Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 9/13/23: McCarthy Starts Biden Impeachment Inquiry, Gaetz Push To Oust McCarthy, UAW Head Torches Billionaires, CIA Lab Leak Coverup, Biden Cuts Deal With Iran, Woody Harrelson Compares US To Russian, LA Snitch Line, Elites Demand Labor Pain, And MORE!

Episode Date: September 13, 2023

Ryan and Emily discuss Kevin McCarthy launching an impeachment inquiry into Biden, Matt Gaetz pushing to oust McCarthy, UAW president torches billionaires, whistleblower claims CIA tried to pay to suppress lab leak theory, Biden cuts major deal with Iran, Woody Harrelson draws comparisons between US wars and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, LA county implements snitch line, wealthy capitalist demands more labor pain, and The Lever's Amos Barshad joins to breakdown how Warren Buffet's son took over an entire city.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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Almost 150,000 workers could walk off the job in Detroit if they don't strike a bargain with the big three automakers. We're going to talk about that in just a moment. We also have some news on COVID origins. What else we got today? Well, of course, the big news about impeachment. We're going to start with that. We have lots of video clips that I think give a great glimpse inside what was happening in Capitol Hill yesterday. Ryan was there, so he can share

some color from actually doing some on the ground reporting inside the halls of the Capitol last night. We're going to talk about the Biden administration's new waiver to unfreeze some of Iran's own money and the controversy that has erupted. We're going to hear from the White House, their response to criticism from Republicans. We're going to be talking about Woody Harrelson, his response to the war in Ukraine. I'm going to be talking about a little bit of a snitch line that's happening in LA. Ryan, you've got some- Yeah, today we're going to get inflation numbers. Those are going to be out by the time that you've watched this. So we'll be talking about that later in the

program. We'll talk about the inflation numbers as they relate to worker power and the battle between capital and labor. And then at the end, speaking of capital, we're going to talk about this incredible story of how one of Warren Buffett's kids bought a town. Why not? Yeah, if you can, why not? Why not? But yeah, so I was on Capitol Hill yesterday and all the reporters, how are you responding to Kevin McCarthy deciding that he's going to open an impeachment inquiry? And it was just so kind of depressing. It's like, I was with Fenneman. Who cares? You don't have the votes for this. Why are we doing this? What's going on? Anyway, here is what everybody was responding to.

Let's roll Kevin McCarthy's kind of quick press conference that he called yesterday morning. I am directing our House committee to open a formal impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden. This logical next step will give our committees the full power to gather all the facts and answers for the American public. It's exactly what we want to know, the answers. I believe the president would want to answer these questions and allegations as well. Now, crucially, the way that an impeachment inquiry is opened is through a vote on the House floor. Typically. Typically. That's what is supposed to trigger all of the kind of extra powers that come with that impeachment inquiry, the ability to obtain records,

deeper subpoena power. McCarthy has said he's not going to do that. He's just going to declare an inquiry. But we also have some suggestion of where this declaration came from. Here's Matt Gaetz speaking on the floor a little bit after McCarthy's announcement. On this very floor in January, the whole world witnessed a historic contest for House Speaker. I rise today to serve notice.

Mr. Speaker, you are out of compliance with the agreement that allowed you to assume this role. The path forward for the House of Representatives is to either bring you into immediate total compliance or remove you pursuant to a motion to vacate the chair. So there you see very clearly the connection here between impeachment and the motion to vacate. And this is all tied together. That's why this is such a busy fall, because this is going to get into the government shutdown argument. This is going to

get into changing the speaker, and this is going to get into impeachment. All of this is colliding in the short number of days that they're actually in session, A, before government shutdown at the end of this month. So now they're going to be fighting over whether they pass a continuing resolution to fund the government into December, which is McCarthy's preference. And then they have to figure out how to fund the government before the end of the year. Or, I mean, it's McCarthy's like between a rock and a hard place. And he's been there for six months now, six months plus. So he has some experience there, but holy smokes, is this a tangled knot for him in the next couple of months. And so Gates is saying that if he puts a CR on the floor, he will introduce a motion to kick McCarthy out of the speakership. A CR stands for continuing resolution, which also isn't very helpful if you're not following Congress.

It basically means whatever the kind of line of the budget lines are now, those continue until a certain date. So if they do a CR until December 5th, then the government stays funded at the same rate until December 5th. And they've been kicking around the idea of, you know, a CR into December. Gates said, no, you do that, we're going to kick McCarthy out of the chair. Now, does he have the votes to kick McCarthy out of the chair? We don't know. But the alternative is to pass a dozen appropriation bills through all the different committees and then pass those through the Senate and then have those signed by President Joe Biden. That's a complete fantasy. Of course. So he's saying neither is okay. And there are a million, we're going to get into this I think a little bit later in the block, but there are a million different scenarios where neither is okay.

Like those are the two options on the table and they're not workable whatsoever. So it's just going to be for people who want their government to function. Some people don't want their government to function. A lot of people on the right say like screw it. You're not doing anything for us anyway. I don't mind if you shut down for a month. But if you're not in that camp, this fall is going to be a bloodbath from that perspective. And what makes this all feel so empty and why it felt so hollow up on the Hill yesterday is later in that speech, Gates talks about the things that the Freedom Caucus wants

kind of in exchange for their leveraging of this power. Here's what they said. He said he wants a vote on a balanced budget amendment. He wants a vote on an impeachment inquiry, not just a declaration of it. He wants a vote on term limits. So he wants these three votes, very reminiscent of force the vote back in 2021

when the left was saying, we wanna vote on Medicare for all. Because just like that vote, Gates acknowledges on the floor, he says, these things aren't going to pass. Balanced budget amendment is not going to pass. He knows term limits probably won't pass. And he says, even, well, term limits might pass because it's an easy thing to vote for, because the Senate's not going to take it up. And he says even impeachment inquiry might not pass. But he just wants to be seen fighting. He needs it. Yeah, he needs to give his base something. So it feels like McCarthy just, okay, fine,

vote on a balanced budget. But then, right, exactly, you have people like Nancy Mace who are like, why are you making us walk the plank on these unpopular items? And that's where, so there's the Tuesday group Republicans, kind of moderate Republicans or people who are aligned with them versus the Freedom Caucus Republicans. And actually when you have the slim of a majority, both are in a big position of power for Kevin McCarthy. And so Nancy Mace though, went on CNN with Caitlin Collins and defended the impeachment inquiry. And this is where, without a vote, and this is where the rubber meets the road for Republicans in that they know, even in moderate districts, so Nancy Mace is from a solid red state, but not a, let's say, red meat necessarily part of South Carolina. People are doing all right,

not like a populist haven in South Carolina. But people want impeachment. Republican voters want impeachment. It doesn't matter if you're populist or not. They look at what's happened with Joe Biden, Hunter Biden. They see that there were outright lies over the course of the campaign and they want an impeachment from it. And so here's Nancy Mace defending impeachment as, we heard this from Kevin McCarthy as well, but this is the key. You're going to hear what she says, that it gives them certain powers. And Ryan and I are going to get into whether or not that's actually the case, but here's Nancy Mace making that case. Do you support launching an impeachment inquiry into President Biden? Well, I mean, it's hard to say at this point. I think there's a difference between an impeachment

vote and an inquiry. The inquiry would give us another tool in the toolbox specifically to look at Joe Biden's bank records. Everyone's screaming about the evidence. Where's the evidence? The bank records hold all of the evidence. And if the American people, Caitlin, if you could see the suspicious activity reports that I have seen on the Biden family, you would too would probably support an impeachment inquiry just as a tool to get more information on, specifically the bank information, bank records of Joe Biden and his family members. That's an important tool in our toolbox. What is the difference between an inquiry and impeachment? There is no difference.

