Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 8/30/23: Florida Slammed By Hurricane Idalia, Biden Impeachment, DeSantis Heckled After Shooting, Park Ranger Rams Through Climate Protest, Biden Civil Rights Claim, US Declassifies Chilean Coup, Jen Psaki On Abortion, New Medicare Price Negotiations

Episode Date: August 30, 2023

Ryan and Emily discuss Hurricane Idalia hitting Florida, McCarthy reportedly supporting Biden impeachment, DeSantis heckled after racist mass shooting, climate protesters confronted by police, Biden makes dubious Civil Rights Act claim, US declassifies Nixon era Chilean coup docs, Jen Psaki contradicts herself on abortion, and Alex Lawson joins to break down Biden's new pharma price negotiations.To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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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 CounterPoints. Glad to be back in the studio. We were not here last week because of the Republican debate. That's right.

Which I hear was a lot of fun. It was a blast. You didn't watch in France. I did not watch that. Ryan has been doing a home swap in France, and I think he had a really relaxing and fun time with his family. I think it was like 4 a.m., and I was like, you know what? I'm not going to watch this undercard.

Nah. I'll catch the Tucker Carlson clips later. Yeah, there you go. I'm going to sleep through this. Well, it's good to have you back in studio. Good to be here. All right, well, we're tracking the hurricane that actually became a Category 4 storm off the coast of Florida overnight, Wednesday early,

early this morning, briefly intensified, as CNN says, into an extremely dangerous category four hurricane with winds of 130 miles per hour before it weakened slightly. We have some video coming in from Florida just as we're taping this right now. Take a look. Incredible storm surge here this morning at about 7 o'clock. Sitting there, look at one of the marine markers coming through. That's a marine marker right there. So that's big water, big wave action. It's approaching the houses here on First Street. And look at this. Look at this.

Look at this. Look at this. Look at this. Look at this. Look at this. Look at this. Look at this. Look at this. Look at this. Look at this. Look at this. Look at this. Yes. Lost power live on air. Now, the National Hurricane Center is predicting there could be a surge of up to 16 feet, which would be around once-in-a-lifetime levels, again, according to CNN. Yeah, and this is hitting kind of the hinge. What do you call that area in Florida where the panhandle meets the rest of it?

The hinge. Something like the hinge. Let's go with that. And it's smashing right through there. It's going to come up the eastern seaboard. We have Ron DeSantis here, if we want to play his response, governor of Florida. So we are going to have the full landfall impacts very, very shortly, within the next couple hours, most likely probably by 0800.

It's going to make landfall on Florida's Big Bend. So please hunker down wherever you are. Don't mess with this storm. Don't do anything that's going to put yourself in jeopardy. And there'll be a lot of help coming on the back end of this storm. And we're ready to go. As soon as it's safe to do so, you're going to see all these different assets deployed. I knew there was something, the Big Bend. The Big Bend region. The Big Bend. And there was some reporting last night that a lot of sheriffs and others from the rural counties in the Big Bend urging people to get out. A lot of people did not get out

because even though this is a once in a lifetime storm, Florida's seen plenty of storms before. So people think, you know, we're going to hunker down as DeSantis said, and we're going to, and we're going to make it through this. And the sheriff was saying that the, there were way too many spots open in the shelters that, you know, in an elementary school that he handled 700, they might have a hundred. And so there's a lot of fear that a lot of people stayed not understanding just how bad it could be. Because if you are judging present and future climate events by the past, you might miss out on some extreme ones that are going to hit you. And, you know, it's also expensive to leave. It's inconvenient to leave if you have a shift that you need to get to.

And who wants to go to an elementary school and spend the night? That's true. Yeah, absolutely. Why would you leave the comfort of your home? Why would you want to if you don't have to and if you feel like you don't have to? Because these warnings sometimes are moved down, they're bumped down, they start really severe and things change as the day goes on. And so people take their chances, but I hope everybody who did that this time is staying safe. And there was a storm chaser on Fox News who was telling people like, no, no, no, seriously. Get out. Get out. So do we have that Fox News clip here we can roll?

That center is going to approach this area within the next hour to hour and a half. And we're going to see those winds switch around and we're going to have to watch for a major water push that's going to come inland. Luckily, we have not seen much in the way of people out here in this area, which is a great thing. We were here yesterday afternoon talking to residents, talking to the Taylor County deputies. There was a curfew in effect. There's pretty much a mandatory evacuation in effect.

So this is a very rare scenario with a system coming out of the eastern Gulf of Mexico that has made major hurricane status because that just does not happen in this region. And later in the show, we're going to talk about several climate protests, kind of one that was out at Burning Man, another in Washington, D.C. All of them went terribly, you know, furious reactions from the public. And I think part of it comes from, and we can talk about this more later, nobody needs awareness raised anymore about climate. Like if there's, there's basically nobody left in the country who doesn't think the climate is changing in dangerous ways. And also that it's happening because of manmade carbon emissions, like almost nobody left. Now the big fight is over what to do about it.

Even Vivek in that debate, when he said the climate agenda is a hoax. He's being very smarmy and clever there. And like, some people are gonna hear that as climate stuff is a hoax. But what he's saying is the agenda is a hoax. So he's saying like, okay, I agree. The climate is changing.

What I don't agree with is how the left wants to use it to kind of re-engineer society But about I'm ten years ago or so I remember thinking all right It's clear that we're not gonna do enough about climate change in my lifetime and that we're gonna see utterly catastrophic results as in the end It's like at least I'll be around for that comforting feeling if I told you so Nothing better in the world than being able to say I told you so to people who fought against the opportunity when it was around to do something about it. Watching it happen now, I don't get an ounce of satisfaction.

Like I'm even deprived of the satisfaction of being able to say, I told you so. Seeing what happened in Vermont, seeing what's happened in Canada, seeing what's happening down in Florida right now, none of that even brings me an ounce of like, I told you so joy. I would be worried if it did. I would be worried if it did. Yeah. And I think it's abstract. 10 years ago, it's abstract. What's this climate apocalypse going to look like? But when you see some of those images where the inland areas have just been turned into ocean, and what's that going to leave behind? I was driving through the panhandle a year or two ago, and you could still see all the devastation. I forget which hurricane it was, but it was not a couple

weeks prior. It was like years prior. And you could still see debris and you could still see destruction. I talked to somebody from Montpelier last night. They've barely recovered from that flood up in Vermont. And so as these once-in-a-lifetime events continue to accumulate and we become increasingly unable to recover from them, what kind of world does that leave behind us? I think you and I have disagreements on this, and we can flesh some of those out in the climate block, but it's another big question for media. Because one thing I wanted to mention here actually is that there's still hundreds of people unaccounted for in Maui. And the media coverage of that has slowed to a trickle at best and again, we're looking at years of rebuilding in Maui We're looking at a devastated local economy and we're looking at potentially somewhere around a thousand if not more

Deaths we have a hundred and fifteen confirmed deaths as of right now, which is a staggering number right now already That's a staggering number right now already. That's a staggering number. It could climb by some tenfold by the time all of the dust, so to speak, settles. Yeah. Yeah. And as I was writing in this morning, I was thinking of one, I was going over all the, you know, 20 years of like climate arguments that we've been having over the years. And one of them that you used to hear a lot was this one, do you remember, maybe you still hear it, like hey, in the 16th century, we had a little ice age.

You know, things get colder, things get hotter. That's all there is to it. What are you gonna do about it, you know, it happens. What I've learned since then is that, have you heard the theory on why we had that little ice age in the 16th century? I don't know. So in the 1400s, 1500s, Columbus and the Europeans come over to the New World and they bring disease with them.

You have a 90% population die off as a result of that disease coming in. Humanity is always at war with nature or humanity is always at war with nature, or humanity is always at war with vegetation, at least. And so with 90% of people gone, vegetation just took over North America, which is why you have all these descriptions of this kind of untouched wilderness 100 years later that people came to. It wasn't that way 200 years ago.

It became that way over the course of like 50 years from all of this just kind of wilderness taking back over where humans had been. And what does vegetation do? Sucks carbon out of the air. So even the silly kind of pedantic point that people made about the Little Ice Age actually turned out to be also anthropogenic in the beginning. Or you could blame a virus, or you could blame disease if you want. But it was humans that carried the disease over there. And so it just shows that, as Elon Musk said on Twitter just the other day, that the carbon, not Twitter, refuse, I absolutely refuse, that carbon concentration in the atmosphere matters. Like it's like, it doesn't care about

your feelings or your politics. Carbon doesn't care about your feelings? Yeah, it doesn't. You take carbon out, it gets colder. You put more carbon in, it gets warmer. This is basic stuff and there's just no way around it. All right, so moving on from this, one thing that didn't get a lot of play in the media this week is a little thing that Marjorie Taylor Greene, of all people, said on, I think it was like a Real America's Voice hit, something like that, but actually has pretty big implications for our politics going forward. Lots of Republicans kicking around the idea of impeachment, and I think that's about to

get really serious. Let's listen to what Marjorie Taylor Greene has to say. Let's talk about what an impeachment inquiry is, Miranda. Thank you for bringing that up. An impeachment inquiry is just asking the question. We're just asking members of Congress, do you think we should inquire about impeachment? It's not saying, do you want to impeach? It's saying, should we just ask the question?

And at this point right now, I'm like, what the hell is wrong with Republicans that we can't just, hey, guys, maybe ask the question. Maybe we should just ask and think about it and look at it and investigate in a much broader way and with more subpoena power. Just ask the question. Just real quick, that leaves the decision to Kevin McCarthy, ultimately. Are you confident he's going to go with the impeachment inquiry this fall in September? I am confident.

And the reason why I'm confident is we had a House GOP call yesterday, and that was his big push on the call. So I think if we were to have the vote today right now, Kevin McCarthy would be one of the first ones to vote yes. So the Speaker of the House is about ready to vote to start an impeachment inquiry. Ryan, let's play this clip of Hakeem Jeffries as well, because he's already, I think, anticipating an impeachment inquiry and has a, I think you get a little taste of the Democrat messaging strategy ahead when you listen to how he responded to questions about that on CNN. Potentially as soon as the end of next month is what our colleague Melanie Zanotta, I know you know quite well, has been reporting.

