Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 8/24/26: Insane MAGA Linked Plot In Bolivia, Silicon Valley Panics Over Wealth Tax

Episode Date: August 24, 2026

Ryan and Emily talk to Jose Luis Granada Ceja of Drop Site News about a potential MAGA linked assassination attempt in Bolivia, then they look at James O'Keefe let off the hook in a lawsuit over his 2016 video expose, and Gabriel Zucman joins to explain the benefits of a Wealth Tax and why Silicon Valley is freaking out. Jose Luis Granada Ceja: https://x.com/GranadosCeja Gabriel Zucman: https://gzucman.substack.com/ To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.locals.com/support    Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Welcome home. Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island to serve the same level of discourse. Each week, we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and pop culture with your favorite writers, book talk creators, and plenty of overthought opinions. Yeah, I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed. Listen to Pro Society on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, Saga and Crystal here. Independent media just played a truly massive role in this election, and we are so excited about what that means for the future of this show. This is the only place where you can find honest perspectives from the left and the right that simply does not exist anywhere else.

So if that is something that's important to you, please go to breakingpoints.com, become a member today, and you'll get access to our full shows, unedited, ad-free, and all put together for you every morning in your inbox. We need your help to build the future of independent news media, and we hope to see you at breakingpoints.com. So we have a truly unbelievable scandal unfolding in South America. And to help us walk through it, in a moment we'll be a drop-sized Latin American bureau chief, Jose Luis Granados Seja. It began recently on a street side where there was actually footage captured of two hitmen walking up to Nadia Bayer, who turns out to be the girlfriend of Fernando Cerimedo, who is. a top right-wing kind of Latin American political operative and the business partner of Brad Parscale, who is a former campaign manager for the, I believe, the 2016 Trump campaign,

is that right, Emily? Yep. And is now a registered foreign agent for the state of Israel and has been working for Millet and a whole bunch of other right-2020 campaign. Right-wing 2020 campaign. A whole bunch of other right-wing figures throughout South America. And so Nadia is allegedly pregnant with Serramato's child. And let's roll D4 here.

You see two delivery guys dressed as delivery people. We're going to blur this out because this is going to be a little bit shocking. One of them, if you're just listening to this, walks up and you can probably tell through the blurred footage there, tries to shoot her dead on the street. Now, it turns out that she survived this assassination attempt. And so she's now in the hospital, or she was in the hospital, you can put up D2 and starts to just completely. So she's giving an interview here from her hospital bed, it just starts to completely unravel this kind of empire of dirty tricks that has been running. She's saying that these are some of her claims that he's been taking $800,000 a month from Mille in Argentina, that he was bribing using violence and bribes throughout a lot of his other operations.

So this gets so much wilder. But let's bring in Jose Luis now to walk us through some of this. Jose Luis, thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for having me. Always good to be here. Yeah, it's crazy stuff here. So walk us through this. So let's put up D1. And I don't know if you can see these on the screen here. Here's a here's a photo of Ceramato. Who's he with here? And what does this tell us? Like kind of who is who is Saramato? And why is this such a big deal in Latin America?

Absolutely. So here we see him with Javier Negre, who's actually, a key political operator as well. He comes from Spain. He is the co-founder, together with Serimedo, of a, I don't want to call it a news outlet because it's more of a disinformation outlet called La Derecha Diario or the daily right-wing outlet. And essentially, in a lot of ways, sums up what these two men are doing in Latin America

and helps answer the question that I think a lot of people have been asking is, why have we been seeing this right-wing trend in the region? And part of it, not exclusively so, but a big part of it is precisely this. It's the way that these individuals, people like Seri Medo, people like Negre, have figured out how to, in a sense, bring that kind of U.S. consultancy system, those culture wars into Latin American political campaigns, really kind of polarize the electorate and obviously deliver victories to right-wing leaders. Setti Meadow in particular is interesting because, you know, according to the biographies, I was reading about him, he was kind of a nobody. He was a taxi driver. He was somebody who was not involved in political affairs. a bit, somebody who's always kind of chasing the latest con, it was a way to describe his

activity, and he managed to really rise to prominence with none other than Javier Mille. So Javier Mille, before he even met Serimedo, was always kind of a provocateur, always using really kind of aggressive language and making fun of the left, and he's the one who started with this whole Sourdos, which means left wing, but it's kind of a, you know, in a disrespectful way. And these two gentlemen joined forces to really kind of drive these kinds of of new campaigns in Latin America we're seeing where they polarize the electorate, but really kind of run very negative kind of advertising, really negative kind of messaging to make it seem like not so much voting for the right-wing candidate, but voting against his opponent.

And that has been incredibly successful throughout the region. Obviously, the case of Milay, he becomes president and actually helps even position him better. But since then, he's kind of gone on to do far more work. And obviously, in this most recent incident, what we've seen is him deeply involved. in Bolivian politics. We have to remember in Bolivia, there was a coup that essentially overturned the election that saw Evo Morales elected. Then we saw this interim right-wing government come in, and then a legitimate election happens. Arce rules, but it ends up splitting the mass, the ruling movement towards socialism party there. And again, there we see the way

that his political machine operates. Using Bot Farm, is using kind of really aggressive, misogynist language, going after the mask. going after the left in Bolivia, and essentially handing the presidency to Rodrigo Paz and where he becomes, according to Rodrigo Paz is his own vice president, a key advisor, apparently having an office near the presidency's office as well. So we've seen some efforts now because of this scandal

of people trying to kind of distance themselves from him, although Mille seems to suggest that there's a larger conspiracy at play, that's not actually what's happening here. But we've seen, Baas actually take position talk about how he wants to accompany the survivor and all of this. But certainly, this was somebody who was very, very well connected to key right-wing leaders here in Latin America and was, you know, successful in being able to deliver power to the right-wing in many countries. And I think helps

expose precisely what's been happening in the region, which is that I think a lot of countries are new to this kind of campaigning, this kind of political operator, and haven't quite figured out what to do in response to him. And that's why he's been able to gain so much ground in such a short of many in time. Although with this scandal, obviously, that looks to have come to an end. Yes. Yeah.

Well, we should get into more of the details of exactly what happened, right? Because this is insane. Yeah, let's roll D3 while we just, while we have it. This is Serri-Mato in the elevator, and you describe for us what's going on here. This is an elevator. And then he happens to be then surrounded by a ton of reporters.