They have to vote on whether to move forward on impeachment. That's what the vote is. That's what when we voted on impeachment of Donald Trump, who we impeached twice because there was real credible evidence that came up publicly and was evident and obvious, not this hazy gray area that they're hanging their hat on. They've acknowledged there's no evidence against Joe Biden. They are going to vote. The House has to vote to move forward on an impeachment period. They're adding the word inquiry like they're still going to do some investigations. They've been investigating for months and months. They've acknowledged they have no evidence. Well, they have not actually acknowledged they have no evidence. But on her

other point, you do have to vote. And this is according to, and Politico reported this last night, if you don't vote in the House that you're opening an impeachment inquiry, then you're just some dude saying some stuff. And then therefore you don't open up the extra powers that come with the impeachment inquiry. That's according to Trump's Office of Legal Counsel that issued a kind of internal ruling on this. And it matters because you say, well, that's just the opinion of the Trump administration. And now it's obviously the opinion of the Biden administration,

but it matters because now if you get a subpoena that gets sent to the White House, the White House will just send it back. Like here's the OLC memo from the Trump administration. Thank you for your subpoena. Once you vote on the House floor, then you come back to us and then maybe we'll comply with this. House floor, then you come back to us,

and then maybe we'll comply with this. Their only route then is to try to sue them. But that gets into some awfully dicey balance of powers questions. The White House can be like, hey, Supreme Court, thank you for your opinion. Yes. But we're also not letting you weigh in on the balance of power issue like this. And I think that's imminent no matter what, even if Kevin McCarthy brings this to a vote on the floor. I think all of this is going to get tied up because I actually went into this yesterday. I was trying to figure out exactly what powers are granted to you by declaring an inquiry or even voting to start an impeachment inquiry. And it's basically court's interpretations of what it means, what powers, as you were just referencing, what powers you have in the House of Representatives, what powers constitutionally impeachment grants you. And so if you're going for bank records, if you're confident that starting

this impeachment inquiry is going to get you bank records, I would imagine that's going to get tied up in courts no matter what, because the Biden administration has zero interest in complying with any of that. They don't feel like they have to comply with any of that. So I don't see why they wouldn't kick it to the court system anyway. So it's not going to be neat and clean no matter what. Here's actually, speaking of the Biden White House, here is a response from Ian Sams. He is working in communications over at the White House. I think he's actually communications director there. He said, well, anyone ask Speaker McCarthy why an impeachment inquiry is the next logical step? The House GOP investigations have turned up no evidence of wrongdoing by POTUS. In fact, their own witnesses have testified to that and their own documents

have shown no link to POTUS. I don't think that's true, but we'll keep reading what Ian Sam says. Reminder, McCarthy already said weeks ago in Fox, he'd move forward with an impeachment, an appearance in which he based his impeachment push on non-existent obstruction of a non-existent request. Why no mainstream accountability for that falsehood? We can keep going with Ian Sams here. This is his final tweet or X on the matter. McCarthy is being told by Marjorie Taylor Greene to do impeachment or else she'll shut down the government. Opening impeachment despite zero evidence of wrongdoing by POTUS is simply red meat for the extreme right wing. So they can keep baselessly attacking him. They admit it.

We can move to the next element here too. Yeah. So they do admit it. I mean, I don't know. So I actually think this is pretty interesting because even in Axios this morning, Mike Allen's newsletter, morning newsletter, admitted there's a big problem for the Biden White House here, which is that Joe Biden flat out lied about, A, whether he had been involved more than just like very, very superficially in the business. He lied about that. He lied about whether Hunter Biden made any money from China. Those are two things he said on the campaign trail in 2020, that if we zoom out to the 30,000 foot view and look at it, say, why would somebody lie about those two things? Even though we may have like color here and there and, you know, understand it a little bit from the perspective of the politics. If you zoom out as you're as an average American, you look that you're like, well, that's pretty weird and that's pretty bad. So I think Republicans feel like they have the wind at their backs when it comes to that. Now, on the other hand, when it comes to all this minutia about tying it back to Joe Biden

and what the text about the big guy means and giving half your salary to pops, all of those things, that's a little bit more difficult of a case to make, even though I think that's legitimate evidence. The other fundamental problem that this impeachment inquiry has is that it involves activity that predated and was known before he was president. So we had an election on which the Republicans ran heavily on the idea that he was corrupt and he was elected anyway. And so it would be breaking new ground to say that you're going to impeach somebody for something that they did before they were in office. Generally, that's, you know, you prosecute them or you sue them, but impeachment is for things that you do in office. And I know the whole audience is going to say, what about Spiro Agnew? I don't know about all

the details of Spiro Agnew. Everyone in the audience right now, what about Spiro Agnew? And he did not get impeached. He resigned in disgrace. So that's slightly, would he ever have gotten impeached? I don't know. He was busted in all sorts of Maryland corruption and he was Nixon's vice president. That's how we wound up with Ford. And so that's the only one that I can think of that, you know, you might have gotten close to getting impeached for something that he hadn't done while he was in office. And that I think is a high bar to voters too because the voters are like, look, this was up to us. We decided this. And the Republicans will say, well, Twitter censored us from sharing all this information.

So therefore, I guess we have to impeach him now. But also as Matt Gaetz admitted in the, in the pieces that you just posted, if this is a platform, this is a way to drag down his numbers. Well, and that's what- If they can do it fast, they will help Democrats so that somebody will replace Biden. Ironically. To hurry up with this. So that Democrats can get somebody reasonable in there. You know, actually that was a case made in the Washington Post just this morning, basically that like the time is, it's time for Joe Biden to step down and the clock is ticking.

Democrats should start leaking. Maybe they will. Ryan's DMs are open. But no, ironically, it's actually Kevin McCarthy is the one who said that about the Benghazi hearings and Hillary Clinton and gotten huge hot water with the sort of establishment Republican sect when he came out, I think it was on Fox News back in 2016, or maybe it must've been 2015, about how Benghazi was, he tied it to Hillary Clinton's campaign fortunes, essentially, the Benghazi hearings. On that note, and on the note of Matt Gaetz talking about how it's all about tarnishing Biden, let's go to the thread, A7 here. The dynamics internally of the Republican Party, which we talk about a lot here on the show,

are absolutely key. This is Manu Raju saying, Matt Gaetz warns that if McCarthy puts a CR on the floor to keep the government open, then he will force a vote to oust him. He also warns there will be regular votes to oust him. Quote, we are going to have them regularly, he says, and suggests that it could happen daily. Let's put a eight up on the screen. This is from Melanie Zanona of Politico. She says the knives are out for CNN for Representative Ken Buck, one of the key lawmakers standing in the way of a Biden impeachment. There's a serious effort to recruit a primary challenger while Marjorie Taylor Greene says he shouldn't serve under the judiciary or whip team anymore. So let's quickly, Ken Buck is under fire in the Freedom Caucus with Freedom Caucus folks right now because he came out against making a huge deal of

the January 6th, the alleged mistreatment of January 6th prisoners and wrote a letter to, I think it was like a county chairman in his district back in Colorado, refuting some claims of alleged mistreatment of the January 6th prisoners. This got on the wrong side of Marjorie Taylor Greene and a lot of people in the Freedom Caucus. Marjorie Taylor Greene's not even in the Freedom Caucus anymore. So what does this have to do with impeachment? What does this have to do with a government shutdown? Well, actually voting on impeachment, as we talked about earlier, if you lose Ken Buck, somebody who would have typically been counted on as a gimme because he's a member of the Freedom Caucus, and you can