Your response to Republicans inching towards launching an impeachment inquiry into the president? Well, throughout this year, the American people have been forced to deal with a do-nothing, extreme Republican Congress that has done nothing to make a difference in the economy, nothing to make a difference with respect to job creation, nothing as it relates to health care affordability, nothing as it relates to inflation, nothing as it relates to public safety. They have nothing to show for their majority throughout the year. And so as a natural consequence of that, they just continue to take orders from Donald Trump, their puppet master in chief, who has directed them to persecute and to go after Joe Biden, which may take the form of an illegitimate impeachment inquiry.

So finally, I would just point out that Kevin McCarthy actually addressed some of these comments on Sunday. So before both of those conversations happen, we can put the last element up on the screen here. He said, so if you look at all the information on Fox News, we have been able to gather so far, it is a natural step forward that you would have to go to an impeachment inquiry. And McCarthy then said, it provides Congress the, quote, apex of legal power to get all the information they need. So Ryan, this is the just asking questions impeachment. And it's a perfect metaphor for our politics

that Florida would be underwater right now. And that the thing that Washington would be talking about is, or that Congress would be considering is not like, what are we gonna do about that? Like, how are we gonna build a sustainable country going forward in this new climate environment? But it's like let's move forward with this theatrical impeachment that we know is gonna fail and Democrats did the same thing and did it twice.

Maybe the second time they had actually some modest hope that it might succeed even though the guy was out of office by the time the impeachment inquiry was done so there was you couldn't you know do anything other than haha We got you but on the first one everybody knew there was no way they were gonna be two-thirds To convict in the Senate right we know right now. There's not me two-thirds ins in the Senate to convict Joe Biden. So Marjorie Taylor Greene just wants the kind of theater in order to kind of show and show the base that they're delivering. And my take on all of this is that it's similar to a government shutdown in that neither party is able to kind of deliver what its base wants because of the way that none of them have enough votes at this point. And so there are like basically two release valves at this point for that energy. One is you shut the government down and you're like, look, see, we tried. And so Republicans are probably going to do that in a few months. And the other is, well, we impeached

the president. So aren't you happy? Well, so that release valve actually might come sooner than a few months. It might actually come within the next month. And so again, when you, so when we're organizing the show, we, we have like, this is our A block. And so you try to put the most important news in the A block because that's the big thing to go through. And actually I think why this belongs at the top of the show is because September, as we're heading into Labor Day weekend here, September could feature a government shutdown and the opening of an impeachment inquiry. And I'm really glad you said, Ryan, that Democrats with the Ukraine impeachment hearing, especially the Ukraine impeachment hearing, and actually Kevin McCarthy

himself will cite that as a moment that really made the Republican conference, as they call it on the House side, coalesce. And people who were in the House and went through the Ukraine impeachment inquiry, which, by the way, I mean, we can talk about, you know, what Joe Biden did with Victor Shokin, who's been out in the media this week talking. He's the prosecutor who Joe Biden used foreign aid to get rid of in the case of he was he was ostensibly corrupt, as many government officials in Ukraine are and were. But that's Joe Biden sort of tethering foreign aid to a decision that the country makes and a decision that a foreign country makes. And that's essentially what Donald Trump was impeached over. So whether that was at the level of an impeachment inquiry

is a serious question. And so too is what Republicans are now going to, the questions that they're just going to be asking going forward. To your point, Ryan, it's become a release valve, not what it used to be. And so Marjorie Taylor Greene trotting out this thing, we're just asking questions, we're just asking questions. It's very much because if you're looking at an establishment Republican member like Kevin McCarthy, I can't emphasize that enough. This is not a guy from the Freedom Caucus.

This is establishment Republican Kevin McCarthy who says, he told me in an interview exactly a year ago, that that first impeachment completely changed the way Republicans saw the game in the House of Representatives. It's now fire with fire. And that's how they know that's what their constituents want. Not all voters, they know that's what the Republican base expects as a bare minimum. And so they feel like they can't not do it. And what put Trump's behavior outside the norm of the typical American president was that not that he was using American foreign policy as leverage over another country, because that's what we do. We're going to talk about that later in the show. That's an empire.

We talked about Pakistan recently. And so what made a difference, it was for pure political gain. You know, it was like, I need you to say, you don't even need to do the investigation of Hunter and Joe Biden. Just go on CNN and say you're doing it. That'll satisfy me. And in Trumpian fashion, it was more transparent and naked. Just completely naked. Self-interested, yeah. And because it cut against Ukraine, which was at the time and remains kind of an ally slash client and in our kind of adversarial relationship with Russia

That's what flipped it so that the rest of Washington was like, okay impeach him over this because the left had been trying to impeach Trump over the Anything Muslim ban the massive amounts of like corruption running through either, through either Saudi or the Trump Hotel, you name it. But all of that stuff was too, even though he was doing it in a more flagrant way, it was too cut too close to the bone of Washington. Too similar in kind to what a lot of other politicians do, except they just do it in a more sophisticated and okay way.

And so you weren't going to have the centrists along with you there Then he does the Ukraine thing. Yeah, and if you remember it was the kind of former intelligence community people like Spanberger and others who came out publicly and said okay now now he's crossed the line Now we're gonna now we're gonna do this and at that point the left was like well We've wanted to impeach him for all these other things We'll take this we're not gonna we're're not going to vote no on impeaching Donald Trump. But of course, you're not going to get Republicans to go along, even though a lot of Republicans hated the idea that you would use our kind of client in any way other than being adversarial in our foreign policy towards like Russia or something like that. And we could keep pulling at this thread and go back to, you know, whether Republicans and

Newt Gingrich started this in the 90s. We could keep talking, we could talk about whitewater, we could talk about, we could just keep going. There's no question about it. But the bottom line is Republicans have a very, very short time to fund the government in September, not just Republicans, actually, all of Congress has a very small amount of time to fund the government in September, not just Republicans, actually all of Congress has a very small amount of time to fund the government in September. The Freedom Caucus thinks a shutdown is, and if you talk to folks, that's the line. They're pushing for a shutdown. Kevin McCarthy wants what's called a continuing resolution to punt that into December. The Freedom Caucus is in all likelihood not going to let him get that continuing resolution,

meaning that you're trying to start an impeachment inquiry and fund the government in September. People are in dire financial straits around the country. We're seeing some really frightening economic indicators that we've covered this month, certain things like credit card delinquencies spiking. And Congress is going to be tangled up in likely in another impeachment fight and shutdown fight. My guess is that they'll do, I'm curious if you're taking this,

that they'll do a short-term extension at the end of, toward the end of September that'll push it into early December and that around then is when you'll get your shutdown. Because I think it's really hard for, if you have half the Republican conference

saying I'm fine with a short-term extension, and you have the other half saying, no, I want to shut down now, like that's such a loser argument that I think they'll just take it and punt it to December. But you have a much better read on the House Republicans. So what's your guess? I could see that happening. I think it's, the way I could see that happening is if McCarthy negotiates with the Freedom Caucus on impeachment. So maybe there's something that he can, you know, dangle, a carrot that he can dangle impeachment-wise that gets him that continuing resolution of the short-term extension to December. But there, you know, when you talk to those guys right now, they are hardcore no-CR

because that's not, you know, where the base is. That's not what anybody wants to hear. It is well past time. If you listen to just Marjorie Taylor Greene, who's no longer in the Freedom Caucus, but a sort of Freedom Caucus adjacent, it is well past time to start this impeachment inquiry. It should have happened. A lot of people think it should have happened earlier this year. So I don't think they're in any mood to, to keep pushing it. I don't think they're in any mood to, to push the potential shutdown either. So I saw like Mark Levin tweeting today, Reagan shut down the government some eight times.

And, you know, it's the least House Republicans could do now basically is where the base is. So I don't feel like they feel like they have much flexibility. I don't think they want to have much flexibility. So I would be surprised. But there are some carrots that McCarthy and he's a good negotiator with them. So we'll see. It is so pathetic. It's like really, it's like the least we can do is a great phrase for it.

It's like because nobody is going to the ballot box saying, you know what I really want is for the park service to get shut down. Like that's why I'm sending you to Washington. But they go and they can't deliver on the things that they want to deliver on. And so, yeah. So they're like, all right, well, what can we do? Because basically, yeah, it's impossible to get anything done, especially in the presidency. Yeah, right. That's the thing.

They control the House of Representatives and they want to govern from there. Barely. You can't. Right. And they barely control the House of Representatives. That's right. Real quick, my unpopular take. Andrew Johnson, worst president ever.

Wish he had actually been impeached. But the thing they impeached him on was crazy. It was after he took over from Lincoln, they passed a law saying you can't get rid of your cabinet secretaries. Lincoln's cabinet secretary. And that's crazy. Yeah. President's got to be able to hire the cabinet. So then he fired Stanton.

And Stanton wouldn't leave the War Department. He's like, no, I'm not leaving, not leaving. Like, uh, and people were like defending him. It was, it was wild. And then I still wish he'd been impeached, even though I disagree with the rationale for why they were done it. They were just asking questions, just asking questions. Yeah. Did you, and he did break that law, but the law is kind of crazy. Yeah. I mean, it's many such cases. Yeah All right, well speaking of Republicans in difficult situations here's Ron DeSantis has been I'm in tragedy continues to strike, Florida this week There was this horrific horrific

Shooting in Florida earlier this week. We can put B1 up on the screen. This is from The New York Times. I'm going to read from the article here. A white gunman wearing a tactical vest barged into a Dollar General store in Jacksonville, Florida, on Saturday and fatally shot three black people in an attack that the authorities said they were investigating as a hate crime. Now, Ron DeSantis has echoed that. He said he's seen the details and that this is the manifesto and this is clearly a racially motivated hate crime. So he's on the same page as law enforcement in that question. The victims, Angela Michelle Carr, 52 years old,

Analt Joseph Legare Jr., known as AJ, 29 years old, and Gerald Deshaun Gallion, 19 years old, 21-year-old gunman with an AR-15 style rifle and a Glock handgun, as the New York Times says, both of which he purchased legally in Florida. So then Ron DeSantis, obviously as governor of Florida, this falls under his purview to handle the fallout. He did a press conference. And let's play some audio and video from this. You can see him getting booed after the press conference. You're welcome, sir. These deaths are on your hands. Well, thank you for doing this. I want to just say to the councilwoman, councilwoman, councilwoman,

don't worry about it. We've already been looking to identify funds to be able to help, one, make sure we've had a good security for Edwin Waters College. We are not going to allow the institution to be targeted to help one, they started a bad foot security for Edward Waters College. We are not going to allow the police to be a part of that. I can't help...