He pulls up his hood, and you can hear him, he's just kind of stuck in the elevator. with these guys just starts sobbing. Let's roll D3. Yeah, and that went on for a painfully long amount of time. We're just a little bit of it there. Once described by the economist, by the way,

not that long ago is Maga's man in Latin America. Right, yes. That's a late December story. Yeah, and as he won some award recently, and on stage, he said I wanted to thank, he switches to English to say, I want to thank Brad Parzcalé, my partner here. So what is the relationship here between MAGA and this movement, which is now being, you know, it's not unraveling, but we're learning a lot about kind of what it's kind of underground tactics have been.

Yeah, Pascal and Serimedo are business partners. They have a consultancy firm together. And what appears to be is that Pascal, who has a lot of experience and likewise in the United States, States, finding these issues that can really divide the electorate, building the digital infrastructure to kind of be able to identify it, to figure out what are the issues that they can exploit, where are the regions where they think they can best make ground. And this is precisely the model that Seri Medo has brought into Latin America. And so it's the same kind of logic of trying to split the electorate, drive these polarizing

issues. And as well said, you know, it's not the left wing calling him this, it's the economist, saying he's magas man in Latin America. Now, the survivor of this attack, you know, this assassination attempt, we should be clear that he, the justice system in Bolivia is so confident about the situation that they have gone ahead and arrested him in connection with this. There's been some leaked texts as well that say that kind of explicitly saying we need to get rid of her or she's going to cause trouble for us.

So, you know, obviously we need to let justice play out. But clearly, you know, there's a list. here, he was his romantic partner, allegedly carrying his child. She said a lot of also Atlantic allegations that I think require more investigation suggesting that he's tied to U.S. intelligence agencies. I mean, there hasn't been any more evidence of that besides that, but certainly his connections to the U.S. political ecosystem are very much there through Brad Pascal. And as building and expanding this method of winning elections in Latin America and working with, you know, these regional actors.

As we know, the United States is far more interested in Latin America than it was in the more recent past, really kind of trying to push candidates in the region that would be favorable to U.S. interests. We saw it in Honduras. We saw it obviously in Argentina. We've seen it now in Bolivia and Colombia as well. Now, he's directly connected to a couple of these, but it shows that it's the same kind of logic. And whether or not he's tied to U.S. intelligence agencies is yet to be determined, but it certainly shows that there is a connection here with U.S. foreign policy interests and these right-wing

actors and the way that they have been operating in the region and the success that they've been having in terms of actually being able to deliver power to allies of Donald Trump and Marco Rubio. Brad Farscale has interestingly become somewhat of a punchline on the right here in D.C. just in recent months because he's not really that connected to Trump himself or even this White House. He was the digital media manager in the 2016 campaign, then the campaign manager in 2020, had a personal meltdown, breakdown. And since Ryan, you've covered this, he's mostly been working for Israel. He has massive contracts with Israel.

And I wonder then if this is, Jose, if this is playing out in Latin American politics in a way where Israel's connection to Brad Parscale has become salient to the conversation, to the coverage about what the heck is going on. I mean, it's easy to make a connection between Pascal and Trump. It just, like, if we're wondering whether he would be operating on behalf of the Trump White House, my guess would be no. I mean, people say he has close to zero contact with Trump, if any at all. It's not like he's close with Susie Wiles or anybody in the White House. It's all very strange to help us parse this a little more.

Sure. I mean, certainly Israel is as interested in penetrating into Latin American politics. It's a region where there is a lot of sympathy. for the Palestinian people, for the Palestinian cause, you know, that there's a lot of progressive leaderships in the region that actually openly advocated in favor of the Palestinian resistance, for example. So we know Israel is interested as well, so I wouldn't put that beyond them to be interested in to try to find different ways to gain ground, as they have, actually, quite successfully in some ways, in the case of Venezuela, for example, which used to be kind of, you know,

the standard bearer for the solidarity with Palestine after the earthquake there. actually after the earthquake in Colombia, they sent teams, and that really seemed to open up the door. So there's definitely an interest of Israel in Latin American politics. You'll know this much better than I do, but going back to the 80s and the Contras and the Sandinistas, the arms and drug trafficking, I mean, Iran Contra, for example, it's like not, I imagine entirely past history. I would imagine some of that is still on the table. Oh, certainly.

When it comes to their spying software, that is a major product here. of interest to governments, both left and right wing, interestingly enough, and of course, the weapons shootments, you know, recently there was an article in the Ackla talking about how Mexico, of all countries, is one of the biggest buyers of Israeli weapons. It happens mostly at the state level. It's not necessarily the federal government, but it shows there's also commercial business interests. But to go back to your question in terms of, you know, how close is he to MAGA? I think it's what's interesting is that you have these kinds of personalities, like Ceri Medo, like Pascal, where they can kind of, you know, at one point, be in the

spotlight and be the person that everybody wants to be connected to and have all kinds of leather and then suddenly it evaporates. In a lot of ways, there's a parallel here in the Saturday Meadow story where somebody who had accumulated a lot of power and a lot of influence, who had apparently they raided his homes and found stacks and stacks of both the local currency and US dollars. So clearly he's moving money around. This is somebody who had power and influence. Suddenly it evaporates because they're essentially, you know, in a lot of ways, the same logic of conmen, trying to figure out how, you know, to get the good connection, to get, to be well placed. You know, Seri Medo is interesting in particular as well because he was the personal advisor, quote, unquote.

This is the way he's been described to Rodrigo Paz. Now, Rodrigo Paz wasn't really his man in the Bolivian election. He tends to work with more right-wing candidates, but Paz turned out to be kind of the figure that other forces could rally upon or rally around. And so we see that, you know, they're chasing power. They're chasing the interests. They're chasing their ability to get that. There's a lot of now allegations as a result of these raids floating around, around illegal enrichment or illegal funds being, you know, how did he get his hands on all of this money?

These people are clearly being motivated by also these interests of making themselves wealthy and powerful. But it comes at a price because I think there's one key thing about the story that people need to appreciate outside of Latin America, which is that part of the reason we've also seen the rise of these right-wing governments in the region has been precisely around kind of not socially conservative, but kind of social questions, the sense that the people in power should be honest, they should be good brokers, they should have the interests of the population at heart and actually put them into interest. And some of the scandals of left-wing governments have actually

played into this, of them feeling like, well, these people are just there. They claim to be progressive. They claim to be here in the interest of the population. But really, when they're in power, they act the same. And so this moral high ground that they try to position themselves as these right-wing candidates and subsequently these right-wing presidents has, I think, I think in a lot of ways, it's starting to diminish precisely because of scandals like this. I mean, this is extraordinary. I mean, it's somebody who clearly was very well positioned, very, very powerful, probably as a result of that felt like he enjoyed a degree of impunity that he didn't actually realize.

