Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - Counter Points #10: Midterm Culture Wars, Fed Policy, Censorship, Pandemic Coverups, Pelosi's Attacker & MORE!

Episode Date: November 4, 2022

Ryan and Emily give their commentary on midterm culture wars, fed policy, censorship, pandemic coverups, Pelosi's attacker & MORE!To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/Ryan Grim: https://badnews.substack.com/ Emily Jashinsky: https://thefederalist.com/author/emilyjashinsky/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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for the midterms and the upcoming presidential election so we can provide unparalleled coverage of what is sure to be one of the most pivotal moments in American history. So what are you waiting for? Go to BreakingPoints.com to help us out. Welcome to CounterPoints Friday. This is our last show before the midterm elections, which we have, of course, been tracking so closely in Sagar and Crystal, and everyone has, but this is the last CounterPoints before the Tuesday midterm elections. Ryan, there's obviously a lot to break down and a lot changing, like actually on a daily basis. What do you make of things right now? Well, last night they dragged Kamala Harris

and Hillary Clinton out to Manhattan to rally the liberals in New York out to defend Kathy Hochul. So that's not a great sign. The wine mom rally. If you're struggling in New York out to defend Kathy Hochul. So that's not a great sign. The wine mom rally. If you're struggling in New York, in the New York gubernatorial election heading into the midterm, that doesn't say much about where you are. Can I say, I actually think they're legitimately struggling in the New York gubernatorial election. And of course, because they're counting on midterm turnout, right? They need to beat Republican turnout in a blue state like New York City, where it's not typically going

to be high in a midterm election by rallying people in Manhattan with, you know, people that Democrats in Manhattan might be inspired by Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris, although I'm not sure anybody's particularly inspired by Kamala Harris. That said, Ryan, this is a really instructive case study in what we're kind of breaking down in this block. Because frankly, I think what's happening in New York is a good example of how, from a political perspective, Republicans are weaponizing the culture war to great effect because Democrats, it's not just that Republicans are doing a better than usual job, it's that Democrats are doing a terrible job responding. And part of that is their own fault. I mean, a lot of that is their own fault because they've kind of locked themselves into ideological prisons that make it very difficult to walk back school lockdowns, to walk back bad crime policy. Say that five times—and all of these other issues across the board. Walk back policies

that people don't like in schools when it goes to the culture war issues. And I really think New York is going to be—will be with Kristol and Sager on election night. That's going to be one of the ones that's on the top of my list to watch, and I never would have predicted that a year ago. And what's been fascinating is that Republicans, I think, road tested a culture war strategy in Virginia in 2021. I think it worked for them. And I think the media collectively decided not to talk about it. By the way, by a guy from PE, like a private equity dude in a fleece vest, road tested that, which from the Republican perspective would be unheard of, right? Like you're getting a dude from the Carlisle Group to talk about what's in schools, but it's because they were reading

the base better. They're right. And they're kind of playing anyway. So what we want to talk about in this segment is that culture war, because it's this very strange moment where you have one political party that is spending a significant amount of its resources on a particular issue and yet it's not getting talked about. Like we know that Republicans are running on inflation. We know that they're running on inflation. We know that they're running on crime. When it comes to the kind of trans school issue, that gets mentioned here or there in the media, but nowhere near

the proportion of the amount of time the Republicans are spending on it. And I want to talk about I think why that is. But first, let's play this first clip. So this is a very typical ad. This is one hitting Catherine Cortez Mastow, who is an incumbent Democratic senator in Nevada who very well may lose. Let's roll this. We have an explosion of kids rather suddenly making an announcement that they are transgender. Democrats like Catherine Cortez Masto, Steve Sisolak, and Joe Biden support policies pushing dangerous transgender drugs and surgeries on kids, taking away parental rights. We have to go out there and stop this.

Our children deserve better. So after I posted this yesterday, Dave Weigel, who was at The Washington Post, got suspended from The Washington Post. And amid the suspension, I guess, started talking to Semaphore. And he's now national political correspondent for Semaphore. He posted this. If we put up A2, this is Weigel's response here. And basically, what he's saying here is, okay, I've been covering this a lot for that exact reason. It seems to me that some squeamishness about platforming it with coverage, but leave a TV on in a swing state, and all you see is, quote, they want to turn boys into girls ads. Right.