Your policies cost this! He's done, Parker! I said after the press conference, but clearly that was in the middle of the press conference. Definitely not after the press conference. Now, Republicans have looked at the media coverage of this, and Ron DeSantis is certainly going to be dealing, I think, with that situation going

forward in the aftermath of this hurricane that we covered earlier in the show that's hitting Florida right now and will continue to be a huge process for the communities impacted in the days ahead, the months ahead, the years ahead. But Republicans saw media coverage of what happened there. And that's become sort of a news cycle in and of its own. This is Senator Mike Lee. We can put B3 up on the screen. This is he's responding to an AP journalist who said something to the effect of Ron DeSantis had this created the climate of fear, and the NAACP put out a travel advisory to Florida. And then, you know, sometime later,

there's the shooting, the racially motivated shooting of three black people. So tying A and B together, Mike Lee jumps in and says, SCOTUS effectively immunized journalists from public figure defamation liability in 1964. Over time, that immunity coupled with political leanings of most journalists had turned the news media into the communications assault arm of the Democratic Party. Now, I don't agree at all about the- What's his exhibit A? I'll read it right here.

It's the tweet from, it is from Steve Peoples who said, Ron DeSantis scoffed when the NAACP issued a travel advisory this spring, warning black people to use, quote, extreme care if traveling to Florida. Just three months later, who said Ron DeSantis scoffed when the NAACP issued a travel advisory this spring warning black people to use quote extreme care if traveling to Florida. Just three months later, DeSantis is leading his state through the aftermath of a racist attack that left three African Americans dead. And I'll put the next element up on the screen. This is my colleague

David Harsanyi writing at The Federalist and saying essentially there's nothing in DeSantis' rhetoric that would be responsible for motivating a racially motivated terror attack. And so the Republican response and the conservative response has become a new cycle in and of its own, basically saying to point fingers at Ron DeSantis for the AP curriculum that we talked about here on this show, for other things in Florida, essentially, that the left interprets one way and to connect it to a shooting is basically a smear. And that's what Mike Lee is arguing. I don't agree at all on the question of liability for the media. That's a much more popular, it's increasing in popularity. As a member of the media. Yes, it's a very self-interested, but for legitimate reasons, I don't agree with that at all. Ryan, though, this is going to be, in the future, this is going to be a problem for DeSantis. We've seen him in ways that Florida voters appear to like, turn the tables when questions like this happen and say this is awful what the media is doing. But at the same time, he can't escape the scrutiny no matter what happens.

Right. And so Mike Lee is trying to blame the NAACP for warning people that black lives are at risk in Florida. And then three months later, three black people are killed by a racist guy, a dollar general. He's like, he should be saying, well, NAACP was kind of right about that, right? He's blaming the AP for regurgitating the NAACP's line sort of credulously. And then you've got, you remember when Rick Scott, he did that really creepy thing where he's like, it's socialists and communists and everybody who believes in big government stay out of Florida. I'm warning you, don't come down here. Like that rhetoric also, like, come on, you can't have a socialist, socialists can't visit Florida.

People who believe in big government ought to be warned not to go to Florida. What are you talking about. So, but on the Ron DeSantis press conference, watching that, I'm thinking, you know, he has a responsibility as a governor. Those are, these are his constituents. Like, he made a choice that he was going to be as divisive as he possibly could and as partisan as he could. And that was going to be his kind of leg up in the presidential primary that he was going to pick fights with with Democrats slash the media which he believes to be the same thing and you know fire elected prosecutors you know in cities around Florida and you know take take take over the curriculum and on and on he had he that choice, and maybe it has 54% of the state behind him,

but that means you might have 46% of the state vocally against you, even in a moment where just several years ago, everybody would come together. Right. Yeah, I think that's an interesting contrast. And actually, we've seen this with hurricanes past, that Ron DeSantis, the way that he's approached tragedies like hurricanes under his governorship has been pretty well approved. It seems to have actually been efficient and a proper use of government, a useful application of government. And he's actually, again, emerged from a lot of those other tragedies, probably stronger politically, if anything. But yeah, we didn't used to see quite this level

of polarization. It used to be that these things were unifying moments for various reasons. But his approval rating, this is as of July, a Florida Atlantic University poll had him at 54% of voters approving of the way DeSantis is handling his job. Then a strong plurality, 41%, saying they strongly approve. 41%. But to your point, Ryan, that means 34% of voters strongly disapprove. One in three. That's a lot of strong disapproval, which means he's generally well liked in the state of Florida, probably beyond just partisan Republicans when you have numbers like that. But at the same time, that means the

disagreement with Ron DeSantis is also highly, highly polarized. And I think as he continues running for president, that's only going to get, that will only become ratcheted up. They'll only be stronger, the reaction to him. And probably some of his numbers as he sort of flails on the national campaign trail will bring his numbers down in Florida, I imagine, especially if you end up looking distracted. If you end up looking like you're treating tragedies as campaigns for a president, which as campaign stops on your presidential bid, that's a pretty bad look too. I haven't seen that so far. And I do want to say, I actually am in the camp where I think tying DeSantis personally, Ron DeSantis' rhetoric personally

to what happened, I think makes no sense. But I also take the point that you were making that, you know, is it insane for a journalist to say this is what the NAACP, a major organization, a major national powerful organization was saying? Yeah, I mean, I take that point too. Right. Yes, I agree with all that, that Bronda Santos is never born. You may very well still have this shooting. Andrew Gillum could be governor. Right. And you might still have this shooting. At the same time, what Mike Lee ought to be asking is why did the NAACP say that? Like what is it? What is it that has happened between the NAACP and the Republican Party, which you know used to be allies, that led them to a place where they were issuing a travel warning to the state.

And so work through that rather than blaming the AP for reporting on it and implying that there would almost be some defamation in reporting. Even if there was no 1964 defamation protection, Mike Lee knows better. You're allowed to report what the NAACP says and does as a reporter. It was't, it was definitely not the moment, the journalistic moment that I would be like, maybe we should look at defamation cases because they didn't, like people's again. Who's going to sue, Florida? Yeah, right. And people's didn't, or DeSantis, I guess, like people's didn't make an explicit, he didn't really have to, but he also didn't make an explicit point of culpability to, he didn't say Ron DeSantis created the conditions that the

NAACP issued a travel advisory because Ron DeSantis is a racist and caused the shooting. And we actually do see journalists kind of crossing that bridge sometimes. So of all of the opportunities, I don't know that this would be one of them. So speaking of extraordinarily polarizing events, there's been a series of climate protests that we wanted to take a look at. And first of all, nobody from Burning Man is watching this show. Maybe they'll watch it when they're done. Although actually, maybe there's some Wi-Fi connection out there somewhere and they're beaming it in and they're all sitting around. You know, I did my honeymoon at Burning Man. I didn't know that, but I'm so glad you broke that to me on air because that is too perfect.

You did your honeymoon at Burning Man. We did our honeymoon at Burning Man. This is 2007, a very long time ago. Hell of a time. The Bush era of Burning Man, nothing like it. And so in order to get there, there's basically one or two roads. And it's hours outside of Reno even, which is in the absolute middle of nowhere. And everybody is supposed to bring all of their own things with them, you know, gas and water.

But, you know, if you, let's say, have to run your car for three or four hours on the highway or on the kind of state parkway, unexpectedly, that might cause some problems for you. And so there was a climate protest that blocked traffic for miles and miles and miles in the northern Nevada desert on the way to Burning Man. And so we'll play how it ended, but then we'll play a little bit of what led up to it. So here's a clip of how this ended in quite a brutal fashion. Did anyone get that? Yeah. Get out now! Get out! On the ground! All of you on the ground now! Get on the ground! Get on the ground! We're not violent! Get on the ground! No, we're not violent! Don't move! So that's a tribal policeman.

The tribal police say that his conduct is now under review. This was several... For being awesome. Afterwards, you see some blood on the face of these women. He really roughed them up. This was several hours after... But not with the truck. Not with the truck. No, this is like... He even he even does the like stop resisting thing.

Yeah. While they were absolutely clearly not resisting at all. So he's under investigation for after he rams through the barricades, his treatment of the protesters, which we didn't fully see there, but. Right. And so it's a fascinating dynamic that they're kind of blocking people from getting to Burning Man. And so let's play a little bit of the discussion between the Burners and these protesters. We've got some of this clip here. What are you guys doing? Why are you attacking people who are on your team?

We're not the ones causing the problem. Attack the big corporations. Attack the government. Don't attack us. We're all in the same boat here, guys. This is the most liberal group of people you can find on the planet. We're not helping with climate change because we're... So they hate us.

Look at that. Liberal policies. Biden is drilling more oil than any president since Bush like come on so liberalism is not the answer either we need to change the system we need burners to rise up you're intelligent you're a conscious human being you're awakened we have it here's a flyer it didn't say anything about Biden if you read read it, you see it says system change. We need system change. We're demanding Bernie man.

Three principles. Radical honesty. Advocate for change. If we can make a full city of 100,000 people in the desert with zero resources on a dry lake bed, we can actually change some policies. We did. We did. We did. So there's a good video of that. I think it's like 25 minutes long of just a lot of these different arguments going on.

And so you did get a chance to hear the protester articulate the theory here that they're going to. Actually, I'm not sure what the theory was. What's the goal there? Well, I mean, she's not wrong from the perspective of somebody who has that, and I think you share that perspective on climate change, that the left is in some ways as culpable as the right, again, from that perspective, for perpetuating the system. Because you can do sort of Band-Aids here and there, Inflation Reduction Act, which was an environmental policy in many, many ways.