only lose four people in an impeachment vote, that's huge in and of itself. If he's out, then we're talking about a totally different navigation. And then on top of that, if these dynamics internally between Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, Matt Gaetz was flirting this week with getting Democrats to help him with a motion to vacate, to oust Kevin McCarthy, meaning if he got like 200 Democrats to vote as just chaos agents, they could oust Kevin McCarthy with just Matt Gaetz and a bunch of Democrats because that's how bad the numbers are for Kevin McCarthy and for Republicans. So this has to do with the markets based on a government shutdown. It has to do with all of us, the way that our lives run when we're talking about a government shutdown. It has to do with what's going to happen with government funding, what's going to get funded, what's

not going to get funded. It's a mess this fall and they don't have a lot of time to handle impeachment and funding. And what's so depressing about all this is that Ken Buck has been really good on antitrust stuff and has been willing to work with Democrats on going after big tech and actually bridging that kind of populist coalition that gets talked about. But that's not what's important in Washington. It just doesn't have the juice. What has the juice is, you know, impeachment hearings and saying stuff about, you know, it's sticking to the party line about what's going on in the D.C. jail, even if Ken Buck looked into it and thinks that's not what's going on inside the D.C. jail. The person that kind of channeled my own response to this the most was actually probably Fetterman.

So do we have Fetterman's response to when he was asked about this impeachment inquiry? This is A5. Yeah, let's watch this. I'm asking you about this news that Speaker McCarthy has formally launched an impeachment inquiry. He said he's going to direct. Oh, my God, really? Oh, my gosh. You know, oh, it's devastating. Ooh, don't do it. Please don't do it. Oh, no. Oh, no.

That sounds about right. Because the whole thing's theater. They're not going to get 67 votes in the Senate. They might not even have the votes in the House. So what does matter over in Detroit, at 11.59 p.m. on Thursday, contracts expire and U.A.W. President Sean Fain, the first democratically elected president of the UAW basically ever, and elected by a kind of lefty reform kind of energy inside the UAW, taking a very aggressive stand and says that they will walk out on auto companies who have not, that they've not reached a bargain with yet. He spoke with Jake Tapper recently, and ahead of this, what he talked about, and we're going to

play some of this clip, what he talked about is that profits and CEO pay have been up 40% over the last couple of years. Nobody freaked out about that. Let's hear Sean Fain talking about the workers' demands. When workers ask for their fair share, it's always the end of the world. And the last four years in general, in the last decade, these companies made a quarter of a trillion dollars in profit. In the last six months alone, they made 21 billion in profit. In the last four years, the price of cars went up 30 percent. CEO pay went up 40 percent. No one said a word. No one had any complaints about that. But now, God forbid, that workers actually ask for their fair share of equity in the fruits of labor and the product they produce. And all of a sudden, it's the end of the economy. It's not that we're going to wreck the economy. We're going to wreck their economy, the economy that only works for the billionaire class. It doesn't work for the

working class. Hear that, analysts? All right. UAW President Sean Fain, thanks for your time today. I appreciate it, sir. We did invite the big three automakers to come on. They declined. The invitation is open. Preach, brother. It's aggressive. And he has ever, from his position, he has every reason to be aggressive. They have a hundred percent. And you know, this is a, it's actually kind of interesting because the UAW feels like they can, if a strike happens, they feel like they're in a position unlike UPS where they can last a little bit. Like they don't feel the same crunch to make a deal before anything happens, like the rail workers. For them, it doesn't feel like an emergency to get the deal out before a

strike starts at all. So, I mean, it's not the same, exactly the same thing. But on the other hand, the UAW has all of the leverage in the world right now. I mean, that's why you see that such an aggressive stance from Fain, because they really are in the driver's seat. And I did not mean for that horrible pun to actually be a horrible pun. I just was actually saying they're really in the driver's seat here. Outrageous. Now, they have about three months in their strike fund. But within weeks, the auto companies are going to start seeing problems in their supply chain. They've been working literally overtime the last weeks and months to produce as many cars as possible so that they have a kind of glut. So that if there is a strike, there'll be cars to go out to the dealers.

But that'll only last a couple of weeks, after which consumers who are looking for new cars are going to go to other car companies. You're going to see car prices increase, which gives auto workers leverage there. At the same time, the auto companies have the leverage in the sense that three months is a long time, but you've seen how long the writer's strike is going on. So, you know, if the auto companies think they can wait them out for three months, a lot of this this is gonna come down to public opinion, you know, you know who you know Who's take who's taking the heat for this and so we'll you know, we'll see the the the UAW is also saying that it's willing to bargain With individual car companies, which I think is very smart because they're trying to then split So if the car companies see like oh wait We we have a better relationship with our union,

our segment of the UAW. So we're going to reach a deal and then we can start moving cars out and we can get the goodwill publicly that comes with that. Oh, gosh. While these other people get called, you know, strike breakers. And so it looks like the UAW is in a strong position to get a serious deal just the way the Teamsters did. I mean, we'll see, you know, there will probably be a collapse today. That's how these things go.

You'll get news that, like, talks have completely broken down. Then, like, six hours later, you get news that actually they're back together. And then the question is, do they collapse again on Thursday? Do they walk out for one or two days? Do we get something extended? We'll see. But this is a real chance for workers to flex some power. We talked about this a little last week with Saurabh Amari, but I want to highlight this quote from Fain.

He said, our union isn't going to stand by while they replace oil barons with battery barons. And I love that because I think these dynamics are really fascinating that sort of pit working class blue collar union guys who are already very tentative about the UAW's politics, especially on like cultural issues. I mean, basically only on cultural issues who sort of like culturally increasingly feel alienated to the union if they care about those sorts of things, which is not everybody. But there are that is true of some union members now against the economics of Basically Democrats who are pushing for the shift to electric vehicles That is a very very interesting fault line And basically this negotiation, forcing the Biden administration to deal with it

and forcing one of the biggest unions, the UAW, to deal with it, that is setting the tone for like the next 10 years and the evolution of the economy as it shifts to greener sources of energy, batteries, well, to the extent batteries are greener sources of energy, but as we shift from oil. More climate friendly, yeah. You put up this AP article because that gets into this, and that's where you see actually an overlap between the point that Emily's making, the overlap between the writer's strike and the autoworker strike is that both of them are about control of the future changing economy. When it comes to the writer's strike, AI is a huge part of it. They want to make sure that humans are still involved in the writing here and that they're

not getting just taken over by AI. Whereas on the auto side, they're worried about these much lower paid and kind of easier to do in some ways electric vehicle jobs because if you look at an electric vehicle it's like four wheels and a battery and you look at an internal combustion engine you're like whoa you could assemble this on Christmas morning yes you yes people do yeah just slap it together and so they though they're gonna be a lot fewer workers, and UAW knows that. But they want to make sure that at least, even though there are going to be fewer workers,

that at least those workers are as well paid as the workers are today. And they want to get back to where they were before. And the AP talks about this too, that in 2007, 2008, when Detroit had its crisis, the workers helped save Detroit by taking huge concessions, by saying, all right, we're going to get rid of our pensions. We're going to move over to these crappy 401ks. We're going to give up pay raises. We're going to get worse health insurance. And what the UAW is saying now is that, okay, we did that. Now we're back to massive profitability. So bring us back in. And it's a completely reasonable case to make. But it shows that once capital has gotten some type of gain,

they're not willing to just hand it back without it being forced to. And to your point, I mean, public opinions, public favorability of unions is soaring. I mean, it is at levels that haven't been seen in years. So if the big three, if they want to test the political waters and public opinion on this, it's not really going to be the right time. I mean, they can send their PR people out to say the workers are going to make cars cost more money. They're going to wreck the economy. They can try that this time. But when you have Fain, you know, even defending that as well as he did on CNN saying, listen, we just went through COVID. CEO pay has increased X amount. And this is what we're asking for. End of the day, he's

going to get a good deal no matter what from the standpoint of right now, at least. Let's see. So meanwhile, just a wild story on the COVID origin controversy. Put a C1 here. The House Republicans announced that they have a whistleblower that they are saying is credible from inside the CIA who tells this story, that there were seven people assigned to a task force responsible for analyzing whether or not, you know, or what the origin of COVID was. Was it natural origin or did it come out of this lab in Wuhan? According to this whistleblower, six of the seven analysts wanted to say with low confidence that Wuhan, the lab, was the likely origin of COVID. The seventh, who was superior to these other six, wanted to say with low confidence that it was a natural origin.

