Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 7/26/23: UPS Union Strikes Deal, McCarthy Threatens Biden Impeachment, DeSantis Defends Slavery Education Policy, Elon Musk Rebrands Twitter, Stephen A. On Jason Aldean, GOP Losing Young Voters, And A Federal Judge Blocks Biden Asylum Policy

Episode Date: July 26, 2023

Ryan and Emily discuss UPS reaching a potential strike avoiding deal, McCarthy threatening Biden with impeachment, DeSantis responds amid slavery education controversy, updates on Elon's Twitter rebranding to 'X', Stephen A Smith speaks on Jason Aldean's music video, GOP voters facing major issues with young voters, judge blocks Biden's asylum policy, and liberals abandoning family values.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. I also want to address the Tonys. On a recent episode of Checking In with Michelle Williams, I open up about feeling snubbed by the Tony Awards. Do I? I was never mad. I was disappointed because I had high hopes. To hear this and more on disappointment and protecting your peace,

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And never let them run wild through the grocery store. So when you say you'd never let them get into a car without you there, no, it can happen. One in four hot car deaths happen when a kid gets into an unlocked car and can't get out. Never happens. Before you leave the car, always stop, look, lock. Brought to you by NHTSA and the Ad Council. I know a lot of cops. They get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. Listen to Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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 and welcome to CounterPoints. I'm Ryan Grim here with Emily Jashinsky. Emily, how you doing? I'm good. It's good to have you here. Good to be here. I'm excited. Let's just get right into the biggest news on the economy and in our politics today,

which is, I think, this deal between UPS and the Teamsters to avert an upcoming strike. But more importantly, I think, if we can put up A1 here, an extraordinary contract, which the Teamsters are saying puts $30 billion on the table in gains. And they're saying with no concessions at all from the workers, the only concession being we're not going to strike and blow up the economy at this moment. Right. You can see that in A2 from David Dayen. He tweeted out the terms of the deal right there. So historic wage increases. And as he says, $30 billion on the table. Wage concessions are significant to your point. Yeah. Let's run through some of the details here because the part-time fight was huge here. And what I love about labor unions that have real solidarity and real internal organization is that they fight for every tier.

And through the 80s and 90s and 2000s, as labor unions were getting weakened badly, the corporations were able to implement these different tiered systems. They'd say, OK, look, you've been here for 10 years. Fine. We're going to take care of you. You're going to keep getting the $30 an hour. And in fact, you're going to keep getting raises. You're going to take care of you. You're going to keep getting the $30 an hour. And in fact, you're going to keep getting raises. You're going to get access to the pension. You're going to get the good health care. Everybody else we hire, minimum wage. It's going to struggle. And maybe not minimum wage, minimum wage plus $2. And recently, there's been

a huge pushback against that trend. And unions have been winning. And so the full timers here went to the mat and fought for the part timers. So now if you're a part timer, you're starting at $21 an hour at UPS. Whereas if you're a full timer, your average wage is going to be $49 an hour. Plus they can't force you to work on weekends, other concessions around just the kind of safety of the job. Air conditioning will be in all vans. Incredible that right now they don't have that situation, given that oftentimes you're cruising around in 100-plus degree heat. It's 119 degrees in Phoenix. Those customers still want their tweezers delivered on time.

There's no grace for anybody in this world. Now, presumably, they're not saying anybody out in 119 degrees without air conditioning, but anything's possible. That's right. So huge concessions. Here's what I want your take on. Trump deserves credit too because of the huge influx of CARES Act money and his browbeating of the Fed throughout his presidential term, making sure that they kept interest rates low and kept pushing unemployment lower and lower and lower. But Biden is now well under 4% unemployment. And the trillions of dollars that he pumped into the economy in 2021 and 2022,

which Larry Summers and Jason Furman and the other economists warned was going to give us runaway inflation. It's going to ruin the economy. And we need tens of millions of people unemployed for years to fight against this inflation. They were wrong about that. And so the UPS workers went into this contract knowing that they're in a situation of full unemployment, so that if they go on strike, they have opportunities. There's gig work. There's other things that they can do. If they get fired, they can go get another job somewhere else. And so I think that that really helped. I mean, what's your read on how the economy played into this? Yeah, they had all the leverage in the world, an unusual amount of leverage.

And obviously, we should mention it still needs to be ratified with a deal like this. It's pretty easy to imagine that it will finally be ratified. Now, CNBC notes in their article, quote, some recent labor negotiations haven't yielded new contracts despite preliminary deals. On Monday, pilots at UPS rival FedEx rejected their tentative labor deal, so they had 57% voting against the agreement. I don't expect that to happen here, but I do think the- It could. Anything's possible. Anything's possible.

People are feeling good. That's right. That's right. People are like, $30 billion, make it $40. And that gets back to the point you were making, which is they have all the leverage in the world right now. If you are sitting in a C-suite at UPS and trying to negotiate with your Teamsters that represent 340,000 members, and to your point at the beginning of the show about what this means for the economy, 340,000 UPS employees who are members of the Teamsters union with a potential strike that would have started next week.

I mean, this is huge. And I think it's absolutely true that you get these sweeping conditions because of the state of unemployment. I think it's true that that has to do with the Fed. I do think the Biden administration is struggling to explain why when you have the unemployment rate that you have, you also have economic pessimism and people feeling, and we've seen like the likes of Paul Krugman try to explain this. Why do people, when you have low unemployment, not feel so great? I think it is because there is still inflation that's hitting unevenly. So for some people, you're not feeling it. But for instance, if you're

trying to buy a used car, or if you are trying to buy a house, or if your monthly bills are really heavy on renting or whatever it is, there's still some real problems for you, prices, when it comes to prices, depending on where you are. But the unemployment rate is the fundamental thing here, because UPS knows they cannot find people in the case of a strike. There's no way. A strike is absolutely an existential problem for them Yeah, and so I think that there's two things going on. So I think that one people Are reporting the way they feel about the economy despite the gains it's made because it feels so precarious Mm-hmm. Like okay. Yes, I Doing well now wages are up

Inflation is back back to pretty flat, but that could change at any moment. Like I think we're so nervous after having gone through this pandemic and also seeing the wild swings of gas prices, like that could happen tomorrow. We could have a crash. Like in our lifetime, we had a great financial crisis. Like we could have another one.

We had that epic crash in March of 2020. But at the same time, you've had this massive run up in rents and housing prices. And so even though that's starting to crest and you're seeing rents come down even in some places, that doesn't help you if your rent jumped 30% over the last three years, when your wages did not jump 30%.

And so even if your wages are now climbing back up, and even if you're, let's say you're at UPS, you're now getting $400 extra a month with some of these $3 an hour increases, just off the bat, and then more throughout the life of the contract. If your rent went up $800 a month a couple years ago and then stayed flat since then, you're still behind and you're constantly, it just feels harder to catch up than it did before. And so I think that that's more of

a structural problem. So you've got the structural rent problem, and then you have the precariousness of it that feels like it could collapse at any moment. So, and no president, I think, is going to say, is going to hear from voters, yeah, economy's great for a very long time. Right. I think that's true. I also think if you're in California, for instance, you haven't really experienced relief in gas prices. It's just so uneven, depending on where you are and what your lifestyle is, that when Paul Krugman sort of tries to explain it away, or other people try to explain it away, we're just looking at this fake average, the hypothetical person who perfectly fits the basket of goods that goes into the real wages calculations. And it just, it's not the

best metric right now because it's so polarized. It's so different depending on where you are. In some places, it's really good. In some places, depending on what you're buying, it's really, really bad. So it's, I think that's where it comes from. But when you have the unemployment rate that you have, there's nothing that really is going to happen in this situation, which is great news for these workers who, to your point, were asking for air conditioning trucks, right? Air conditioning and trucks and asking for significant wage increases, which which they got. If you compare this bargaining to the 2018 bargaining, you get a window into how much the working class has aggregated power onto its behalf since then. Because the wage gains that they won in this contract are roughly double what they won in 2018. And 2018, the economy was like, unemployment was low, economy was growing.

So it's not as if that was into the teeth of a recession, which interestingly, like we're seeing signs that we may be headed for a recession very soon. We'll see how that unfolds. But the difference in five years tells you everything about the militancy and the strength of workers in this economy. Yeah. And I actually think pointing to the pandemic, I mean, so the Trump economy was

good on a lot of different fronts, but then what happened during the pandemic is it sort of accelerated this shift, uh, in the economy. It was headed in this direction anyway. So, you know, more shopping done on Amazon, meaning more deliveries, meaning more, uh, you know, more shopping done on Amazon, meaning more deliveries, meaning more, you know, online product advertising. And it accelerated this reorganization of the economy that was happening slowly, gradually, you know, pretty quickly in the scope of time, but like actually it was happening over time. And then we're here now. And that's happened. You know, there was no, that's why UPS, for instance, is so central to the economy right now. Because if that spigot turns off, you're in big trouble.

Yeah. And last point on this, it also shows that elections matter. And by elections, I mean union elections. After the 2018 bargaining, or during the 2018 bargaining, UPS workers actually rejected the deal that Jimmy Hoffa's crew came up, Jimmy Hoffa Jr.'s crew came up with, or Hoffa's kid or whoever it was. And out of that, this Teamsters Reform movement really gained a lot of traction. There has been for years this TDU, Teamsters for a Democratic Union, which has been challenging kind of the old Teamsters guard leadership. But it was anger at the way that the negotiating unfolded because even after the UPS workers rejected it, they basically forced it on them. The Teamsters bosses forced it on them.

