Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 9/6/23: Mark Meadows May Flip On Trump, Biden's 2024 Economic Pitch, Elon Fights The ADL, China's Chip Breakthrough, McConnell Responds After Freeze, Tucker Pushes Obama Gay Conspiracy, Key Rhode Island Election, Media's Double Standards, And More!

Episode Date: September 6, 2023

Ryan and Emily discuss Mark Meadows potentially flipping on Trump, Biden buys NFL ad slot for economic pitch, Elon Musk goes to war with the ADL over lost revenue, China makes major semiconductor breakthrough, McConnell responds after multiple public freezes, Tucker guest pushes gay Obama conspiracy, leftist infighting tanks Bernie backed candidate in Rhode Island, media hypocrisy destroys US credibility, and Sohrab Ahmari discusses the UAW strike and East Palestine.To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Hey, guys. Ready or not, 2024 is here, and we here at Breaking Points are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that. Let's get to the show. It's Wednesday, so welcome to CounterPoints. And actually, Ryan, I was just thinking, we are about a week shy of one year of CounterPoints.

The one-year anniversary of CounterPoints is coming up, doesn't it? And right now is perfect because the campaign season's in full swing. Congress is going crazy. There will be chaos in Congress this fall, so we're ready to cover all of it. Gearing up, can't wait. Well, we should just start right away with some big news about the lawfare against Donald Trump. We're also going to be talking about Elon Musk and the Anti-Defamation League, which are in a really intense back and forth, the two parties are right now. We're going to be talking about China, Huawei, and semiconductor chip technology

advancements that are a little, I don't know't know Ryan what's the word for this? I it's a it's a nice kind of Cold War everybody throwing money at technology Yes, that's one way to do it for things that don't like necessarily have to blow up. Yeah, they don't necessarily That's kind of nice. That's a good kind of Cold War. Yeah, there was a big special election for to fill a house seat in Rhode Island last night Progressives got rinsed. It was extremely disappointing result for the left there. We'll talk about that Yeah, a little bit later what it's in the McConnell saga and then we'll be talking about some big news Tucker Carlson It's going to be making later this week

I'll just leave it at that. I'll leave it at that Yeah, it's I'll leave it at that if the name Larry Sinclair means anything to you back back from 2008, you've got a clue about what this is about, but we'll get into it later. I was going to say it's a perfect subject for Ryan because he was covering all of this back then. Here we are again. Here we are. Flat circle. And Sourabh Amari is back with us on Breaking Points to talk about some developments. This is a huge fall for labor, not just for Congress, but also for labor,

a lot of stuff happening. And we want to ask Saurabh basically, can the right put its money where its mouth is when it comes to weighing in in these disputes and these battles and actually fully realigning? So that's the question we'll toss to Saurabh when he joins us later today. But let's go to Mark Meadows because Politico had a really interesting story that made waves yesterday where they narrowed in on an exchange between Mark Meadows' lawyer and the judge. I think it was the judge. We can put A1 up on the screen here in a case, the case down in Georgia last week. So this is, I'm reading here from Mediaite. A new report connected the dots among Donald Trump's co-conspirators for

his indictment in Georgia and it established a pattern of behavior indicating the former president's allies will turn against him to legally save themselves. Politico reported on Mark Meadows' potential legal strategy as the White House chief of staff faces charges connected with Trump's alleged conspiracy to overturn Georgia's 2020 election results. The report referred to a court document showing a strong likelihood that Meadows will join Trump's other former allies who will blame the ex-president and portray him as the primary driver of the racketeering enterprise they've been accused of. Okay, so here is the key exchange that media pulled out from Politico.

Meadows is the person who arranged the call with Raffensperger. The perfect call. The perfect phone call with Raffensperger. But Meadows' lawyer, who's named Michael Francisco, which always makes me think of the scene in Elf, where he's like, Francisco. That's a fun thing to say. He says, quote, there's a lot of statements by Mr. Trump. Mr. Meadows speaking rules were quite limited. He didn't make a request that you change the vote totals, Mr. Meadows himself. And then he asked that to Raffensperger and Raffensperger says, correct. Right.

So this is an exchange, not the judge. It was between Brad Raffensperger and the attorney for Mark Meadows. And he's getting him to say that Meadows didn't ask for the vote totals to be changed himself. Yeah. And there's another piece that adds a breadcrumb to that, which is around the fake electors scheme. And this part's gone viral where he says he did something because he didn't want to get yelled at by the president of the United States. But the context for that is the fake elector scheme. So they said, well, why did you go ahead and put these fake elector slates together? He said, well, in the event that we won the court case, I wanted to have them ready to go. Why did you want to have them ready to go?

Well, because the president of the United States would have yelled at me if I didn't. And to me, if he can convince a jury of that, that the only reason he was setting up the fake electors slates was in anticipation of a legal victory, then that falls within his proper duties as a White House chief of staff. Because we do accept that you are allowed to challenge election results through the court system. Like, that's fine. That's fair. That's all in the game. You're allowed to do that.

And so if the jury believes, okay, he was just putting these electors together in case the Wisconsin, in case the Georgia case, the Arizona case, whatever, came out the way they wanted. Hawaii 1960. That's the example people point out. Yeah, he's going to have a timeline problem in that they had lost most of these by this point. Uh, however, uh, maybe it's enough to like cloud it for a jury, but it does show his strategy that he's saying I was doing things all within the legal confines. Like nothing wrong with setting up a phone call with Raffensperger. Yeah. It's the president who got on there and was like, me 11,000 votes Nothing wrong with having alternative electors ready to go if the courts go with you

It was the president who tried to use them even after the courts shut him down So that's does imply that he is trying to distance himself here Yeah, and Willis though and that's where she I think brings in the racketeering charges and that was very intentional Obviously because then you can charge all of these people with the sort of peripheral activities and behavior because it all goes into the racket, literally into the racket, that was the attempt to,

as she sees it, overturn the election, as opposed to what Mark Meadows is arguing, which is that we were preparing for potential legal changes. And again, Lawrence Tribe and Alan Dershowitz disagree about what happened in 1960 in Hawaii, and they disagree about what happened in 2000 in Florida. But there have been other legal theories that you need to appoint a separate slate if the vote totals get overturned so that they're ready to go and vote

in the direction that the vote totals have shifted to. So yeah, it makes sense. It absolutely is a legal defense. It makes sense what Mark Mendels is doing. People were surprised, I think, not to see, first of all, to see that Mark Mendels was indicted and not to see more breadcrumbs that maybe he was flipping in the, I think, the original Willis indictment. Were you surprised by that? I think everyone thought he had already flipped. But he had already flipped. No, because I have been hearing since day one of the Trump presidency that all of his people are going to flip on him and turn state's evidence over to initially whoever it was, and it's over to Mueller, then it's like on and on. The media has constantly been waiting for this kind of rollover on Trump.

And that it was always going to be the thing that was going to get him. Because it also like has a kind of narrative satisfaction to it because Trump is such a cruel person to people underneath him. And so like obviously disloyal to people underneath him and so obviously disloyal to people underneath him, so willing to toss him off that I think a lot of people see people in that situation and are like, if I were him, I would have no loyalty in reverse to this guy. So he must want to flip. And so I think people have been anticipating a lot of flips that haven't come. And so I'm not ready to believe a flip until they've actually stuck the landing on it.

Yeah. Because, you know, the football's been pulled away so many times on this particular point. Yeah. But it still is the point that Trump has raised $250 million and he's got some broke, like, co-defendants and he's not even helping them out with their legal bills. Yeah. It's like that is a recipe to get somebody to flip on you. Yeah.

That's what happened to Nixon. Maybe Roger Stone needs to tell him that. And what we haven't had up until now is all of these felony charges, these actual criminal charges. So we had kind of rumors of charges, we had investigations, we had legal jeopardy, but now people have been fingerprinted and mugshotted and are facing actual prison time, like staring down their lives being irreparably changed. Michael Cohen. Got him to think. Yes, you did. Yes, you did have Michael Cohen. And he turned into the biggest Trump critic out there. Right. And yeah, and the significance of Mark Meadows

is sort of similar, I would think, to Michael Cohen, whose testimony has created. I mean, actually, I think probably the Alvin Bragg stuff is in some ways rooted in Michael Cohen. Yeah, for sure. He's the star witness. Yeah, right. Yeah. So and Mark Meadows was by Donald Trump's side throughout that fall of 2020 and into the winter of 2020. So you can imagine what might, especially like Willis, prosecutor Willis, would delight in getting Meadows to flip, certainly. There would be a lot of questions that they would be eager to ask him

in that context of having flipped. Yeah, sure. Let's turn to some 2024 news, because Donald Trump, obviously the Republican frontrunner, Joe Biden, I guess the Democratic frontrunner, Joe Biden, I guess the Democratic frontrunner because we're not going to do a primary. I guess we're just not doing it, despite the fact that, what, 70% of Democrats want some semblance of a primary. But Joe Biden is getting ready to blanket the airwaves during NFL games with this ad. Take a look at it.

They said millions would lose their jobs and the economy would collapse. But this president refused to let that happen. Instead, he got to work fixing supply chains, fighting corporate greed, passing laws to lower the cost of medicine, cut utility bills and make us more energy independent. Today, inflation is down to three percent, unemployment the lowest in decades. There's more to do, but President Biden is getting results that matter. I'm Joe Biden and I approve this message. It's like AI Joe Biden. No, I think that was actually real Joe Biden, but you never know these days.