But that's sort of your bandaid. That's not going to fully change the entire system that Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, et cetera, are part and parcel of. So I guess I understand it from that perspective. On the other hand- Oh, yeah, the analysis is dead on. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Right. But the prescription, what like, and also I liked one of their demands. We didn't show it there, but across the street, it said ban private planes, which is, which is a wonderful message for these burners here. Now, obviously those people don't have private planes because they're rolling in there in cameras. Although maybe they flew into Reno, some of them,

and then, and then drove from there. But the But the wealth at Burning Man is just obscene. It's Silicon Valley. It's the richest people from Northern California who have, you know, liberal to libertarian values, you know, tons of libertarians out there. So it's not just liberals. But yeah, so ban private jets, that's cool. I'll go with that. But how are you going to ban private jets by blocking? It's like what – by making everyone there hate you so much that they're supporting the police. Right. Barreling through you and almost killing you. Yeah. willing to overlook that, then how are you kind of organizing a coalition that's gonna have enough power to implement the

prescriptions that your analysis rightly says we need? Yeah, it's really visceral for people who are, you saw in those videos, this incredible line of traffic backed up through the desert. They're running out of gas and it's 100 degrees and there's no gas station for hours. You made that point before we started taping the show that it's actually really dangerous when you're out in the middle of the desert and you're idling, potentially for hours, if the climate protesters get their way and you run out of gas. How are you supposed to deal with that situation? Obviously, there were a lot of people backed up, and I'm sure people would be helping each other out in the true spirit of Burning Man. Radical self-reliance, though, is the true spirit of Burning Man.

It's like, hey, radically self-reliance, though, is the true spirit of Burning Man. So I was like, hey, radically self-reliant yourself, man. I'm going to burn. On the other hand, I want to play the video here from Washington, D.C., actually not too far from where we were that came in over the weekend because climate protests are obviously, there have been a lot here recently and we don't need to have sympathy for the politicians and lobbyists here in D.C. But you'll see in this video, that's not really who's bearing the brunt of the problem. We could just roll it here because we can talk over it. Yeah, take a look.

Yeah, you see here, all white and like older. Mostly retirees looking like. Yeah, look like retirees, climate protesters blocking a really busy strip of road here in Northeast D.C. Far from the power center. Right. Multiracial, ostensibly sort of middle class people trying to get to work. And when you're listening to the audio, you can find the video online. It's just people saying over and over again, which we have seen for years as these traffic blocking protests have transpired, people saying, I need to get to work, please. Like, I need to make my shift.

I need to punch in. I need to pick up my kid. And I think the real problem, even for people who are on the same page, which you hear in the DC clip, one woman saying, we all know the world is melting. Yeah, that woman that we just saw there, that was her point. She's like, look, you think we don't know the world's melting? Yeah. She says that. Like, we know that. It's even people that are on the same page who are saying, like, look, we get it, but we also need to get to work. And it's this lack of empathy, I think,

with the material concerns of everyday Americans that comes up when you have retired, yeah, all white retired climate protesters or even people who are just blocking your ability to have a normal day that is just so deeply visceral for people saying like, listen, we get it, but I got kids to feed. But I also, I mean, I get the impulse. I get the fear, the anxiety,

the desire to just do something. When you look at what's going on in Florida right now, when you understand the threat to a sustainable planet, certainly at this population level, and you look at the minimal amount of progress that's been made I can I can see where where they would say you know what just throw it all out but it but that's all that is is personal satisfaction at that point all that all that is is kind of making you feel a little bit better about what you did in in this crisis without any connection between your analysis and your action actually doing something.

And so if you think deeper about it, you don't actually get to credit yourself for doing everything you could if what you did didn't actually help. Like good, like, and the- And maybe it was counterproductive. Right, the left has a new phrase over the last several years, which is intentions don't

matter, impact matters, actions matter. And so when people are apologizing for whatever they're apologizing for, people have now absorbed that. And so they don't say anymore what their intentions were when they did something. They just acknowledge the impact that their words or their actions had on people that they harmed, and they pledge to educate themselves and do better. So if intent doesn't matter, like if you believe that and you're not just saying it to get out of whatever trouble you're in, then you have to connect your action to actual impact.

Absolutely. And if you're not making progress, if you're actually making things worse, then your intent doesn't matter. And so we have, if you want to put up C5, another one of these incidents in Canada, which I think we've seen a bunch of these in the UK, that I think is just going to lead to draconian penalties for people who do this kind of thing. Also in Canada, protesters splashed paint on a Tom Thompson piece at the National Gallery this week. Again, we are seeing an increase in this type of activism

that feels it's really intentionally obstructionist. And I don't use that phrase pejoratively. I know it's really charged, but I don't use it pejoratively because on the left, they would say, yes, it is obstructionist. That is the entire point of what David Sirota and Adam McKay were making, don't look up. It has to be obstructionist because we need to radically rethink the way that we're, our relationship with the planet. At the same time, an interesting thing from Canada is the protesters say that paint was washable and that there's no

damage to the painting. There's also a lot of paintings are covered. A lot of these masterpieces have a little covering, which this one did. Right. And so it's an inverse, I think, also of the traffic protest. I still don't think people want to see it. I mean, they think it's, you know, silly. But when you're attacking art, that's like sort of high culture as opposed to blocking traffic. It's a very different thing. So I think climate protesters are trying to reckon with this themselves. You know, I think this goes back to a kind of naivete and a delusion that we have, that all of us across the political spectrum have. And the dudes on Chapo Trap House have talked about this, that on the right, this idea that there's all these conspiracies to kind of produce new events so that we forget about the events before and that all of these things are psyops, this whole, you know, psyop analysis of the world. What that assumes is that if people

only had the right information in front of them, then people would be able to act. And so what it does is it explains our failure to act as well people are people who don't understand what's happening because there's all these psyops but that's not true we know what's going on we have the knowledge we just don't have the power to do anything about it and i think that is so kind of humiliating and so difficult to just process as a human being. It's pessimistic. That you're just a powerless atom in this, you're getting pushed around by these structures that we then tell stories that if only people knew, then we'd be able to change something.

And so the corollary there is if we just splash enough paint on these paintings and get it into the news that there's a climate catastrophe coming, if we block people on their way to work in DC, if we block people on the way to Burning Man, then that will wake people up. They will know that there's a climate catastrophe and then they will use that knowledge and they will take power and they will do something about it. But what's broken is that there the structures make it impossible For a population to express its will because there we are locked out Yeah, the government we're locked out of decision-making authority. Yeah, so we can know we can we can Raise as much awareness as we want. That's not the problem. The problem is we don't have power

You can't rain nobody wants to admit that we don't have power. And you can't reign in the corporate powers. You can't reign in the government powers collusion with the corporate powers for those reasons. And it actually reminds me, and this is an extreme connection of what we were talking about in the last block, where Republican voters are demanding the release valve of a government shutdown and impeachment inquiry. And again, that's because they feel helpless against the system. They feel like the system needs a radical check in the form of both of those things, which will ultimately, you know, be not measures that radically change the system, right? They're measures that will make radical demands of the system, that will make radical condemnations of the system, but will not ultimately change the system. It's more of a sort of aesthetic.

And in substance, it's a rebuttal. It's the fire with fire. But you can really understand why people are demanding fire with fire. And I think, again, extreme connection, I know, but fire with fire is blocking the roads. It's a similar thing. And I'm not saying that it's an exact one-to-one, but I do think there's a powerlessness that people feel, especially in a world that has been shrunk over the last 100 years because of technology. And that what happens in China and India is now dramatically affecting the lives of people in Kansas or in Canada. We don't have control, really, over what China and India does.

We can try, and we don't feel like we even have control of our own government, let alone the governments in China and India. And because of the way the world has shrunk, it all matters. Yeah, but it's poignant in such a sad way that even in the sense of the depth of that powerlessness that those people on the street feel, they still feel like if they just raise a little bit more awareness, then we're going to solve this. Yeah, I agree. Big if true news out of Joe Biden, who says that as a 21-year-old, he convinced Strom Thurmond to support the Civil Rights Act. If we can put up the quote from Biden here, he says, I was able to literally, not figuratively, talk Strom Thurmond into voting for the Civil Rights Act before he died. And I thought, well, maybe there's real progress. But hate never dies. It just hides. It hides under the rocks. This is the latest in Joe Biden's long, long history

of just completely fabricating nonsense about his role in the civil rights movement. It goes back, this is probably the most, this is the second most absurd of all of them, and we'll get to the most absurd in a minute. He actually got in a lot of political trouble back in the 1980s for claiming that he was, he marched, you know, and was involved in the civil rights movement and Pressed on it. It turned out that he went to I think like one luncheon thing after a church event or something and that was that and he had kind of been embellished that into like Serious involvement in the civil rights movement his most absurd one was he basically said he broke into prison to see Nelson Mandela Remember this one? This was during the campaign. This was during the 2020 presidential campaign.

And before you really start to see obvious cognitive decline in him. So it's not just an old Joe Biden. But Joe, he's a liar. Yeah, he's a liar. He tells lies. He also has, I think, lies to himself. That's probably true. It's even more sad. Yeah, maybe. And so the White House was pressed for some clarification on this. What do you mean that he literally, not figuratively, talked Strom Thurmond into voting for the Civil Rights Act? And they said what he actually meant, because it's physically impossible. He was 21. He was not in the Senate. And also Strom Thurmond voted against it. Yes. Strom Thurmond. Literally voted against it. Not figuratively. Think of all the layers here.

Strom Thurmond did not vote for the Civil Rights Act. Joe Biden did not talk him into it. And Joe Biden was 21 years old, not anywhere near the Senate. Now let's be generous. What he was thinking about, according to the White House, is that Strom Thurmond ended up voting for the 1980 reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act. Yes. Which, let's sit with that for a minute. That is, that is something. And it also shows how far our politics has come in a way that MLK said the arc of history is long, it bends toward justice. It's been more of a pendulum

than a bent arc in the sense that by the 1980s, you did have kind of unanimous support almost for the Voting Rights Act in Congress. In 2006, I believe it was, maybe even more recently than that, there was a Voting Rights Reauthorization Act that passed 98 to 0 in the House, in the Senate, and overwhelmingly in the House of Representatives. And then just a few years later, John Roberts gutted it, saying that Congress's intent on this passing in 1965 had basically been fulfilled, completely ignoring that it had just been

reauthorized in a bipartisan vote and signed by a Republican president, George W. Bush. And so the fact that Strom Thurmond was among that pendulum swing in that direction, then only to see it swing back, I think is a fascinating commentary. Yes. But let's talk for a second just about Joe Biden, Strom Thurmond, the other thing that he might have been thinking of. And we can put up this second story here. This is from historian David Stein.