And Sean O'Brien, who had been kicked out, kicked off the negotiating team, basically, for trying to bring rank and file workers and enemies of Hoffa onto the negotiating team ran for Teamsters president and won the election and so And with the support of TDU the kind of left-wing reform movement within TDU and at the bargaining table this time They had rank-and-file workers not just the bosses from the, from this extremely glitzy office down here in Washington, D.C. It is glitzy, yes. It's an incredible building.

It's like for long, it's the most valuable thing that they have, that they used to have. Now their militancy and their organizing capacity is the most valuable thing they had. So they had actual workers part-time and full-time on the bargaining unit pushing, making sure that the actual workers' voices were heard at the table. And I think the reform movement, Sean O'Brien in particular, and the workers who kind of pressured the bosses to really fight for them deserve the credit here. Well, one question for you on that. What is it that changed in your mind as you've watched labor in general have this resurgence and become more robust pretty quickly in a pretty short time span? Obviously, it's the problems that

workers are facing that has motivated a lot of organizing. But then is there something post-pandemic that clicks, that makes organizing suddenly come together? I mean, the main significant thing that happened in the middle of the 2018 and now is all of these UPS workers being told that they're essential workers, fighting through this pandemic, making sure that while everybody was staying at home, that these packages continue to get delivered. Some of them for convenience and making people's lives more comfortable, others life-saving, moving medicine, moving medical supplies, moving PPE. Combine that with a full economy and a continuously falling unemployment rate.

UPS doing great. UPS doing great. with frustration at the old leadership, then you finally get the pieces that come together to say that the work work that enough workers are going to line up with the reform and the democratic wing of the, of the Teamsters to take power. And then, and then, and then once UPS saw that, that's a sign that these workers are organized. They're militant. They're ready to strike. Like they're not bluffing. Right. Like we're not going to win this. Right. So what do you guys need? Right. And that's where you get the huge wage hikes in addition to the air conditioning in the cars. You get the full package. All right. Well, we'll keep following that story, but we should note that Hunter Biden. End of August. They have till end of August to approve

it. August 22nd. It's looking good. Yeah, it's looking good. It's looking good. Well, we should note that Hunter Biden's plea deal hearing is today. There was a whirlwind, strange legal drama on the eve of that trial or of that hearing in Delaware. But also Kevin McCarthy in this context has floated the idea of impeachment a little bit. We have a first element. We can roll this. SOT, you can see that's the Politico headline. He said that the Biden probe's, quote, rising to the level of an impeachment inquiry, something he said this week. He also said just yesterday that, well, why don't we just let him say it and then we'll react. Here's the SOT of Kevin McCarthy, B2. What do you say to the moderates in your party who say you continue to side and appease the

right wing on many issues, including such as what? On talking about an impeachment inquiry, President Biden on appropriations on the long list of things. Well, I don't know. Cause you haven't quoted anybody. You just say something. you say, you frame some brand of something. But let me answer your question. Okay, so you had that reporter a little flat-footed. She just said a long list of things, basically. But impeachment was one of those questions. And another thing Kevin McCarthy said yesterday is that his red line for when impeachment

will be on the table is when people stop cooperating with information, when he feels like the probes are hitting a dead end to the point where he needs to rise to an impeachment inquiry in order to keep getting information, which is somewhat of an interesting red line to draw. But again, this is all as Hunter Biden's plea deal is set to kick off today. The hearing is set to kick off today. We can put B3 up on the screen. New information also came out this week about his art sales, which is, you know, always amusing. But this is from the New York Post reporting on what Business Insider scooped here. First son Hunter Biden's novice artwork has raked in at least $1.3 million with buyers, including a Democratic donor, quote, friend whom his dad named to a prestigious commission. That's from Business Insider. Now, the Washington Free Beacon checked the White House visitor logs.

This is before. And they found that that person, Elizabeth Hershneft-Hawley, has visited the White House at least 13 times since December 2021 and has attended, as they say, several large events at the White House, but has also had several more intimate visits, including with Neera Tanden on March 21st. And they have an important note here. All of her White House visits occurred after Hunter Biden's first art show opened in New York City in November of 2021. Finally, I want to put this up from Sarah Bedford over at the Washington Examiner. This is B5. Okay, so she's also reporting that a very close personal friend and aide to the Biden family appears to have worked for years in the Delaware U.S. Attorney's Office under Weiss, including when the Hunter Biden probe began. That is important because it gets to the whistleblower saga that was playing out in

Congress last week, where you have IRS whistleblowers saying we were impeded. Or you have, for instance, the Department of Justice appearing to impede the investigation per, that gets to the FD-1023 form that has been circulating. We still don't know who the confidential human source is in that case, but reporting that they were being impeded as they were probing Hunter Biden's alleged wrongdoings. So Ryan, a lot of people on the right now feel like this is hitting critical mass and becoming a real albatross politically for Joe Biden. I don't know about that at all. But it's obvious that Hunter Biden's problems, the more, as Kevin McCarthy said just yesterday, he was like,

well, we wouldn't know any of this if Republicans hadn't taken back the House and opened up all of these investigations. We may have known some of it, but basically he's saying we used our investigative power to start exposing a lot of this. So that's one thing that he's trumpeting and feels like is a feather in his cap. But I just don't know that this matters to Biden politically. I think you would need so much more than this. Like the epistemic closure around both parties is so tight that in order to break through, you need something way more damning than what they've got so far. Like the 1023 is not gonna do it.

That's a Ukrainian oligarch saying that Hunter said things. It's all dirty. It's all messy. Like it's all scandalous. It's corrupt. Like a Hunter Biden friend working for the prosecutor. It's crazy. The levels of kind of privilege that are wrapped up in all of this are something that should drive everybody across the political spectrum mad. At the same time, Democrats, A, don't care. And B, are like, what

about Jared Kushner? What about Trump? Like, you, the party that's supporting Donald Trump for presidency, are going to accuse our guy of being corrupt? Like, let's go take a look at how much money the Saudis have run through Mar-a-Lago over the last, like, two years. Like, absolutely pales in comparison to the amount of money that this donor gave to Hunter Biden for his masterpieces. His masterpieces. Well, here's where I think there is a difference in that Joe Biden touted himself

and actually campaigned on this idea that he was gonna return the country to normal. Fair enough, Trump has never claimed to be clean. In fact, he's claimed the opposite. He's basically said, I alone can fix it. I know the system and I alone can fix it. He's going to drain the swamp and put it all in his own bank account. Right. Yeah. So it's baked into the Trump cake. And with Hunter Biden, I actually think this is where Republicans might be hitting a brick wall.

It is also kind of baked into the Joe Biden cake. I mean, people knew this about Joe Biden. Well, they knew this about Hunter Biden. And that's why Republicans are trying really hard to tie this directly to Joe Biden. And I think the Miranda Devine report this week that showed or alleged you had people, serious people, including Devin Archer, who's set to testify, has postponed three times, still says he's going to testify. He's a close business partner of Hunter Biden. So this is not a kind of Republican hack who's a Chinese spy who you can smear in all of these different ways. I'm sure he'll be smeared. But yeah, he was a legit business partner of Hunter Biden. And facing serious charges separately. Which then undermines his claims. That's what Democrats will say. Well, he's just saying this

to get out of. Right. Although undermines his claims, but gives him some motivation to speak, I'm sure. Exactly. Sure does. So on that note, he is set to allege, according to Miranda Devine at the New York Post, basically that Joe Biden was openly interacting with Hunter Biden's clients, which, again, we already know. And that has still not fully penetrated the news cycle, that we have pictures of Joe Biden on the golf course with Ukrainian clients of Hunter Biden. We know that he was at those Cafe Milano meetings with people from everywhere. Bobulinski, right? Tony Bobulinski. Exactly. And so we actually sort of- And we know Hunter went on Air Force Two to China and met a business associate over there.

Well, his father was the Vice President of the United States. He was doing business and using Air Force Two to do it. We've known that for years. Don't even let Harry and Meghan on Air Force One yet. Hunter Biden gets on Air Force Two. There's no justice in this world. If Devin Archer testifies and says Joe Biden was telling, you know, so the allegation is that Hunter Biden put him on speakerphone with Burisma executives and then Joe Biden, as the media claimed, this was a debunked narrative, right? That there's nothing to see here when Joe Biden's at the Council on Foreign Relations bragging about using aid money as the sort of stick to get Ukraine to comply with firing a corrupt prosecutor. I'm sure the prosecutor was fully corrupt, but it also happened to help Burisma.