According to the whistleblower, there were then financial incentives that were given to the six members of the task force in order to pressure them to go along with the natural origin. That's what we know. Letters have been sent to the head of the CIA and to others over at the CIA asking for records and details. And we'll see if this whistleblower turns out to be a crank or turns out to be somebody who actually has credible information. If you read this letter, it's somebody inside the CIA who clearly knows what's going on. They got

the names of the task force. They got the names of the people. They got the numbers. So it's somebody who has some sense of what's going on. We'll find out how much of this is genuine power play. That's where the whistle is being blown. And how much of this is kind of internal office drama. Like this person got a promotion and I didn't think that they deserved a promotion. And I think they got a promotion because they didn't go along with COVID and I'm going to blow the whistle on that. Like that's possible. It could be that kind of like annoying office stuff could also be a major story. It could be absolutely huge. Although at the same time, as of right now, that term financial incentives is so vague.

They are right. They could have gotten a promotion or something. Right, because financial incentives could mean a million dollars. They got a 3.5% COLA rather than a 3. Sure. Yeah. So we need information. Right.

Yeah, because, and you would think, by the way, that if it was some cold dollar amount, you would at least say they were bribed with a check or something. You could say something more specific than financial incentives. Maybe you can't for legal reasons or maybe it's even unclear to the whistleblower. Going into its black box and just handing cash out. Like Trump with the paper towels. No, I mean, this could be a lot of different things. At the end of the day, though, when you have a CIA whistleblower making allegations like this, it's probably serious, but we don't quite know yet, except Ryan. What we do know is that the

intelligence community hasn't exactly been shy to say that this is likely a lab leak. They've had this like low confidence. A lot of different agencies have come out with a low confidence classification for their investigations. The key ones have been the FBI and the Department of Energy. Right. We don't know some of them, but the CIA has been. The CIA basically has said can't figure it out. They're like, we don't know. Like we're not saying one way or the other if we put up c3 we do have

response from the CIA it's rare that they put a name on a response or you give a response at all so see I director of public affairs Tammy Cooperman says at CIA we are committed to the highest standards of analytic rigor integrity and objectivity don't spit your coffee We do not pay analysts to reach specific conclusions. We take these allegations extremely seriously and are looking into them. We will keep our congressional oversight committees appropriately informed.

So it's not a denial. It's a, okay, this is a serious allegation that cuts against what we say we do, and we're going to look into it. So I think that we kind of have to leave it there until we get more. The CIA is going to hopefully respond in a serious way to the COVID Select Subcommittee and either refute with some evidence these charges, or maybe find out that you did have somebody who was running this task force who had a particular take on it. And you could also see a non-conspiratorial

way where, let's say the boss of this task force really believes that it's natural origin and has been convinced of that, that they can then use their authority inside the institution to get their way Yeah out of a task force that's called bureaucracy. That's how these things work The public deserves to know if it was done in an improper way and the public deserves to know what are these six? Analysts who looked closely into this actually think yes, I'm up to the hill. Let's hear from them We should and this is I mean they got it with the IRS whistleblowers We ended up hearing from them very recently, a very recent parallel to that. I'm actually really interested in this

question of the CIA specifically because the Trump administration was increasingly adamant that a lab leak was not conspiratorial in, I mean, as early as like the summer of 2020, as early as like the spring of 2020, the Trump administration was pretty hardcore about saying, we think that there's a lot of evidence, this is a lab leak. At the time, the media was saying that this was essentially a racist conspiracy theory. The evidence starts going in different directions.

But why I think the CIA's involvement is so interesting is as we've talked about, although the media doesn't talk about it much, this implicates, a lab leak directly implicates the United States government. And so that the CIA would be in a very CIA way, perhaps having someone go rogue and just saying like, hey, cut it out and figuring a way out where there's probably no fingerprints whatsoever. But having just one rogue agent be like, we got to, what can we do? What can we do here? You can certainly see a situation where somebody's like, hey, by the way,

this is not just a Wuhan, China run lab that we can just blame on China. It turns out we were actually funding this as well, which is true. That's not a conspiracy. Intercept got in the documents that show US money was funding that lab. And so that makes it uncomfortable when if you're just trying to pin it on a lab. It's like, ugh. Turns out that's a U.S.-funded lab too. Yes, and it's something that I think the Trump administration has not, not just the Trump administration, but sort of the Republicans who are on that side of the lab leak and who were on that side of the lab leak early have to really reconcile with their distaste for Fauci and the sort of Byzantine bureaucratic system that allowed American taxpayer

dollars, as The Intercept has reported, to fund the laboratory with very little transparency and apparently very little, very few guardrails as to how that money was being used, whether it was being used responsibly, with the reality that it's very possible that this biohazard emerged from that lab because initially the theory was that this was potentially a bioweapon or that China was a malign foreign actor that couldn't be trusted for X number of reasons. And this was proof of that. And if we're involved and we're at the very least complicit in funding a Chinese laboratory while not enforcing any guardrails on the way that the money is being spent or whatever it is, and reckless, by the way, again, at the very least, it's very difficult for Republicans to reconcile those two points because the United States government is implicated in it. Why are we funding this research? Is it just because you have gain of function nerds at the NIH who really

believe in gain of function? Maybe, or maybe there's something else going on. And these are really, really serious questions. So I'm glad actually the CIA is under a microscope because the intelligence community's motivations here, the political motivations here, that is something that I don't think has fully been probed. Yeah. As Chuck Schumer said, they have six ways to get you from Sunday. So we'll see how this works out for the COVID subcommittee. So over in Iran, some news that also relates to gas prices, to CPI, to the economy, all of this intersects. So the big controversy now in Washington is a prisoner swap that was struck between the

United States and Iran. Five Iranian prisoners being traded for five U.S. prisoners, plus $6 billion in Iranian funds being allowed to be released from a South Korean bank to a Qatari bank, which Iran will then have access to only for humanitarian concerns. And so people understand the way that this works. Iran ships oil around the world. We sanction the heck out of Iran. And so most banks don't want to move any money

that might have something to do with the Iranian oil shipments. And so if money winds up in, say, a South Korean bank, South Korean bank might say, wait a minute, this looks like it had something to do with Iranian oil shipping, we're not moving this money. And now, boom, now the money is frozen. By unfreezing it, you allow Iran to continue

to put more oil into the global market, which then counteracts actually OPEC's reduction in production. And so the Biden administration actually has real incentives. Even if we can't buy oil from Iran, the entire world price benefits from more supply being in there. John Kirby was asked, this White House spokesperson was asked about this deal. Here was his response to it. The parameters of this arrangement, Andrea, are very clear, very concise,

and the Iranians have signed up to this, so there should be no doubt in anybody's mind how this is going to work. And again, I think it's important to remember this is not U.S. taxpayer dollars. It's not ransom. These were Iranian funds that had been frozen in a South Korean account that they did not have access to. All we're simply doing is moving this money to Qatar, to Qatari National Bank, so that it can be accessible to them for, again, very discreet, targeted purposes. I love how he's like, all we're doing,

it's the simple matter of transferring the funds to Qatar. But actually there also, I think what's so interesting about this is that it's a waiver to your point that you were making. It's a waiver that says that this whole decision was just the Biden administration saying, we're going to give you a waiver that should assure you, South Korea, that this is not going to be sanctioned money, that you're not going to get sanctioned for moving this money. Like U.S. sanctions won't apply to this. Here's a waiver, sort of like a kindergarten teacher will give you a waiver. That's really what's happening here. U.S. sanctions are so draconian and overbroad that banks over-comply with them all the time. And over-compliance to sanctions is a huge problem. So like in Afghanistan, for instance,

none of the aid money could get into the country because the banks were saying, the U.S. has said aid money can flow into Afghanistan, but our reading of the sanctions is that it's a little dicey and might get too close to some of the groups that they say were not allowed to finance. And so we're not sending money to the Red Cross. We're not sending money to any of these organizations inside Afghanistan. And so then it kicks off this entire bureaucratic process where the Treasury Department will then have to specifically say, no, we waive it. Here is paper.