So you're seeing these ads all over the place, all over the country. They're a big part of the political conversation in the sense that it's going to play a significant role in how voters end up making their decisions. Recently, you started seeing swings among suburban women, for instance. There was a poll that they were saying they saw an 18-point swing in the Pittsburgh suburbs away from Democrats. And by the way, that's kind of what Kathy Hochul, since we opened talking about New York, she was up by, what, 19 or so in August, and by this first week of November, that's a very slim margin, if even she's up at all. And so to Weigel's point about squeamishness, I think there's something to that. In fact, so a source, a campaign source sent me that ad. It said, we're just seeing this

absolutely everywhere. These ads like this around the country, a lot of them targeted Latino voters. Sources send me these ads. My job is to report on them, post here and tell people here, this is what's happening. And I was like, I don't really want to post this. I was literally squeamish about it. But I'm like, well, this is my job. Get over it. So I post a video, tell people like this is what is playing a significant role in these races. And so by not talking about it, I feel like Democrats and also the media allowed Youngkin to kind of road test this strategy in 21, allowed Republicans to test it. Allowed Republicans to own the narrative. And own the narrative and see what worked and what didn't work.

And now they're just rolling with it in 22 and just without any response at all from Democrats. Because they don't have a response that's persuasive in a midterm election cycle. And that was on full display when there was a local Michigan elected leader who went viral. And I remember we covered this back at Rising a few months ago. And James Carville marveled at her and she was responding to the trans debate locally. And it's just not a persuasive argument, no matter how compassionately and how reasonably you try to frame it. People do not buy it.

And Republicans allowed Democrats to control the narrative for years and years and years until I think really they saw Trump put cracks in that foundation. And that's where you get a PE guy in a fleece vest like Glenn Youngkin coming in and road testing that message, like you said. And then the year after that, in a midterm cycle, other Republicans are following suit. And that ad, I watched it a couple of times.

We were talking before the show before realizing and sticking around to the very end to see it was done by the American Principles Project. So who's that? So it's run by a friend of mine named Terry Schilling. And Terry, for a couple of years, has been running ads like this because other Republicans in the party establishment have been squeamish about it and have just freelancing, basically. Well, like American Principles Project was buying ads in Michigan, I think Kentucky, Wisconsin in different elections over the last couple of years where national Republicans did not want to touch. The trans issue did not want to touch. Speaking of squeamishness, they have an ad up in Maine against Janet Mills where it's just parents straight up reading excerpts from certain books that Democrats have defended putting in schools up in Maine and showing the

squeamishness that parents are experiencing just when they're reading these excerpts and looking at these pictures. And so Terry's been doing this for a couple of years. And it looks like actually other people have learned. Because to your point, Ryan, I think we even have it here. There's another group, Citizens for Sanity. Citizens for Sanity. They've been running all these psychotic, xenophobic ads during the World Series and the NLCS. So we have one of the Citizens for Sanity ads.

We can roll that now. Left-wing politicians are pushing sexual agendas on our children. X-rated drag shows for kids, pornography in elementary schools. Now they want to charge you with a felony if your school wants you to change your kid's gender and you don't agree. Legally require movie theaters, restaurants, and other businesses to let men use the women's restroom. The radical left has lost their minds and it's only getting worse. Stop the insanity. Citizens for Sanity paid for this ad.

So what used to be the case is that American Principles Project and maybe some like grassroots conservative groups were the only people willing to make ads like that. And to your point about Republicans road testing it in Virginia and then kind of saying, actually, this looks like it works coming in. Why was that? Why? Why? Why? What was holding them back? I don't think of them as kind of. OK, so remember the 2012 Republican autopsy? Sure. Famous. I actually keep a copy of it on my desktop in case it ever gets disappeared from the Internet. But it was basically coaching Republicans, a lot of folks remember, at the RNC under Reince Priebus to move away from the culture war.

Don't be such bigots and jerks. Okay. That was the conventional wisdom in Washington, D.C. But see, actually what you just said I feel like is why there's squeamishness about talking about this. And it was like that in the Republican Party very much because it was any, like, they have the trauma from the war on women, the political trauma of the war on women. They have that memory. They never wanted to go in that direction again. They didn't want to get their hands dirty in what they saw as the culture war. Meanwhile, Democrats were, as Obama did, passing things or like his directives on Title IX from his Department of Education that opened the entire country up to what a lot of people are now talking about as radical, ideological stuff on LGBT issues.

And Republicans let it happen because they didn't want to touch it. They want to talk about the economy. They wanted to do tax cuts. They wanted to do their big spending foreign policy. And it was hands off. And it took a major L on marriage equality. Took a major L on marriage equality. And looked like real jerks in front of their kids and the whole country.