So that's a $25 million ad campaign for battleground states during the NFL opener on Thursday. They plan to actually run that through December. Obviously, as everyone just heard, that was very focused on his economic record, Bidenomics, the new hot phrase in Washington. And a Wall Street Journal poll, as Axios notes, found a majority of American voters disapprove of the president's handling of the economy and inflation. So he's obviously trying to get ahead of that. Had a little bit of trouble in the White House briefing room yesterday answering an interesting

question on the World Bank from a friend of the show, Philip Wegman of RealClearPolitics. Let's play that video. Last question. Given that you said bolstering the World Bank is not about countering China, in this country, credit card delinquencies have spiked. Mortgage rates are through the roof. Inflation remains a problem. Meanwhile, the federal deficit this year

has almost tripled, and the president wants to increase funding to foreign nations through the World Bank. How is that fair to citizens in, say, Scranton? Look, I think citizens in Scranton recognize the problems that happen overseas don't stay overseas. They come here, too, at great cost to working people. COVID came here from overseas. When there's massive debt or instability or conflict elsewhere, it has a drag on the global economy, and America is part of the global economy. So our perspective is that for a modest investment from the point of view of the overall size of the U.S. budget to put into ensuring greater stability, greater prosperity, greater capacity in the rest of the world,

that is going to end up reducing the costs and burdens on working people in Scranton or Minneapolis or any of Ural's hometowns. And frankly, that's not some novel idea. That has been a bipartisan commitment of the United States for decades. And even the last administration, the biggest skeptic of all of this, made investments in foreign aid because those investments are in the naked self-interest of the United States as well as being the right thing to do. And you can obviously envision as well Ukraine being roped into a similar line of questioning about the Biden administration's basically control of the purse swings, purse strings. What do you make of the ad? What do you make of Jake Sullivan's answer there?

He got more and more honest toward the end of it. And I like the part where he finally said, we're spending this money in the naked self-interest of the United States. Yes. And I think people just need to understand that this is not charity. Like what the US gives to the World Bank and the World Bank then spends abroad

or the IMF or even propping up the WTO. This is not charity. This is not, and foreign aid is a deceptive term. Like we're not out there just trying to do the right thing by peasants in Vietnam or whatever. Like what are we trying to actually do? We're trying to exert our imperial influence around the globe and we're trying to extract labor and resources from the rest of the world, from the periphery into the center here, which then, if you have a kind of a social democratic empire, benefits the working class inside the empire. If you have

a more conservative and laissez-faire one, then it all flows up to the very top. But then trickles down. And then you tell people that it trickles down. Exactly. So, for example, the World Bank might make a loan for a giant nickel mine, which then strikes contracts with American corporations, which get cheap labor working in the mine, subsidized nickel that then flows into whatever kind of battery kind of supply chain that we're structuring. Right. Then people then buy EVs that we're structuring right then people then buy EVs and that we then also subsidize so it's all for the United States now the fight becomes who in the United States is it for but the idea that It's it's unfair to people in Scranton. No like it

Back in the back in the center people need to fight over the spoils of war. But this is this is just war done by other means. It's not it's not foreign aid. It's just extraction of wealth from around the world. And so do you think that the ad that we played a clip of airing during NFL games, you know, battleground states trying to get ahead of the fact that you have a lot of Americans saying, huh, I don't feel great about this economy. I don't feel great about Biden's oversight of the economy.

And you see a lot of people, especially sort of Democrat leaning or Democratic leaning economists who are saying, what is wrong with people? The economy is doing better. There have been gains and people aren't reflecting that in their sense of how the economy is going. So Biden comes in and says, basically, like, everything is rosy. Is that going to work? Well, I mean, it's better than saying everything's terrible, probably,

if you're the one that's in charge. Like, because you're in charge, you're going to get the credit or the blame for it, you know, no matter what happens. I think every president going forward is going to be in a tricky situation because of the combination of just the general economic precarity, where at the flick of MBS's risk, we can be paying $4, we're paying $4 a gallon all of a sudden because MBS decided to restrict production. Why?

Because a year ago, I was telling people like 2024, gas prices are going to go up because MBS doesn't like Joe Biden. And sure enough, we're heading into 2024, gas prices are going to go up because MBS doesn't like Joe Biden. And sure enough, we're heading into 2024, gas prices are going to go up. And so people, I think, it gives you a sense of anxiety that at any moment you could start to see these wild swings. Because we went through in 2021, this big upswing. And now it's nice that it's back to 3%, but I don't think people feel comfortable that it's going to stay there combined with housing. Like the inability of people to afford either to buy a house, buy a home, uh, or if, if they bought a home, they can't move because they're kind of locked into a low interest rate and prices have soared everywhere else. So they can't

kind of go anywhere else. Or if they don't have a home, they're even worse off. And it's eating up more and more and more of people's income. And so while everything else is true, like we have had a long run of adding jobs. You're seeing people, you're seeing, you had the unemployment rate go up this last month because hundreds of thousands of people who had been out of the labor force came in because they're like wow wages are up Jobs are available. I'm actually gonna try to get a job now like we haven't had that practically since World War two and What and real wage growth is happening? But in the context of the amount that people are paying for housing and the then the kind of precarity that people feel about the future,

nobody's going to sit there and say, yeah, things are great, even if they're so much better than they were before. And gas prices are a huge part of that. And you disagree with us for environmental reasons, but Biden is going to have to answer to voters in Scranton about Keystone, revoking the permit for Keystone,

which has given MBS even more power over our economy. And that's really, I mean, it's another interesting part, and we've talked about this a lot, of the economy right now, which is gas prices in some parts of the country have actually been okay. Not great, but okay. And then in other parts of the country, they are horrific. It just, depending on where you are,

you're experiencing the economy differently. It's the same thing, you know, if you're in the market for a car, if you're in the market for a house, you're experiencing a different economy than if you're, you know, good on some of those things. And so it is, it doesn't surprise me because that also those sentiments kind of bleed into other things. And people all pick up on that feeling of malaise. Speaking of which, we can put A4 up on the screen here. This is from the New York Times. This is an upshot. Quote, President Biden is underperforming among non-white voters in New York Times, Santa College national polls over the last year, helping to keep the race close in a hypothetical rematch against Donald Trump. On average,

Mr. Biden leads Mr. Trump by just 53% to 28% among registered non-white voters in a compilation of polls from 2022 and 23, which includes over 1,500 non-white respondents. So that might seem like a big margin, but as the Times continues to say, the results represent a marked deterioration in Mr. Biden's support compared with 2020 when he won more than 70% of non-white voters. So that's a 17% dip, 53% after he won about 70% of non-white voters. Ryan, those are really bad numbers for Biden. Those are. And let me just add one point on the fossil fuel before we get to the voters. And I'm not celebrating this, but fossil fuel production is up from the Trump era. It's true that, I mean, Nick's Keystone XL, it's true that he just passed a regulation saying you can't put liquid natural gas on trains.

I mean, communities where trains go through are probably breathing a sigh of relief over that. Those headlines are true. But overall, fossil fuel production in the United States is up significantly from 2019 and 2020. Like, it's this weird kind of people think that Sunrise Movement is kind of running the White House or something. And so therefore, you know, he's just kept everything in the ground.

But if people can just Google like the production numbers, we're pumping an enormous amount of fossil fuel. I think we have to solve it on the demand side. Like we just have to get away from it so that Mohammed bin Salman says, oh, yeah, well, you know, I'm taking a million barrels a month or a million barrels a day offline. We're like, OK, do whatever you want. We got windmills and solar panels over here. We got hydro. We got nuclear, whatever.

We're like, we're fine. And we will still have needs for gas and for fossil fuels. But if the demand is way down, then he can't really whip us around the way he is. Although, yeah, and we don't, I guess, need to get too far in this. I just say things like Keystone XL help us sort of ease into the transition. But anyway, the 17-point dip among nonwhite voters for Biden is significant. Again, he's still up by a big margin. I don't know if this is through anything. I mean, it seems like the New York Times reading of this

is that it's not something that Donald Trump has done because they're doing these hypothetical match-ups. It's not just favorability of Joe Biden. It's a hypothetical match-up. It seems like everyone's saying, well, this is a Biden problem, not a Trump solution. I don't know. I actually have no idea what's going on there. I wonder how much of it is like reverse magnetic, where as Democrats increasingly become the party of kind of suburban college-educated voters, and particularly white suburban college- educated voters, that if there's just something about that coalition that pushes then non-white, non-college educated and white non-college educated voters out of the coalition because there's just the kind of cultural differences are so strong. The class differences, yeah. Class differences that manifest as cultural

differences are so distinct that it makes it, but on the the other hand you had a New Deal coalition that had you know the NAACP and outright white supremacists, right because Everybody was in it for higher wages for and for union power and and for the kind of material gains I think that that the New Deal coalition was pushing for so it's an act It actually is not impossible to pull that coalition together But there's something different about our kind of tribalized social media driven era that might make it uh more more difficult uh you're but you and then the question will be what's the what are

the policy implications of that because back in the mid 90s You had right-wing Democrats who were pushing really hard to say we need to move away from our working-class base And we need to move to the suburban voter because the suburban voter is going to be more conservative on Economic issues and that's where we need to be and that that lined them up with their kind of corporate PAC strategy the Clintonian stuff That they where they wanted to take the party. Today, though, if you survey suburban white college-educated voters, economically, they're often to the left of non-college working class people. So you get into this really awkward place where, as a party, to maintain a kind of left-wing economic material-driven agenda, you have to override what a lot of working class voters are telling people. And on cultural issues too, social issues.

It's the same problem that arises when everyone tried to make Latinx happen and working class Hispanic voters were like, let's cool it with that. I think they're backing off that somewhat and I think these numbers are a reason that they're backing off. They're like, oh, okay, we tried the Oberlin approach. Yes, we tried the Oberlin approach. And the arrow's just pointing down. So let's try not.