I mean, how does that make sense? How does it make sense to go after your romantic partner who's apparently carrying your child in such a brazen way, get caught on video, and think that it wasn't going to catch up to you? Right. So they were operating with a sense of impunity, but that's starting to collapse precisely because, you know, these are not honest brokers. These are not people who are actually going to follow through on their campaign promises of actually bringing well-being to the population. Again, we see the echoes of this also, you know, of U.S. policy in or Trump's policy in the United States, right? Where they promise certain

things, people expect them. And when those expectations are dashed, then we see kind of the House of Cards start to fall apart. That's the case, I think, in some ways with Pascal. And it's certainly the case here with Cedimedo. And I think it's going to have really important regional reverberations. Actually, anecdotally, people already mentioning that they see far less bots in their responses on social media because apparently this guy was largely running most of them and actually feeding this kind of anger and hate machine on social media. And now we see that kind of disappear. And I think because these are now being shown to be con men, then they're not going to be as effective. And I think people are also going to think twice about trusting somebody who's associated

with figures who are willing to allegedly assassinate their partner. Yeah, good way to lose the moral high ground is to hire hitman to assassinate your pregnant mistress. Gustavo Petro in Colombia, as cap was commenting on some of this bot farm activity as well. We can put a D5 here. He's saying in Colombia during the election, 500,000 bots were active to spread lies about Yvonza Peda and about me and then, you know, links this network to to this guy who's now in jail in Bolivia. And there's footage of one of these bot farms that's been circulating. And Parscale is almost certainly operating bot operations on behalf of Israel.

Israel, yeah. Like pretty much everybody watching this has probably gotten a text literally from Israel. Yeah. Saying, like, I don't know if you're getting them in Mexico, Jose Luis, but in the U.S., everybody's getting these texts saying, hey, let's talk about the U.S. Israel relationship. And she's like, what? And it's a par scale operation. So certainly, and these kinds of bot operations seem to be, for whatever reason,

even either more prominent or more aggressive in Latin America than in the U.S., of course, in the U.S., we have plenty. But can you talk a little bit about the way that they do play into the politics of Latin America? It seems like there's a distinction in the scale of it that happens there, as opposed to here. Oh, absolutely. And I think we can actually go back to even sort of the more recent elections all the way back to Bolsonaro. Without these WhatsApp channels that were distributing this false information, dismiss disinformation, I don't think he wins that presidency.

It's been a very successful instrument in the rise of the right wing in the region. And it's precisely that. I think, first of all, there has to be an appreciation that a lot of people who are online, who are very online, tend to be come from more, you know, middle class and upward sectors. And so they're a lot more receptive to these kinds of communications. I think one difference that we've seen in Mexico is that, on the one hand, there's always been an emphasis, a really, really heavy emphasis on kind of communication coming directly from the presidency.

We know we have these daily morning press conferences, formerly by former president Lopez Obrador and now with Claudia Scheimbaum, so there's a great emphasis on that. But the difference is that there's a lot more work happening in the territory, right, like directly with the population. And so I think in some ways, if you want to see why a case like Mexico, there's been, in a sense, an exception that they haven't, you know, gone down the right-wing trend, even during, you know, that election year where it seemed like all incumbents were being turfed. Mexico was, again, the exception.

I think a lot of it's because they kind of operate outside of this online ecosystem. But those that are heavily influenced by it, like the case of Columbia, for example, we see the consequences of it. It is a very effective tool. And like you well said, it's very aggressive. It is something where they spend extraordinary amounts of money to be able to basically inundate social media. I mean, if you go on Twitter on X and you look at some of the replies, if you mention certain people, right, there's always kind of, if you mention Israel, if you mention former president Felipe Calderon, if you mention Alito Moreno, who's one of the opposition leaders here, you'll see that they'll start to kind of pop up inside of your replies. And it's because it's very much clearly one of the strategies that has been successful because it relies on distributing in a very efficient way this disinformation, where people are led to believe certain things that don't actually. accurately reflect reality inside of a given country. And it is extraordinarily effective.

And I think it's particularly effective in Latin America because there's already an existing polarization. So we're talking about these more recent elections where they win by less than one percentage point. In the case of Peru, you know, Kiko Fuhimori won because of the vote abroad, not necessarily because of the vote inside of Peru, for example. We see this denunciation from Petro in the case of Colombia, who's pointed a finger precisely at all of this kind of interference. So we see that this is really effective in terms of being able to provide just enough to get

them over the edge and to be able to win. In fact, these foreign influence campaigns, I think, have become such an issue that here in Mexico they're actually discussing right now the possibility of actually making foreign interference one of the reasons why an election can be annulled. So we're seeing this case after case of seeing this kind of influence that it's gotten to the degree where elections in the future may no longer actually count because of the level of foreign interference, seeing precisely because how effective it actually can be in dividing the electorate and creating these wedge issues and making it so that the right wing, even by the slimmest of margins,

is able to win. Fascinating stuff. And sometimes these are the contingencies on which kind of historical events begin to change, you know, that, you know, had the hitman been successful, we wouldn't be, we would, we wouldn't be learning all of the things that she's spilling now. And we'll, we'll see, you know, where this takes us. Jose Luis Granada, Seha, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having it. The new Red Bull Dragonberry and Tropic Berry Energizers, now at McDonald's, made with freeze-dried fruit and an electric burst of flavor. The all-new Red Bull Energizers, now at McDonald's. This product may not be right for you. High in caffeine, details at McDonald's.cai at

participating Canadian restaurants, excluding Quebec. When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and held captive for nine months. I survived, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the Survivor files. I just remember this low, taunting voice next to my ear saying, shut up, don't say anything. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable. I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me. I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming.

They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. But these aren't stories about what's taken from them. There's stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to the Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. If your bookshelf and your for-you page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought

daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks pride and prejudice and love island deserve the same level of discourse. I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having. I'm going to have to look up this story. I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed. From bestselling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table. It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters, then that is the Trojan horse.

Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place. Listen to pro society on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. See you between the pages. So actually a major press freedom victory out of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, James O'Keefe has won a reversal of a verdict that went against him previously and put up E1 here. This is the case O'Keefe first democracy partners. So this is kind of an interesting one for me to cover because I actually know a whole and like a lot of the people involved on the democracy partners side. I do not like it all, James O'Keefe's political project that he's engaged in throughout his career,

particularly the kind of deceptive destruction of acorn from almost 20 years ago at this point. Jeez, was it? Yeah, 2007 or 8? Something like that, yeah. But we're separating all of that aside because this is a case about press freedom. and what is allowed under the First Amendment. And so what happened here is in 2016, O'Keefe sent some undercover journalists. And we're going to call them journalists. Somebody like, oh, he's not a journalist.

First of all, it doesn't matter because all citizens have the protection of the First Amendment, whether you're a journalist or not. But he's gathering information and he's publishing it. I don't have to like the information that he publishes. It still makes it journalism. So he sends an undercover journalist, into this bar. And he catches,

and what they do is they say provocative things and then try to get Democratic operatives to agree with those provocative things. It worked fantastically with this one guy, foball, I believe his name was. The old Fed tactics, basically. Yeah, so he goes in and the guy says, basically, you know what we should do?

He's like, the guy that funds my left-wing organization hates voter ID because he loves it when illegal immigrants vote for Democrats. And so what we should do is we should bust in a bunch of illegal immigrants into Wisconsin and have them vote. And it's idiotic democratic operative, it's like, that's a brilliant idea.

Let's do that. And the guy even says, he's like, have you worked with Bob Creamer at Democracy Partners? Maybe he'd be interested in something like this. Like, oh my God. So he's got this footage. Then he sends a fake interoper, into this firm democracy partners.

And the intern goes in with, you know, filming everything. And the firm does basically no, doesn't ask for ID, does no due diligence. The young woman works there for eight days, then abruptly quits. And they publish this video that includes some footage from inside the office, but mostly it's relying on footage from the bar. immediately the firm gets, so many of his contracts are cut from, you know,

AFSCME was a major client of theirs. They lose that. It's a giant mess for this firm. Yeah. Because in the footage, they're also making kind of grandiose claims like, oh, yeah, we're working very closer with Hillary.

And, oh, the other thing the guy says in the bar, he and another guy, they say that, like, oh, they're paying people, homeless people to go to Trump rallies. and instigate violence there. Like, you know, say, you know, just get under the skin of Trump people, wear a Planned Parenthood shirt. Yeah.

Do anything you can to, like, get them to then be aggressive towards you and then film that. Chicanery, yeah. Yeah. And so then the firm suffers all of these consequences. They sue. They win at the district court level. A jury finds in their favor and says that because there was fraud and deception involved in the way they got it, that the First Amendment doesn't apply.

Luckily for O'Keefe, his trial attorney, made a motion right before it went to the jury saying, as a matter of law, as a matter of First Amendment, this should be thrown out. And the judge said, we're going to put that aside, put that motion aside, we're going to let the jury decide. The jury finds four democracy partners. And first, it's like $120,000 to pay the money,

back for the contracts, but then buried underneath that, if they can prove this kind of tortious fraud, that the intern had violated her fiduciary duty that she had to the organization, then O'Keefe would owe legal fees as well, which from when I talked to O'Keefe and his lawyer yesterday, that would have been well over a million dollars if they would have gotten a hit with that. And so the appeals court, which is the three judges were two Democrats and one Republican, all three of them basically sided with O'Keefe. There was one dissent, but it was a dissent in small part. They would have just narrowed the amount of money.

They would have, it was mostly a victory for O'Keefe from all three. So I don't think they're going to appeal because if you get two Democrats, are mostly siding with them. Like, you're not going to do much better, either with the whole appeals court or with the Supreme Court. But what they effectively said is that you can lie to somebody in a bar,

say that you're a democratic operative, say whatever you want in a bar. Like, your First Amendment allows you to lie, and if you then trick that person into saying incriminating things in public, then that's fair game. And you can publish that, and that's First Amendment protected activity.

the court is the opinion is much more confusing and unclear about whether or not going into the office is kosher it it leaves it it leaves it kind of open the way the way i read it was that you can't possibly trespassing at that point you're well there's a higher level of fraud like the the fraud is going on for longer um they they never made her sign an nda they said they would but then they never gave it to her. Yeah. That was a mistake on their part. So they made a lot of mistakes. Had they not made, they would have been more protected. So basically, you got to make your interns signed contracts and like, yeah. And then if you do that, then it's going to be harder for them to get away with. That makes sense. But they, so they leave it a little bit gray. But they

completely, in my reading, protect the right to go into a bar. Now Mark Zed, or Zed, Democratic lawyer, is still suing O'Keefe on behalf of some of the people who went on dates with his operatives. And he said, and I asked him online about this, he said, no, we're still going forward because this says you can't commit fraud. You can't, you know, deceptively, you know, obtain this information. That's not the, that's not what it says. So I'm not a lawyer.

He is. But my reading of his ruling here is that. those cases are screwed too. We'll find out. But this seems to set the precedent that the dates are fine. And just to back up, when you were explaining this, I think part of the important point is about precedent and how legally judges, attorneys could read into deceptive practices,

what may be perfectly acceptable journalistic behavior. and I don't think that a lot of what James O'Keefe does is acceptable from like ethical practices of journalism. Legally, though, we have to have what we do be covered as broadly as humanly possible because when people try to shut down free speech, they rely on narrowing those definitions of things like what's deceptive. So you can easily find a journalist and in the art or in the act of totally normal, journalistic information gathering, say, well, that was deceptive. So that's why you have to have a very broad protection for what constitutes as journalism, because it's then weaponized if it's not broad enough. And so, while I think, you know, journalists hold themselves to the standard that

you generally tell people you're trying to get information out of that you're a journalist, you identify yourself as a journalist. If you're in a crowd, if you're at a protest, you're at a riot unless your life is endangered. Say, you identify yourself as a journalist, even when it's hard. That's part of the standards that you hold yourself to formally at news organizations. Those aren't legal standards. Right, exactly. And so, but you could see how, you know, you say you're working on a story about one thing.

And someone says, well, it's deceptive because you didn't narrowly describe exactly what the story was about. Which is like what people do all the time. All the time. There's going to be a great story for you. And if you're smart as a like a person in government, you know that's what happens. and nobody's forcing you to say anything. Nobody was forcing them to say absolutely anything. They said it of their own volition.