And they felt like they were on the wrong side of history kind of at the moment. It's a good point. There's a lot of, that is a really good point. And there is a lot of memory from that too That it was handled incorrectly that you know a lot of people even a lot of Republicans now think that was the wrong side of history And so yeah the squeamishness were the same as just very much like that exists So they were hesitant to dip back into this again. Yes, very much. Until they were like, oh, wait. And is the expansion of this just in the public space, does that have something to do with it? Because I think the number of, I think that the salience of the issue has risen, I think,

in the last three, four years. It's just a bigger issue. Well, I think there's a clear social contagion aspect to a lot of this. But I also think during the pandemic, when parents had this very direct way of monitoring the curriculum, they were seeing it, hearing it in the kitchen. And you would know that better than I do because I actually have kids. But seeing it during the kitchen while everyone is at home together, it exposed a lot of the curricula. Then there was 2020, which exposed a lot of the curricula because parents were like, wait a second, what's going on? What's being taught? I'm sorry, you're putting the 1619 project in the schools. I don't want my kid reading that. And so I think it was a combination of those things. And I think also, I think Democrats went sort of pedal to the metal in 2020 in a way that got noticed by a lot of Republicans and became

sort of that brick wall where even Christine Drazen in Oregon, did you see the ad she was pedal to the metal in 2020 in a way that got noticed by a lot of Republicans and became sort of that brick wall where even Christine Drazen in Oregon, did you see the ad she was running of Democrats and independents saying, I've never voted Republican in my life? It was very heavily culture war. Obviously in Oregon, crime is a big issue. It's one of the places where it's obviously very salient. So I think it was just a lot of, and part of that is because when you have this binary formulation where you're either progressive on every and part of that is because when you have this binary formulation where you're either progressive on every single step of the way or you are a bigot and you wrote about this kind of in your intercept piece about dei uh becoming like sort of a

hindrance to progress of progressive organizations then nobody wants to be the voice of reason and say like hey like don't agree all the way on that one. And so when it came to Virginia in 2021, and particularly in Loudoun County, the media narrative was heavily around CRT and a fight over schools and school boards. But there was also in that area, this massive fight over transgender policy that Republicans really seized on. And what was your sense of which was a more important issue at the time? And did CRT kind of become a cover for all of it? So the media talked about CRT, the right talked about CRT, but actually what was going on was more around the transgender fight. Yeah, we actually did a whole documentary on that at The Federalist where we just,

that you can watch on YouTube, the whole thing is just interviews with different parents that are involved. And it's just them unfiltered in their own words. And we asked them that question because I couldn't sort of disentangle those many variables. And what we got over and over again was it's a combination. So when you're mad about COVID, your COVID lockdown, and then you hear about the book, you're going to get involved. You're going to give money to the candidate. You're going to start organizing and you're going to vote a different way as opposed to in the past, if you had just been mad about the book, maybe you would have just been mad about the book. Maybe you would have just been mad about the locker room policy. But when you are also mad about the locker room

policy, the book, and the COVID, and everyone's locked down, then you really do start to... I mean, that was... The combination of all those things happening at once was animating for the people in Loudoun County, for sure. And that's what they said repeatedly. It was the combo. And is it the focus on kids that is resonating, you think? It's just that, really. So if, right, so I'm trying to think what would be the non-transphobic response that Democrats could make to this. It's a good question.

It's a good question. You don't want to embrace some of the genuine kind of transphobic elements out there that are trying to like smuggle their own agenda through here, through these concerns of the parents. But if they're completely silent on it, then all of that space is just going to be filled by the far right. If they have no, yeah right, if they are unwilling to compromise one bit on this issue, and I don't know what that compromise would look like. I know what I think about this, but I don't know for Democrats, you know, reasonable Democrats what that compromise would look like. If they're unwilling to even move an inch in that direction because the activist base will hold them all accountable for every millimeter that they go towards that inch, then I think it's just a loss. And I don't know how you can message Alice on that, because voters,

whether they're Democrats, Republicans, independents, they want the compromise position on this. They want the nuanced position on this. And that's not to say that there isn't any legitimate bigotry going on. Of course there is. That always exists and sadly likely always will. But the vast majority of people want a compassionate, compromised situation here that is best for their children. Most people in this country are pro-LGBT. But it's just what they're seeing with children. They view as extremism.