You know, actually, this isn't entirely dissimilar from what we're going to talk about in the next block, which is Elon Musk and the Anti-Defamation League. It's a pretty interesting back and forth and not also dissimilar from the one we talked about recently with the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which Musk, there's a lawsuit where Musk accused the Center for Countering Digital Hate of hurting X's relationship with the advertisers, and that's from The Guardian. But The Guardian also is now digging into what's going on with the ADL and Elon Musk, and it's very similar. It's about advertisers. So reading from them again, it says, Elon Musk has threatened to sue the Anti-Defamation League after accusing the U.S.-based civil rights group that campaigns against

anti-Semitism and bigotry of trying to, quote, kill his ex-social media platform. The owner of formerly known as Twitter said the ADL was trying to shut down his company by, quote, falsely accusing it and me of being anti-Semitic. In a series of posts, Musk said advertising sales for the business were down 60 percent and, quote, based on what we've heard from advertisers, ADL seems to be responsible for most of our revenue lost. He also said, quote, it looks like we have no choice but to file a defamation lawsuit against the Anti-Defamation League. Dot, dot, dot. Oh, the irony. He also said that he wants to be, quote, super clear he's in favor of free speech, but, quote, against anti-Semitism of any kind.

Now, the ADL is saying that anti-Semitic posts on X increased sharply after Musk bought the site back in October 22, and the platform subsequently reinstated extremists and conspiracy theorists while allowing the harassment of former members of its now dissolved Trust and Safety Council. A lot of money on the line here, clearly. It does remind me of what some conservatives, an argument you hear from some people on the right

and in the center even about ESG, that you can have one index that is following whatever the rating system is, whatever the environmental score system is, and you'll get BlackRock embracing it. And this affects a wide swath of businesses. It really affects where money is going. It affects all of that sort of stuff. And so I think Elon Musk is making a similar thing, that if people are funneling their ad decisions through the Anti-Defamation League, then in the Anti-Defamation League has a bias against him. If you buy the argument, which I mean I do, but we probably disagree on that. If you buy it, then all of these advertisers are going to be affected by one bias source that's not neutral.

But I don't think they purport to be neutral either. Right. Well, first of all, let's score the hypocrisy. Like this guy is a free speech absolutist who is now trying to sue his second organization for their speech. And his top investors are recently, Saudi Arabia,

recently implemented a death penalty for somebody for a retweet at eight followers. Yeah, a retweet and This is he has said nothing about that. Yeah, where whereas if you're a business partner with somebody in a major enterprise and they use your activity on your business enterprise to Give somebody a death penalty. Mm-hmm for a retweet youweet, you're free to speak up and say, you know what, can we not do that? How about not? How about we don't kill that guy for a retweet? Since that goes against my beliefs as a free speech absolutist. Anyway, so taking him seriously

for a second, which I don't think he is, I think he just made a joke about defamation and defamation. I don't think he's actually going to sue. He just wanted the joke. Yeah. But I think he also said that discovery as a part of this lawsuit will show whether or not it's true that the ADL pressured all of these companies to pull out their advertising money. And then that's why Twitter's worth half of what it used to be worth the idea that you're gonna win your advertisers back by suing them and going through their emails is like

Couldn't be any more absurd. Yeah like that. That's how you're gonna win your advertisers back and secondly the idea that anybody needed the ADL To step away from advertising on Twitter is also absurd. So his theory is that if not for the ADL privately reaching out to these corporations, these giant corporations, Dove, Unilever, Coca-Cola, all the others, would just be bidding against themselves to get their advertisement under cat turd twos hundreds of millions of impressions Like if the CEO then CEOs just constantly engaging with cat turd and all of his friends It's very clear to the entire world What type of platform it is and then advertisers can decide whether or not they want to be part of that

The fact that the ADL was saying the exact same thing that everybody else was saying about the platform. He also flamboyantly unbanned a bunch of people who had been banned for saying, like, viciously anti-Semitic stuff. So you're like, okay, like, you're going to blame the ADL for that? And I'm no fan of the ADL.

I think that they have stretched the definition of anti-Semitism for political purposes in order to kind of shut down any criticism of the Israeli government, for instance. However, in this case, I just don't think, I think if the ADL never even existed, people would have clearly seen the changes that he publicly said he was making at Twitter. Yeah, no, I don't think that's wrong. Although I do think the ADL and I think the SPLC, which we've talked about here before, the SPLC is in a pretty gnarly lawsuit where it had to admit that it wasn't totally neutral and non-biased. I do think those have had sweeping,

chilling effects on not just conservative organizations, but some other organizations that said- I mean, that's true, but that's different. Yeah, it is. Yeah, it is. And but the definition inflation, it also reminds me of what we're talking about in the last segment. But this is where it's an impossible circle to square, because I think one of the things people loved about Twitter in the first place in the halcyon days where Jack Dorsey was, you know, renegade, is that it was this open platform where people were dunking on racists and people with horrific

arguments, bad ideas. And it was, you know, there was a time when Twitter wasn't really even quite that political and it was more just fun. But there was also a time where like you went to Twitter and the level of open speech just embarrassed everybody who was remaining, you know, still had these like lingering bigoted sentiments. They looked ridiculous. I mean, that was the beauty of these exchanges is that these minority voices, I think if anything, they were empowered by people who freaked out and tried to say like, you don't belong on the platform. There was something really powerful about when they were on the platform and getting absolutely torched nonstop.

And there was something that people looked at that and was like, yeah, this is what we do. Like, this is what we can all agree the boundaries of decency and political speech are. We don't necessarily need Big Brother and Silicon Valley or the government to make these decisions for us. But that's obviously

not happening anymore because when you rely on corporate advertising dollars, it doesn't matter. Like they don't want their content next to, for instance, here's a good one, Libs of TikTok. I'm reading from my colleague, David Harsanyi. He says, Elon Musk contends that the ADL wants him to ban the Libs of TikTok, a popular account run by an Orthodox Jew, Chaya Rajchik, who gained fame by reposting real leftists saying real things. It's certainly plausible, considering the ADL already has an entry for Rajchik in its, quote, glossary of terms. But, well, Harsanyi says, I'm not a big fan of nutpicking. I haven't seen anything in her feed that could rationally be construed as anti-Semitic. And that speaks to the problem of who gets to decide what, quote,

hate speech entails. And so it's fine. I mean, that's the problem with who gets to decide what quote hate speech entails and so it's fine I mean, that's the problem with Twitter if you want to be In this business, you're gonna have a hard time being in the ad sales business. Yeah, these two things seem utterly Irreconcilable even though Twitter and we've talked about like making Twitter a public, you know utility before Because it's you know, basically this de facto town square for a very particular kind of speech. I mean, it's a good, in this context, there's some good reason for that,

because if you're looking at this and you're expecting advertisers to prop up a platform where you necessarily, in order to be a fair platform, allow people to speak their mind and say things that not everyone's gonna agree with Who are you gonna get to advertise there? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think that's right Yeah, make it a make it a public pick an actual public square I Think my idea should be adopted. I already solved the Catalan independence crisis of the Twitter crisis

That's right If you didn't catch Ryan solving the Catalan independence crisis, just check out our video on the Spanish Soccer Federation because that's where you'll find it. Yeah. You just have Twitter be owned by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and you have five board members. The right can pick two, the left can pick two, and then whoever wins the White House gets to pick one. And then they kind of like battle it out. Marjorie Taylor Greene can be on there. Elon can be on there, whatever. And they just, they set policy.

And maybe they even have to run. They have to get elected so we can all kind of democratically weigh in on how we want this public square. And in order to be on, you have to show your driver's license. I don't know. MTG can figure this out when she and like Van Jones are on the board together or whatever. Well, I mean, and that's the thing with Twitter. It's that nobody, I mean, you can try to go to a subscriber model basically, which is, you know, in some ways what Substack is doing. You know, if the New York Times thinks its advertising revenue is going to be hurt because it now has this really small niche consumer base that's able to pay a lot of money, you know, you have these educated sort of liberal people who

have disposable income and can pay for the New York Times. They don't want to see Tom Cotton's op-ed in 2020 in the New York Times. So the New York Times takes it down, not for any journalistic reason, I would argue that was a pretense, but they take it down either way. And then you can go to Substack, which is basically, I mean, Barry Weiss ends up at Substack, is doing fabulously well on Substack, and it solves the New York Times advertising problem. That's not great for journalism. And I don't think it's great for the public square either if we can't coexist together because we're all propped up by these

niche different advertising areas as opposed to, I don't know, maybe a subscriber model can work for X. It's still very much in flux and in transition between what it was and what Elon Musk wants it to be. So I guess we'll just have to wait. Yeah, we will. Well, we are not waiting to find out what's in the new Huawei phone that was announced actually while Gina Raimundo was in China, right? They unveiled it. The Commerce Secretary, former governor of Rhode Island, was visiting China trying to cool tension. And yeah, they dropped this new phone that went viral over in China. It includes some type of, I'm not even going to try to describe the technology, just be a waste of everybody's time. Super cool and fast

phone, basically, operating on some cool technology that Huawei has been able to develop despite, and perhaps in spite of or in the face of U.S. restrictions on Huawei. So the U.S. blocked Huawei from all sorts of kind of technological cooperation with U.S. and U.S.-aligned chip makers and processors. And so they kind of went back to their own drawing board and came out with this phone that they unveiled to Time, clearly with the Commerce Secretary going over to China. People saying it operates faster than some of the best 5G phones out there. I don't know how. Seems cool. Seems good. And this is related to, and we can put up this first element,

Reuters reporting, Bloomberg confirming that China is seeking a $40 billion fund to invest in its kind of onshoring of chipmaking, which would be cool because, hey, China, go ahead, develop a massive semiconductor industry on the Chinese mainland. Then maybe we don't have to have a war over Taiwan. Over Taiwan, right. Which the whole thing's great, like the precision needed to produce these semiconductors

suggests that a war zone probably is not good for business there. You'd think, you'd think. Like I said, not an expert, but I think probably blowing up the factories doesn't help with the development. Well. Unless you just, that means you have to rebuild them. And that's how Japan and Germany did so well after World War II.