It's signed by all these bureaucrats. It's fine. But that's a one-time thing. And then you get jammed right back up again. And so it appears like that's what's going on here. Okay, you can move this $6 billion. Now, you put the Fox News clip up here. Fox News acknowledges in this article, which I thought was interesting, that this is Iranian money. Because a lot of times in the public mind, this gets kind of conflated with U.S. money getting shipped over to Iran. That we're giving them our money. It's not. We give our money to Saudi Arabia. Not to Iran.

We would never give our money. Never support a theocratic terrorist financing country. We're friends with Saudi Arabia. But so there was kind of a maniacal Ted Cruz response to this that I was curious to get your take on what he's alluding to. He thinks that he has found evidence of some secret nuclear deal. President Biden has established a secret nuclear deal with the Iranian regime that is being kept from Congress and the American people. Today's news confirms there has already been a side deal, including a $6 billion ransom and the release of Iranian operatives. Nevertheless, these are only the barest outlines of the staggering concessions that Biden has already made and intends to make to the Ayatollah, including an additional $10 billion transfer and indeed hundreds of billions of dollars by not

enforcing oil sanctions. He goes on, meanwhile, he has allowed the Iranian regime to all but acquire a virtual nuclear arsenal over the last two and a half years. The Biden administration must keep their deal secret because if they disclose it, the law requires them to come to Congress and defend it. And this appeasement is utterly indefensible. Instead, they will continue lying about their policies until Congress forces them to do otherwise. So what I'm confused about here from Ted Cruz is what kind of nuclear deal is it if we're giving them money and also allowing them to develop a nuclear program and nuclear weapons, seems like the earlier deal in which we pulled back on some sanctions in exchange for them

not creating nuclear weapons was better and maybe we should have stayed in that. Well, that's an interesting question of better versus bad. There's bad and then there's bad but better and I think maybe that would be a good question to pose to Ted Cruz if you see him in the hallway this week. Is it a matter of, like, was the Iran nuclear deal at least better than the post-Iran nuclear deal order? He'd probably say the Biden administration is still basically bungling it in the last couple of years because obviously Donald Trump, at the urging of people like Ted Cruz, pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal. The Biden administration comes in and implements this

policy that Cruz is taking issue with here. Your point about gas prices is what's really interesting to me, because Republicans have been pointing to the president of Iran. And we saw John Kirby say there are guardrails on how this money can be spent by Iran that are on actually the bank. We have ways of monitoring how this money is going to be used. It essentially has to go to helping the Iranian people. The government of Iran, the president of Iran has said, yeah, we'll use it for quote, helping the Iranian people. Wink and nod, basically like we can do what we want with this money. And whether or not we're able to actually

ensure that's the case, Republicans are saying, they're basically calling BS. They're like, there's no way that this money is actually going to be used on things like food. And, you know, just like it's going to go into the pockets of actually struggling Iranians, struggling Iranians partially because of sanctions, not in any small part because of sanctions. So they're skeptical and have this idea that the Biden administration is trying to do what Ben Rhodes and the Obama administration were doing back in 2015, when the original 2014, when the original Iran nuclear deal was struck, because they just sort of have this dovish approach to Iran. I actually think the gas prices are a way more reasonable explanation for what's happening here than a conspiracy. Right. Yeah. The big mistake the Biden administration made was not

getting back into the Iran deal as quickly as possible, you know, dragging its feet, asking for some, you know, concessions. It's like we signed a deal with them. They followed the deal according to all international observers and according to the EU and then we walked out of it because Trump didn't like that Obama cut the deal with them and so the Iranians like how can we trust you to stay in it again? It's like well, you can't like we're completely unreliable negotiating partners We struck a deal and then two years later for no reason other than that. We had a change in president walked out of it.

And so the result has been, yeah, Iran getting that much closer to a nuclear weapon. It's one of the most – the only explanation for it is that the leading force behind undermining it, which is the kind of pro-Israel lobby and Israel itself, kind of wants a hawkish confrontational approach with Iran. Like the idea of an Iran that is actually not sanctioned and is abiding by a nuclear deal with the EU, the United States, and Russia makes it harder for them to then, you know then raise conflict with this country. And there's some domestic benefits to having Iran out there and being able to saber-rattle back and forth. None of it otherwise makes sense because our policy is pushing Iran closer

to a nuclear weapon rather than further away from it. You know, obviously in Israel's, from Israel's perspective, it's a very, it's a more existential question and visceral, I think, because of that. Which would make you think they'd want to get it right. Well, so this is what's interesting because, you know, we have two more elements here that I think are worth mentioning. Iran this week confirmed the detention of a Swedish EU worker. So this is, yeah. And we're also on the one year anniversary, this is the next element from the Associated Press, of the Masa Amini protests, which erupted last fall. There is some evidence that there's

government crackdowns coming right now on the anniversary of the protest and that there have been government crackdowns in the aftermath of Massimiliani's death. And this is all happening as Iranian drones are being found on the battlefield in Ukraine. And the conventional wisdom of American foreign policy over the last several decades would, of be, especially in the context of Israel, would of course be, this is not the time to be easing sanctions. This is the time to be implementing more sanctions. This is the time for saber rattling, if anything. People like Ben Rhodes, and I would say gas prices aside, let's say gas prices, which I think probably is the most reasonable explanation, but hypothetically, let's say that had nothing

to do with it, and there were real ideologues in the Biden administration, Ben Rhodes type ideologues. And we have evidence that Barack Obama is behind a lot of the Biden administration's decision making. Let's say that's what they're doing. That's a challenge to the conventional wisdom of United States foreign policy in the way that actually Obama campaigned on challenging the conventional wisdom of U.S. foreign policy back in 2007 against Hillary Clinton and into 2008. It's not this like black and white, you know, hawk versus dove. It's actually saying, is the hawkishness even effective at accomplishing hawk goals? But imagine a world where, 2015, Trump comes in and instead of becoming, after a close nuclear standoff with Kim Jong-un, he becomes best buddies with this North Korean dictator. Imagine he becomes best buddies instead with the Ayatollah and stays in the nuclear deal.