Yeah. And to Mark Zaid's point, here's on page 19 of the ruling, this is why I think that his reading of this is incorrect. So the ruling says it's basically saying that it's going to allow the bar footage because, quote, there was no trespass. All of the faux-val conversations were held in public locations. there was no theft of confidential business information. Everything that Fovall said in these conversations, he said willingly.

And although the defendants lowered Fovall into these meetings, based on an elaborate web of lies, Bob Kramer does not claim that conduct amounted to fraud. And so in other words, in this case, they were able to lie to get Fovol to come to the meeting and to spill the beans on or not beans like made up beans. He doesn't have any project of bringing people into Wisconsin, but he's open to it. Now they say, they say separately, though, applying this principle, we agree with Bob Kramer

that the First Amendment does not protect the video segments that O'Keefe procured through Moss's fraud. Moss is the intern, the fake intern, namely the portions of the video that show Maas inside Democracy partners speaking with Kramer and his staff. Maz obtained that footage by subterfuge and the jury found that her conduct amounted to fraud. So they're relying on the jury who said that it was fraudulent the way that they got the intern into the office, but it was not fraudulent the way that they got him into the bar. And just because you lie doesn't mean you're committing fraud. Like those are very different things.

And then their footnote is they say it is generally true that for a lie to constitute fraud, a tangible harm must follow. It is undisputed that Mazas lies at least partly contributed to Kramer's harm. In other words, AFSCME had said one of the reasons they cut ties with the firm was because of their embarrassing lack of vetting, their intern. And so they're saying, like, it wasn't just the story itself, because the story itself was protected First Amendment activity. It was this embarrassing fact that, wait a minute, so you're just letting any random O'Keefe plant come into your firm without, like, checking ID,

and then you're just sending them to DNC headquarters. Like, to them, they were like, that, that is a problem for us. And so we're cutting ties. Right. And that is a result of her fraud. So anyways, it gets a little complicated, but that's where they seem to be drawing the line. Yeah, this is a really interesting case, and it's not getting a lot of attention, but it's worth, I think, appreciating the broadening of what constitutes as deceptive because that can be weaponized. Yeah. Speaking of, by the way, speaking of undercover operations, we can put E3 on the screen. You may have heard, like NBC News and other places had these big. headlines, NBC's was FBI thwarts an alleged ISIS-inspired plot to bomb New York Capitol. This

35-year-old woman named Jessica Bowie in New York converted to Islam, I think they say five years ago. And if you read the federal complaint, you find out. And actually, if you read the NBC News story, you have to get almost to the bottom of the article to find this out. Quote, one of the confidential sources, working for the FBI, gave Bowie $200 to purchase bomb-making. materials, which she is alleged to have done August 5th at a Home Depot. She then gave the items to the confidential sources when she met with them in the days that followed. So between August 5th and I think the arrest on August 19th, this is all really recent,

this person who they were encouraging, I mean, we'll see more in this trial because I imagine more of what the confidential human sources were saying came out. And I went through the complaint and we just put it up on the screen. You can see some of this as like they're not putting even everything in the complaint, obviously, but you can see that the confidential human sources are egging this person along. They literally gave the full list of necessary ingredients to create a bomb and started explaining how to do it. Went, like, gave $200 to go to this Home Depot.

And then for over a week between August 5th and the ultimate arrest, this person who absolutely like appears to have, they appear to have the goods pledged support. to ISIS has all this information on how to make a bomb. They've gone through the plans about the Albany State Capitol in Albany. They've gone through all of this, and this person isn't arrested after they gave them. They apparently took the bomb making materials, but there's a week where you've given this person the necessary information for how to make a bomb for arrest. I mean, it's just in all the headlines say things like FBI thwarts alleged ISIS-inspired

plot to bomb New York Capitol, which, again, should read FBI thwarts. an alleged FBI-inspired plot to bomb New York Capitals. I didn't want to let that one go without mentioning. A classic of the genre. A classic of the genre. Yes, indeed. FBI's on it. We've got Gabriel Zuckman standing by, Ryan.

We do indeed. Let's get to it. My SUV's worth more than ever. Time to upgrade? There's never been a better time. At Plaza Auto Group locations get top value for your trade and shop hundreds of new and pre-owned vehicles across 11 locations. And if you can't come to us, we'll come to you.

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Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable. I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me. I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming. They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. but these aren't stories about what's taken from them. There's stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to the Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse. I'm Eli Rallo and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having. I'm going to have to look up this story. I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed.

From best-selling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table. It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters, then that is a Trojan horse. Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place. Listen to Pro Society on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. See you between the pages. Recently on the All In podcast, Chammath Palpatia said he'd identified who the villains are in this story.

And it's him and his buddies. Let's roll this. Silicon Valley has completely lost what made it great. It was a place for weirdos, for people at the fringes, for people that really were idealistic. And it has become something that's far from that now. It is the equivalent of what Harvard used to be. It's a credentialing place. It's a place you come to say, oh, I came to Silicon Valley. I worked at a startup. You know, I got into YC. You know, when we came, we used to aspire to meet the Bill Campbells of the world, Mike Moritz's, John Doors. Those folks are gone.

We used to aspire to work for Steve Jobs. He's not here. And in that breach, all we have done is focused on making money in every single way that we can. Hand over fist. And I think, again, there's nothing wrong with that except now is a point where we need to do a better job of acknowledging it and trying to do a little bit better. And every time we don't, and we're given a chance to be better and we're not, the hatred builds. The animus, as you said, David, builds. And that's what we're seeing now.

We're extremely excited to bring on our next guest, perhaps the foremost scholar on wealth inequality, who doubles as an advocate for doing away with the very thing he studies. In France, he's both vilified and celebrated it as the father of what's known as the Zuckman tax, a 2% tax that applies to people worth more than 100 million euros. Now, before Professor Gabriel Zuckman joins us, let's do a quick 101 of the problem. Now, we all know that we're living in an era where the very rich are getting richer at a much faster pace than at any time, certainly in the last 100 years. We don't even need charts or graphs for that. We can all just look around. I've been reporting on this trend now since the beginning of my journalism career, which began in the run of,

up to the great financial crisis. What I've come to realize, though, is that we in the media have not done a good enough job of explaining why this wealth inequality that's getting so out of whack matters. We haven't explained how it directly comes out of your pocket. We've talked about how it's wrong for the rich to have more power than everybody else and to be able to buy elections, but that misses the more immediate problem, that the super rich are getting rich by making you actively poorer. Now here's how to understand that. In the 1970s and 1980s, as the rich were pushing to massively lower taxes on themselves, deregulate the economy, and make it legal to move capital easily across borders in search of the cheapest labor, they relied on a few metaphors, like