So maybe that's our plan. Well, and China on-shoring chip technology also puts, I mean, it creates this, or I think it exacerbates an existing tension in that European countries, other people who are, you know, for price competition reasons, whatever, still relying on Chinese technology, whatever it is, you can, I mean, they're creating more reasons like Germany with Russian oil, right? Like you're on the hook if you're really dependent on Chinese semiconductors because so much of the global semiconductor industry, if that's what happens with this $40 billion fund,

continues to be exploding in China at competitive rates, then it can just exacerbate the dependency problem, which of course some people see as a good problem to have because it will de-escalate any actual military tensions. I'm not sure I buy that argument. Now, Reuters quotes an analyst with Tech Insights who says this development is, quote, a slap in the face to the US. He said Raymundo comes seeking to cool things down and this chip is saying, look what we can do. We don't need you. This is also from the Reuters report. They say from 2019, the US has restricted Huawei's access to chip making tools essential for producing the most advanced handset models, with the company only able to launch limited batches of 5G models using stockpiled chips. And so now you put the sort of feet to the fire when it comes to tariffs. People are going to be saying U.S. policy is

counterproductive, that it's creating all of these different unintended consequences when, in fact, Ryan, it is also these policies, whether or not libertarians want to admit it, are not just about low prices, of course, in this case, they're also about making sure that if there is an incursion in Taiwan, we have an ability to have not just phones, not just smartphones like this new Huawei one, but also military technology to be able to defend Taiwan. Right, and the kind of ban and the crackdown on Huawei

also came because of these military connections. This wasn't just a kind of trade war between the U.S. and China. It was also the U.S. saying, look, we've discovered that Huawei is basically putting bugs in a lot of this technology, this 5G technology that they're helping build around the world. And so they told all their allies as well, don't know Huawei technology because we believe that we're getting spied on. And the US is like, we're the only ones that are allowed to spy on everybody. I was just going to say, take that message to Angela Merkel. Yeah, exactly. And so that kind of fueled then this,

the trade implications here, which then resulted in Huawei coming out with this breakthrough technology, which once again, I think, complicates this argument that the only way that you can get innovation is through a kind of pure capitalist system. It's obviously the case that there's some significant market activity in China, but it's also very heavily directed by the state. It's not remotely a pure free market. And the fact that you can continue to get economic growth if fragile as it is now and continue to get serious innovation

you know really kind of undermines the kind of Western claim that the only way to do it is is Through like, you know, you know Tech bros take an acid in Silicon Valley and getting a VC money or something. Well, yeah I mean, that's the whole DARPA story if you like pulled that's true's true. Exactly. That's a great point. That was state funded and produced. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. If you pull that thread long enough. It was generals taking acid. Yeah, that's actually true. It is amazing how many rich and powerful people were taking acid. Well, you know, you wrote a book on it. Yeah, those were heady days. This is Your Country on Drugs by Ray and Graham, available at a bookstore near you. Probably not

actually anymore, but you can probably find it in some. Maybe available at a bookstore near you. Let's move on to Mitch McConnell, the big news of the week. And it is really big news, continuing to be really big news. Why? Because it's actually easy to forget this, but Mitch McConnell has been the Senate Republican leader for 16 years, 16 years. It's just mind boggling when you really think of how long Republicans have gone without having any leadership transition in the upper chamber. It's actually shocking. I can't remember. I mean, Nancy Pelosi's reign in the House wasn't that long. I mean, it's close.

It's the same, but she's gone. Yeah, so she also took over in 2007. Although she became leader in like 2003. That's true. She was leader. Minority leader. And then, yeah, and then took. Which is similar.

Or maybe she took over in 2005 when Gebhardt ran for president in 2004 and washed out. Oh, Gebhardt. Wow. Yeah. Well, let's put the first element up here. This is from CBS News reporter. It says Congress's in-house doctor says he's examined Mitch McConnell, including a review of his MRI results, and says there's no evidence of seizures disorder, stroke, or Parkinson's. A lot of people immediately reacted to this by saying that's incredibly hard to believe. It feels

almost Soviet in the level of like Pravda type spin that we're seeing, including, it seems, Senator Rand Paul. We can put the next element up on the screen, who is a doctor. He's an eye doctor, isn't he? He's an optometrist. He said, quote, I don't think it's been particularly helpful to have the Senate doctor describing this as dehydration, which I think even a non-physician seeing that probably aren't really accepting that explanation. Yeah, I would think that's dead on if most people see that letter versus the two videos, one from July and one from just what was it last week. They're not going to look at that and say, ah, yes, dehydration is what caused him to pause uncomfortably for

like a minute in both cases, not quite a minute, probably 30 seconds. But you know, when those seconds are so painful, it feels like 10 minutes, 30 seconds does. But let's move on to the next element here. This is from The Hill, which points out that editors of National Review, which have come out and they said that Mitch McConnell is, quote, a legend of the U.S. Senate and, quote, one of the most effective leaders in memory. He should step aside from his post. And then we have D4. This is from The New York Times on potential replacements to Mitch McConnell, which they list as the three Johns. And that is exactly what it sounds like. John Thune, John Cornyn, and John Barrasso. They also float the idea of Joni Ernst and Shelley Moore Capito potentially going for that top slot.

I have heard rumblings that Capito is a serious contender for that. I want to read a quote from a senior Senate staffer with some color here that says basically, quote, it's an open field and there will be no coordination. So this is two breaking points from a senior Senate staffer who points out it's the first leadership transition in 16 years. Whoever replaces McConnell has the opportunity basically to, quote, transform the Senate. And it looks like the Senate staffer is basically saying that John Thune is kind of doing the job of leader right now. And the more that Mitch McConnell cedes, the more ground McConnell cedes specifically to Thune, the more that there's just sort of the power of inertia

moves in Thune's direction and gives him the clear advantage here. But John Cornyn really, really wants it is what I'm hearing from the source. And I definitely believe that John Cornyn really wants it. He's a good fundraiser, so he's definitely a potential candidate. But, you know, I think that's where you get an edge from Joni Ernst and Shelley Moore Capito if they want to run, is that the optics in 2023 of the three Johns being the potential heirs to the McConnell throne are not great for Republicans when they're trying to also say, I mean, Barrasso and Cornyn are both 71. Thune is like 62, so he's slightly younger, but like a bunch of old white dudes, you know,

those are optics that some Republicans who like to exploit the identity politics angle, the I'm a woman angle, could have a lot of fun with. And we have a profile of Cornyn a couple years ago that we did over at The Intercept that if anybody's curious about this next potential leader is a fun one to read. He's just a very affable, old school, Texas oil man, like Republican. Like a Karl Rove basically recruited him into politics. So that's kind of what you need to know about him. Like he's just a Rove guy who's like good with the lawyers.

He's good with the oil men. And he's gonna go like in whatever direction, you know, he's like very much like a Chuck Schumer or a Joe Biden in the sense that they're, they're very good politicians. They're just, and if the party's moving in one direction, they're going to move in that, move in that direction. Thune, you know, as he accumulates power, like you said, in the Senate, he's going to be able to do favors for people. And he's going to be increasingly then able to get people on his side. Cornyn is very popular. It's Barrasso, though, that is more of the Trumpy guy, who tries to be more of the Trumpy guy. Neither Thune nor Cornyn are kind of obsequious Trump

supporters. They're very similar to McConnell. Barrasso isnyn are kind of obsequious Trump supporters. They're very similar to McConnell. Barrasso's more of a kind of movement conservative, I would think. That's interesting about Shelley Moore Capito. Good friends with Manchin, like the Manchin-Moore Capito dynasty. This has been this bipartisan West Virginia political powerhouse for years, and the Moores and the Capitos, actually, and she combines them both there. And so, so you think that she has a real shot, or? I just think that it's really easy to exploit the,

and if she wants it, I mean, she's probably also a pretty good fundraiser. I'm not sure I would have to check on that, but like, if she wants it, the idea that you have these three guys who are also two of whom are in their 70s as well, Thune, who's not exactly charismatic, if that's what you want in the Senate leader, it just depends. But I could see someone really exploiting the idea that, listen, this has been 16 years. You guys have been in leadership. I mean, Thune, Cornyn, Barrasso, they've been in leadership for a long time. And look where we are. I mean, Republicans in the Senate are not happy with where they are at all. And that's another interesting thing about this, where the more Mitch McConnell seems incapacitated, the more you have other people running the Senate and the more people recognize

exactly how poorly they think things have been led under Mitch McConnell. And that's not to say they aren't happy with some of the wins McConnell has sort of earned over the years, whether it's getting Merrick Garland, no vote on Merrick Garland, and getting all of these Senate seats, pushing through Kavanaugh, et cetera. It's not to say that people aren't happy with that. But when you look around at someone else's running the Senate and there's a stark contrast with how it's been run, that's one of those things that makes you think, oh, actually the grass is really greener. That's a benefit for somebody like Thune if they feel

like things are going more smoothly under him now, but it's also an indictment if he's someone who had been carrying out Mitch McConnell's orders. People might say, well, I don't trust you to actually, you know, in the long term do a great job. We're going to bring someone new and maybe Jenny Ernst, maybe someone from the outside. People are really unhappy from what I'm gathering. People are now just recognizing how unhappy they are with how things have been running in the Senate in recent years. So that could be a problem for people or it could be a benefit if, you know, you're jumped in and you're having some fun now. Yeah. I mean, Mitch McConnell gets celebrated as this, you know, absolute genius. And, you mean, Mitch McConnell gets celebrated as this absolute genius,

and yeah, he was able to prevent Merrick Garland from getting a vote. That's basically his legacy, that plus what he was able to do around campaign finance stuff. But yeah, his performance in 2021, the left thinks that Biden got nothing done. On the other hand, the Senate was divided 50-50,

Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinna being two of those 50. And they pushed through like $8 trillion in spending. American Rescue Plan, $2 trillion. The IRA. Then he got played with that chip deal. He's like, I'm not giving you that chip deal if you're still doing the IRA. And we're like, we're not doing the IRA. Then they passed $200, $300 billion in the chip deal. That afternoon, Schumer and Manchin put out a statement. It's like, oh, we have a deal on the IRA too. That's true.