We published this in The Intercept. I helped edit this piece. It's a great, great piece of journalism from September 2019 during the campaign. The story that Stein unearths is that in the 1970s, Joe Biden was far to the right of Ronald Reagan when it came to the crime and to the drug war. And he relentlessly pushed Jimmy Carter to get tougher and tougher on crime and kept insisting to the Democratic leadership, give me – this was called – give me the crime issue and you'll never have to hear about it again because he's going to be so tough on crime. After Reagan was elected, Strom Thurmond takes over the chairmanship of the Judiciary Committee and Biden becomes the ranking member. And he goes to Strom Thurmond and he says, look, we can do a crime bill together. You and I can get tough on crime. He says, and this is his telling of it, if you get your right-wing guys, and I love the idea that Strom Thurmond is not a right-wing guy, you get your right-wing guys not to kill it, I'll get my

left-wing people not to kill it, and collectively we'll do a tough on crime bill. And Reagan had no interest initially. The entire 1980 campaign was about unemployment. It was about inflation. It was about malaise. It was about Iran hostages. We kind of retcon it to be about the war on drugs and the crime wave, but it wasn't. Like that wasn't just the reality of it. That wasn't what the 1980 campaign was about. And Biden just kept pushing and pushing and pushing, saying we need to make this the centerpiece of our agenda. Reagan vetoed one of his big tough on crime bills because Reagan didn't want to spend the money. He was still a he had there was that pull between the small C conservatism and the and the push against a strong federal government and the desire to be the tough-on-crime party, whereas Biden didn't have that.

Biden was fine with big government, and he wanted to be tough-on-crime. And so his alliance with Strom Thurmond is really what then enables him to put together the coalition that eventually becomes the war on crime and, you know, ending with his and not ending with his 1994 crime bill because he continued to do the Rave Act and other kind of quote-unquote tough-on-crime legislation after that.

So that's the actual thing that he talked Strom Thurmond into doing. And maybe he did actually talk him into voting for the Voting Rights Act in 1980. I don't know. Maybe he did. Fine. I mean, yeah, who knows at this point. But at the same time, I mean, this is part of a pattern with Biden, who also he had some interesting words about his work with George Wallace. He's had interesting words for Robert Byrd. In fact, he called Robert Byrd a, quote, mentor, guide and friend. Robert Byrd was a leader in the KKK. He was but Byrd was one of those He renounced that past and like yes, so for you know, if we're gonna allow for that

I think we got to allow for that. I think I think we absolutely have to allow for that I also think it's a pattern with Joe Biden. You know was, you know, renounced at last, but yeah. It's interesting with Joe Biden and because we're, the reason that made me think of Bird is that we're also doing a segment in the show about how Biden gets a surprising win against Pharma. And it's just this pattern in Biden of that I actually think the left really needs to reckon with in that he is a political chameleon. And he's willing to say whatever it takes, whether or not it's true. And he's gotten away with it. He's actually done that to the presidency, which is, you know, he had to drop out of a presidential race at one point because he was caught plagiarizing, essentially.

The 88 campaign. It's dogged his entire career. His speech said that, you know, for thousands of years, my family's been living here. It's like, what do you mean thousands of years? And they realized it was a Scottish politician that he'd ripped off. Yeah, yeah.

Again, like it wasn't, first of all, it wasn't true. And secondly, it wasn't even him. Like, it was just amazing. But at the same time, he has had- The civil rights stuff hurt him too when he got busted for that. Right, uh, but at the same time he has had civil rights stuff hurt him too, when he got busted for that. Right. It did. And, but he, at the same time, he continues to like, just do enough, uh, to get things done. Not, he's not like radically reforming anything, but he does just enough to get things done to the point where the arc of his career is such that in

2023, uh, or in 2020, the rest of the Democratic Party feels, the rest of the candidates are talking about things like Medicare for all that makes voters uncomfortable. And Joe Biden has, he's just a step beyond that. He says no Medicare for all and gets elected as the United States. It just, he's had a very telling arc, I think. He has a fine-tuned antenna. He's a very good politician in his ability to find the kind of political center. And he doesn't care. He's amoral about it. Yeah.

He doesn't have any value. He's just going to go where it is. And I think part of it comes from coming from Delaware. Delaware has several things that make it kind of, I think, a good breeding ground for a good politician. One is that it's so wildly corporate dominated that he understands corporate power. And so has a very strong sense of where that power lies. But also it's such a small state. He and people like Tom Carper know everybody in that state. Like they know by first name.

Like when I've reported from that state people like oh, yeah I had dinner with Tom Carver I had tenor with Joe Biden just regular people on the street and also it's a microcosm in the sense that There's rural white working-class areas. There's rural black working-class areas. There's there's there's Wilmington There's the Wilmington suburbs and so you have kind of every different political dynamic And so he is able to go into these towns, have authentic conversations across the spectrum with people, racial and political, and then regurgitate those. Just, you know, turn them back out to a national population. And so that enables him to find the center at all times. And it helps him fend off the charges from Republicans that he's some radical socialist.

It's one of those frustrating things for Republicans. They're like, look, he's doing all these things that are pretty progressive. And people just keep assuming that he's a centrist kind of reasonable guy. Yeah. Because he just looks like one. Right. And he's always willing to talk to other people. Talk to Strom Thurmond. Exactly. I was going to say like George Wallace or Strom Thurmond. He has those conversations, which is something that a lot of people on the

left take issue with and say, we're not essentially it's that we don't negotiate with terrorist line, which you can see some of that argument. And at the same time, if he talks Strom Thurmond in the V voting for the Act of 1980 which who knows whether that's true His his funeral that he spoke at right strong Thurman's. I think it was birds I think but maybe he did both he might have done both that one surprised me at all Actually Ryan this is well let's go back to the the Nixon era for our next subject subject, because this is actually new information that we're receiving, declassified CIA presidential daily briefings that were recently declassified.

We've learned just in the last month more about the coup that overthrew Allende in Chile. And Ryan, you have a lot more information to share on this. Just fascinating stuff. This is Joe Biden's freshman year, right? 1973. So recently, a group of Hispanic members, left-wing Hispanic members of Congress, Greg Kassar, Ocasio-Cortez, Nigue Velasquez, left to center-left, Maxwell Frost, did a trip to South America, met with a bunch of, you know, governments and also dissidents to, you know, try to build bonds between the kind of left here in the United States and the rising left down in South America. They met with Gabriel Boric, who we've talked about on the show. Or they met with, actually, I think they met with him. I don't want to say that for sure.

But they had, that's the president of Chile, a kind of millennial lefty guy who's been in office for about a year. AOC had attached an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act asking for the documents related to the 1973 coup in Chile to be declassified CIA documents. That never even got a vote. Lots of amendments don't get a vote. But it got a little tiny bit of coverage. Now, Boric pushed for the release of these documents. And so they were released by the embassy in Chile. And they were released with a note that says, we hope that this helps with US-Chilean relations. Because Pinochet was in power until 1990 and

still looms over the politics there. His opponent was a kind of Pinochet supporter and talked about, you know, talked romantically about the time period. And so this is not history for them. And so what they released is two presidential daily briefs from one was September 11th, which is a day of the coup. The other was from three day of the coup. The other was from three days before the coup.

And what you see is Nixon getting information from the intelligence agencies that a coup looks like it's going to happen. At first they talk about the Navy might be the one that's going to lead the coup. You have them on September 11th. They're still not certain that it's going to happen. The whole situation is murky and unclear. And the US role in the coup is kind of contentious because the US very clearly and actively destabilized the country, wanted Allende ousted. Kissinger famously famously said make the economy scream There were CIA agents who were you know played active roles in you know destabilizing the economy through different work stoppages and other kind of other kind of sabotage throughout the economy but there was also a

You know very native Chilean element to to the, the Chilean right very much wanted the support of the United States but was going to do it – they weren't taking necessarily orders but it was more like they wanted permission. And what's clear from the newest documents is the permission was there. And after the coup the Nixon administration condemned it and said this is as outrageous violation of democratic principles, but as we as we know now They were very secretly supportive of it immediately and did everything they could to like make sure that the coup stuck as it did then for 17 17 years And so a lot of this comes from and and there's parallels with Guatemala, for instance, how the CIA destabilized Guatemala. Allende tried to nationalize, he did nationalize copper mines in Chile, which was a huge, I mean, American business was like 60% of the Chilean economy

at the time. And so to business interests that have their tentacles all over the CIA and have since the inception of the CIA and the OSS. They are saying, we got to do something, right? And so what's interesting also, though, is the pretense. And I think it was Nixon who said the scream thing to Kissinger, and then Kissinger sort of carries it out and directs the—it's from the Nixon tapes, I think—but directs the CIA to take various different steps. Right, they told the CIA to do it. And yeah, exactly. And the CIA was funding certain dissidents, but the economy under Allende had absolutely faltered. And you can make the argument that's because of his more collectivist policies,

or you can make the argument it's because the United States said, well, great, we're not doing business with you anymore. And there's no market for all of this copper. Sorry. And so it's clear interventionism in their economy on our behalf, but it's happening in the middle of the Cold War. And again, what we see with Guatemala, we saw this to some extent with Cuba and other places throughout South America, Honduras, is that there were business interests, but you also had Allende with contacts in the KGB. We know from declassified, not declassified, but obtained KGB Soviet information

that they had met with Allende, that they had in some ways fueled the rise of, Allende's more of a socialist, Marxist socialist kind of guy, hard to define, than a communist, like a hardcore. He's not Che Guevara. He's not Fidel Castro, though he was also cooperative with Castro. At the same time, you have this like real fear that there's going to be this Soviet bulwark in South America that, you know, emboldens Cuba right off our coast with nuclear weapons. And it's just, I think when you see parallels to it today,

it's a great example of how it's like, listen think when you see parallels to it today, it's a great example of how it's like, listen, we have been doing this for decades and it never works out the way you, Henry Kissinger, who's still trying to like make excuses for ideas like this. It has never worked out the way the sort of realists during the Cold War said it would. Never. Right. And the irony is that the upshot is that it's ending with a lot of these countries forming tighter relationships with China. Yes. While we were looking at the Soviet Union the whole time. It's like, whoops. But it did the same thing. It pushed people during the Cold War into the Soviet Union's arms in Indonesia, for example, where people did not want to turn to the Soviet Union. They wanted to have good

relationships with the United States. And you see the exact same thing playing out today. And I think, Ryan, you want to talk about Guatemala in this context. Yes. If we put up that second one to bring it to the present day, we talked, I guess, two weeks ago about the upcoming Guatemalan election with Bernie. And Bernie won. Bernardo Arevalo, the progressive insurgent candidate, who's the grandson of the first president elected back in the 1940s. So the democratic legacy that survived through the civil war that came after the U.S.-backed coup in 1954 is clearly resonant with the Guatemalan people.