trickle-down economics and a rising tide lifts all boats. But after the rich got their wins, a not-surprising thing happened. The tide stopped. lifting. Since 2000, Western economies have grown at an average of 1 to 2%. That's it. The amount of the economy owned by the super rich, meanwhile, has grown many, many times more than that. Gabriel Zuckman has dedicated his life to studying that phenomenon. So in a moment, we can get some detail from him on what we know about the scale of this incredible divergence. But to suffice it to say, it's been absolutely huge. So think about it. If their wealth has gotten many times bigger over the past 25 years and wealth overall has barely grown, where did their wealth come from? It came from you,

of course. Now to understand this better, think about our economy as holding three different kinds of wealth. Public wealth, normal people's wealth, and the wealth of the super rich. Public wealth is some of the obvious things like schools or hospitals or apartments or land owned directly by the public. When the public owns the schools and the buildings themselves, it's much cheaper for members of the public to go there. Wealth owned by normal people is obvious too. We're talking about homeownership, retirement assets, pensions, cars, that sort of thing. Every year that the wealth of the super rich grows faster than everybody else's, they have to do something. with that extra money that they now have.

Because they're too rich to be able to spend it buying new stuff, they buy assets, they buy houses, which drives up the cost of housing. They buy stocks, which drives up the price of the stock market. And they buy companies directly, as we've seen with the rise of the private equity industry. Then they loot those companies, sell off the parts, have the company filed for bankruptcy,

and take the money in the pension fund to pay themselves off for their trouble. A normal company, that once made, say, paper products or sold toys and supported an economy working for normal people in a small town is wiped out, and the money flows to the top. Now the people at the top have even more money, and now they have to buy more assets. You see how this goes. Now, what you might notice, though, is that things haven't gotten as bad as quickly as you might think. People haven't gone immediately from middle class to abject poverty. That's because, while the very rich have been

buying up everybody's assets, leaving everyone owning nothing, they've swapped that out for loans. In the run-up to the financial crisis, the super-rich loaded up American homeowners with enormous amounts of debt. When they could no longer pay that debt, the government bailed out the super-rich, but took the homes from tens of millions of people. During COVID, we shut the economy down, borrowed a historic amount of money, and then effectively gave that money to the top, 1%, minting more new billionaires than at any time in history. Trump's new AI policy has directed hundreds of billions in borrowed money to the AI industry, money that is again flowing straight to the top.

The money we are borrowing increasingly comes from the very rich, who are now charging even higher interest rates. We're now paying more in interest on our debt than we are on the Pentagon month over month. That means that every month we are transferring billions of dollars from the public directly to the 1% who are then using those billions to buy more and more assets pricing you out of being able to own anything. So now we have sold off most of the public assets and the assets held by normal people are dwindling. What we're left with is the government heavily in debt, normal people drowning in debt too, and all of us

owing that money to the super rich. Now is the time it's getting dangerous. The rich don't need to be gentle with us as they did before because we don't really have anything anymore that they want or we don't have much at least. There's a YouTube channel in the UK that's done a terrific job of mainstreaming all of these ideas and it's called Gary's Economics and the homework assignment for people watching breaking points now is to switch over to Gary's economics. Go find a couple of the videos that make sense to you. Watch those. You'll and watch several until you fully grasp what's at stake here. He does a very good job of putting the choices we face quite simply. If we want to fund our growing deficits, the money has to come from somewhere. Either we have to

raise taxes on the super rich, raise taxes on the middle class and the upper middle class, or we have to all get poorer by slashing the government, which would raise your cost of education, housing, health care, and so on. Now, I know what some of you might be thinking, no, There's a fourth option. We can end the stupid wars, stop funding Israel, and stop wasting money on stupid things. Great, yes. If you watch this program regularly, you know both Emily and I will immediately agree with doing all of that. End the wars, cut the waste, jail the fraudsters. But even if you cut the entire Pentagon and lock up every fake Medicaid ripoff in Miami, that still won't do it because the gap is too wide and you haven't fixed the problem. we identified at the top. The primary problem is that the speed with which the rich are gobbling up resources is

faster than anything else. And it is swallowing up everything. We have to reverse that trend. The rich have to start giving back some of their wealth to normal people rather than the other way around. The only way to do this is to tax their wealth. The new Red Bull Dragonberry and Tropicberry Energizers, now at McDonald's, made with freeze-dried fruit, and an electric burst of flavor. The all-new Red Bull Energizers, now at McDonald's.

This product may not be right for you. High in caffeine, details at McDonald's.cai at participating Canadian restaurants, excluding Quebec. When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and held captive for nine months. I survived, and I've spent my life experience. exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the Survivor Files. I just remember this low, taunting voice next to my ear saying, shut up, don't say anything. Every week, I'm with survivors who lived through the unthinkable.

I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me. I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming. They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. But these aren't stories about what's taken from them. There's stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to the Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. This is Pro's Society. the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse. I'm Eli Rallo and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having. I'm going to have to look up this story. I'm obsessed.

I'm obsessed. From bestselling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table. It's like if you can hide some real. messages inside compelling characters, and that is a Trojan horse. Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place. Listen to Pro Society on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

See you between the pages. So joining us all to discuss this is Professor Zuckman himself. Professor Gremmer Zookman. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me. So I wanted to start by getting your action to Chimath's assessment there, that Silicon Valley has basically kind of been destroyed by the pursuit of greed. As you've been involved in so many of the debates, both in Europe and the United States, over how to respond to this kind of yawning wealth inequality, what are you noticing change?

Yeah, I think I share that assessment, and indeed you see it to do. day with the reaction of most Silicon Valley billionaires to Proposition 40, the California billionaire tax that's going to be on the ballot in California in November, where they are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to try to defeat what would be a very modest one-time tax of 5% on the wealth of California billionaires, frankly, a rounding error in their wealth, has grown by more than 200% just over the last couple of years. I think this is really indeed illustrative of how Silicon Valley has changed over the last couple of decades, let's say.

And one of the big criticisms of the wealth tax that obviously you're familiar with, because you've received this criticism many times. I've reading from a Forbes contributor here who specifically is writing about you and uses the example of the UK to say the UK is an example where the recent policies of the and labor have allegedly scared all the billionaires off to either Milan or Dubai, which is something that the Chamas of the world, say, would certainly happen in California. It's been leveled at Zaramam Dani in New York City. What's your response to the argument that everyone's just going to leave?