I actually completely forgot how much that blew up in McConnell's face. Just humiliated him for two straight years. Yeah. Before he fell on his head. Yeah, and I mean, he had huge, huge problems during the Tea Party years, sort of wrangling then what, what did John McCain say, the wacko birds, but at the time was like Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, and maybe someone would put Marco Rubio in that sort of bunch. But it's never, you know, been smooth. He's never had a, in the last 10 years, at least a super easy journey with the conservative movement. Although

it was, you know, there were these sugar highs during the Supreme Court confirmation battles, and he's had a good relationship with like judicial, the conservative judicial movement. That is really what people will see as his legacy. All that is to say, though, this is years of discontent bubbling to the surface, and that could manifest in some interesting politics that really change the way Republicans work in Washington, DC. The implications for this, I think, are really serious. As somebody that's staunchly on the right, I would say it's a time for the Senate to really, really run, decide that it's running differently, decide that Kevin McCarthy is

a great model for Republican leadership. And that is an establishment guy. He's a politician, almost Cornyn-esque, although he was sort of changed by the Trump years. But he sees where the incentives are. And the incentives are not just paying lip service. They're not just saying X, Y, and Z. They're actually taking action on certain things. So we'll see if that translates into the Senate. But for legislation, people's daily lives, there is some stuff on the line

here in terms of how Republicans decide to manage the Senate. Right. And McConnell, as you know, was endorsed by Planned Parenthood when he first started running. Like that's how much people are willing to just move around. Planned Parenthood endorsed the person who reengineered the courts so that Roe got overturned. Well done. Full circle. How about that? Next, we're going to talk about this new Tucker Carlson interview.

And at first, I didn't even want to give this any oxygen because it's so absurd. But I think that it's worth talking about here because it's going to get oxygen no matter what we do and I think there's some incredibly important context that people need to have before the full video airs. When I saw this going around on Twitter, Tucker put out this clip teasing this interview with a guy who says he had sex with Brian Vaughn. I'm like, hmm, what?

I'm like, wait a minute, that guy looks familiar. Is that Larry Sinclair? This absolute notorious fabulist and liar and con man from back in 2007, 2008 days. And so I think it's, Tucker has not put out the full interview. Maybe Tucker includes all that context and dismantles him by the end of it.

It's not what it sounds like from the trailer that he put out. So play a little bit of that and then we'll talk about who this guy Larry Sinclair is and why it's important that we understand what his backstory is since this is probably going to get tens of millions of views on Twitter, or if you believe that counter. But even if you don't believe the counter and you think it's inflated by 10, it's going to be a lot. And so let's roll a little bit of this clip. You're just a guy who's in town for the night, and it sounds like you're looking to party. Yeah. Pulled up in a bar outside, and there's this guy that's introduced to me as Barack Obama. I had given Barack $250 to pay for coke. I start putting a line on a CD tray to snort.

And next thing I know, he's got a little pipe and he's smoking. So I just started rubbing my hand along his thigh to see where it was going. And it went the direction I had intended it to go. Even though you had sex with him twice, you did cocaine with him, watched him smoke crack twice, you had no idea who he was. I had no idea who he was.

You just asked the obvious question. What was Obama like on crack? Is it your sense that that's who Obama is, just transactional, or that he's bisexual? Or, like, what is that? It definitely wasn't Barack's first time, and I would almost be willing to bet you it wasn't as long. The guy's running for president,

and credible information comes out that he's smoking crack and having sex with dudes. That seems like a story. Well, it would be a story if the media really cared. I would hope that people could see that and just see how little sense all of it makes. Like, paying, he gave him $250. Like, they meet outside a bar,

all of a sudden he's giving him $250. Then somehow crack shows up. Yeah. Like, just the details on its own don't make sense what didn't he go by barry at the time not barack so this is inside the four corners of the guy's story and the best parts that go up like it to me it it's not credible like not not making sense uh from the trailer just from the just from the trailer and he's dropping the interview what thursday so tomorrow is that what it is? That sounds right, yeah.

But now Sinclair himself basically spent most of his adult life in and out of prison for fraud and for lying. For writing fake checks. For all sorts of other, like... Stealing tax returns. Yeah, crime. Forging signatures. Yeah, con man type crimes. There's, this is, if you notice the byline on this, Ben Smith, my old colleague at Politico. I was at Politico.

The Politico. At this time, the Politico. His attorney, or I don't think you'd call him attorney. You had to call him spokesperson because he'd already been disbarred at this point at the time was Montgomery Blair. Montgomery Blair Sibley, who people can kind of Google him too.

Just an extraordinary kind of figure in our politics, like this gadfly. He represented the D.C. Madam, and I worked with him on a story back in 2007. That's another reason I remember this, which involved me calling him and him answering the phone. That's what I mean by working on a story. He said a couple of funny things, and then answering the phone. That's what I mean by working on the story. And he said a couple funny things and I quoted him. He also told, and Ben has this in his story as well, he told a judge in 2004 or something that he couldn't show up for sentencing

or couldn't show up for his trial because he had terminal disease. That was 20 years ago. Clearly he's still alive. Yeah, I forgot about that part too. Like you couldn't, and he also, so he booked the National Press Club during the 2008 campaign trying to get the media to pay attention to him. And it didn't work because he was never able to produce anything that could even remotely show that he and Obama were even in the same area at the same time. You have to have something.

Right. And so not only did he have nothing, no corroborating witnesses, no people that he told over the years. trying to construct the backstory of a non-credible person, you couldn't do better than this guy who's been charged so many different times for crimes related to lying and deceit. It's not a good start. It's not a good start. And the other thing is... That's why I wanted to talk about this, because I think as kind of untoward as it feels to even air those allegations, they're going to get aired. And I'm curious if you're taking this. I think it's a cynical move by Tucker Carlson here, because he understands that in 2008 there was the Internet. He did put his stuff on YouTube, and it got almost a million views or something but the mainstream media and the conservative media as well was still playing a gatekeeper role yes

and there there are good elements and bad elements to this gatekeeping yep and I think Tucker knows now that the gate the gates are off he's that he's gonna be able to like basically put this into the bloodstream and tens of millions of Americans are going to believe it without ever knowing this backstory. Maybe he'll put it in the interview, but a lot of people won't even get to the end of it. And here's the interesting context. This is why I think the Barack Obama,

we're going into the 2007, 2008 fever swamps where there's all kinds of stuff circulating the primary. There's plenty of dirty tricks being played by the Clinton campaign. There was plenty of wild stuff coming out of even conservative oppo dives. Clinton oppo dives. Yeah, Clinton oppo dives. Crazy stuff was circulating around back then because Barack Obama's had an interesting

life. He lived in all kinds of different countries, and he was a new type of politician. First of all, he had been a senator for a couple of years, and people were trying to vet his record, and some really crazy stuff came out of that. I can't imagine what it was like to start covering some of this stuff back in 2000.

It must have been wild. One wild, I think it was Ben Smith who had the story that a bunch of his friends came out and publicly said that Obama was inflating his drug use. I actually remember that. It was the first presidential candidate in American history who was maybe falsely elevating. People were like, Coke? Barry? I don't think so.

I don't know about, I don't think so. Yeah, smoked a lot of weed, but. And now we have Kamala Harris on Breakfast Club being like, oh yeah, I smoked weed. Oh yeah, I listened to Snoop. And Charlamagne being like, when? She's like, I was listening to Snoop Dogg. That's right, so she's the second.

Yes, and Snoop wasn't even signed to a label yet at that point. Right. So the reason that this has become, it was like sort of bubbled to the surface of discourse again, I think is in large part from this Tablet Magazine interview that David Garrow, who's Obama's biographer, gave in early August. And he found, or he talked about in his book, and the story just did get kind of buried, that this is, I'm reading from a letter that Obama wrote to Alex McNair in November of 1982, quote, in regard to homosexuality, I must say that I believe this is an attempt

to remove oneself from the present, a refusal perhaps to perpetuate the endless farce of earthly life. You see, I make love to actually at, it's in the Emory University archives. They don't let you take pictures. They don't let you take it out. But Garrow's friend transcribed those paragraphs by hand. He wrote them down himself and then gave them to the New York Post. It ended in, and Garrow's a Pulitzer Prize winner. It ended up in Garrow's book. People didn't notice it when it came out in the book. It's a thousand page book.

