award a grant, although the institute makes the final funding decision. They say this clearly all over their website. And if you talk to scientists, they will say that, you know, particularly in cases that involve kind of geopolitical sensitivities that involve funding priorities, like what are the current priorities? It's not

enough just this has scientific value. Does it fit the current funding priorities. Like what are the current priorities? It's not enough just this has scientific value. Does it fit the current funding priorities? And that's as it should be. The leadership of these organizations ought to make the final call. So to be clear, the Democrats made a lot of hay over the fact that Anderson said that the funding decisions were made before this conference call, when in fact the funding decision was made after this conference call. All right, we're going to be talking in this segment about the recent elections in Sierra Leone, but we wanted to start speaking of the COVID hearing that took place yesterday with a reference of Sierra Leone that came in the opening statement by virologist Bob Gary here. Let's roll this.

For nearly 20 years, I've worked closely with scientists and clinicians at the Kenema Government Hospital in Sierra Leone. KGH is a major site for research on the virus that causes Lassa fever. Ten years ago, Ebola virus emerged just 50 miles from Kenema. Ultimately, this Ebola outbreak would claim the lives of thousands of people, including dozens of healthcare workers at the Kenema Government Hospital. So we're going to be joined in this segment by Sierra Leonean journalist Cherno Ba, who many of you may remember we interviewed him several months ago about his book on the Ebola

outbreak in Sierra Leone. So I wanted to ask him about this first. Cherno, welcome to the program. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you very much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. So what did you think about hearing Gary bring up the lab in Sierra Leone? And particularly, I noticed that he referenced the work that the lab does on the Lassa virus, which nobody asked him what kind of work

was going on in that lab. There's been an enormous amount of reporting, yours most prominently, that there was a lot of Ebola research going on in that lab as well. Papers were written by scientists from that lab about that Ebola research. Did it strike you the same way it struck me that he got so specific about the Lassa virus work being done in that lab? In my book, I had even mentioned the fact that the CDC had been present in the region since the 1970s doing lots of fever work and funding uh lots of fever research so in fact that was what triggered my uh interest in investigating the ebola outbreak and arguing or pointing to the fact that um we cannot understand the causes of the ebola outbreak without looking at what um the viral

hemorrhagic fever consortium was doing in the region 10 years preceding the outbreak. So it did not surprise me that any effort to understand COVID will have to first start with the same kind of work that was done in West Africa, because we're talking about the same individuals and the same groups of scientists and organizations that were involved there. So we have been calling for an investigation into the Ebola outbreak. And unfortunately, since the outbreak, this is the first time we are having some kind of hearings that appear to reference the outbreak in West Africa.

We are hoping that a similar kind of investigation, or at least a hearing that drills into the questions that we have been asking years ago might happen. Yeah, and for people who missed it, we'll put the link to your previous interview in the notes to this one. But today we wanted to talk about the presidential election in Sierra Leone, which you mentioned in your last interview. So can you bring us up to speed? What are the kind of political parties and political formations in Sierra Leone that were competing in this election? Well, politics and power in Sierra Leone has been dominated by two major factions, as I call them, of the elite, divided into two parties known as the Australian People's Party,

the SLPP, that is currently in power, and the major opposition party, the All People's Congress, that was previously in power before this current party that's in power. In fact, the APC was in power when the Ebola outbreak that we just mentioned happened. So it appears that these two parties have been there for more than 60 years now since the transition to what we call independence. And they have dominated, the elites of these parties have dominated and monopolized politics for the last 60 years.

There has been no all-independent effort to organize against these two factions of the middle class, as I call them, over the years have not been, you know, have not succeeded in displacing them. Part of the reason is that there seems to be some kind of arrangement where they rotate power after every, you know, 10 years. And this is the first time where individuals,

groups of uh regular citizens mobilized to vote against a government that has openly become dictatorial and repressive over the last five years um dozens of people have been killed um and no you know investigation or hearing has been done on that situation and we have highlighted corruption and and and the dictatorial tendencies of the government so the elections that happened um the current president declared himself or was declared winner of elections when the elections were incomplete votes were not fully counted they were not fully tabulated and pretty much every organization that has been or that was present uh during the uh voting process and this includes the

the kata center and the european union and various other international organizations that supposedly went there to monitor the elections have classified them as non-transparent elections but we are pointing to the fact that um it's not just a question of lack of transparency but there is um illegalities surrounding the way the elections were conducted so in in a general sense we had no proper elections they just um decided to allow the president to continue because there appears to be a consensus among these parties, both the opposition party and the ruling party, to allow the president to continue for two terms, because that appears to be the only time they shift power amongst themselves. You report extensively on this corruption in your article, and we can put that up on the screen. That's the next element. I want to ask