So he wins. But immediately another, and I'll just read this AP article. It's just insane what the left has to deal with when they take power. Progressive candidate Bernardo Arevalo was confirmed the winner of Guatemala's presidential election by the country's Supreme Electoral Tribunal on Monday. But the same day, another government body ordered his political party suspended. Arevalo has faced a slew of legal challenges and allegations of irregularity since his unexpected victory over a candidate favored by the country's conservative elite. Arevalo appears certain to take office as president on January 14th, but it was not clear whether his seed movement lawmakers would be able to take their seats in the country's Congress.

And so another situation where you have the will of the people expressed through an election they want our Evalo in power and they want him to be able to enact the agenda that he ran on and He's just getting stonewalled at every turn They might not even let his like party take power and then and then what And then you'll have a situation like Castillo in Peru or elsewhere where he can't then deliver on what he was elected to do. You'll see some protests. And all of a sudden, oh, in the shame, we had a no-confidence vote.

And if the United States is serious about, quote-unquote, root causes, trying to actually bring stability and prosperity to countries so that they're not, so that people are not kind of pushed out to our border because of both economic and political crises, then you would think that we would say, how about you honor the will of the people down there? Like let the guy take power.

But that would require allowing Guatemala sovereignty and potentially even allowing Guatemalan workers to ask for higher wages. We talked about foreign aid, like in the context of Ukraine, particularly earlier in the show in the way that it's actually fairly normal. Like the Trump apologists during the first impeachment, like there were some specific things that Trump did that were different than how it normally goes because he's just more nakedly transactional. But it is normal to use foreign aid as a carrot to manipulate other countries. And to some extent, it's understandable. But it's also malign in many cases like this one. And throughout our history in Latin America America where we look and conservatives,

people on my side say, well, these Latin American countries just need to take care of their own business. It's not our business to worry about that. This is a problem that is dragging the American economy down and Guatemala should deal with Guatemala. Why can't Honduras fix Honduras? And it's like, well, they're reeling from decades of foreign policy that was, the pretense was understandable and correct about nuclear weapons and communism. And in Cuba, you don't want nuclear weapons right off the Florida coast, obviously. But it was so often motivated by business interests, literal Banana Republic stuff that we were fomenting in these countries that they're still reeling from and that we are still interfering in. We talked to the former ambassador to Haiti. This is a similar situation. How the United States, because we want to be able to deport

impoverished Haitian migrants that have lived in other countries all over South and Central America back to Port-au-Prince, because we want to be able to do that. We're backing somebody who basically doesn't have the will of the people and using our power to ensure that he remains in power in this transactional quid pro quo when it comes to migrants. It is still happening. This is still our policy, essentially. Yeah, right. And all of these kind of conservative Guatemalan elites who were who were trying to block our revalo from enacting his agenda are either acting on the behalf of the United States or think they're acting on behalf of the United States and if the US really cared about root causes all

they you know with a flick of the wrist they could tell them back off he won the election the United States is proud of the wrist, they could tell them, back off. He won the election. The United States is proud of the Guatemalan people for holding this free and fair election. Now it's time to allow him to govern. And how can we help? Because rather than the previous efforts to quote unquote help, which is just to try to undermine democracy by saying, well, let's create a gigantic area of Honduras or Guatemala that has no laws. We're just going to sell it to crypto bros and just do that. Oh, you're talking about Bukele. I was actually just going to talk about Bukele because this far left, far right clash in Latin America right now is really interesting when you have

both the fear of the sort of cardillo and then the nostalgia in some ways too, because you have rampant crime, again, created in no small part by our border policies and our drug policies all throughout Latin America. And then you have people in America looking at Bukele, especially people on the left, and just sort of like, this is outrageous and just sort of dripping with sanctimony over what Bukele is doing. And at the same time, you have people in Latin America who are disgusted by the sort of former Sandinista rising to power again, because people have really visceral, deep memories in their lifetimes of the left dictator and the right dictator.

And this is coming to a head again now. It's actually really fascinating, but it's so sad the way that we have learned essentially zero lessons from our own lifetimes. Yeah. And the conservative Guatemalan candidate fashioned herself as a Bukele. She was like, I'm going to do basically what he did and lost in a landslide. And we can talk about more in the future, a future show. There's this wild story unfolding in Honduras where under the under the coup president uh they enacted this law that allowed uh basically bitcoin crypto dudes to come in and

build their own country almost with its own sovereignty and then once uh shimura castro uh was elected kind of progressive down in honduras she's like no you're just done you can't do this anymore now they're're like basically trying suing Honduras They're taking they're like doing they're they're using all of the power of international capital to say no no No, like we actually own this state you do not it's like well do we believe in democracy? What are we exporting? Yeah, crypto bros or democracy starts with copper mining, ends with crypto mining. Crypto mining, yes. I want to revisit some comments that Jen Psaki made while she was watching the Republican debate last week. Oh, that's right. We haven't done that yet. Oh, yes. How dare you, Ryan?

Yes. No, it's actually a pretty interesting thing to talk about. So let's actually roll right now a couple of clips of Jen Psaki from her show on MSNBC, which I sometimes forget exists. It's kind of remarkable. Kayleigh McEnany is on Fox News, so former Trump press secretary Ari Fleischer, Bush press secretary Dana Perino, Bush secretary on Fox News. Jen Psaki is the host of her own show on MSNBC these days.

And she got into a sort of tiff with conservatives on Twitter during the Republican debate because she tweeted essentially, and we'll hear her talk about this in the clip, that Democrats do not support late-term abortion. I think she even said nobody supports late-term abortion. And then on her show, in an attempt to kind of fact-check Republicans who sought to dunk on her over that comment. She basically confirms the criticism of her, and it's really interesting. So let's take a look at Jen Psaki from this weekend. This claim that Democrats support abortion up until the moment of birth is entirely misleading. First of all, abortions past the point of fetal viability do not happen often. They are incredibly

rare. And those that do happen involve agonizing emotional and ethical decisions. According to the CDC, the vast majority of abortions in the United States, over 80% in 2020, happen before 10 weeks of pregnancy. And over 90% take place in the first 12 weeks. Less than 1%, 1% happen after 21 weeks of pregnancy. If you look state by state, you see a similar pattern. As compiled by the Washington Post, in Virginia since 2000, an abortion after 28 weeks has been performed only in three of the last 22 years. In Oklahoma in 2021, only six out of nearly 6,000 abortions took place after 21 weeks. And in Colorado, where the Boulder Abortion Clinic specializes in late-term abortions, less than

2% of nearly 12,000 abortions in 2021 took place after 21 weeks. And just 60 took place after 25 weeks or later. Are most Democrats in favor of a legislation that allows for this? Yes, for all the reasons I just outlined. At the end of the day, the point here is that no one is rooting for late-term abortions. No one is running on the platform of aborting viable babies. Yeah, so that's not a fact check at all.

Those are facts that everyone is on the same page about. Every Republican that I know would say exactly everything that Jen Psaki said. Nobody denies any of those facts, which interesting is that she started the segment by saying the Republican attack on her was, quote, misleading, that the Republican talking point that Democrats support abortion up until birth is, quote, misleading. That's how she starts the clip. She ends the clip with that line where she says, do Democrats support legislation that allows for abortion of viable babies? Yes. That's how she ended the clip. And that's why I wanted to play the full thing, because A, all of her facts there

are completely correct. It is most often an agonizing, horrific decision that women make to abort late-term babies. Late-term is not a medical definition. It's something that's used basically to convey viability, so around 21 weeks after 21 weeks. These are not, in most cases, third-term abortions, but they are, because of medical technology in many cases, viable babies, and they're also pain-capable babies. And that's another important thing to remember when Jen Psaki is saying, listen, look at these numbers. These are, this is exceedingly rare.

But would Democrats allow for, do most Democrats allow for the termination of pregnancies, the abortion of babies up until that stage? Yes. Her thing at the end where she says, bottom line is nobody is, quote, rooting for these late-term abortions, I think is, again, absolutely true, except for some fringe of the far left sort of abortion advocacy wing. That is largely true. These are horrific decisions that women have to make, but Democrat policies absolutely allow for it. And Jen Psaki just said yes to that herself. So she's trying to have this sort of semantic debate about whether Democrats saying

Democrats support abortion up until birth is the same as Democrats allowing for abortion up until birth. And I would say when Republicans argue and conservatives argue that Republicans support or that Democrats support abortion up until birth, there's absolutely nothing factually inconsistent about that statement because the Women's Health Protection Act, for instance, which virtually every Democrat in Congress voted for and supports, has a mental health exception up until birth. So that means you can and a doctor can give any woman a mental health exception to terminate a pregnancy after Viability after pain capability up until the moment of birth now whether or not that happens often is a completely different question

The point that Republicans are making is that the legislation and the policies of Democrats Absolutely allow for that. And Jen Psaki agreed. So when we can debate whether or not these are frequent, we can look at the facts that Jen Psaki shared. It's absolutely true. I'm going to read from John McCormick, who covers this issue really well for National Review, who wrote, the odd thing about Psaki's false assertion that late-term abortions are, quote, almost always performed when the baby cannot survive after birth or to save the life of the mother is that during her TV segment, she quoted the same Colorado abortionist, this is a guy out of Boulder, who said to the Washington Post, quote, in an average week at my office, 25 to 50% of the

patients have some serious catastrophic fetal abnormality. And there are some weeks in which this is true for 100% of the patients. In other words, in a quote, average week, 50 to 75% of the viable babies he kills with a poison-filled syringe are physically healthy. That is from the abortionist's own rhetoric. That's his statistics on his own clinic. Now, according to Guttmacher, as McCormick continues, it's a pro-abortion think tank, there are 930,000 abortions performed annually, and 1.3% of abortions are performed at 21 weeks or later. This is the same fact that Psaki would agree with. That equals 12,000 late-term abortions a year. So, again, we all agree that these are rare.