It's a thousand page book. And it seemed like that tablet article, which was also like a thousand pages, is what got people to pay attention to this because, you know, everyone started excerpting it on Twitter. And so the bottom line is, A, people are going to be like, first of all, why does it matter that Barack Obama sounded like Judith Butler when he was writing to a girlfriend in 1982? And what does it matter if Barack Obama was gay? I feel like that's pretty much what the public is going to say, other than the fact that there's some intrigue to the idea that, you know, whatever. There are questions of why, you know, the corporate media didn't dig into all of this. You know, the letter, where was the curiosity about this, because it does seem strange

for a man who's married to a woman, but then you get back to the bottom question of who cares? Yeah, again, who cares? But I think that's why Tucker Carlson, to your point, every interview that he's done so far with Tucker on X, which I still think, like X itself, in this flux transition period, has been essentially not perfect, this immaculate manifestation of journalism, but a giant middle finger,

intentionally a giant middle finger to the gatekeepers. I think that's very intentionally what he's doing and saying, look, if the media didn't want to touch this, despite having an actual letter itself that Emory University is not letting anyone to, but if they don't want to touch it,, you know, having an actual letter itself that Emory University is not letting anyone. But if they don't want to touch it, I'm going to have fun with it and screw you guys for not doing it. An understandable sentiment, I will say. I'm not sure this is the best use of Tucker's time, though. Yeah. Yeah. I can only imagine that. Yeah. He sees that tablet thing. He's like, oh, yeah, there was that crank back in 08. You know, he said he hooked up with Obama.

Let's see if that guy's still alive. Said he was terminally ill. Oh, turns out, aren't we lucky? That was a lie. Yeah. He's still alive. Yeah. But, yeah, and that, like, you read Obama's letters from that period, from the early 1980s.

They're all dripping with that philosophical, just, you can just feel, it's early 20s, you know, men working through what it means to, you know, be a person in this world. And then, and this was the period when letters were still a thing. Yeah, you had to put everything down in writing. And there was a, there was kind of a cache to being able to write like these kind of profound sounding letters. People were kind of working out their identities through their letters. That's something that's basically gone.

You know, now we're doing the same thing but through like TikTok or Twitter or whatever. It's a shorter form too. It's more snippets. You have to sit down and be really deliberate if you're writing a letter, as opposed to when you're just like firing off a text message. Yeah, but for hundreds of years,

this was the thing that young men and young women would do. They would just write these like super purple letters, exploring like the deepest thing. He's like, the philosophers and writers that he name checks in these letters are just absurd and over the top. And I think the bit, yes. And I think one of the big like narratives that this is framed within is that there were things about Barack Obama that people felt like were, what's the word? I mean, he definitely was a new type of politician.

And I think some folks felt like the media kind of glossed over some of these things that like, if you go back to Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers and Obama coming out, like genuinely coming out of the left in a way that I can't think of another like super mainstream politician after since I mean, like maybe the only other example would be Bernie Sanders in 2016. And Obama wasn't static. He changed after he came out of the left very clearly. But he did have a huge

sort of his genesis politically was in the, you know, organizing areas, the organizing community in Chicago of the left. And that was intriguing to a lot of people. And they felt like maybe didn't get quite the attention it deserved in the media. Although it was, and it shows the paucity of the left at that time. And it was, and it was kind of like the Harvard law firm left, like the community organizing was done in, in like, and Darrell gets into this in the book in kind of collusion with these law firms. It's not the Black Panthers. It's a much different type of community organizing going on.

The aging Black Panthers. Like the post. Well, he ran against Bobby Rush. He ran against Bobby Rush, who was a leading Black Panther. But before that, yeah. And then he was very big into the anti-nuclear movement, anti-nuclear proliferation. That was a big niche issue for the left because they were, they cared a lot about Latin Central America. Because of Reaganomics and Reagan, they had been so severely routed in the kind of New Deal and anti-war stuff that had kind of fueled what was a left.

But there wasn't much left. Of the left. Yeah, how much was left of the left. And so, yes, he comes out of that, but it's a much kind of weaker and kind of more elite aligned movement. Yeah, I mean, he's just a fascinating figure. So lots for David Garrow to work with, regardless. All right, Ryan, you're going to take us through some election results from Rhode Island. What have you got?

So progressive Aaron Regenberg was defeated in the Rhode Island House election last night, despite the support of Bernie Sanders and AOC, we can put up this first element. A Biden and Obama official named Gabe Ammo ended up eking out a victory against Regenberg. This came after consolidation by the establishment against Regenberg. A good example of it playing out here is from former Congressman Kennedy. If we can play this clip here. And I really hope this district takes Gabe and moves him on as their congressman because they won't go wrong with Gabe. I will tell you his opponents, especially the one that's in the front runner status

right now, the notion that he would come out against the largest economic driver in the first district, the defense economy, left me flabbergasted. The notion that you can be a good Democrat and a liberal and not also support a strong national defense and good jobs here at home makes no sense. Gabe is a good Democrat and a strong liberal, but it doesn't mean he's not going to fight for Rhode Island jobs. And the way you fight for Rhode Island jobs is you don't cancel out Jack Reed, who's chairman of the Appropriations for Defense Spending. That's what Aaron Regenberg would do.

So Aaron Regenberg there getting slammed by Kennedy, who seems genuinely angry because he recommended a significant but not that significant cut to the military spending budget. And people need to understand that is the reaction that you get from even a standard establishment Democrat who will just publicly say, you know, how dare you? What on earth are you possibly doing? Now, Bernie Sanders held a rally last Sunday in Providence, Rhode Island, for Aaron, who was a former state legislator who pushed through a sweeping set of kind of progressive legislation while he was in the Providence State House. But he didn't just have Kennedy and the establishment as his opponent, and this is the story we'll talk about here. And we're also going to get to the big mistakes that

Aaron Regenberg himself made at the end of this. But what's amazing here is that for all of the anger that former Congressman Kennedy felt toward Regenberg, that was matched or even eclipsed by the anger of what you would call, say, the post-left or maybe the online left, chaos left. I don't know, Emily, we got to come up with a name for them. Non-electoral left that believes, and we can put up this Boston Globe article, led here by an organization that was called the Co-op and then also Rhode Island DSA, which said that they were not participating in this primary because they believe the Democratic Party is thoroughly corrupted and et cetera. To me, that is a perfectly defensible position. You don't want to participate in a Democratic

primary. You are under no obligation to participate in a Democratic primary. You want to run a third party candidate? Wonderful. Do that too. This is America. Run a third party candidate. But they didn't do those things. They did participate in the Democratic primary, but the way they participated in it was by solely going after the most progressive candidate in the race. They didn't have somebody else that they were supporting. They just didn't like Regenberg. And part of it is strategic because the idea is that if you can elect kind of a, if Bernie and AOC can team up and go to Rhode Island and elect a progressive legislator to the Rhode Island congressional delegation, then that encourages more people

than to participate in Democratic primaries and try to take over the Democratic Party from the inside. If you believe that that's a dead end and you want to build a third party instead, or you don't want to be involved in electoral politics at all, then you need that project to fail. And so in some ways, it is strategic. I think in other ways, it was just nihilistic that there was a lot of bad blood between Regenberg and some of these other Rhode Island lefties. And so they just didn't want him to win. So they end up getting a Biden-Obama official instead. This is a really kind of sad and ignoble end to a story that started out with a lot of promise in Rhode Island. If we can put up this next clip, run through this story pretty quickly.

So this is from 2021. In 2020, the kind of broad Rhode Island left came together and in September of 2020, ousted 10 incumbents in the Providence State House and ended up bringing about a lot of progressive change in Rhode Island. And it was great to see because the idea was, look, a lot of working class people in Rhode Island, the Democratic Party, which is basically the only party in Rhode Island, is not responsive to working class needs. We don't need to collect that many votes to actually

get these people out of the state house and state senate. So let's combine our forces and let's take it seriously and let's throw these bums out. And they did that. Then in 2021, as I covered there, they put together a slate of kind of 50 where they're going to run a governor, a lieutenant governor, up and down. They're going to take over the state house. Before that could happen, it just collapsed in drama. Utter chaos. Some people who had been elected by this co-op left the co-op for all sorts of reasons,

saying that the co-op was a mess, the co-op wanted to kick out some of the other members, and through this period, DSA is kind of collapsing in its own acrimony, and recently DSA decides that they're not doing electoral politics at all, which although that wasn't true, they're doing electoral politics, just not running candidates, just engaging in electoral politics. So we can put up this next clip. Dan Marins over at HuffPost kind of did a good story on this back in the end of 2021,

if people want to read the kind of sad drama that brought this to an end. And that brings us up to the place where then in 2022, David Siegel runs in an open primary. He has the support of the CPC, the support of Bernie Sanders. He ends up falling short to Seth Magaziner, who's now going to be in office as long as he wants. And then now progressives have swung and missed at this. So they had a chance to have two Bernie backed members of Congress representing Rhode Island in Congress. Instead they will now have zero. Now, not to let Aaron himself off the hook. If the election were held a couple of weeks ago, he probably wins. And that's why you hear so much panic in Kennedy's voice right there.

At the last debate, he was hammered from all sides for a super PAC that his father-in-law had funded on his behalf to the tune of about $125,000, which is a small amount of money in today's politics. But when you only need 10,000 votes and you can – if you can get $100,000 in mailing, it helps. So the question that people were asking of Aaron was, did you coordinate with this super PAC? And in the debate, he was accused of having what's called a red box. We've talked about red boxes before. This is a little tiny piece on your campaign website where you click on it and it goes to, it's messaging for a super pack, like what demographics you want to target and with what messages. It's intended and it's a way to get around coordination laws because as long as you have

a link on your campaign website that somebody can find, then you're not coordinating because it's just public information and a super PAC can go out and find it. So Matos challenged Aaron directly, you know, did you have a red box on your website? And he flat out lied in the debate and said no, he did not have a red box. All it took was the Wayback Machine and Matos was able to show later, like no, he did have one. So there are a lot of different ways you can handle that if you were gonna do a Summer Lee did a super PAC like candidates should not be I mean she didn't do a survey there were super PACs

Working to benefit summer Lee summer Lee would not be in Congress right now if the Working Families Party justice Democrats You know had not come in at the very end with this big outside spending which is called a super PAC But summer Lee was open about it. She's like hey these super PACs are supporting me I don't I don't I don't like this campaign system, but a PAC is spending millions of dollars against me So if they want to spend a million at the end I'm not gonna tell them not to and she didn't lie about whether or not she had a red box on her site and was coordinating with them the decision to have a father-in-law do the super pack kind of independently if i were going to be cynical about it i'd tell them go give it to the

working families party go you know give it to some other organization don't just do your own super pack and also don't lie like don't if you have a red box be like look every the talking point is out there i'm not going to unilaterally disarm. Like, that's what everybody says. Like, I want the system to change, but until the system changes, I'm going to fight fire with fire. Like, that's all you need to do. Instead, he said no. And because turnout in this election was so small, that means it's a highly informed voter demographic. So, a highly informed electorate.