First, that the empirical evidence is not consistent with that view. So, of course, if you tax the super rich, some of them are going to try to relocate to some low-taxed states. but the academic literature is very clear in finding that those relocation responses are quite small. And number two, and that's what's more important in my view, is that this migration of high net worth individuals, it's not a law of nature, like gravity. It's a policy choice. So you can structure taxes in such a way that there's a lot of nature. not going to be an opportunity, a possibility to avoid the tax by moving to some low tax state.

So, for instance, in the case of the California billionaire tax, it's a one-time tax that would be owed by billionaires who lived in California, who were resident of California as of January 1st of 2026. So it's just too late to move. You cannot avoid the billionaire tax if it passes in November by relocating to another state. Now, if you think about wealth tax at a national level, if the U.S. had a federal wealth tax, the U.S. taxes its citizens based on their citizenship, meaning if you move to another country,

you still have to pay federal taxes as if you were still living in the U.S. And I think this is something that many European countries should emulate, perhaps not exactly the U.S. system, perhaps some variation over it. They could say, for instance, If you've lived for a long time in the UK and now you move to Dubai, then you have to keep paying taxes in the UK for 10 or 20 years. We can debate the details.

But what is important is the idea that this out migration, it's a policy choice. It's not a law of nature. And you recently published a book, We Need to Tax Billionaires. And in it, you address one of the objections that people have to wealth tax, which is, that is, just too complicated and the kind of wealth is just is a different beast than income income is obvious a company pays you a wage that if your wage is $100 and the tax is $15, you owe $15 of that $100, quite quite simple. Whereas whereas wealth exists largely in assets, whether whether there are equities which are rising in value and having been sold or paintings, you bought a

Hunter Biden painting for $100,000 and now it's worth a million dollars. So, you know, add that to your net wealth. And they say it's too complicated for us to do that. Now, Representative Rocana, who represents Silicon Valley, has recently presented a solution to some of the billionaires in a back and forth on Twitter. He said, well, we can value your wealth. Let's say it comes to a billion dollars. The government can make you a non-recourse loan, which you can use to pay the tax. if your wealth then declines, you don't owe that money back.

The government just eats it. But the government then takes a 2% share, you know, takes 2% of the shares and you could securitize them or, you know, you could create some other, you know, some other product, financial product. So as you've been involved in this for so long, and, you know, you were fighting for the Zuckman tax, as they call it in France. What are the, what are the mechanisms that you've come up with? or that policymakers have come up with to overcome this objection,

that this is all just too complicated. You know, these arguments sound very similar to the arguments that the opponents of the progressive income tax were making modern century ago at the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century, when the U.S., other countries at roughly the same time, created their income tax. And one of the main arguments of the opponents was to say that income is just too complicated

to measure and to define what counts as revenue, what counts as an allowed expense that you can deduct from your income. And look, we know the end of that story. We created the income tax. It's a big success overall. It has some limitations, especially for the source. super rich, which is why we need on top of the income tax, a wealth tax for the super rich. But by and love, it has worked pretty well.

And the reason for that is that fundamentally, when you create a tax, you always create much more than a tax. You create accounting standards. You create norms. You create an administration to enforce the tax. So that those difficulties, which in some cases exist, you know, I don't want to minimize that. But precisely by creating the tax, you create tools and solutions to those problems. So, for instance, how do you value paintings?

You might say, well, it's very complicated. No, it's not. If you have a very valuable painting, if you have a Picasso, it has an insurance value. And so you can use those insurance values. The tax administration could ask insurers to report those values to the tax authority. So there are lots of practical solutions, but to make progress, we need to start somewhere. In one state, hopefully it will be California in November, to do it first and to demonstrate by example that those problems, they have solutions. One of the concerns coming from the right that I would have is, does it create a worse, more crony system if you have?

Let me just ask for your response to that. Like, is there a concern? Because my preference would be something like a flat tax, closed loopholes, raise revenue that way. But obviously, there are problems with that approach to. Nothing's perfect. On the other hand, if we do a one-time tax like this, it does seem like the system will still, people will really wealthy people will still find ways to game the system. So how are you thinking about the possibilities of further cronyism or worsening,

exacerbating that problem that already obviously exists? I think that number one, in the ideal tax system, you have an income tax, you have an inheritance or estate tax for meritocratic reasons, and you also have a wealth tax for the super rich,

just because for them the income tax is not enough. When you're extremely wealthy, it's just very easy to organize your wealth such that this wealth will generate no very little taxable income. And that's how you end up in situations where people like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Larry Page in some years, they report no or barely any taxable income and they don't pay income tax. And this problem has been long understood, including by economists in the US.

One interesting element is, for instance, in the late 1940s there was a commission by US economy to advise the new Japanese government after World War II on how to build their tax system for a new democracy starting from ground zero after World War II. How should the tax system look like? And this is the troop commission with people like William Vickre who went on to win the Nobel Prize in economics. And what they said is, they said, look,

there should be a highly progressive income tax, just like in the US of the time, with top marginal income tax rate of 80, 90%. But also on top of this, there has to be a tax based on wealth just because from super rich, wealth is a much better indicator of their ability to pay taxes than income, which is very easy to manipulate. So that's why you need a wealth tax. And California billionaire tax, it's a one-time tax.

So don't get me wrong, that's not enough. No one thinks that you can, no one believes that you can. fix any structural problem just with a one-time tax. But the reason it's so important is because it would be the first ever tax on billionaire wealth enacted anywhere in the world. And it could have a massive ripple effect just by demonstrating that, look, the billionaires, they don't have to, we don't have to accept that they are bound to live in their own parallel society free of tax.