So, again, like all of this has been out there. And so on the political question, I don't know. I think the more you can tie it to Joe Biden, the better for Republicans in their goal to oust Joe Biden. I think it is really corrupt. I think we're learning more about Joe Biden's involvement in that corruption. I still don't know that it's going to make a whole difference in the election. And that's the other problem with 45 percent of voters being with one party and 45 percent of the other and just being with them in a tribal kind of cultural way. Is that in the media and the media and that and you're immune then to negative things about your side because and, you know, Herschel Walker and John Fetterman are good examples on alternative sides. Like Republicans looked at Herschel Walker's record and were like, and you could not have listed kind of a person who was, you couldn't have a list of

characteristics of somebody less qualified and less supportable for county commissioner, let alone United States Senate, you know, weapons violence, domestic abuse, like the allegations just across the board and coming from his own campaign. Right. But Republicans are like, well, he's a Republican. He's going to vote with Republicans. I'm going with him Fetterman in Pennsylvania A lot of Democrats had real questions after his stroke over whether was gonna be able to perform the duties They're like, you know what better than dr. Oz. Yeah, don't care right and so that makes kind of that when when you have people off into their different camps it makes journalism and a kind of general accountability just land with much less impact.

Fetterman is such a good example because that also created this media bubble and I'm not saying this doesn't happen in conservative media, but it created this media bubble where nobody, it was taboo to talk about what was happening with John Fetterman and potential cognitive impairment because A, there was an issue of political correctness, but B, this was a binary between Dr. Oz and John Fetterman and the vast majority of people who were covering that race had an opinion on whether it should be John Fetterman or Dr. Oz. And so you end up with like that tribalism seeping into media in a way that's not helpful.

And I think that happens all the time with Hunter Biden. You'll get coverage from The New York Times. You'll get coverage from CNN here and there. It doesn't become a priority in the sort of punditry space. And it doesn't get the treatment in terms of like front pages and breaking news headlines, et cetera, et cetera, that Trump-Russia got. So it's not a priority because in the binary, people have an opinion on what's important and what's not. And it's just not great. And also, I think the media, I think some of that bias is very real. But I also think that they feel bitten by a lot of

these Republican scandals. Because if you are at the top echelon of CBS News now, you remember like Whitewater. I don't know if you were born then. I was born. This is like this fake scandal that they ginned up about Bill and Hillary Clinton and some real estate deals or something like this. Then they open it up. They end up finding nothing. There's some cattle future weirdness going on that, but ended up- Soft corruption. Like at best, they, at best, there's some soft corruption. I mean, the Clintons, you know,

became, I think, even less softly corrupt throughout their lives. But yeah, just- The Sopranos of Little Rock. Basic Arkansas stuff, which then evolves into Monica Lewinsky, which is the only thing Ken Stark can get, which started with Whitewater. Then you've got Fast and Furious. You've got Cylindra. You've got Benghazi. All of these scandals that the right just kind of doesn't let go of, and the mainstream media just gets bored of eventually.

I'm very sorry that four people were killed in Benghazi. It was a huge tragedy. It happened in, what was it, 2012? We were talking about that in 2016, 2017. Hillary Clinton lied about it. Okay, but still, it's like four years we're going to talk about Benghazi? It's like you end up losing people that way. Well, yeah, I think what you're saying is true about media because there's it's

absolutely accurate that a lot of people on the right will get fixated on certain things down to these like minute details and it reminds me a lot of how the mainstream press covered Trump Russia for a long time. They end up looking crazy because they're with the boards and strings. Charlie Kelly, yeah, with the board and the strings. They look like they're redoing Benghazi or Fast and Furious. Right, right. No, I think that's true. And I think it's when you see that coming from the right, a lot of what motivates people on the right to go that deep on these scandals is that they feel like nobody else is paying attention

and nobody else cares. And I mean, it's like- Eventually they're not wrong. To legitimate things. Like Benghazi was a great example where I don't, I think there were serious wrongs on behalf of our government. I think what Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton did

in that situation was despicable. But was it sort of being used for political purposes? Yeah, absolutely. Who admitted that? Was it Kevin McCarthy? It was someone like admitted it on TV. Yes, it was Kevin McCarthy. That it was, it was seen as something. He's like, look at their numbers. It was a big political win. Yeah, absolutely. Look at the Clinton's numbers. Absolutely. Because we keep hammering on Benghazi. Yeah. And people are like, it was, it was that and the alleged affairs that blew up his first speakership. And part of what motivated Republicans to go to the mat on keep hammering on Benghazi. Yeah. People were like, it was that and the alleged affairs that blew up his first speakership. And part of what motivated Republicans to go to the mat on that

is they felt like nobody was like the so-called mainstream media wasn't paying due attention. And so I do, I think that was a political mistake to think they had a real like winner and to treat it so as like a partisan football. Yeah, absolutely. Last question on this one for you. Does he have the votes to impeach Biden? I don't think he does. And I think Democrats would relish putting that on the House floor. And I think there's 18 Republicans who serve in districts that Biden won. I think they'd love to say, go ahead, go ahead, vote to impeach Biden. We'll see you in November.

Yeah, I think the more interesting question right now is what they do with Mayorkas. And I remember when I talked to McCarthy last September, that was what he said. I asked him because Marjorie Taylor Greene already had an impeachment bill. And he said, I think you don't start with impeachment. And the question of whether he has the votes to impeach Mayorkas, I feel like is a good barometer of what would happen should an impeachment inquiry of Biden come to the table, because you'll see where some establishment Republicans who would be comfortable impeaching Mayorkas but not Biden, what do they do? Do they actually go for Mayorkas if that vote comes and they get that sort of ball rolling? I'm curious about that as a sort of gauge to what they

would do with the president himself, because I tend to agree with you. I don't think they have the votes to impeach Biden right now. Well, let's talk about this unfolding scandal in Florida. A couple days in now, a lot of back and forth over this new African-American history curriculum put up, I think C1 here in Florida, that the debate has really centered on one kind of clarification that is included in this new curriculum, where they say that some slaves developed skills that they could use later for their, quote, personal benefit. That has ricocheted around kind of both Democratic and Republican powers. There's actually a lot more to the curriculum that we're going to get into soon.

But if you could put up C2, I think you've got Chris Christie jumping in on this. Because Rhonda Sanchez's response to this was the quote was really bad. What was it? I didn't. Yeah, I didn't do it and I'm not involved in it. Okay. And the buck stops with some other person. And so Chris Christie, of course, is going to, you know, eat him up for that.

Like, look, own it. Chris Christie's going to eat him up. We got pudding fingers on the one hand and we got Chris Christie eating it up on the other hand. Yeah, Christie is, you know, loves to say he's the guy who's going to, you know, the buck's going to stop with him. He's a leader. He's going to stand up. Yeah. If people close down a bridge on his watch, he's going to take responsibility.

That's right. And it also is an easy hit because then he's not debating the merits of the curriculum. DeSantis doesn't force people to debate him on it. Instead, they can say, you ran your whole thing on what's wrong with Florida public schools and wokeism and how they're teaching about race. And then something comes out that's unpopular and you're like, I don't know, maybe we'll find the guy and fire him. They fired the staffer who tweeted the weird Nazi symbol thing. So yeah, maybe he'll hunt down and cancel whatever administrator does. But then we have the thing that really set it off was Kamala Harris's response, right?

So let's play Vice President Harris. They decided middle school students will be taught that enslaved people benefited from slavery. They insult us in an attempt to gaslight us and we will not stand for it. Join us now, the host of MSNBC's Politics Nation, president of the National Action Network, Reverend Al Sharpton. Rev, good morning. I had to dig in and read this because the headline I thought couldn't be true, but here it is, a 216-page document from the Florida State Board of Education, one section that reads, slaves develop skills which in some instances could be applied for their personal benefits. I never thought I'd see both sides-ism of slavery taught in public schools. Well, it is not only insulting, it is humiliating. And it really is dangerous because it will instruct young people if it is allowed to go forward. Not only a is quite perfect on that, but I do want to play. In fact, actually, this is our next thought. This is a clip from one of the

men who drafted the curriculum, who says it's the controversy is has taken what he wrote on this line. This is a 216 page curriculum. He says that it has been taken out of context. He's a black man who was involved in the drafting of the curriculum that was created post-STOP WOKE. That's the name of the legislation. It's like all caps. There's some acronym in there. But let's take a listen to what he has to say. There's been a little bit of backlash to these standards that were put out. And like you know, like you said that, you know, these were, these were done in open open sessions. So the public could, you know, listen or watch along. You know, what would, what would you say to critics who say these standards have set education back?

Well, I can't answer critics whom I haven't seen or heard. The only criticism I've encountered so far is a single one that was articulated by the vice president and which was an error. As I stated in my response to the vice president, it was categorically false. It was never said that slavery was beneficial to Africans. What was said, and anyone who reads this will see this with clarity, it is the case that Africans proved resourceful, resilient, and adaptive, and were able to develop skills and aptitudes

which served to their benefit, both while enslaved and after enslavement. Ryan, what do you make of all that? Right, you can't judge it based on just one little kind of snippet taken out of context. But there is some other disturbing stuff in the curriculum that suggests the direction that it was trying to go. And it reminded me of being in a dorm room in college and arguing with people about slavery. And you saw a lot of those same arguments that you'd hear then kind of gussied up into kind of curriculum language in here.

One of them being that, well, serfs and slaves are kind of really similar. So it's actually you can't blame the U.S. because there's always been serfs. There were serfs before we had capitalism, we had feudalism. Then you'd also hear often, well, actually, a lot of the slave traders were Africans, and Africans have had elements of slavery through war fighting culture for hundreds of years. So actually, you can't blame the United States for that because it's an African thing. And then you'd hear, well, it was a lot worse in the Caribbean. The Caribbean slavery, boy, let me tell you about how bad that was. And then you would hear that, right, some people gained skills.