And money continues flowing back and forth. And relations with Iran get better. And they agree. We are going to continue allowing inspectors in. We're not going to build this nuclear program, this nuclear weapons program anymore. Once the Ukrainian invasion comes around then in 2022, if Iran and the US are on much better terms at that point and Russia comes in is like hey, we need help with drones Iran is gonna think twice about that Mm-hmm

Because now they have something to lose with the United States because their their population loves the United States already like that's the the one kind of trump card that the US still has is that Culturally the US is still very popular. Our foreign policy, extremely unpopular. But culturally, hip-hop, Hollywood, just kind of the American ideals of liberty, freedom, equality, all of those things resonate with people. And if you were in a place where we're on good terms with Iran, Russia comes in and is like, yeah, we need drones. Iran might be like, you know what, maybe you shouldn't have invaded another country. And you can make the same case. I think this is actually a case that is being made about Ukraine

and China too, that the sort of conventional hawkish approach to Russia and the conventional hawkish approach to China, because we're sort of caught in this Cold War muscle memory that is now being grafted onto the China conflict in some ways. I think there are actually even people in the Republican Party and the conservative movement, the Heritage Foundation put out a damning indictment of our policy towards Russia, which was rather interesting. But I think that's actually becoming a more like top line conversation. And actually speaking of which, we have some video from actor Woody Harrelson who weighed in on Ukraine and on imperialism. Let's take a listen to Woody Harrelson here. all this military might with no provocation attacks a country that is, you know, like,

like, you know, Iraq. I'm sorry. Afghan. I'm sorry. Korea. No, sorry. Ukraine. Terrible. I like that he threw Korea in there. That's a deep cut. That is a deep cut. We're listening to blowback. What did you make of those comments from Woody Harrelson? Love Woody. Yeah, great.

So good. I mean, it's good. The mirrors need to be held up in front of imperial powers. Yeah, it's actually so similar to what we were just talking about with Iran. When you're making these equivalencies, as he's making his joke there about Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Ukraine. This is one of the things I've been thinking about since the entire invade Russia's entire invasion of Ukraine started is just how the Cold War is still ever present in foreign policy every single day in ways that we think we sort of turned the page on end of history but we've had nuclear power on the face of the earth for not even 100 years as we talked about when

Oppenheimer came out this summer this is really. And the idea that humans can eliminate tens of thousands of other humans on another part of the world with the push of a button has dramatically changed the way that we relate to each other, just as human beings, let alone as like great powers. And we're not even a hundred years in this vast scope of human history into that world order. It's the blink of an eye. And we've run a lot of experiments unsuccessfully without realizing it yet. So Emily, what's your point today? Well, a couple of weeks ago, I was in Los Angeles giving the remarks on a panel, basically. And as I was walking back to my hotel, I noticed something interesting on a bus sign. Let's put this picture up on the screen. This is

exactly what I saw. Report acts of hate, the sign on the bus stop said. Dial 211. That was really interesting to me because, A, there are hate crime laws and the police are involved. Obviously, there's a legal system, there's law enforcement that exists to enforce all of these things. And B, I wonder just exactly how this was being facilitated in a context of a culture that doesn't really agree on what hate actually is. And that's been the case in different periods of American history, and we've had to fight and overcome that. But it's a serious problem right now. People who tend to be on right of center, like myself, are more concerned about it than people on the left

of center, because people on the left of center right now have a lot of power in government and in pop culture, et cetera, et cetera. But I think this is a problem that affects everybody, regardless of where you stand on the political spectrum. So we have a young writer who goes to UC Davis, and I sent the picture to her. I was like, you know, let's look into this. At the bottom of that picture, you would have seen the group LA versus Hate. There's their website, laversushate.org. I was particularly curious to know if this was a government-funded project and a government-authorized project. So we dug into LAvsHate.org and actually have a new story up on The Federalist from Rebecca, the student I was talking about, just this morning. You can put that up on the screen.

What we found, in fact, is that LA vs. Hate, this is a government group out in Los Angeles County, runs a snitch line. It's funded by Biden. They got, in some sense, they got this grant from the Biden administration's American Rescue Plan, about a million dollars. It's funded by Kaiser Permanente and Blue Shield of California. But most importantly, it's funded by taxpayers and it is operated by Los Angeles County. Now, the key here is not that this is merely, is that this is not just merely a tip line to report hate crimes, right? It makes sense in some cases that you have a tip line to report things that are actual criminal behavior.

For instance, domestic abuse, women who don't want to go to the police and would be more comfortable calling a hotline, something to that extent. So I'm not saying it's crazy to have a tip line for criminal offenses. And this is a tip line for potentially criminal offenses. And they have fielded calls for criminal offenses based on their own records. But what's really important is that they're also open to calls about, quote, hate incidents, hate incidents, hate incidents, and nowhere on their website do they define what actually constitutes hate. And when the Federalists reached out to ask for a definition of hate, to

ask if things based on their website which endorses you know full trans ideology, endorses the Black Lives Matter movement, there are a lot of people in the country, there are certainly people in Los Angeles County who are decent and disagree with every sort of aspect of trans ideology for whatever reason or disagree with the Black Lives Matter movement for whatever reason. Are they committing hate incidents if they make a reasoned case against either of those movements? if they make a reasoned case against either of those movements. For instance, let's say the Dave Chappelle special. Let's say can somebody report one of the Dave Chappelle specials, his criticism of the trans movement, which some people may disagree with,

but is that a reportable hate incident to the government of Los Angeles County. Because they refused to define, and because they refused the free press's questions on that, it doesn't give me a lot of optimism that this isn't a government snitch line, essentially, that operates in a way that should actually be chilling. This is a case, actually, that Edward Snowden, who hasn't, you know, I don't want to put any words in his mouth, he hasn't weighed in on this particular incident, but he made a lot when he was more front and center in the news about how just the knowledge that you're being watched, just the knowledge that the government is monitoring, surveilling what you say, what you do, and is looking out for those things changes the way that we think. It changes the way that we interact with each other. And it's really, really bad. It's a bad precedent. Whether you're in deep, deep blue Los Angeles County or a deep, deep red area, and people are having issues with, let's say, what I think are sometimes incorrectly referred to as book bans. You know,

there have been some really excessive legislations, pieces of legislation when it comes to that. I think there have been some really reasonable ones. We've talked about it here on the show. But the principle is basically the same, that the government doesn't have any business, especially if we're talking about adults, not children. The government doesn't have any business monitoring your sort of ideological consumption, conversation, discourse. It's not the business of the government. It is the business of a society to decide what its norms are, what is hate. It's a business of individuals to come together and make those decisions. And obviously, through the democratic process, they should be reflected in our laws. But non-criminal, quote, hate incidents

should not be facilitated. You shouldn't facilitate a tip line. The government, of all places, and these major corporations should not facilitate a tip line for people to snitch on one another for non-criminal, quote, hate incidents that we can't even define the root cause of what a hate

incident actually is. And all over the website, you can see very clearly this was LA versus hate or something that was launched in 2020. I think they started the process of launching it in 2018, but it formally became a program in 2020. So it's been around for a couple of years. They do list examples of hate incidents on their website. They could include name-calling, insults, displaying, quote, hate material on your own property, posting alleged hate material that doesn't result in property damage, and distributing materials with hate messages in public spaces. But if you cannot fundamentally define hate, especially in a time right now when there's so much of that word being flung at people,

even on the left, who disagree with some people on the left, that is just extremely dangerous. And it's not just going to hurt people on the right or people who disagree with BLM or trans ideology. It is going to hurt everybody when we set precedents like this, because when another person gets in power, we're actually seeing this happen in the Capitol this week as the impeachment inquiry came up for a vote, when you sort of break one of those precedents or you break a norm, that norm is going to be broken right back at you when the other side is in power. And the principle of government monitoring ideological conversations, discussions, and lumping it into that broad category of hate is really, really dangerous.