which is the current situation, we can actually address that issue very completely with the wealth tax. So one of the other objections that I've heard, and this is, I don't know if this is from the left to the right, one would be that a wealth tax that ends up forcing the 0.1% to sell assets to then pay this tax, ends up then pushing down asset values. And so the government ends up not really actually getting anything. All they do is kind of reduce the amount of paper wealth that exists in the world. It just ends up being some paperwork. And a parallel argument is that, okay, even if they do end up extracting some of that wealth,

it ends up being inflationary because the super rich, you know, have a maximum amount of wealth that they can actually. consume at any given moment. And if you take some of that and spread it around the middle class, they're going to actually consume it, which then drives up prices and doesn't, and has a similar effect of just kind of moving paper around. What's the reaction? What's the response to those criticisms? On the second point, you know, I think the revenue from the wealth tax, in the case of California, 90% of the revenue would go to health care, would go to making sure. that people don't lose access to Medicaid, which will otherwise happen because of the cuts

that were introduced by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. And there would not be an inflationary effect, but quite the opposite. If those cuts go as planned, what's going to happen is that not only millions of people are going to lose their health insurance, but also, premiums for private health insurance are likely to increase. And so if you get $100 billion or so to protect Medicaid, you would prevent that increase in private health insurance premiums. That's California, but what about on a more... So more broadly, so on the first point, and more broadly, beyond California, the point is

that the government, of course, is not going to reduce. distribute the revenues from the wealth tax, lump sum to consumers across the board. And it's going to use the money to fund what is the true engine of economic growth, which is access to education, high quality education for all, access to health care, public infrastructure, which if you take a broad view of history, and I think it's one of the main lessons, frankly, of economic history. This is these investments, the public investments in those things, education, health, infrastructure that have been the core and dine of modern economic growth, that have

allowed productivity to be multiplied by a factor of 10 over the last century. So it's not going to be inflationary, it's just going to allow us collectively to continue the rise in well-being and in productivity and prosperity that has characterized the past century writ large. Now, on the first issue of the effect on asset prices, I think this is a common objection, but I think there's a misunderstanding because what determines asset prices fundamentally is the future income. streams that are going to be generated by those assets, right? So what fundamentally determines the

stock market value of a company is whether people believe that this company is going to make a lot of profit or not in the future. This has nothing to do with how much tax the shareholders of this company are going to have to pay. And so if some billionaires must sell some shares to pay the tax, you know, that's fine. Other people are going to buy. And because the tax itself does, affect the profitability perspectives of the underlying company, it has no reason to affect its stock market value. Any other objections? I don't think we could solve any other objections.

It's so interesting. And just really appreciate you walking us through it. Last thing from me, what did you learn from the fight in France that could be applied to the UK? The California case is interesting. how closely you've followed the details of this, because the funding is supposed to go to this Medicaid situation in California, and it was pushed by a kind of local SEIU, not even the statewide SEIU, which is the Nurses Union. There's a lot of intramural fighting among the

California left. The teachers are in particular, are very angry that the money is not going to education. And without the support of the teachers, the measure looks like it's going to be in trouble. You know, there's a good chance that it ends up losing, not because the public is against the concept of it, but because there's so much infighting over what to do with the revenue that comes from it. Meanwhile, I'm curious, and also, I think it needs to be national.

Doing it state by state just doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. But what did you learn in France from the failed fight there? What is the prospect for it there and elsewhere? going forward in the UK or anywhere else? Oh, I think in France it's going to come back pretty soon in the discussion. So in France, the National Assembly in February last year adopted a 2% minimum tax on wealth for people with more than 100 million euros, roughly over a million dollars in net wealth, which was the proposal that I had developed for the G20 the year before,

and that I summarized in my book, we need to tax billionaires. And it was blocked by the very conservative Senate, but what was really striking is that there have been many polls conducted in France that show an enormous popular support for this measure. So we're talking about 80 to 90% of the population in favor of such a proposal.

These are numbers that you don't see anywhere for any other kind of social or economic, concrete policy or reform. And so there's just a huge disconnect between the popular demand and what elected representatives are deciding at the moment. And I don't think it's going to last forever. I think it will end up passing. And whether it's going to take a few months, a few years, it's difficult to know. There are lots of parallels, again, with the income tax, which was a big fight at the beginning of the 20th century.

In many countries, it took years between the first birth. in Parliament and the eventual enactment of the progressive income tax, but in the end, it succeeded. And this brings me to California and why I'm much more optimistic and enthusiastic, I think, the new on Prop 40 on the California beginner tax, because even though it's just in one state, you're right, I think it's to pay the way eventually for a national, federal wealth tax. And the reason, there are good reasons to believe so for at least two reasons. Number one is that this is how it has played out historically with the income tax, which first started at the state level. Wisconsin famously in 2011 was the first state to create a progressive income tax

and it greatly facilitated the creation of the federal income tax in 1913. And second is that California is often at the vanguard of broader national policy changes. In 1978, famously, California passed 13, which kept property prices, property taxes, sorry, and which was a kind of harbinger of the Reagan revolution that would triumph a few years later at the national level. And so I think that for all people who generally want to have a federal progressive wealth tax in the U.S. national level, it's very important that they support the California billionaire tax because, frankly, it's our best shot at starting the process, at launching the process that eventually will deliver

this federal wealth tax. Well, yeah, couldn't agree more with that, at least. And you're targeting Emily's heart by bringing up Wisconsin there. So, you know, they did lead the way on the income tax. Very progressive history. Yeah. And it is interesting that a lot of the arguments made it at the time against the progressive income tax are now being, you know, wielded again. Which I still agree with. Of course. Of course. Professor Zookman, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. Thank you. All right, that'll do it for today. Emily, you sold? You know, those segments are sometimes hard for me because I get the calculations. Like as you were laying out, it's true. Get rid of the Pentagon, all of that. It still doesn't do enough. There's a moral

question of taxation, though, that I just don't agree with the left on. And that's why I like flat tax. I'm not genuinely not in favor of progressive income taxation. But on top of all of that, you said, it's funny because you were like, we have to start dealing with the top. I agree we also have to start dealing with the top. But then we have some problems in the

programs themselves, too, because most of the spending is Medicare, health, Social Security. I'll have all week to convince you. You're here till Wednesday. Is that right? Soccer's going to jump in on Wednesday. Okay. But yeah, no, I thought that was so. I mean, he is one of the leaders of this entire thing. And your point about state versus national, I think is really important, too, because in a place like America, you would just, like, South Dakota is basically its own Cayman Islands right now. Yes, indeed.

You can just go somewhere. Anyway. All right. Well, we will both be here tomorrow. We'll continue this discussion. We will. We've got plenty of talk about because of Bessence Presser and Canada and all of that. So there'll be plenty of economic stuff to go on tomorrow. We're going to jump into the AMA right now, which you can get breakingpoints.com. That's how you get access to the AMAs we're doing free month right now. And if the show gets to a little late today, that was the first day of school. First day of school. So we're a little, a little bit late.

First day of DCPS. Get the kids out, yeah. Got to get the picture, the first day of school picture. Yeah, you got to do it. Sorry. I'm going to everyone. I survived nine months in captivity, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the Survivor Files. Every week, I'm with survivors who live

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