So it all kind of flows into this idea that, yes, slavery was an abomination. However, relatively, it's not as bad as you might think because it's actually doing it for thousands of years. It happened in Africa. It was worse in the Caribbean. And then the question you have to ask is, okay, let's stipulate that all of those things are true. They mentioned that the word slave comes from Slav, so the Slavs were enslaved in like the 9th century. It's like, okay, let's say that's true. What's the point of telling people that?

What are you trying to get people to take from that? Why make an argument that slavery was relatively better than you might have thought it was? And I think it's to get you to a place, it says, that doesn't undermine the kind of American exceptionalism that we're trying to kind of push through a purely patriotic education. And I think that very quickly then becomes false in a sense that even if it's true on all of the various points, it becomes false overall. And it doesn't really um doesn't really serve the students and there is also to to its credit the curriculum uh talks about uh slave resistance and slave slave rebellions right uh and talks about the slaves who escaped uh underground railroad and then served in the uh union army fighting you know for uh not just their own freedom but

for the emancipation of the four million slaves throughout the South, which has to be understood. We're talking like four million enslaved people. Puts it in a category that just is substantially removed from these other things that they try to say, well, it's not as bad as it was over here. Right. And so that's where I come down on this, that it's just, it is clearly trying to move in any direction that is unnecessary. Now, Harris seems to have just gone off that one little clip. And it's interesting that we were able to find the place where she's able to make a direct, firm, and passionate case. Yes.

And it's against slavery. Right. So we found the line. That was, yeah, that was like animated Kamala Harris that everyone thought was going to do so well in 2020. And you see that so rarely now. I had the same reaction to that clip. What you just made is a really interesting substantive critique. I have seen so little of that. What I have seen is this despicable smear

by Kamala Harris, elevated by the corporate press, saying one black voice is more important than other black voices, or one black voice is more inherently legitimate than the black voices defending the curriculum that they drafted, actual academics. And that would be a much more interesting conversation about why are you trying to sort of put slavery, American slavery, in this like historical perspective to the point where it seems as though you're trying to absolve. I haven't read the full curriculum. I think that's an interesting critique. From what I've heard made the best of it in ways that speak to remarkable resilience. And I don't think there's one factual point,

factual problem with that claim. I think your point is interesting. Why is this being, you know, is this being tied into a problematic narrative? That's always a worthwhile question. But this has been such a useless conversation because there's just been a debate against the straw man. The straw man of Ron DeSantis. It's basically the don't say gay controversy. Again, were there substantive problems in that bill? I actually think there were. But are they what anybody is saying they

are? No. And it created a completely false caricature of Ron DeSantis, of Florida Republicans in the press that is still indelible in the public's imagination today. And that's not helpful to fighting what could be very real problems in the curriculum, to correcting what could be very real problems in the curriculum, when you have the vice president taking this highly publicized trip to Florida to push back on an abject smear, it's not just that she's disagreeing with the substance of the curriculum, it's that she's actually accusing people of despicable racism. And I think that's despicable in and of itself.

It's not like we're disagreeing over marginal tax rates. She's accusing black academics and Ron DeSantis of facilitating white supremacy, essentially, and on what I think is a lie. And I just, I find that completely despicable. I think Chris Christie has an interesting point in his response. I think Ron DeSantis, his response was weird. I didn't do it and I wasn't involved in it. For Ron DeSantis, you would think he would be leaning into it saying it's a meat your whole thing man the guys Yeah, he's clearly lost his mojo. I think a little bit and this gets to c6 we can put that up on the screen Losing a third of his campaign staff. He's sending out talking points to his key supporters

C6b yeah, and yeah, we haven't you can go to the the next element here talking points being sent around, where Ryan mentions they actually spelled break wrong. Yeah, they're going to tap the breaks. They're going to press the breaks. Oh, yeah, you can see that in the first bullet point of the second section. They spelled it break. We can go to our last. They laid off the copy editor. Yeah, they actually very well may have.

But you can see in the next one the point about layoffs, about a third of his staff in the next element, if we go to that, just announced another round of layoffs last night. So more than a third of his 2024 campaign staff. Now, Ryan, another thing I think is interesting that Chris Christie says is he goes on to say, we're arguing about these issues, these smaller issues, when we've got big issues in our country like runaway inflation that continues to hurt families, like an education system, blah, blah, blah. And I actually, he's making a point that's half right and half wrong. Half right in that, do I think DeSantis has overemphasized the culture war in his campaign? Yes. Half wrong in that actually some of these culture war issues, like what kids are being taught in school, does matter to parents. Ask Glenn Youngkin. These are kitchen table issues in the same way that inflation is a kitchen table issue.

Parents really care about what they're paying for in public schools and their kids are hearing on a daily basis. You have to talk about it in the right way, though. And the DeSantis meme campaign has not necessarily been the right way. Right. And DeSantis has pushed his meme campaign way off. If we could go back to, was it C6B here, which is the Ben Jacobs tweet of the, yeah. So if you look right in the middle there, it says the central themes of the great American comeback. These are the talking points that the campaign sent out to reporters.

Number one, economy. Number two, border. Number three, China. All the, border. Number three, China. All the way down at number four, culture. Woke ideology has infiltrated our schools and our military. We need a leader who is unafraid to restore our nation's sanity. He looks a little afraid because it's all the way down at number four. This was kind of number one up until he was doing his reset, which I think doesn't bode well for that point. That like, if you can't even win a Republican primary on this stuff, what good is it?

Yeah, it's not the best. I mean, it would be a really interesting test case if Trump wasn't in the race because Trump sort of makes it hard to gauge what the other Republicans are trying out. But the economy bullet point has a little culture war in it, which I think is well placed on Ron DeSantis, where he talks about corporate elites, the economy benefiting corporate elites. That's a culture war messaging on the economy that Republicans never used to sort of connect the dots to in the same way that Democrats do. So I think they're trying to do both at the same time, to walk and chew gum at the same time. It's not as easy as it looks.

And so I mean, that's tough stuff. But this should be Ron DeSantis in his element. Like he shouldn't give Chris Christie an opening to come after him on this. Like this is a gift to him. It's a political gift to him in the same way that Don Lemon saying women are past their prime or Nikki Haley's past her prime was a gift to Nikki Haley. Like Ron DeSantis should just be like rubbing his hands together, like eagerly trying to figure out how to make the most of this instead

of that first response was punting. You know, his campaign has like, I think hit the ground running with us since, but that was bizarre to me. Right. But I think I, right. Now his campaign has like I think hit the ground running with us since but that was bizarre to me. But I think I right I think he has a messenger problem and a confidence problem and his confidence problem is coming from you know just getting rinsed by Trump in this primary so far and so I think he's not feeling as confident agree and will and willing to stand on some of this culture war stuff and the messenger problem is that all right, is it true that some enslaved people were blacksmiths and were able to use their skills? We've talked about Robert Smalls

on this show a bunch before. One of the greatest American heroes ever. He was an enslaved ship pilot in Charleston, South Carolina who stole his slave ship and delivered it to the Union Army. And then ended up fighting on behalf of the Union Army, ended up serving in Congress, worked with Harriet Tubman, he was doing guerrilla stuff back in there.

Just absolute incredible hero. Is it true that learning how to pilot the ship as a slave enabled him to steal that ship. Oh, yeah, that is true Yeah, but It gets too close to sounding like you're patting The person who taught him how to pilot the ship on the head and in career gradually and good good good job You know good for you for teaching these skills Yeah to work to Robert Smalls when it's like now no, you owned him as property and were like utterly exploiting

and degrading him and his family. And he then had the resourcefulness enough to escape. So I think it's a messenger problem that DeSantis needed to be more careful about. Like if you're gonna be making this, you're central to your campaign and saying that the education's too well, people are gonna be looking very closely

at what you come up with instead. And so I think somebody ought to have seen that and been like, mm, yeah, that's not gonna come off well, especially when you're doing the whole, oh, Africans did slavery too thing. It's weird, because when I looked at that sentence, I know we have to move on, but when I looked at the context that it was in,

I got completely with it. Like they were saying, I thought in the context that it was in I got completely with it like they were saying in the I thought in the context it was look at how resilient and look at how like look at how there's a lot of that in there yeah it to me it just it was like all about putting the agency on people who were under like incredibly difficult circumstances phrase personal benefit that benefit was extremely grating to people. That's a how dare you kind of line. Whenever you're using personal benefit in relation to

anything to do with slavery. Although I also think the media was disingenuous in acting as though this was something that like Ron DeSantis and not black academics had personally put together. If they cared, they could have to do an actual segment on what's in there and talk about it had personally put together. Right, if they cared, they could have to do an actual segment on what's in there and talk about it the way we did.

Let's move on to X. You just see the letter X at the bottom of your screen if you're watching. We're just going to fill in the blank here. Yeah, what are we going to talk about? We're going to do some algebra today. X is, of course, as Sagar and Crystal talked about yesterday, now Twitter. It's sort of like when Facebook changed to Meta, you don't quite know when you've hit the point of critical mass that people know what you're talking about. So you can actually just start referring to Facebook as Meta or Twitter as X.