And so my message would just be this is not good whether you're on the right, whether you're on the left. This is a wild abuse of government power out in LA County under this very innocuous and seemingly virtuous mission of combating hate. There's nothing wrong with combating hate, that's for sure. But this is not nearly as innocuous as it sounds. There are new inflation numbers out. You've been crunching the numbers. Actually, we took a little break here. So Ryan can dig into the inflation numbers. What should we be looking

at? Well, so the inflation data that was released today found that the core rate of inflation remained the same at 4.3% year over year. Core inflation, which excludes energy and food, basically, for August had been expected to run at 0.2%, but came in at 0.3%. That means that when the Fed meets next week, they're likely to keep interest rates where they are. Now, the leading driver of overall inflation this month was, as anybody would guess, rising gas prices. But we'll get into all of these numbers soon in a bit. Whenever you hear that the Fed is planning to raise interest rates to cool off the economy because of these inflation numbers that you're hearing, it's useful to understand what the titans of industry are really after. Now, I often try to explain that interest rates

and unemployment are really about worker power, but nobody has explained it better than this guy, Tim Gerner, who's the founder of the Gerurner Group, he spoke here recently at the Financial Review Property Summit. Here's his lesson. I think the problem that we've had is that people decided they didn't really want to work so much anymore through COVID, and that has had a massive issue on productivity. Tradies have definitely pulled back on productivity. They have been paid a lot to do not too much in the last few years, and we need to see that change. We need to see unemployment rise.

Unemployment has to jump 40%, 50%, in my view. We need to see pain in the economy. We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around. I mean, there's been a systematic change where employees feel the employer is extremely lucky to have them as opposed to the other way around. So it's a dynamic that has to change. We've got to kill that attitude and that has to come through hurting the economy, which is what the whole global,

you know, the world is trying to do. The governments around the world are trying to increase unemployment to get that to some sort of normality. And we're seeing it. I think every employer now is seeing it. I mean, there is definitely massive layoffs going off. People might not be talking about it, but people are definitely laying people off and we're starting to see less arrogance in the employment market. And that has to continue because that will cascade across the cost balance. Now, Emily, believe it or not, it turns out that this was the avocado toast guy. Put up this next one. If people remember, this feels like five, ten years ago at this point.

There was this viral sensation going around where a dude said the reason that millennials can't afford to buy a home is that they buy too much avocado toast. This guy's back with a new take. And what's useful about this guy is that that avocado toast idiocy was obvious idiocy, but it was the wisdom of the kind of Titan class distilled down to its essence. How idiotic it is in its purest form because there are a bunch of people who were saying at the time Look, it's just these spendthrift Millennials. That's the problem. I guess it's not that rent is too high It's not that wages are down. It's not that there aren't enough jobs coming out of this the financial crisis. It's that yeah, they're just Spoiled and spending money on avocado toast But back to his point that he's making now, it's the same thing. It is what he's saying feels idiotic because he's just saying it so bluntly, but it is really the wisdom of the ruling class distilled down to its essence. And to me,

what it suggests is that a capitalist class doesn't deserve to exist because if they can't handle a full economy that is humming on all cylinders, that is employing as many people as it possibly can, if they can't handle that, if their reaction to that is that they have to undermine it, then they should be thrown out. Let some other system in that can actually allow humanity to flourish in its full dignity like they what what he's saying there is that we can't do this like we don't know how to run a full economy because if we're running a full economy workers have power and we and we don't like that now uh you go back to some of these inflation numbers. You put up this chart from recently.

This shows kind of the the direction that we're looking at. And so the the headline number, you know, it popping up because of gas prices. But overall, you're seeing this kind of mountain. You know, we we climbed up the mountain in 2021 and we're heading down the other side of the mountain now. Now, the problem being, if you look at where prices were back in 2020, which saw massive deflation because of COVID, compared to where they are now, that's the gap that spells the headache that we're all living in. And so you do have food prices coming down, the numbers showed, but you have gas prices going up.

Gas prices haven't gone up as much as people are worried about. We're probably going to see more pain on that front. So what it means is that we're not going to see a, we're probably not going to see an inflation increase, an interest rate increase at the next Fed, but we're not going to see a cut either. I don't know, what's your takeaway on the avocado toast man? an interest rate increase at the next Fed, but we're not going to see a cut either. I don't know, what's your takeaway on the avocado toast man? Howard Buffett, who is billionaire Warren Buffett's son, owns a town essentially in Illinois, Decatur, Illinois.

And we're joined now by Amos Barshad of Lever News, who was out in Decatur to try to figure out what it's like living in a town effectively owned by a billionaire. And the story is terrific. You can put it up here. It's called American Oligarchy. And it's something of a kind of allegory for, I think, our broader society, because we all live under the thumb of a Warren Buffett one way or the other. But these folks, you know, live right specifically underneath that thumb, and they can see it every single day. Amos, you know, welcome to the program. Thanks for joining us and grats on this piece. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Yeah, and yeah, I should clarify, he obviously doesn't legally own the town.

That's not possible. But yeah, his influence over two decades now can be seen, can be felt. And that was kind of my hope from the piece is to go to Decatur and to hear from regular people what it feels like to live amongst Buffett's influence. And that's how the story was first introduced to me. I was happening to speak with someone who was born and raised in Decatur, who's now a professor at the University of Virginia. His name is A.D. Carson. And we were actually talking about a completely different topic. It was the Illuminati's popularity in hip hop.

And he just kind of happened to mention, you know, this thing with Howard Buffett, which I just had never heard of. I don't think a lot of people have. But after he told me about it, you know, I read up and learned that there has been some great reporting on him, some of his influence on the southern border, you know, some more positive coverage. He donates a lot of money internationally, globally. But I felt like this piece hadn't been done, this piece where we focus on the people of Decatur and what it feels like to live under the influence of Howard Buffett. Yeah, and in 2019, my colleague, my then colleague at The Intercept, Rachel Cohen, wrote about this kind of phenomenon where she focused on the weird marijuana fight that was

going on. That was my first introduction to the idea that howard buffett had decided he was going to spend his money effectively just kind of running the show over here and has all of these weird kind of interests in being a sheriff sometimes actually as you report literally being a sheriff otherwise kind of playing one on on tv but so when i say that he effectively owns the town, like what, what is that? What does it mean to kind of like, how does he exert his influence in Decatur? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So yeah, first of all, that intercept piece you mentioned is a great piece. And I encourage everyone to seek that out. She was reporting from the time as he, it was revealed that he had pushed back against a dispensary. So Illinois had legalized dispensaries,

marijuana dispensaries statewide. And so then the municipality of Decatur had to decide if they were going to have one. And a lot of people were very pro of the dispensary. There was a referendum that was run in the township of Decatur and showed that there was, you know, an overwhelming majority of people wanted the dispensary. But basically, you know, as that piece, the intercept piece reported, you know, due to Buffett's explicit influence, the city council members, the majority voted against the dispensary. And it gets tied back into his personal views, his personal views against marijuana, against, you know against pro-war on drugs. Interestingly, there's a big addiction recovery center

that he built in town, which feels objectively a good thing to provide addiction treatment, recovery treatment. But where it gets more complicated is in the idea of how, it's a philosophy, right? It's like a world building, it's how he sees the world. So he believes in addiction recovery, but he doesn't believe in access to marijuana. So, you know, you see these things as you shouldn't be opposed, but in his point of view, they are. So, you know, so it's a very palpable thing that he's able to control, you know, what happens in this town through his influence and through his financial support. From there, it goes on to just kind of, you know, when you walk around the town,

you'll see signs, you know, thanking his foundation. The local zoo has an exhibit for the paying homage to the guards of the Virunga National Park in Congo and the mountain gorillas. You know, strange, but, you know, it's one of his passions. So it's there. The Children's Museum, which is a private museum, it has an exhibit called the Heroes Hall, which is like this very, very explicitly