We all agree that these are a small, a tiny fraction of annual abortions that occur. But these are viable babies in many, many cases, and they are pain-capable babies in almost all cases. And that is absolutely a consequence of laws that Democrats, quote, support, which is exactly what Psaki was herself fact-checked for saying, and then in her own fact-check, confirmed. So all I'm going to say here is that as we're wrapping up, and I toss it to Ryan, all I want to say is that it is really, really obnoxious for Democrats to hide the ball and pretend that their policies do not allow for these abortions. I remember a Naomi Wolf essay from the late 90s where she sort of said, people who support abortion, this is when she was more of a leftist than she is now,

people who support abortion, she wrote, basically should be open about the reality of abortion because the reality is ugly. But there's a moral argument. This is her perspective at the time. There's a moral argument to allowing women to have the freedoms to make these decisions. Now, I completely disagree with that, and we could have that debate, but her point is correct, that Democrats who support these policies should be honest with the American people, and the media, even more importantly, should be honest with the American people about what's going on. And the media has a responsibility to hold Democrats accountable for supporting policies that support for abortion up until birth and that support abortion through viability and in early stages, you know, 21 weeks, you know,

that's called late term, but early in the phases of viability, at least. That should absolutely be something. And I understand the politics of it. I'm not naive to that. But Democrats can spin all they want. The media should not spin on behalf of Democrats. And Democrats should have the decency to be honest with the American people. I'm not saying anything that Republicans are perfectly honest about their positions on abortion, but I am saying the media never gives Republicans a pass for it. They're constantly giving Democrats a pass for it. So Ryan, I find this very, very frustrating because Jen Psaki is a member of the media now, but also we've seen fact checks, so-called fact checks from people like Glenn Kessler at the Washington Post that do a similar thing that

minimize the fact that we're talking about 12,000 late-term abortions a year, late-term abortions a year, so past the stage of viability. And that is, I think that is a huge number, but it doesn't get any play. It's minimized and Republicans are treated like crazy people for saying that it happens. And if I had to guess guess it was an honest mistake from sake because I've gone through the same thing where like Where you hear Republicans saying that Democrats are now support abortion right up until birth. That's insane, right? That's impossible. So you go then you go read the Women's Health Protection Act. You're like, oh, okay They do support the legal right

To it basically right up until birth, as long as through a mental health exception. Then I think Saki said everything else very well. A lot of this is, you know, that almost all of these situations are terribly tragic. And I think Naomi Wolf makes a fair point that, you know, own it. Say that this is the right, that this is a fundamental right of the woman to make that decision, and that it's not a place for government to come in and tell people what to do between, you know, the choice between a woman and her doctor. So that's where they are. Now, I also think that Democrats would at this

point be willing to compromise on, like if they could get Roe v. Wade codified, I think you would have a lot of people from- Well, Roe allowed for abortion in that stage too. It allowed for states to- It allowed for states to allow it. But I would imagine that there'd be some type of, like, if that was the only thing that stood between legalizing, re-legalizing abortion nationwide and the status quo in which so many states are just straight up banning it, then I think Democrats would ultimately compromise on that. But it feels like that's not where we are in our politics, that it's either one thing or the other.

But we'll see. If Democrats get a trifecta in 2025, we'll see if they get rid of the filibuster and actually push ahead with something. If they don't, and Republicans get a trifecta, that's also within the realm of possibility. We'll see if they push a nationwide ban. But it's hard to see the two sitting down and saying, all right, here's how they do it in a lot of European countries. Yeah.

You know, that there are regulations after 30 weeks, after 30, but whatever. Yeah. It just feels like we're not in, we don't have a politics that allows for that type of negotiation. I mean, even the pro-life movement is roiled right now about the question of Lindsey Graham's 15-week ban. And Ron DeSantis signed a six-week ban. These things are like even hot in that area. And I've seen some- Six-week ban, you basically don't know you're pregnant. Right. Yeah. I've seen some viewers say, because I think when Dobbs was decided,

we were still over at the Hill and we had a lot of conversations about abortion. And I've seen some viewers ask why I'm anti-abortion and I have no problem saying anti-abortion. I don't need it to be pro-life because that's exactly what it is, anti-abortion. But it has absolutely nothing to do with religion for me. It's a simple disagreement with people over when life begins. And I've come down on the side of Christopher Hitchens, which is that the science makes it really difficult for the pro-abortion side to say that it's not a life. And that's why I think, you know, Ryan and Naomi Wolf in the 90s, like that's a it's a much more honest position to say it's a balance of the rights versus the life. And truly, that's just my position is that life has begun at the point where just about every abortion takes place. And it's my position as minority. It is completely unpopular in this country. It is not politically

viable in any way whatsoever. And I understand that. I think it happens to be morally correct. But that's why those 12,000 infant lives that are painfully, in many cases, ended a year seems like a five alarm fire to me. It seems like something that we should be talking about all the time, even though it's a small minority of abortions, which are now typically medical abortions. They're not the same sort of physical process that used to take place. It's a lot of times, most times now when you have 90%, some huge percentage of that 90% taking the form of an oral medicated abortion. So it's different than what it used to be. I get that. 12,000 lives a year is seriously crazy to me. But if you have that sort of disagreement about rights versus life, then I understand. So I get that. I just still,

it's very frustrating that the media kind of runs cover and pretends things like the Women's Health Protection Act didn't exist. Well, let's say you're president and the Democratic Congress comes to you and says, all right, you won fair and square, you're the president, this is what you believe, we'll give you a 20-week ban. After 20 weeks, life and health and physical health of the mother, there's exceptions, but no mental health exceptions after 20 weeks. But before 20 weeks, abortion is legal. Would you sign that? Yeah, I would do like any compromise to end abortion after 20 weeks. And, you know, that's what is tough for the pro-life movement. And I think it's actually an interesting,

there are interesting parallels with climate on the left, that like incrementalism, as people talk about in the pro-life movement, is really controversial. And I think you saw Biden sort of face similar things with the Inflation Reduction Act. Like it's just, if you see something as an absolute emergency, a political emergency, and there are good faith disagreements in our politics about whether abortion or climate constitute these levels of emergency, it's like, well, should we be blocking every freeway in the world if our kids aren't going to be able to breathe fresh air? Speaking of Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, we're going to have the block that I teased 10 minutes ago up now. Alex Lawson of Social Security Works is going to join us to talk about the long battle, 14, 16 year battle that's been going on to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices.

That's up next. Stick around. The Biden administration yesterday announced the 10 medications that it is going to be allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices over. And we're joined here by Alex Lawson, who is the executive director of Social Security Works, which is an organization working on this issue, trying to get the government to be able to negotiate drug prices for how many years now? Really long time. You know, on drug prices for over a decade, we've been working in a variety of ways to push just any action that the government can take to lower prescription drug prices. We pay the highest in the world. Medicare negotiation is sort of the nicest one that we've pushed. It's the most

obvious one. Medicare is the largest purchaser of prescription drugs in the world. And we are saying just use that purchasing power to negotiate a better deal than paying the highest prices in the world. Yeah. And this has been a Democratic priority at least since, I say priority in quotes, because they say that they wanted to do it. At least since 2006, when Rahm Emanuel had this super clever campaign strategy as the DCCC chairman, he called six for oh six and One of the six was we're going to negotiate drug prices then as Alex remembers in 2009 when they finally got a majority First thing they did is promised big pharma. Okay, we will not actually do that cuz it's not oh six anymore Yeah, it's so nine. That was very specific to oh six. Yeah, no six. We're gonna do it Oh, oh nine. No, I6, we're going to do it. Oh, 09? No, not in 09, not this time. And so they said,

if Big Pharma will support us, spend $150 million defending us in reelections and not opposed Obamacare, we will not include prescription drug negotiations in there. So then they lose their majority. So then what happens after that in this fight between big pharma and advocates saying like this is insane what we're paying Yeah, I think a lot of work just continues happening the whole time But the the deal that was cut with pharma that has to be one of the worst deals that's ever been 150 million dollars is literally nothing to these companies So but you know. All the companies together just had to pay that.

Which is nothing. I mean, that's like one hour of one day of profit of some of these drugs. So, great deal for them, really bad deal for the American people. Expansion of Medicaid is great, if you want to think of it that way. But we didn't have action on prescription drugs through the, basically the entirety of the Obama administration. Now, Hillary Clinton had a robust plan to come after pharma. Six for 16? It was something like that, but it was real. And at the time, insurers were lining up to punch pharma. That's always, they always fight each other. It's nice when you can have industries against each other. Which is what that first Obamacare pharma deal was about.

It was taking on insurance and not pharma. The correct way to do it, if you're wondering, is you take them all on at the same time. You can't actually think that one of them is going to be on your side. But along the way, there are a lot of victories. You have to move policy slowly. But losing the ability to charge as much as the company wants with no basis in anything, it doesn't have to show any clinical value. Companies can actually just push

poison, right? They'll corrupt the process. You know, the FDA under Janet Woodcock, get a special seal that says this heroin is not addictive. And then bang, you have the overdose crisis, right? So that's the caliber of sociopathy that you're dealing with with these corporations. And so you have to be able to hit them from any angle. There was a lot of work on importation, which it makes absolutely... From Canada and Europe? Yeah, or from anywhere that has... It's called parallel importation. A lot of stuff is from Canada.

But Canada has the second highest drug prices in the world because they're right next to America. So pharma just jacks up their prices as well. The truth is that these molecules are the same, right? It's one factory. And if it sends it to America, they're like, charge them, you know, as much as humanly possible. And if it goes to another country that has a government that actually says, well, what's the therapeutic value of this? Let's actually figure out what the value of this medication is. And that's what we're going to pay.