So, they knew. Like, this penetrated the consciousness of these voters. There were only 35,000 people that voted total in this primary. This was another case where, like with AOC, if the left had been able to cobble together 11,000, 12,000 votes, they win. We'll see what Ammo winds up with, but I think he'll own 11,000, 12,000 votes, and he'll probably end up winning by 2,000 or 3,000 votes against Regenberg. And so a pretty pitiful end to what began as a kind of hopeful moment in 2020, which kind of sums up the left, I think, over the last three years. Yeah, no, that's interesting. So there have been a lot of responses. There has been a lot of responses

to Washington Post journalist Philip Bump's appearance on Gnome Dwarven. He's the owner of the Comedy Cellars in New York, his podcast. And it was fodder for a lot of critics of media, especially to watch Bump have a very, very difficult time defending his stance that Hunter Biden doesn't go to Joe Biden. So anything that sort of affects Hunter Biden, there's not enough evidence suggesting that Joe Biden was implicated in wrongdoing to basically draw conclusions about the president. Dwarman says as he opens the podcast, basically, I was looking for the smartest person who disagrees with me

on Hunter Biden to come on and have a conversation. And basically, I want to learn what the other side is and the best version of the other side, because I'm genuinely curious and want to see how it holds up to scrutiny. Well, if you accept this as an experiment to test that question, how well does the defense of Joe Biden basically hold up to scrutiny? The video didn't go so well for Philip Bump. So let's take a look at a quick clip from how it went. What do you take from the text message to his adult daughter? Hunter text message. I have to get 50 percent of my income to pop. I have no idea what that means. I don't. I have no idea what that means.

It's it's it's I know it's circumstantial evidence and you prefer that. What could I have no idea. I don't know. Well, I appreciate your, has anybody, has anybody asked her? I don't know. I don't know. Don't you think somebody should ask her? Okay. Like I'm not, I just said, I don't know. And I don't know what to make of it. So I have nothing to say about it. Yeah. But you say there's no evidence, no evidence, but then there's a text message where he says, I give Pop 50% of my money. That's evidence. Okay, well, okay, fine, fine. It's evidence.

I appreciate you having me on. It doesn't, something like that. Who do you think is being more, I listen to that and I'm saying, you can free to go. I feel you want me to leave, like just walk out in the middle of this because that way you can like. You can go. Is this a standard really? This is the way the Washington Post handles people who disagree with them? Yeah, when I agree to be on for 45 minutes and then I get on for an hour and 15. Yeah, so that is at the end of the interview

because Bump does get up and leave, but he had been there for some hour going back and forth with Noam Dwarman. You can actually watch the interview. I think it's very interesting because Philip Bump repeatedly says that he's kind of debunked. He uses the phrase debunked, this idea that Joe Biden is potentially implicated in Hunter's wrongdoing. Dwarman there is referencing that text message from Hunter Biden to his daughter, Naomi Biden, that was found on his laptop, suggesting he had been siphoning, that his father had been getting money funneled to him from Hunter's work. And we know that his work was influence peddling, essentially. So if you don't care about the Hunter Biden thing, I don't particularly blame you. I care about it

because I like covering influence peddling. But what I want to get to the bottom of, whether it's on the left or the right, by the way, is what the real world serious consequences of the double standards in our politics are. And at this point, I am talking about left and right, although I think it's particularly a problem for the left because the left is largely in charge of the media and the media does largely purport to be a neutral arbiter of a lot of these things. Philip Bump isn't out there saying, listen, I'm a partisan Democrat, so take my perspective with a grain of salt. He's not saying that. And I think that's a real problem. Let's put up the second element. This is a story that you may have also heard, I think Crystal and Sagar covered it,

about this serious attempt to rein in corruption in Ukraine. So that's from Reuters. It says, Ukraine lawmakers back anti-graft disclosure rule, comma, but with loophole. I wonder how the loophole got there. There's a lot of money flowing in the United States and in Ukraine, as we all know. We basically understand that at this point.

But what I just want to focus our attention on for a moment is something a lot of the media isn't talking about when it comes to Joe Biden and when it comes to Ukraine. If we go back to when Joe Biden had Ukraine in his portfolio during the Obama administration, there's a serious question of him being sent over to Ukraine to have these conversations with Viktor Shokin and whomever else, who's the prosecutor that Biden ended up firing, about corruption in a foreign country when his own son is being paid tens of thousands of dollars a month, like $80,000 a month, by Burisma, by a corrupt oil and gas company in Ukraine. So this is America taking

their credibility and all of their aid money back in the Obama administration over to Ukraine and saying, you guys really got to clean up your corruption. The messenger for that really needed to clean up his own corruption, as even people in the State Department recognized when they realized what Hunter Biden was doing with the Biden family name back at the time. Fast forward to 2022, 2023, Joe Biden is overseeing millions and millions of dollars going over to Ukraine, and he is completely compromised. There's just no other question. There's no question about it because even Philip Bump recognizes that what Hunter Biden did with the Joe Biden family name was wrong. And whether

or not you think Joe Biden literally profited from any of that, whether or not you think he's been honest, et cetera, et cetera, it is absolutely no questions asked affecting the way, affecting the moral credibility of the United States as they say, hey, let's put a pause on some of this corruption. This is hard-earned American taxpayer dollars. We're giving it to you to fight this war effort. We need to make sure that it's going to the right places. Our moral credibility is absolutely hampered by the reality that the Biden family name was being used to peddle influence for the last decade, essentially. Now, this goes in both directions. We can talk about Jared Kushner, for instance. You get to a

place where basically the left has no credibility on Jared Kushner. There are some serious problems there. People on the left who don't care about Hunter, but care about Jared, which I would argue is most of the left, is in a huge credibility deficit once again. And I get that they'll say, why should we talk about Jared? Or I get why people on the right would say, why should we talk about Jared, when when it came to Hunter, you know, you had 2020, in 2020, the intelligence community, you had top Democrats, you had big tech rallying in this concerted effort to censor information about it. I get why conservatives don't want to touch the Jared stuff. But once again,

if you are implicated in influence peddling, as Jared Kushner has been when it comes to Saudi Arabia, leaving the Trump administration with Saudi Arabia in his portfolio and then getting a massive influx of investment money from Saudi Arabia, from the Saudi investment bank, then, yeah, you're in a huge credibility problem once again. And let's put up the next element because this is another serious consequence of double standards. This is a New York Times headline. And if you're listening to this, I wish you could see the picture. It's a juxtaposition of Dianne Feinstein and Mitch McConnell. The New York Times asks, reluctant to retire, leaders raise a tough question. How old is too old? Once again, a consequence of the double standard is that the left has no credibility saying that Mitch McConnell needs to retire, which, by the way, Mitch McConnell absolutely needs to retire.

And the right loses credibility, although most people on the right are not defending Mitch McConnell. As we talked about earlier in the show, most people on the right are eager for Mitch McConnell to go. But defenders of Mitch McConnell lose their credibility on Joe Biden and on Dianne Feinstein if they are defending Mitch McConnell or not saying anything about Mitch McConnell. What is the consequence of all of this? That's the central point I want to make.

This is not just a media play thing. It is not a political football that we just punt around to what about Jared Kushner? What about, you know, Hunter Biden? What about Mitch McConnell? What about Dianne Feinstein? This is a political football that's way too often treated like it's part of a game here in Washington, D.C., but there are actual serious consequences to it, which is that in a normal circumstance, you look at Joe

Biden and say it is abundantly clear this man should not be running for a second term as president. He wandered out of a Medal of Honor ceremony just yesterday in a painful way. It happens every week, seemingly every day. There's a moment that is just cringeworthy and you feel badly for the man because perhaps you see some of your own relatives in him. We've all watched this happen before and it's sad. It belongs nowhere near the presidency and in a normal media atmosphere, in a normal political discourse, we would know that, we would understand it and we would be able to have somebody, whether Democrat or Republican, who's at least more competent and able to have conversations with world leaders that they understand, is able to be trusted when they're

negotiating with world leaders that, okay, I believe Joe Biden heard me and understood me, and whatever we're working on, that'll be just fine. Same thing with Dianne Feinstein, who's been in Senate leadership for forever. Mitch McConnell, who is Senate leadership for Republicans. It's a real problem for the United States, both how we're negotiating with Ukraine and negotiating with Saudi Arabia, that we lack credibility on those two fronts. So all of this is just to point out that it's easy to do the what about thing. And I actually believe that there are some legitimate circumstances to do it because again, well, what about Hunter Biden when people are bringing up Jared Kushner and you had this massive concerted effort to block out some information on him? I get it. footballs and realize that the double standards I think largely fueled by the media that fueled by people like built like Philip bump this hypocrisy actually

is it may not have real-world consequences for reporters in Washington DC who have comfy lives but it does have consequences for the country in the in the near term and in the long term Ryan it's just frustrating because I know it's just frustrating because I know it's also easy. We're joined now by Saurabh Amari, the founding editor of The Great Compact magazine, which you should subscribe to if you're not already subscribed to it. He's also the author of the new book, Tyranny, Inc., How Private Power Crushed American Liberty and What to Do About It. We're going to get into the question of private power in just one second. But Saurabh, first of all, thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for having me and good to see you, Emily. At a distance, nice to meet you, Ryan.