But this is actually a pretty interesting story because Elon Musk has basically come out and said X was all along the goal of buying Twitter. The goal of buying Twitter was sort of, the free speech question was secondary to what you can do. Make Twitter sort of like Weibo, make it this one-stop shop, this huge financial hub where people are doing social life,

they're doing news, they're doing finance all on X. This goes back years for Elon Musk. People have been digging up press quotes and clips of him. This goes back years for Elon Musk. People have been digging up press quotes and clips of him. This is from CNN. We have a shot we want to start off with here. And I can say that real Musk heads who are in my DMs have been telling me that, like, this was his goal from the very, like, people have, like, if you, I'm not a Musk head, but the real Musk heads that have been talking about X for a very long time

have been like, whenever I'd criticize Musk, they'd be like, wait till you see X. Let's roll the tape. Like, literally, let's roll the tape. This is an ATM. All we're going to do is transform the traditional banking industry. I do not fit the picture of a banker. X.com, this is Julie. Raising $50 million is a matter of making a series of phone calls. And the money is there. I've sunk the great majority of my net worth into X.com,

which is the new banking and mutual funds company on the internet that I've started. Big X. Exactly. X.com. I think X.com could absolutely be a multi-billion dollar bonanza. Okay, so he's 28 years old there. That's from a CNN Perspectives documentary in 1999.

And he's already talking about X. Yeah. Now I think in Musk's telling there, it's a little bit backwards. He really, he's always, yes, he's always wanted to do this X thing. He tried to then turn PayPal into X. And that this basically what got him pushed out of there, right? I was like dude, we're PayPal. We're doing we're good Like we're sitting here people are using our platform to exchange money and we're taking a piece of it, right? We're all gonna be multi billionaires, right? We're gonna have multi generational Like what it's, we're not doing

anything. Right. Just putting buckets out and taking people's money. Yeah. He's like, let's call it X and do Y. I mean, you can see it. Just get out of here, dude. It's actually kind of interesting because I never thought of PayPal as what it became. And you can see that PayPal became, I think, you know, bigger than, and it has potential still to keep getting bigger as crypto grows and et cetera. Actually, speaking of crypto, Jack Dorsey weighed in. This is our next element. We can put it up on the screen.

Jack Dorsey, obviously, the longtime head of Twitter, he tweeted, keep calm and just X through it. Another amusing sort of subplot in this whole story. We can put the next element up on the screen. What you're going to be seeing is the Twitter sign, the famous Twitter sign in San Francisco getting taken down by a guy in a bucket truck. What actually happened, though, is security and police also stopped them from taking down the famous, the iconic Twitter sign because there was a miscommunication as to whether or not they were supposed to be doing that. So while they're taking the Twitter sign down, the bird down, which Elon Musk reportedly hates, has always been fixated on getting rid of the birds,

that was actually interrupted. And some more interesting stuff in Axios from Walter Isaacson, who apparently has this huge biography of Musk coming out on September 12th. He says that the X-ray branding has been in the works for more than nine months right since Musk decided to buy Twitter. Quote, he said it can be a trillion dollar company easily. This is an idea he's thought about for 25 years. A financial platform that helps anyone profit from creating content. He feels it can transform journalism by offering an alternative to subscription models where people can make easy payments for whatever strikes their fancy. When he first walked in, it was like a hard

Scrabble cowboy walking into a Starbucks. He said there are too many birds here. He pulled all the woke t-shirts out of the cabinets and scoffed at the notion of psychologically safe workplaces. It was like watching a movie on Fast Forward. I could see him getting more and more frustrated with the culture. And Musk himself said, we have to replace this with a maniacal sense of urgency. We can put the last element up on the screen here, which is from Elon Musk himself. I think the most interesting point here is he says, Twitter was acquired by XCore both to ensure freedom of speech and as an accelerant for X, the everything app. The Twitter name made sense when it was just 140 character messages going back and forth

like Byrd's tweeting, but now you can post almost anything, including several hours of video, and then he adds a timeframe. He says, in the months to come, we will add comprehensive communications and the ability to conduct your entire financial world, so we must bid adieu to the Byrd, your entire financial world. I always figured this was his goal because he kept name-checking Weibo early on in the Twitter days, which is a Chinese equivalent of Twitter that's more of a hub than Twitter is right now. And then he's added subscription on

Twitter. He's added long, long, long form video to Twitter and has been working with big content creators like Tucker Carlson, says he wants to transform journalism. Ryan, what do you make of that? I'm sure you have some thoughts on that. I mean, the number one thing you want in a financial institution is safety and security, right? You want to believe that the money that you have sitting there is going to be sitting there the next time you come.

You want to believe that when you press the transfer button and you send it to the person that you're trying to send it to, it gets to them. Yeah. And that you can confirm that all of that happens. That takes an enormous amount of infrastructure. Yeah. And then it takes social confidence in the institution to manage that. It shocks me that Elon Musk would have handled Twitter the last nine months the way he has it's good point and then expect us

to turn over Month us to turn over money to it and to do something much vaster in scope when you've narrowed the company Yeah, it's like okay. You said you're gonna take care of the bots the bots are worse This scam there's scams everywhere uh you know dave dane is constantly getting hacked and selling laptops to people fake laptops don't buy laptops from dave dane like don't don't do it um and then he's gonna instead of fixing that stuff he's gonna come and be like no no it's totally fine now i think the idea is if he pumps billions more of his own money into it, the idea is an interesting one. Like if you can – I mean and it's not that original.

It's like PayPal. Yeah. It's like try to be a place where people move money around and take some of it while they do that. Like that's basically what he wants to do. But he's going to have to put up money to make it safe to do that. The reason that it's become less safe is because he pulled so much money out of it because he levered so much debt on top of it. Well, Twitter was in horrible shape. It was. But when you hear him complain about it, he's like, yeah, we lost 50% of our advertisers

and it's just so deeply in debt. It's like, well, the advertisers fled from you, bro, and you put the debt on it. Like literally, like that's your debt so that you could buy it. So the things that you're complaining about, you caused. And then that made it much more rickety. And is something rickety the kind of thing that you want to give access to your bank account? I don't know. I mean, there's potentially, yeah, there's potentially an argument that we're in the middle of, you know, he can go five years from now, let's say, hypothetically, Elon Musk's vision is realized for X. And we're looking back on now, it looks like his critics were, you know, nitpicking at something that was in the process of becoming much bigger,

and it was in the middle of a transformation. But the question right now, I think, is whether that transformation looks plausible. And yeah, I mean, I think it's been a really rough go for Twitter. It's not that he inherited a perfectly great situation. That was like all rosy. That is true. But yeah, the confidence in creating and building something much bigger in Twitter when the version of Twitter right now, like, so yesterday I got a notification saying the violation you reported has been reviewed. And I clicked on it. It was something like very obvious that someone's personal information had been posted to Twitter. And I reported it a few weeks ago with somebody's address. And it was like a very obvious thing to take down.

Before Musk had taken over Twitter, Twitter, to its credit, had a much bigger workforce, and it was, I still think, a terrible app. But they would take that down like much faster. And that's the basic question of security that you're raising. And so if he's trying to get new cash influxes by having a bigger vision that allows him to have a better staff, a smarter staff, smarter AI, whatever, that gets stuff flagged, I guess. But, you know, he's had Twitter for a while now, and I feel like problems like that have only gotten worse. Right. Which is a pretty big deal. Right, man.

You're like, hey, so I had money in my account. Now it's gone. Yeah. They're like, yeah, we'll get back to you in 45 days. It's like, yeah, but I got bills to pay, like, gone. Yeah. We'll get back to you in 45 days. Yeah. Yeah. But I got bills to pay like now. Yeah. And I think all of this is also the bigger picture is that like Twitter is engineered to addict you and disrupt your brain in ways that are very harmful, not just to discourse, but to people's personal and professional lives. And I can't share anything. No matter how much I

like free speech, I can't really share anything that ignores that much deeper problem in Twitter and tries to add our banking to a platform that is made like a slot machine. It doesn't feel good. If this results, though, in haters' money flowing into my account because they're engaging with me and trashing me, all right, that'd be funny. Have you tried the subscription yet? I see what he's saying about how it could transform journalism, and I get why he was upset about Substack rolling out the notes feature

because it does look a lot like Twitter, and Substack is sort of doing the journalism thing that I think he wants to do on Twitter. Did you do the subscription? No. Yeah. I just really don't like Twitter. It doesn't matter who's in charge of it.

My tweets are still free for y'all. They want you to call them sheets. Did you see this? No. Yeah, literally. Okay. Well, moving on. Stephen A. Smith has weighed in on the Jason Aldean controversy. Let's start. This is from Stephen A. Smith's podcast on Monday, the Stephen A. Smith Show. He weighed in on the Try That in a Small Town controversy, which, by the way, has risen to, I think, number two on the Billboard Hot 100 in the wake of, that song was released in May, the video came out, and then the controversy bubbled to the surface

and the song started taking off. Strice and effect. Yes, total strice and effect. Aldine is on tour right now, too, so I think that probably hasn't hurt, but there's a very clear correlation. Coming to D.C. soon. Yes, that's right.