pro law enforcement exhibit. You basically go in there and you, you know, you read these placards about how the police are heroes and you can put on different uniforms and pretend to be a cop. And you're told about what, you know, the great things that the police do. And, you know, this is a children's museum. It's like all primary colors and, you know, fun running around stuff. There's a statue of Buffett from his time when he, yes, he was actually officially sheriff. There's

a statue of him outside of the museum as well. So, so yeah, I mean, it's just, it's just about, I think when someone has this amount of money and this amount of focus on a small town, they're able to, you know, actually literally change people's daily lives, you know, the things that they see, the information that they're provided through their daily lives. Now, his representative told you in the story, when you asked to potentially speak with Howard Buffett, basically that, listen, he would have moved out of Illinois years ago if it wasn't for his wife's health. You know, he's too busy for Decatur, basically, except for planting and harvesting season. He's traveling around the world with his charities. But you also point out that Decatur is a really interesting kind of case

that it's not your typical maybe Rust Belt city. There's something, it's shrinking like many Rust Belt cities are, but analysts look at it and say there's a decent number of jobs here. People are able to make a living. What can you tell us actually about Decatur just as a city? What kind of city is it? What is it like? And how has the city reacted? You have some really interesting stuff in there too about how the city itself has reacted in different ways to Howard Buffett over the years. Yeah, absolutely. This is, you know, all stuff that I learned from my reporting. And, you know, I really enjoyed being in Decatur and learning this.

And so, yeah, it's, you know, kind of classic Illinois farm country, as you imagine, you're driving through and you're seeing, you know, rows and rows of crops and it feels, you know, endless. And the big company that's there is Archer Daniel Midlands, this agricultural giant. So they take all this corn and make all these products that end up in our food in all these millions of different ways,

which is obviously a very lucrative business to be in. And that's actually what brought Howard Buffett to town originally, which is another kind of layer to this, that he's not from Illinois, he's from Nebraska, famously like his father. And so he comes here almost arbitrarily and becomes, you know, starts building his influence over the years.

And so, yeah, so there are jobs and this is a profitable company. What I heard from locals, people that are involved in the city in different ways, activists and also a member of the the school board is that they feel that there's been a a lack of you know the the maintenance of the infrastructure you know the things that the school needs um you know the thing the city needs like schools and you know i was told that you know literally some of the public pools have been closed down as this private pool uh kind of complex had come in you know just things that any person that lives in a town would think about you know if you have come in, you know, just things that any person that lives in a town would think about, you know, if you have children or not, you know, you're just, you know,

this is, these are the basics that a town might need. And that's what they felt. They felt that, you know, despite the fact that there's this benefactor who has spent all this money, somehow none of that has manifested in, you know, the basic needs of a town, what a town really needs. And yeah, I think that kind of, that's kind of the interesting point, you know, the basic needs of a town, what a town really needs. And yeah, I think that's kind of the interesting point. You know, someone spending money, are they spending money the way they want to? Are they spending money the way that the town might need? And so, yeah, so I think it's, you know, while Decatur has had factory closures that have led to job loss, you know, as we've seen throughout the country, throughout the Rust Belt, the feeling that I got from some of these activists is that if we just made some decisions differently,

we could prop this town up a little better. And that goes back to the dispensary, the tax revenue that they would hope to get from that. So what has happened since the original fight over it is the dispensary has opened, but over the Decatur border. So it's a small municipality, just over, you know, just, you know, five minute drive from Decatur that's getting that tax revenue.

So I think that's a very kind of a blunt and clear example of, you know, if locals are saying that they want something because they believe that it will lead to tax money that they can spend on things they want. And then you have a billionaire who has spent all this money and has accrued political capital, you know, political influence through that spending, deciding that that's not going to happen. Yeah, I think I think that that puts it pretty starkly. You know, the idea of who who like who does this person to their whims, what can we learn about the pushback to that? Like, who are the activists and what can we draw from what it looks like to kind of try to, like, galvanize some energy against that and reclaim a kind of self-government? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know,

I think that, I think that that's what was so interesting to me about Decatur and being in Decatur. You can literally physically see his presence and you can hear from people and, you know, people see him around and it's this rare example of the billionaire that is controlling or influencing your life isn't, is really there where most of the time, we'd be hard pressed to try to exactly connect the dots between the way money is spent and the way it affects our lives. And so I think that also manifested itself

in the ability for some activists specifically to rally around the dispensary. They were fighting the city council to kind of reverse their decision against the dispensary. And I think through that, a lot of attention their decision against the dispensary. And I think through that, a lot of attention was paid to the manner in which Buffett did influence the whole thing. And from what I was told by local activists, that they feel that that did push him back somewhat from being as gung-ho about, you know, further actions in that kind of capacity. And, you know,

the idea that maybe they're pushing him out of central Illinois a little bit altogether. Maybe he has lost the appetite to, you know, influence as aggressively as he has in the past. I think that this specific fight around the dispensary was the most kind of cohesive grassroots pushback that he's felt, that he's seen. And, yeah, I think that kind of might kind of stymie any given person. You know, nobody really wants to be in the spotlight like that, especially when you're someone who spends a lot of money. You're also interested in how that money is interpreted. So you can Google him.

You'll see a ton of great coverage from his time as sheriff about how he's just this guy who loves the small-town life and just runs around wanting to help people, where the reality of how he became sheriff is much more complicated. Sheriff is an elected position. He was appointed when the acting sheriff quit and assigned him as the sheriff. Later on, this sheriff went on to work at this kind of police training facility,

this big police training facility that one activist compared to Atlanta's Cop City, to to me that they have in Decatur. And so, yeah, so there's just like very direct kind of a influence buying that you could kind of see or assume. There was also an issue with Buffett had gotten somewhat of a fraudulent law certificate and the person who gave him the certificate, he was involved with this standards board in Illinois. He ended up being indicted on charges of, you know, felony forgery, fraud. And, you know, this certificate business came out.

So you see like, you see some of the more nefarious or, you know, sort of kind of not as appetizing elements of how Buffett ended up becoming sheriff and how he kind of, yeah, plays out some of his law enforcement fantasies. And finally, were you able to determine, there's a shocking anecdote in the story, does the guy really drink a gallon of Coke for lunch? Do you have any information on this could you confirm it seems like biologically possible from an interview with an australian newspaper that that that would

you know that that that interviewer did sit down with buffett so i have no reason to believe that that is not true uh that was not my direct reporting uh i did not witness it i have to clarify that. But I assume this person went to lunch with Buffett, and that's what he saw. Otherwise, why put that in there? I'm almost impressed. But he doesn't like weed. But it's fascinating that weed seems to be the thing that broke his back. And so the key to breaking the grip of the billionaire class is weed.

And it's also good for a broken back. So there you go. Just hoping Sagar doesn't watch this segment. Amos, thank you so much. It's rare also to have such great writing and great reporting at the same time. The writing of the story is really great. We recommend you check it out over at The Lever. Thank you so much, Amos.

Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Well, that does it for us today on this edition of CounterPoints. We told you impeachment was coming, and here it came. Sort of. It sort of came. Yeah, well, we don't know. Without a vote.

So Ryan's going to head back over to Capitol Hill. We'll have more for you on all these internal dynamics of Republicans, Democrats, impeachment. Will Matt Gaetz get AOC to finally vote with him? We'll be back with more next Wednesday Thank you so much for liking and subscribing. It has been a year here at counterpoints We appreciate all of you guys so very much. Oh, yeah, and if you're here in DC tonight at GW I'm gonna be doing an event with Naomi Klein. Oh nice 7 p.m. At the GWU Amphitheater, she got a new book out, really fun book, called Doppelganger.

Nice. Quite good. Anyway, see you there, if you're there. Over the years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned no town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've heard from hundreds of people across the country

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