Chernow about what the hope is and what the next steps are for people outside of the ruling party and the opposition party, who you say they've reached a consensus, allowing corruption to continue festering and illegitimate elections to be rubber-stamped. What does it look like for people who have hope for democracy

that looks less corrupt than this going forward? Well, that is what we have been putting forward. If they agree that the only legitimate means of changing a government is through the ballot box and groups of organizations, including the United States, governments around the world who are partners of the corrupt politicians in Sierra Leone, you know, will not just call that kind of facade as an election because where an election is where people are allowed to freely participate. We have a law that was brought in in Parliament a year before the election that gave the Electoral Commission and the current president the power

to determine how the elections will be conducted and they program the political environment in a way that we will have the current outcome that we have. So we expect these individuals who claim that that's the only way to compete for power to respect the rules that they have developed for them, you know, for these kinds of competitions, but they have openly allowed the subversion of that kind of situation and and as we speak right now there has not been any significant uh efforts to call into question the current uh situation in israel what we hear is just um issues of transparency it goes way beyond that we have to talk about the responsibility um of these individuals uh both the united states europe and the politicians in Sierra Leone,

you know, in holding each other responsible for denying Sierra Leoneans the right to decide the kind of government under which they want to live. Cherno, can you give us a couple examples of the kinds of irregularities that have been uncovered? Well, they include virtually the failure of the Electoral Commission to properly count the votes, to properly tabulate the election. But up and above that, the law requires that in order for a presidential election to be announced, they have to count the ballot, the votes in the polling stations, then at the district level, at the regional level, before the results are collated and tabulated at the national office. And that was not done. In fact, individuals who supervised the election, citizens, ordinary citizens,

and including political parties, complained that, in fact, district returning officers and regional officers had not completed their own tabulation process their own calculations when the presidential election results were announced so that means that what the electoral commission announced was basically the result of and the result of in of numbers they they just came up with their own numbers that do not reflect the actual votes that the people were counted. So up to now, we have been asking for, you know, where are the votes of the people? And even international organizations are so embarrassed to the point that they are now asking for disaggregated, for the numbers to be disaggregated, basically for the Electoral Commission to show how they came up with the figures from the polling stations to the district centers

and the regional centers, and that has not been done. You mentioned this earlier, but what more can you tell us about how the West and the United States and other international organizations are reacting to the results, I should say that in air quotes, out of Sierra Leone? Well, they've just classified the elections

as non-transparent elections. But we are saying that it goes way beyond just the question of transparency that the Electoral Commission organized in the elections in a secret fashion or not allowing people access to monitor the elections. It deals with a range of irregularities and illegalities where the elections, you know, we are not conducted following the

public elections laws. So an election does not conform to the rules and regulations that we have in that country for the conduct of elections. It's basically an illegal arrangement. So any government that results from the illegal conduct of elections is an illegal regime. So it has to be called that way. But when you just describe the situation as non-transparent, it is an ambiguous way of basically, you know, it opens the discussion to conceptual issues rather than the actual crime that has been committed. But it's so unfortunate because on June 30th, the US International Development Finance Corporation approved $150 million loan to the Suma Group, which is a private company that's in charge

of running the national airport in Sierra Leone. And that airport was built by that company through a contract awarded to them by the current government and the parliament without proper scrutiny and without citizens being aware of the details of that agreement. So such kinds of funding that goes to fund projects and programs undertaken by the government of Sierra Leone, by the United States and Europe, even as we speak of these kinds of illegalities and discrepancies in voting processes and the way the country is being run,

and boldens dictators and leaders like the current president of Sierra Leone, who is openly stealing votes. So we have, a year ago, we have, in the African Express, we've published the fact that the current government cannot win a free and fair election based on the objective conditions on the ground, that the desperate economic situation, the economic crisis coupled with the dictatorial tendencies

of the government, the authoritarian nature of how they've run the government corruption that we've reported about. So we knew that the only way the government is going to retain power is by rigging the elections. And we have also pointed in advance that they cannot rig the elections without the complicity of the opposition parties on the ground, which is why we have been calling for effective international monitoring of the elections. And it ended up into a situation where the politicians ganged up