He's coming to Merriweather Post, I think this week even. So the thing happened really quick. The ball started rolling down the hill when the controversy bubbled to the surface. So Stephen A. Smith weighed in, and here's what he had to say. Are you ready for this, y'all? I find nothing racist about those lyrics surprised you did not nothing racist about those lyrics only when the video gets attached to it do you see what he's trying to say see I ain't no damn hypocrite

I see the lyrics that are spewed in other genres, whether it's rock and roll, hip hop or whatever the case may be. If we don't say anything about them, we shouldn't be saying anything about Jason Aldean's lyrics. The problem is, A, the whole Trump supporter thing. Him showing up allegedly to some party in blackface, trying to look like Lil Wayne. There's racial undertones showing Black Lives Matter protests as opposed to protests at other places. I didn't see the insurrection on January 6th, 2021 in that video. Maybe I missed it, but I didn't see it. What does that have to do with Ron DeSantis? It's simple.

It's a race war taking place in our country. So he had previously said some nice things about Ron DeSantis, and I think that's where this was especially interesting to people. Because, yeah, he had previously said basically he was interested in DeSantis. He didn't want Donald Trump to get the nomination. And that's where DeSantis comes into play and his interest in DeSantis comes into play. Coleman Hughes in Barry Weiss's publication, The Free Press, He wrote an essay using lyrics from, and Coleman is a rapper himself, lyrics from 21 Savage and comparing it to like lyrics from Lil Baby. I am not going to do the Ben Shapiro thing where I read rap lyrics. You just got to learn from other people's mistakes. But Ryan- He had other mistakes in that clip, but yes.

So a few people more entertaining than Stephen A. Smith. What did you make of his take here? I love Stephen A. He's so good at what he does. One of the best out there. I think that he makes a really fair point, that you have to understand in the context that it's presented. And it is a choice that if you're trying to talk about

just general unrest and problems that you've got in the community, but you're not gonna have them in this small town, you have a lot of choices that you can make when it comes to footage. And if you choose Black Lives Matter protests rather than January 6th protests, then okay okay, that's a choice you made. And that's the context you're setting.

He did show white people protesting and, like, yelling at cops. A lot of the Black Lives Matter protesters were white people. white liberal woman scream in the face of a working class black cop for hours on end, basically in the middle of the day on like a Tuesday in the summer of 2020, calling her despicable names. And so I mean, like it saying I get what he's saying. So what he's saying is interesting because the conversation we had last week about how actually a lot of small towns, a lot of people you saw on January 6th, have been hit with economic circumstances. People in their situations used to look at, you know, urban areas and minorities,

black Americans, and have this like smug sense of superiority to people who were rioting, protesting, like L.A. riots. And then things hit their small towns, and their small towns aren't so great anymore. These places have actually been ravaged, and there are serious problems with crime and drugs in those small towns. So Aldine's narrative, try that in a small town, isn't so clean. Again, where I grew up, that's a small town that's still thriving,

but that's not everywhere. And it's certainly not a lot of the places where Aldean is maybe talking about where there are Trump supporters like him who have faced, like people on January 6th, for instance, that have actually dealt with, it's not to excuse anything whatsoever, it was horrible on every level,

but people were motivated by economic disenfranchisement. There's no question about it. And that has created crime. And that has created less cohesive small town communities. And so I think that's the real problem with this narrative. I still don't think that it's racism. I get what Stephen A. Smith is saying, but a lot of people died in those riots. A lot of people, a lot of black Americans have been victimized by the crime surge in the last couple of years. So I still don't see the racist question being answered. I mean, the title, Try That in a Small Town, is an extraordinarily clear allusion to vigilante justice. And in this country, vigilante justice almost exclusively

has meant mob, lynch mobs. The two things are very much linked. And his unfortunate choice to film it outside of a courthouse where black men had been lynched only furthered that. Now, I think they're probably just dumb and just didn't know that. Yeah, Coleman Hughes pointed out there was like a Hannah Montana music video filmed at that same courthouse. Sure, but it wasn't about vigilante. Hannah Montana wasn't singing about vigilante justice. The sad reality is that there are a lot of places in this country where there's

a history of lynchings. In, a lot of courthouses. In the South, yes. And so I think it's extraordinarily likely that was a coincidence. It is a sad reality, but at the same time, he is talking about it with some nostalgia. We're talking about the idea of, or you could see why people would think, why Stephen A. would think, combined with Black Lives Matter footage, that you're making a nod to that. I think you had an interesting point last week where you talked about how that used to be in cities, too. Like people used to take pride in taking care of their own in their cities. And still in a lot of cities now, yeah. Totally, in certain neighborhoods.

And again, I think that's another thing people miss is that there are— You can have Mayberry inside a big city. Right. There are pockets, although Muriel Bowser actually just this week said, this isn't Mayberry and basically blamed valets for losing people's keys that were stolen in D.C. Did you not see that? No. What's your point? Don't valet your car downtown.

There were a bunch of keys stolen at valet kiosks and Muriel Bowser came out and was like, this is a Mayberry. This is not on us, basically. Fair enough. Don't just hand your keys to random people. There are pockets of big cities or pockets of the country that really still are great. And people do take pride in taking care of their own. And I think that's the vigilante justice thing is interesting because I still see this as taking pride in your small town, taking care of other people and taking care of your neighbors, even though I don't think that's reality in a whole lot of small towns, especially where it used to be because people had jobs and families and intact marriages and mental health, et cetera, that has been plundered. I get that, but I still, I just don't see that

as being necessarily racist because there's truth in that and different, that still exists, whether you're in a city or a town. And I guess it's true that Jason Aldean was probably talking about rural America. He probably didn't have like big cities in mind. But when Stephen A. Smith says the lyrics are not racially motivated, I mean, he's saying because there's not January 6th protest video, even though there are videos of white protesters acting out in the video. I mean, I guess I still struggle to see how that's racist.

To put him in his full context, at the end he says it's a race war and but it's not started by black people like this he's making the point that That the aggressors in it the ones that are instigating it are people like out Dean who are making a big deal of the Like they're the one like they're the ones that are kicking it off I just realized we cut that video off right before he said that right it's and that's actually an interesting point Like why does it matter to Jason on Dean who doesn't live in a big city? Why is that the focus of the song? I mean, I think people have good reasons for that.

But I guess the other thing I should say is that this does, I do think it's true that people, especially white Americans, sometimes stumble into things they should know better that are like racially insensitive, that for good reasons are interpreted as having racial under or overtones to people, especially to their black neighbors in a way that they don't intend, or maybe they subconsciously intend and they don't realize that. But I think that that's actually a fairly good point that Stephen A. Smith is making when it's like, where's the January 6th footage, et cetera, et cetera.

I don't think there's any like racial animus behind what Jason Aldean did. I don't think his label would be dumb enough to deal with that. I don't think he would be dumb enough to intentionally do that. But I do think there's absolutely still the case that people stumble into things that are interpreted

for a good reason because of the country's history as racism when it's not intended to be. You also wouldn't carry off an insurrection in a small town. Because the Congress isn't there. That's true. You would do it in Harper's Ferry. Good insurrection there. That's a good point. All right, Ryan, what is your point today?

So by the time we get to the presidential election of 2036, that's just four quick cycles from now, three if you don't count this one, Gen Z will make up a full 35% of the electorate. In every election between now and then, their numbers are going to grow, and the number of boomers making it out to the polls will get smaller and smaller. And one of the most common misconceptions in American politics is that young people are always liberal. And part of that misconception is the boomers' fault, because the kids in the 60s who were

actually leftists were so loud about it, with their tie-dyes and their huge marches and their campus sit-ins, that you couldn't miss it. Yet in 1972, the first-year 18-year-olds were allowed to vote. Nixon actually won voters under 32. If that pattern had held in 2020, Trump would have been reelected in a landslide. Instead, historic youth turnout gave Democrats the House in 2018, put Biden over the top in 2020, and in 2022, the kids over the top in 2020, and in 2022, the kids saved Democrats from a red wave. In Michigan, youth voter turnout was the highest in the country, which is bad news for Republicans because that election was fought heavily along culture lines with abortion on the ballot

and fights over schools and trans rights dominating headlines. The Republican response to this generational shift has been truly confounding, which is why I'm glad we have Emily here to help explain what on earth they're thinking. But first, let's take a look at a few numbers from the Harvard Youth Poll that are just out. They were plucked out by Greg Sargent over at the Washington Post. He zeroes in on what one pollster calls the big four and those are gun laws action on climate

Same-sex relationships and the question of whether quote food and shelter or a right unquote Now back when I was a youngster all four of these issues were underwater for the left now looking at the chart You can see a few obvious things happened The most obvious of which was Trump as in Emily as you can see in this chart things happened, the most obvious of which was Trump. And Emily, as you can see in this chart here, once Trump is elected, support for all of these things just skyrockets. And people can pause that and study that if they want. But you also see in 2018 after the Parkland shooting, the number almost goes just straight up when it comes to, you know, strong gun laws. What's your point today?

Well, yesterday, as CNN reports, and you can see this up on your screen here, a federal judge blocked President Joe Biden's controversial asylum policy, delivering a major blow to the administration, which has leaned on the measure to drive down border crossings. The judge put the ruling on hold for 14 days for a possible appeal. So we see this happening time and again with the border, it getting litigated in the courts, 14-day appeal.