And pharma hates that. They're like, no, no, no. We would rather just charge whatever we want. And in the case of insulin, and it's not just insulin, but at least in insulin, the price they're going for is a price that's so high that some people die, right? Not everybody, because that would kill their market. Like a virus. They want some people to die so that everyone else is terrified enough that they'll spend

every dollar they have and every dollar that they can borrow to keep them or their loved ones alive. That's a cartel. That's extortion. And that is what we needed to break in any way possible. And Medicare negotiation was the one that had the most political sort of buy-in from people. As you said, going all the way back to when it was created, there were a lot of Democrats at the time, this corrupt carve out for pharma was created by Billy Towson, which is like, in this town, I would say it's probably

the most corrupt story that exists, is the creation of the non-interference clause. Tell the Billy Towson story real quick. Billy Towson. Democrat turned Republican. Yeah. He came to Congress with one goal, which was to deliver for pharma. He was a Democrat. He rose to be committee chair where this was advancing. When the Democrats lost power, he just switched parties so he could keep that committee position, insert the non-interference clause, which forbids Medicare from negotiating. Literally, as soon as he did that, he just quit Congress and he went and took a $2 million a year job at Pharma. The head of Big Pharma.

The head of the lobbyist organization. I mean, it is as clear as day. So even since then, Democrats, some Democrats, many Democrats have known that this is something that needed to be overturned. There was a lot of negotiating and just sort of back and forth about what the policy itself would look like. And I don't want to go too far into the policy weeds. But if you remember, the House passed a bill called HR3. And if you look at the battle during that, you can see sort of the contours of in the Democratic

Party of what this policy was going to be. And basically, it comes down to like weaker or stronger. And HR3 is quite strong. You know, I think my my side won more. And HR3 would be the starting point in Build Back Better that sort of compromises down to what actually got passed. And you had some pharma dems deliver some really key kneecapping for pharma. And because of that, we don't have all drugs. We only have some drugs. It doesn't start right away. So pharma is an incredible opponent to have because they have almost unlimited money and their entire profit comes from controlling the government. If the government didn't give them the ability to charge whatever they wanted, they would not be able to do it. Well, it's crony capitalism at its finest,

as you just explained perfectly. And I want to ask about this quote you have in Ryan's story, and we can put that back up on the screen. Ryan did a great report on this in The Intercept. You say this was an unexpected victory in a long fight against an illegal cartel of three corporations who have raised their insulin prices in lockstep. You're referring there to Eli Lilly, Nordisk, and Sanofi. And then you continue to say the inclusion of insulin in the list of negotiated drugs shows that the Biden White House isn't fucking around. Tell us more about what this says in terms of the Biden White House, because you just explained this, the arc of pharma's power in Washington, D.C. when it comes to controlling drug prices. Amazing. But it's also still this

like push and pull. And you have people in the Biden administration who are actually tugging on the other side of the rope in this grand game of tug of war to the point where you have insulin included here. What does that mean? So the way I read it is that it reminds me of FDR's I welcome their hatred line about banks and speculators. I believe that the Biden White House, the people in the Biden White House who they realize that if you're gonna go after pharma, you gotta go as hard as possible. You can't be like, well, they, they're going to run ads against me. Maybe I'll do less.

They're going to run ads against you if you even mention their name. But the thing is, everyone hates pharma. Pharma is the most hated institution in this country, according to that Pew poll that ranks all the institutions. Pharma is dead last. So pick the fight with pharma. Be very aggressive. Of course, they're going to say, oh, you can never win in court and all of the things that they're going to say. They also said that we'd never get it passed. The IRA passed. They did

everything they could. And, you know, I have that begrudging respect that you should have for your opponents. We didn't see some of their for your opponents. We didn't see some of their maneuvers coming. We didn't see some of the committee plays where they did kneecap the bill. They threw everything they can at this. But the Biden White House and Democrats in Congress understand that this issue, A, it's morally correct, right? This literally helps people. It's incredibly important. But then politically, it sells everywhere. It does not matter in this country where you go. If it is a room full of camo NRA hats or a parking lot full of electric vehicles, the people all hate pharma. They hate high drug prices. They hate getting ripped off.

And the really amazing thing is most Americans don't even know how ripped off we're getting because they don't fully get that we pay to develop the drugs in the first place. It's taxpayer dollars that develop these drugs at the NIH and that we give grants out to research facilities and universities. We pay for it. Then we give the patent to these companies who turn around and charge us whatever they want. The ripoff is so amazing, so profound that it's hard to imagine. But just I think another thing in D.C. that is important is it's also so big that when you stop it You can use it to pay for other things There's so much money in stopping this ripoff that you can pay for enormous other things with it

You're like, oh, how are we gonna pay for that? Well, let's just stop getting ripped off by pharma and everyone's like, hey That's a great idea. Let's do it That creates this one-way street in my estimation. It's going to be really hard for pharma to turn around. And that's why pharma's strategy, as I understood it during Build Back Better, was not to try to take their piece out of it. They just tried to destroy the whole thing because they reasoned that if anything passes, they're gonna be part of it. Because they can raise somewhere between 100 to $500 billion, their little provision by

not getting ripped off by pharma anymore. So anything that went through it was gonna have them. Whereas if you're the carried interest loophole guys who are with private equity, like you can go to Sinema and say, like, get us out of there. And she'd be like, okay, because that's only maybe $50 billion or something. And then she was like, all right, fine. Sinema wants it out. We'll take that out. But there's so much money in front of them that they had to stop the whole thing. And briefly, it looked like they succeeded. Like it looked like they had taken down the entire kind of Biden agenda

legislatively. They had to work really hard to get Joe Manchin's phone number. Right, and then until Manchin came back and kind of rescued it at the very end, which what happened there? A, obviously West Virginia filled with old people who don't like paying high drug prices. Manchin's a good politician. Why did Manchin agree to do something that hurt pharma in your estimation? Oh, you're going to get me in trouble here. Now, it's because Joe Manchin is not terrible on pharma. I mean, that's just the truth.

When we were pushing for Janet Woodcock's removal for her not to be confirmed at the FDA, it was in partnership with Joe Manchin. Is he just not bought by that industry? He's just bought by coal and oil, right? But in his worldview, he understands that West Virginians are hurting, you know? Literally hurting. Literally hurting. And pharma is not his people., that's my estimation of Joe Manchin on this is that he is not, you know, a pharma dem. I use that, you know, like there are definitely Democrats who sing, who dance to the tune that pharma calls, and he's not one of them. And so what can the Biden administration still do? Sorry, sang the song of joy for what they did do.

I hear talk of march-in rights, which is if we helped fund a thing, you can march in and sell them. This is what you can charge for. There's international price setting that we can do. There's other executive action. There's legislation at the state level that could have an impact. So what could still happen? And what has the Biden administration kind of left on the table? There's an enormous amount that can still happen. I'll sort of, you have to rein me in. I'm a nerd.

So, but I'll start, I think one of the most exciting things is Governor Gavin Newsom in California is actually making big strides on public manufacturing. So he's bringing online public manufacturing of insulin with an eye towards public manufacturing of anything. For example, the FDA keeps this list. It's the shortage list, right? Everyone's heard of the drug shortage. It's just getting worse. A lot of stuff is written about the Adderall drug shortage. I think that's because a lot of journalists need Adderall. Wait a minute, where's my Adderall? Where's my Adderall?

So it's getting a lot of limelight. But this is an old issue. And a lot of the drugs are cancer, are chemo drugs. These are, this is classic market failure. So these are generic drugs. They're not hard to produce. The market hasn't failed in other countries. Just here, this is a total prime the

pump type thing. And so instead of just keeping a list of the drug shortages, the FDA could just end the shortages, right? They're like, I identify it. We need 400,000 units of that drug. Okay, well, I'm going to purchase 400,000 units of that drug. Boom, the shortage is done. Gavin Newsom's work in California is showing one path towards doing that. The federal government could do a lot to make that easier for Gavin Newsom and to create a marketplace amongst the states to use those publicly manufactured drugs from California. So that's something that I think is not widely talked about, but it has a lot of potential. Importation, again, is a huge one.

States are importing drugs through the so-called personal importation loophole. The loophole is so old now that it's just settled law. We should actually work on that and make it settled law. And one of the things is you could have a lot of policies done at the federal level that would incentivize states to import their drugs. This is one, this is also super nonpartisan. Colorado and Florida are the two that are taking the lead on this. There are enormous costs faced by the states for their workforce. Let them buy their drugs, the exact same drugs, from a country where it's cheaper. You have all 50 states doing that, and then it's a national policy. So there is also the federal use, which is something that you brought up with March in, or just government use.

The government does have the ability to say, this privilege that you have to have a patent, that's a privilege. And if you abuse that privilege, you will lose that privilege. And we will allow another manufacturer to produce that drug at a reasonable price. My dad actually texted me this morning because a drug he takes, Eliquis, it's a HIPAA violation on my part. I'm sorry about that, dad. You're not his doctor. That's true. I can violate HIPAA. Am I bound by HIPAA violation on my part. I'm just sorry about that, Dad. You're not this doctor. That's true. I can violate HIPAA. Am I bound by HIPAA?

No. You know, if your father gave you permission, then you're good to go. So, you know, that made the list. Now, it's not until 2026 that this goes into effect. Correct. But the prices are so insane for these drugs. He had to get, like, on a special, like, program a program that like brings the prices down, but that costs money itself. It's just a giant mess. People want to know the rest of the drugs that are on the list. They can check my

intercept story out. And also just to let people know, Alex Lawson, I founded this publishing house many years ago called Strong Arm Press, which published my book. We got people back in 2019. So thank you to Alex for that. Wow. Which gives me an opportunity to plug my next one. So the next book is called Squad. Such an entrepreneur. There you go. Such a capitalist. It's coming out in December. And it's about basically the left from like 2015, starting with Bernie up through Build Back Better and the IRA. And we'll put a link in the video here because the publisher is giving out free stickers. Whoa.

You get a free sticker. All you have to do is sign up for something. I'll put it right here. Yeah. I should put it. I got room right here for a sticker. Plenty of room. Excellent.

Alex, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. Well, that does it for us on this edition of CounterPoints, our last edition of the summer. When we come back next week, it'll be post-Labor Day. There we go. We'll be into the fall. No more white. Yeah, no more white.

Ryan will stop wearing his white pants in the set. But in all seriousness, it's a big fall coming up. Probably looking at, as we talked about earlier in the show, government shutdown. Probably looking at an impeachment inquiry. So all kinds of things going on. Four indictments against the former president and a presidential election, all of that and more coming to you on the other side of Labor Day. We'll be here to cover it all. Can't wait. See you soon. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight-loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. But there were some dark truths behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children.

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