to steal the popular mandate of the people in front of the whole world. So we believe such kinds of governments cannot be funded. The U.S. and the European partners cannot continue to give taxpayers money to politicians who steal elections, because any individual who steals a national election cannot be trusted with the with the management of the national economy let alone being awarded loans and grants more debts from international organizations like the US international development finance Corporation so the US has to hold itself accountable to the its own its own standards of governance that it claims to

promote around the world, which is what we, that's the message we want to call. We expect them to be able to impress upon their partners around the world, including the government of Australia, on the need to maintain human rights, the need to respect the freedoms of its own citizens, and not only that, to impress upon them the minimum standards of good governance and accountability. So when they fund, when they give loans like the current credit that they've approved for the funding and expansion of the Salinan Airport, it emboldens leaders like Julius Madabyu

who has hijacked the mandate of the people. And they've transformed the country into a colony of gangsters. And two final questions for you. You know, as a socialist, you've been critical of both of these parties. I remember you were hopeful that the elections might lead to some pathway toward the end of your exile. You're currently joining us from Chicago rather than Sierra Leone because of the work that you've done uncovering corruption in Sierra Leone. So I'm curious, one, what do you

think these election results mean for you personally? But then also, two, what do they mean for the long-term future of Sierra Leone if people decide that democracy is just a facade, that there's no point in participating in it, are they going to seek channels outside of electoralism that could lead toward violence and other ways of enacting policy change that there clearly is demand for? Yes, the entire West African region is prone to conflict. If you look around West Africa now, you have crisis and political conflict. In Guinea-Conakry, that's a result of rigged elections. We look at the unstable situation in Nigeria, and we have elections coming up in Liberia. So Ivory Coast was recently faced with the same kind of political crisis.

We have Mali and the entire region is in conflagration. We have the same kind of issues they were dealing with in Senegal a few weeks ago, where masses of young people were out on the street demanding for more accountable leadership and effective participation. So what these kinds of situations, when you have regular citizens, men and women, who are living on trading fruits and vegetables, the totality of which is not more than $5, living that and then standing on queues for the rest of the day and trying to see if the ballot box can serve as an instrument to make their voices heard, I deny that opportunity. Then you open up the space for other kinds of possibilities. People might think of other ways to actualize their own citizenship.

And we must remember the fact that Sierra Leone, not too long ago, that entire region, Liberia and Sierra Le, we were in conflict. We entered into civil war for 10 years because we had a dictatorial one-party state that was there from 1970s right up to the 1990s. By 1991, we had a conflict that ended in 2001. And we are hoping that we cannot have the same groups of organizations that led the country to war, programming the country into the pathway to more conflict and the possibility of crisis. So that's what we've been warning against. to go back home for doing nothing other than just highlighting and advocating that governments must be transparent. You know, leaders should be held accountable to the basic principles of governance and

transparency, and we cannot have a handful of people, less than 1% of the population, holding on to the state and using it as a basis of personal aggrandizement instead of providing basic economic and social services for the rest of the population. As we speak now, major parts of Sierra Leone lack electricity supply. More than 90% of the country's population do not have the basic conditions of human existence, absence of adequate housing facilities. Healthcare is a problem. education is a challenge. You know, some of the worst statistics when it comes to infant and maternal mortality rates, these conditions are the result of corruption, of mismanagement that has been

ongoing with impunity by the politicians of the two dominant factions. And we were hoping that at this time, these elections that just got rigged openly in front of the whole world would have empowered citizens with the belief and the faith that at least the ballot box can answer to their own problems, can serve as a check to these kinds of politics of a banditry that we have experienced for the last 60 years. But unfortunately, while these politicians are looting public funds,

they're openly ganged up to loot the votes of citizens. People, you know, they just announce results without properly counting the votes. It cannot get worse than that. All right. Well, Chernobah, thank you so much for your reporting and thanks for joining us on the votes. It cannot get worse than that. All right, well, Chernobah, thank you so much for your reporting and thanks for joining us on the show. Chernob is the editor of Africanist Press.

Thanks again for joining us. And that'll do it for us today. Thanks everybody for watching CounterPoints. Absolutely, Ryan, it was great to have you back. Good to be back and we'll see you next week. this is an iHeart podcast