There was a judge in Florida recently blocked another important aspect of what the administration sees as an important aspect of its policy. And of course, there are real human lives in the balance. Many of those human lives currently making their way up through central, south and central America and to Mexico. Many of those human lives waiting on the other side of the border right now for any word of what might work for them, how you get in. Here's more from Fox News on that particular decision, which again, keeping in mind

the context that there are people who are literally waiting on word for how this is all working out in the courts. Judge John Teeger of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California blocked the Circumvention of Lawful Pathways. So that's capital C-L-P, Circumvention of Lawful Pathways rule in response to a lawsuit from a coalition of left-wing immigration groups, that's including the ACLU, by the way, which claimed the rule was actually similar to the Trump-era transit ban that was similarly blocked. He found the rule is both, this is quote, substantively and procedurally invalid and has delayed his ruling from taking effect from 14 days. That gives the administration time to appeal, which they certainly will,

because, as Fox continues to say, the rule formed the centerpiece of the administration's strategy to deal with the expiration of Title 42. That expired, as you may remember, a few weeks back, more than a few weeks now. That expired actually in May, but it was one of those things that presumed migrants, you've probably heard this, to be ineligible for asylum if they entered the U.S. illegally and have failed to claim asylum in a country through which they have already traveled, Mexico being sort of the obvious example of that. Now, what's important to know, that sounds on its face like maybe it seems overly draconian, maybe if you're conservative, it sounds reasonable, but one thing it does sound is effective, right?

How could anybody get into the United States in large numbers? Where would you possibly see an influx of immigrants coming into the United States if they are being forced to go through legal channels and then come to claim asylum in Mexico or in another country that they've passed to, especially people who are taking flights? It's sort of confounding. There's no way, if you have this rule in place, that you could possibly have an influx. Well, there's a dueling Republican lawsuit over this particular plank of the Biden administration's policy as well. And here's where things get interesting. As Fox News writes, the lawsuit is also facing a separate challenge from Republican-led states, which argued that that rule is, quote, a smokescreen to, quote, define the problem away by recharacterizing what would be illegal crossings as lawful pathways. And that's where the rubber meets the road, that when you're looking at this rule and saying, how do we still see big numbers of people coming across the border. The Biden administration claims those numbers are down. Either way, even if they claim those numbers are down, you can see with your own eyes from reporters that are on the border that there's overwhelming crossing attempts at different places. We know

that. You can see it with your own eyes. And the reason for that is, as Fox News adds in their write-up here, the, quote, controversial CBP One app, which allows migrants to apply for one of the more than 1,400 appointments at a point of entry each day to be paroled into the U.S. So when you're saying, how could people still be coming in big numbers when you have this rule that has now been blocked by this judge, gives the administration 14 days to appeal, which they certainly will, how are people still coming? Why are their shelters still overwhelmed? Why are we still seeing coyotes bring people into the water, wade them into the currents

and get them to the other side? Well, it's because A, the administration has expanded those legal pathways via CBP-1, which was supposed to have about 1,000 appointments a day and has now been expanded to 1,400. 1,000 a day, as this is in the words of the Obama administration, is, quote, a crisis. Now we're talking about just 1,000 legal appointments, 99 percent of which, according to reports, are being—you're granting your entry into the United States while you await that sort of pending asylum trial. And so that means you can go to a sanctuary city. We saw a reporting recently in the San Francisco Chronicle about why so many migrants from Central America that are building literal mansions in Central America go to San

Francisco. Well, it's because of the way law enforcement is able to deal with people who have crossed illegally. It's the way law enforcement is able to deal with people who have crossed illegally. It's the way law enforcement is able to deal with people who have been imprisoned and given jail time for drug offenses, et cetera, et cetera. So all of these policies really do matter. Lenient immigration policies are inhumane. There's a way to have humane immigration policies, especially important when people are coming to the United States for good reason. I've talked to some of the people who are coming to the United States for good reason. Some of it doesn't meet, in any sense of the word, asylum claims. Some of them do. Some of them, clearly, if you hear these stories and talk to people up close,

you would think we should expand the way that we define asylum in the United States to economic asylum. But for a whole lot of people, it is purely economic. That is why they're willing to wait in the streets of a dangerous border city like Reynosa for an indefinite time period, waiting to get their CBP1 appointment, waiting to get the right amount of money to pay a coyote to cross, doing odd jobs so that you have enough money to pay a coyote to cross. This is inhumane. And the Republican lawsuit referring to this Biden policy as a smokescreen is much closer to the truth than the ACLU's claim that this is, and they also claim, by the way,

a lot of immigration groups claim that CBP1 is in and of itself inhumane, even though, again, it's really fast-tracking the asylum process or the entry process for a whole lot of people that are climbing asylum. The administration is not being transparent at all about their numbers when it comes to CBP1. So all of this is to say the court process, because Congress has kicked the ball to the courts and to the executive branch, is genuinely tragic. There are people who are waiting in border cities, desperate people in grave danger because cartels have seized on this business and they are forced to stay in these border cities

or they're coming up because they hear, and this is the important thing, they hear from so many people who have gotten in via CBP1 that you can do it, that if you pay the coyote to smuggle you up through Central America into Mexico and you wait in that border city long enough, you will get your appointment through CBP1. And even in cases people are being detained, well, if you're detained and then released into the United States, or if you are detained and then released back into Mexico and you still have a chance of getting through again, people see that as genuinely being better than where they are in Central America, because in so many places, life is miserable there. And that doesn't absolve the United States of helping to facilitate that level of misery. But it does mean that people

are so desperate to get out of those situations. They are traveling up and spending time in these inhumane conditions that are being caused by policies like this that are lining the pockets of cartels. And it's an incredibly tragic and unfortunate state of affairs. Also, people have realized that the administration is not enforcing what it says entirely that it is enforcing. So if people do cross the border illegally, they are still being granted entry in cases. We see this only anecdotally because again, we don't have numbers on this.

The administration isn't being especially transparent about it, but border reporters who are down there have video talking to migrants and are watching this happen. And so as soon as that call gets down or that WhatsApp gets down back to people in Honduras or Nicaragua,

then they will take the gamble on coming up. And so, again, this is not the way to run a border. This is not acceptable in any way whatsoever. It's not safe for the American people, and it sure as heck is not safe for the people of Central America and Mexico whose lives are being, even if they don't travel, their lives are being turned upside down by the power of cartels, which is, especially as the government is cracking down on fentanyl, are turning more and more to human smuggling as big business. It's disgusting and these policies aren't helping it. So what we need is a Congress that wants to take action. And in the absence of that, what we get is people hanging in the balance

of our court system and being punted around like footballs as these cases make their way through the court. Ryan, we've talked about this a lot and this is a pretty big... We talk a lot on this show about the nature of the family as it relates to economics and to culture. And we wanted to talk today to a philosopher who has been thinking a lot about the role

of the nuclear family, its relationship to the extended family, and the way that the left ought to be thinking about it. You've probably guessed already who that is. Welcome to the show, Arami Osei-Frimpong. Arami, thanks so muchrimpong. Arami, thanks so much for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having me. It's not obvious why liberals hate families, right? And why they get their clocks cleaned on family issues pretty consistently, both electorally and just in popular media. Arami, set that up for us first. Do you really think that-

That liberals hate families? Yeah, yeah. Why do you think that, why do you say liberals hate families? I don't, I think, I know you're being a little hyperbolic, but I don't think you're totally wrong on the intellectual history there.

So tell us what you mean by that. Okay, yeah. I don't even think Emily would say I'm hyperbolic. Like I think it's just conventional wisdom that liberals hate families. But Emily's hyperbolic. I think there are good reasons and bad reasons that liberals hate families. Because it used to be the case that what you did in function of society was a product of your lineage. Like farmers, people with the last name Farmer came from farmers and they were expected to be farmers.

Smiths came from Smiths and Coopers came from Coopers. And it's not obvious that your productive activity in society should be determined by your lineage and who you came from. And that was kind of an affront to freedom. So the idea is that we level out that lineage privilege and distribute assets. And then people can work for their passion and build up skills in areas that they're passionate about. And then let the market decide what's produced and who produces it for society. And that seems to be better until we think about who protects little kids from the market, because the market just wants us to be on social media and jewel so it's not obvious that i mean so that's a good reason why liberals go at the family and historically have went at the family because the pre-modern family used to decide what you did for

your life right and then the same argument could be made for the church um it's another reason why liberals kind of hate the church the bad thing is that nothing then defends children from the predations of the market and it's not obvious that parents shouldn't have uh aspirations and realize their aspirations for their children. And even like there's a variety of transphobia that's in America today that's like, I should be able to send my kid to a school, my son to a school and not have him come back and like fight with me about wanting to become my daughter. So family has so little power that we don't understand, like, the right sort of mediation for family right. And for example, like, my nine-year-old just finished studying a list of SAT words, right? So it's not as if when she takes that test against in 10 years or in eight years, when she takes that test against other kids, her family is going to have a lot to say about her quality of success.