Same here. Same here. Let's start with this question of private power, especially we can put the first element up on the screen when it comes to a couple of things that I think are creating a really important moment for the right this fall, actually just this fall. We have rail safety on the table. There's a bipartisan rail bill that's been supported by the likes of J.D. Vance but opposed by other people on the right. Actually, John Thune comes to mind, somebody who was involved in the private power of the rail industry actually for a while, has really stalled out in Congress. I think that's both due to corporate Dems and corporate Republicans.

But truly on the right, this has created a huge debate. It should be on the table this fall. It may or may not be. And also, if we go to the second element, the UAW, we can talk more about this in detail, but huge. I mean, the labor movement right now, I think, is creating in and of itself a put up or shut up moment for the right, digging into some of these disputes. Saurabh, I want to get your take on the kind of confluence of these two things as Congress is back, you know, basically this week and they have a hugely

chaotic fall in front of them. It's absolutely packed. Do you similarly see this as a kind of put up or shut up moment for the realigning conservative movement, the realigning right that now has this more working class coalition, especially among voters than it did in the past, likes to talk about the middle class a lot because of agreement, consensus on some cultural issues, but maybe hasn't taken the steps necessary. A lot of people on the left are skeptical that it's taken the steps necessary to really support the working class on policy measures. So A, do you see it as a put up or shut up moment? And then B, how are Republicans faring in this test so far? Yeah, it's absolutely a put up or shut up moment, Emily, but it's not the first one,

certainly. There were many such tests that came even during the Trump administration. And despite the Trump campaign's very pro-worker rhetoric, that was borne out in some things like trade policy. and instincts, ended up acting like any other union busting type of conventional Republican party. And its largest, biggest legislative accomplishment, as you know, was a corporate tax cut engineered by then House Speaker Paul Ryan. But here we have another one. And I think it's a very important one because the right made a lot of noise after East Palestine, Ohio.

That incident, you'll remember, was framed in its typical kind of the right stance for the working class, for the heartland, for kind of the forgotten inner country. But right now, as you said, this reform legislation that's been pushed forward by actually Senator Vance and a number of Democratic allies he's found on the other side of the aisle is stalling mainly because of Senator McConnell and other kind of hardline free market Republicans who answer to the Chamber of Commerce more than they do to any other constituency in the United States. And it's very important to note what the cause was. Actually, Senator Rubio, Senator Vance wrote a letter, you know, homing in on the fact that it's kind of this neoliberal model of absolutely minimizing labor costs so that you have ever more material on the nation's railways with ever fewer workers because they do this kind of just in time scheduling, which was popular, especially before the pandemic to minimize labor costs. But

what that means is that each sort of ton tonnage of rail content has fewer safety professionals to deal with it. And therefore, if there is an accident, both they're more likely and more likely to be catastrophic. So yeah, it's a put up or shut up moment. And we'll see how the Republican Party fares. The UAW, I could just briefly say, there's an element of fears about what the green transition will mean, which I think are pretty legitimate. And I think Republicans can speak pretty cogently to that, given their skepticism of some of the green agenda. And some of that skepticism, as you know, I think is well-founded. typically younger workers who come in don't get to benefit from the same sort of middle class stability and lack of precarity that used to characterize manufacturing jobs in the auto

sector back in the day. And so the battle is over workers, including older workers, out of solidarity with their young successors on the factory line, demanding that there should be kind of uniform contracts that are, you know, you don't have this tier model. Again, if you have a Republican Party that claims to be pro-worker and, you know, President Trump, as you know, won the highest marginal share of union households for any Republican nominee since Ronald Reagan in 1984, he won those union households by precisely by speaking to, you know, those kinds of workers. And so if it doesn't deliver for them and continues for the most part, with few exceptions, like Senator Rubio, Vance, Hawley, for the most part,

gives workers the back of the hand, then I think that it's easy to predict those workers becoming apathetic again and certainly leaving the Republican Party or finding their more comfortable home on the Democratic left, which has all sorts of other problems. But in short, I agree with you. Yeah, and so what's gonna shake things loose

for the Republican Party? So next week is the contract deadline for the UAW, after which you could see a strike. And I'm curious if you think you're going to see support for, if they do go on a strike, support for the striking workers. Are we at a point where you're starting to see a transition from Republicans saying that they're pro-worker to Republicans also being pro-union? Or is that too big of a bridge at this point because of the kind of you know power base that you accurately identify in the Republican Party as the

kind of you know car dealer Republican the small to medium-time Goldwater you know the same font kind of force that fired Goldwater is still so dominant within the Republican Party. And they are, they hate nothing more than unions. So what, how far do you have to go to get from pro-worker to pro-union? Well, that's a really good question. I would say that as far as this battle coming up next week, I can't predict what individual senators will do.

But if the past has any precedent, you remember when there was the looming rail strike last fall, if I remember correctly, I think last November, you did have a number of Republicans in the Senate stepping in and saying, no, Congress should not put a stop to their ability to strike, actually going against the Biden administration in that case, that rare case. You've had Senator Rubio speak out for Amazon workers at a warehouse in Alabama and Bessemer. So there are these kind of green shoots. and so we'll see how they react to this case. But more broadly, I mean, I think the dynamic is such that if the Republican Party doesn't deliver for the growing number of working class people who rally to it, often for cultural reasons, then, you know, they will become apathetic and begin to get disillusioned with the party. Now, one of the reasons that existing unions are so close to the Democrats is precisely because they've, since the Nixon era, Nixon was the last president who actually competitively fought for their union vote. Since the Nixon era, the party has become much more, again, I've used the term neoliberal, much more sort of resolutely just on the side of employers and corporations. And so unions keep getting the back of the hand from the Republican Party. Of course, they'll just cling ever more tightly to

the Democratic Party. The reason that's a problem is because, first of all, it means that we don't have an independent labor movement. We have a labor movement that is deeply dependent on one side of the political aisle. It also means that we have a labor movement that becomes ever more culturally polarizing in a way that's not good for its larger cause. we are basically maximal on abortion rights. Some workers might be pro-abortion, but plenty are more conservative. They may not be utterly, completely opposed to abortion, but they may want limits at 15 weeks or 20 weeks or what have you. There's no reason why their labor union should take a stance on that

that is so at odds with what they believe. But things will stay that way unless enough Republicans reach out to organized labor that it becomes possible for workers to have an organized voice in the Republican Party in the same way that, for example, small business has an organized voice in the Republican Party. And then you can do coalitional politics, like you can bargain between the various coalitions of the Republican Party and achieve things that are,

maybe not everyone will be completely happy, but everyone will be somewhat happy. But in order to get there, you need the courage of a few Republicans who are willing to break with the orthodoxy. Yeah, and I think this fall is such a big test of that. I want to get your temperature. My last question for you, so Rob, is on the Trump, I think this was a Truth Social post where he goes after the UAW and says basically Mexico and Canada love Biden's idiotic

policy, save Michigan and the other auto states, save the American consumer, basically from electric cars. Trump says, you know, Sean Fain, the respected president of the UAW, cannot even think about allowing all electric cars. They will all be made in China, and the auto industry in America will cease to exist. And you mentioned, so Rob, how a lot of union workers particularly flock to Trump for cultural reasons. Now I think you'll probably have some people flocking or people opposing the UAW if they give in too much to the kind of green agenda of the Biden administration. So how then do Republicans morally do the right thing when it comes to the UAW, electric cars, the workers in Michigan, and then politically do the right thing? What is the answer to that kind of difficult balancing act?

Yeah, well, first of all, I mean, if Republicans are in the arena and not so utterly hostile, the bulk of them, to organized labor, then you can influence organized labor, right? This is how kind of politics works. You know, if you have a stake in something, you get to have a say in it as well. And so, you know, I think that that is a reasonable concern about the green transition threatening existing manufacturing jobs that are high, you know, relative high weight and quite secure. And I do know that the UAW has made public noises about its concerns, you know, made public its concerns to the Obama administration, to the Biden administration, about the transition. That said, I will say that I'm of the view that green

didn't necessarily mean job killing. In other words, there's a tendency on the right when they look at something like the Inflation Reduction Act and they think, oh, it's all green subsidies. The green transition is something that a lot of our kind of rivals like China are putting enormous amounts of investment into because they see it as an industry of the future that's important. And so, you know, we should absolutely try to preserve existing auto manufacturing jobs. I'm in favor of that. But to look in the long term and think about what we can do industrial policy-wise to bring these jobs, which can be high-wage jobs, to the United States or more of them to the United States and take them away from China, I think that's part of this

kind of industrial policy package. And when I compare, for example, how someone like National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan thinks and talks about this stuff with the Republican Party, I can't but say that, okay, this is a serious party of government, the Democrats, with which I have big disagreements to be sure. And then you have Republicans who are just, I don't know, there's a kind of just merely reactionary and saying like, well, they're going to take your jobs. You know, it's sort of lopsided. You look in terms of seriousness. So anyway, I think that's a hard needle to thread, no doubt. And we'll see.

Saurabh Amari, the book is Tyranny, Inc. Thanks for joining us. We'll be following the UAW strike closely. The rail fight hopefully isn't over yet. Appreciate you joining us. Thank you both. Thanks, Ryan. Thanks so much. So, Rob, that does it for us today. We'll be back next week. And again, I think we're at the one-year anniversary of CounterPoint, so maybe we'll do something a little special for that. I don't know. Maybe a brand will bring in brownies. Oh, there we go.

Who knows? We'll see. We'll see. All right. Stick around. See you then. This is an iHeart Podcast.