So this idea that you can completely evacuate the family responsibility and family right from the lives of people is, I think, a little bit ludicrous. But the overdetermination of family and people's lives up until the modern era is real and had to be mitigated also. Yeah, and it's that question of freedom. You wrote a really interesting medium post on this. It's called Families Under Siege, A Left Defense of the Nuclear Family. And I wanted to ask you about what I found one of the most interesting paragraphs. You write, since justice is going to be a matter in making sure that each person has the opportunity to realize the different varieties of freedom, if people are restricted from participating in family relations, an injustice has been done. Yet the left is bad at conceiving the family as an institution of freedom that needs to state protection from predatory markets and special

cultural interests. And then the next line, you invoke what you were just talking about. You say the nation's most recent bout of transphobia and medical procedures is rooted in the anxiety that only the GOP cares, that families can set an agenda for their genetic line. Can you flesh that point out more, especially as you juxtapose it with the conservative focus on, there's actually a literal conservative group called Focus on the Family. But what, you know, when you see the left walking away since Betty Friedan calling the home a comfortable concentration camp or whatever she said to now, that is a stark

contrast. And especially in that sort of conception of freedom that you're advancing, if the left doesn't see a family as a bastion of freedom, of something that can protect individuals from markets, from government overreaches, that does seem to be a problem for it. So there's a structural advantage the right has when it talks about families, because it could say, it could look at all the good things families have done for people and argue from a matter of tradition and say that, like, as a matter of tradition, like, we should keep the family because without the family, you know, people go, things go horribly awry. And you can say, as a matter, this is what we've done.

This is how we've succeeded. And it's the same, and there's a similar kind of religious argument we could, the right could use to support the family. The left doesn't have those kinds of resources because tradition has licensed all sorts of awful things. And religion has licensed all sorts of awful things. So the left has to look into family

as a variety of freedom. And if it's not a variety of freedom, we get rid of it. But if it is a variety of freedom and our Constitution is supposed to protect freedom in all of its manifold colors, then the federal government's job to support the peculiar kind of freedom that can only come in the family. And so in that article, I talk about what is the peculiar kind of freedom that can only

come in the family. And that peculiar kind of freedom is the freedom of acting with someone who is committed to you um without you know their immediate choices having anything in the matter there's a certain kind of freedom that you can only have with someone who can't choose their way out there's a certain kind of freedom that you can only have uh certain kind of relationships and certain kind of plans you can make and certain kind of plans you can realize with someone only when their exits are tied. This is why, you know, Cortez burned the ships. There's a certain kind of self-determination you can have.

And we kind of know this with rules and other aspects of our lives. For example, if I were to play soccer, let's say I had to play soccer, except my opponent when I play soccer says like, you know what, you can't keep me from using my hands. I really want to use my hands. Who are you to tell me that I can't use my hands? And there's a way in which the only way any of us can be soccer players is if we forswear the ability to use our hands. And that's one of the kinds of freedoms you get with family, the immediate unity where the other person can't just leave. You have to figure it out together. And you get to figure it out together. So it's also something you have to do. And my kid can't just decide that

my neighbor makes better cookies and then come to me and say, dad, I want to quit you and live with them because they're better. And so far as that's a particular kind of freedom, it's a particular kind of freedom that needs to be supported. And I think it's an important kind of freedom. But there are other kinds of freedoms that also need to be supported. So we need to support them, just kind of mediate them through each other and moderate them so that they can all allow each other to flourish. Well, Arami, you talk about in your piece, kind of nannies for all, you know, maybe I came up with that term for it. But you're, you know, you write about how you elevate the nuclear family, but you're kind of dismissive of the extended family, which kind of the capitalism and the way that people have moved around so much has really gutted the extended family anyway. So it's not as if it needs any extra push.

But that leaves us with a situation where you have all of the work of child rearing and running a house on just this nuclear family. And so one of your solutions is kind of basically subsidized nannies, which gives a new meaning to the nanny state. But I wanted to- A policy Arnold Schwarzenegger can get behind. And so I wanted to get your take on what you make of the rising kind of politics of kind of movement within the Democratic Party of taking families seriously and really helping them make ends meet, to economically stitch the family together. That ran up against climate in Build Back Better and got pushed aside for the climate money. There wasn't enough kind of support within the party for it, but it is the new thing Like you you've seen you're seeing a lot of foundations. I think getting behind it and you're seeing kind of the kind of democratic apparatus

Moving into place to say that that the next time that we get a majority We are going to implement as big of a care economy agenda as we can, which is similar to what you're talking about here. So how, where do you think that, how did that come out of the ashes of what the Betty Friedan kind of movement that you're talking about? And I'll tag something quickly onto that in that Republicans would say all of this has to be done with a marriage requirement. That's a huge debate on the right. And so, Arami, is that also important? Is there something still telling about the fact

that Democrats would basically never pass cash payments for families with a marriage requirement? Right, so Democrats like children, but they hate families. So it's very complicated. So if we can give the money directly to the kids, we could. But supporting jobs for the adults and jobs with unionized benefits and free time and all of that. And just calling.

And I'll say this because I don't really get paid to do what you guys do. I think the casual divorce in America is a form of child abuse. I think children should have access to the two people who like naturally love them. And, um, and then when you split that access, it gets weird because I don't think there's a 50, 50 divide happening because if you have kids, you might notice I have three kind of a heap parenting isn't 50, 50, it's always a hundred, a hundred. And if you're not doing a hundred, a hundred, you're not doing it right. So I like, I, I, I think the casual divorce is right but the left is no yeah but the left is never going backwards on legal no cause divorce are you talking about uh social

stigma around it i mean it's already way down from what it was in the 80s are you uh are you talking about social stigma are you talking about actual legal restrictions on it i don't want to make a no-fault divorce um or a divorce illegal, but I do want to put marriage training into the culture and as a public curriculum. And we need to decide what marriage is for. And I think marriage is for the realization of this peculiar kind of freedom you can only have when you're committed to working it out with someone. Now, this isn't sex-specific. It could be two people committed to working out, two men, two women committed to working out,

two non-binary committed people working out together. But it is a commitment to work out your household issues that have been congealed together because once you put things together like that, you can't just split the baby like that. We've casually just assumed we can't. So we need a cultural revolution and not so much an external legal one to like jail or fine people for getting divorced.

I think the wrong people are getting married for the wrong reasons. So let's try to address that first and get people married for the right reasons to realize this peculiar kind of freedom. And they'll look for different things in a partner. They'll look for like, you know, the creative spark that allow me to um solve weird problems when they emerge because that's all like that holds a real kind of marriage together

like a little bit of love a little bit of like lust but also like an appreciation of the way that person solves problems with you when external shocks come because kids are nothing but an external shock that like causes people to want to solve problems. So that's why I think, that's how I think we can hold marriages together. But why I want to get rid of the extended family is because, well, I mean, experientially, I've run into so many like 60-year-old people who are still taking orders from their 90-year-old parent that we need to figure out how everyone can realize the freedom of the nuclear family as a realization of freedom got you away from Klan power. That's Klan with a C power, where the richest uncle just didn't dictate what everybody else did.

So we need these nuclear units to be able to, kind of with their partner within the family, within that nuclear family, decide how to live their life without having to worry about ticking off the inheritance from the richest aunt or alienating themselves from the child care provided by the richest uncle, which means the state has to step in and be like the child care of last resort when the grandparents can't do it or don't want to do it. Uncle Sam.

No aunts and uncles, but Uncle Sam. Yeah. Arami, we can fight about the extended family last time. This has been fun. We have to leave it there, though. Thanks as always for joining us. Can I make one more quick point? But a quick one, cuz we gotta roll.

Okay, so a lot of people will say, well, you have to keep marriages and you have to keep families together because it's good for the children. And then they list this laundry list of empirical data that says that families are like intact families are good for the children. But that's not the right kind of argument because you could also imagine studies that come out that say that it's really good for children of poor kids for the bottom 20% if the top 20% of wage earners and wealth hoarders can just pluck them from their family and raise them as their own. So we could have like those same empirical arguments that tell you to keep the family together can license family pillaging. So you need a non-empirical account of why families are good. It can't just be looking at the outcomes for children.

It has to be looking about the rights and access of parents and children to each other in a more robust way than just looking at, you know, presupposed outcomes. And the same can be said for marriage. You can have a study that comes out and says that like, well, you know, if an eligible marriage partner comes to you and they make 30% more than your current marriage partner, these studies say that you'll be happier if you just divorce this partner and go with a richer, richer would-be spouse, right? So these studies can't do it. It needs to be a non-empirical rights-based argument about the peculiar kind of freedom

that families, um, realize that's not, that's different from market freedom and that's different from political freedom. Yeah. Well, Rami, thanks again for joining us. Always, always fun to talk through this stuff with you. Oh, no problem. And if anybody likes hearing what I have to say, just go to either www.funkyacademic.com or you can go to the YouTube show. I do a show on relationships on Monday. But when I do relationships,

I'm not like, oh, this is getting late. It's like how to date in a way that will not end up in a divorce. There you go. So I had to think about relationships in a way that like will not end up in a divorce. So I had to think about relationships in a holistic manner. That means like staving off divorce. And on Thursday, I do a political show that's just more straight politics. That does it for us on this Wednesday edition of CounterPoints. Hope you enjoyed the show.

Make sure to subscribe to watch the full thing from the beginning to the end. We appreciate all those subscriptions. We appreciate all those subscriptions. We appreciate all the support for CounterPoints. It means so much to us. Thanks for tuning in. See you soon. I also want to address the Tonys. On a recent episode of Checking In with Michelle Williams, I open up about feeling snubbed by the Tony Awards. Do I? I was never mad.

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