And if Democrats can't budge from that, I don't know. I don't know. And there's a spectrum of ads, like the Citizens for Sanity one that they played there. I think that was just a typically wildly over-the-top crazy ad that organization runs. Whereas the other one was more of a typical attack ad. I saw a lot of people saying that the ad that I post, for instance, are like, well, that whole thing's inaccurate. It's like, well, actually, if you look at what they're saying, there's a lot of hyperbole,

and there's a lot of language that you wouldn't use to describe things, but basically what they're saying is that Democrats approve of, you know, gender-affirming medical intervention for people under 18. Yeah. And they do. Yeah. So that's the basic fight. Yep. And Democrats are on one side and Republicans are on the other.

And I think Republicans have an enormous amount of polling, and so do Democrats, that show that at least on the polling, it's not going well for them. So what happens if, let's say, there's an upset in Michigan? Tudor Dixon. Yeah, you could see. Could she win? What do you think? Yeah, I think Tudor Dixon. And if she wins... It depends on the size of the place.

That's a race, for instance, that has heavily been fought over these issues. Yes. I mean, the parents in Dearborn, which we reported on a couple of weeks ago, could swing that election to Tudor Dixon. That's not a bloc that ever votes Republican in any large numbers whatsoever, but could be so animated talking about turnout in a midterm cycle. Those are the folks that could be so animated that they wouldn't normally vote, let alone vote Republican. And they're going to. Actually, I reached out to Terry Schilling from American Principles Project after you sent me the ad and said we were going to be covering this. And he sent a statement that said, the big story around these ads is that Democrats have lost their minds when it comes to children and families and establishment Republicans are committing political malpractice by not leaning into these issues. Talk to an average

voting parent and protecting kids from this Democrat party-led insanity is front of mind, along with inflation and crime. The new crop of GOP candidates understands this. How long before the party committees pick it up? So what he's saying is interesting because it leaves room for even more messaging on this in the future. And it makes the stakes for Democrats. It increases the stakes for Democrats to come up with a good answer. And what I would say for people on the left is that there has, for a long time, last couple of years in activist circles, been a phrase that goes roughly like, your intent doesn't matter. Yeah, right. What matters is outcomes. And that's usually used at somebody who says, I didn't mean to say something bigoted. Well, it doesn't matter

what your intent was. You did say it, so you're guilty of this. If outcome is what matters, not intent, and the outcome is that the far right wins in Michigan and wins in all of these and wins in Nevada and takes over the Senate, takes over the House. Then your intent doesn't matter. Yeah. And just before we leave, I want to commend to everybody a piece on Ben Dominich's subset called The Transom. And he wrote about in the Spectator US as well. He talks about the kitchen table versus the kitchen tablet. And it's sort of a new spin on the fact that we live in two countries, right, which is a cliche that is used in different ways and in different contexts. But in this context, I thought made a lot of sense that if you're, you know, an average parent who doesn't have time to spend on social

media, you're experiencing a very different version of America where, you know, if you're on social media versus if you're not on social media, this is a different and the people who are on social media disproportionately are running campaigns and media outlets, et cetera, et cetera. So. Yeah. And so actually speaking of kitchen table issues, the Federal Reserve yesterday hiked interest rates again by three quarters of a point, which we can put up tear sheet A1 here, which brings rates to their highest level since 2008. This is going to push mortgage rates even higher. They had climbed over 7% recently. You're going to see this bump them up again. You saw kind of a little run in the stock market get blunted over the last couple of days,

days by this. And it took a hit Thursday. Yes. And it's so it's, it's another instance of the Federal Reserve, you know, I guess, hoping that you, that their use of monetary policy is, is going to be able to affect things that I think it just can't. Like it can't make it rain in areas that are suffering from droughts. It can't end the war between Ukraine and Russia. It can't undo spending that's already happened. Well, I mean it couldn't exactly do that, but it could like pull some money out of the economy. So sort of, in a way it kind of could.

I meant like legislative. It couldn't undo. Right, it's not fiscal policy. Right. It's not. You'd have to tax that back out, which is the flip side of modern monetary theory, which says you can spend,

your only limitation is inflation, and once you hit inflation, then you have to tax it back out. But if you don't have majorities that are able to pass tax increases, then you can't. Then actually you can't do that. Jerome Powell, not into MMT. Well, he seemed to be into MMT.

He was flirting with it. For a pretty long time. I mean, he kind of, he probably is. Let me, okay. It's just a description of kind of how the economy does work rather than prescriptive. I guess that kind of depends on the content. So with Jerome Powell, an interesting mix that I think reflects what we're seeing in the media from Jerome Powell. And I wanted to ask you about that, actually, because it's sort of mixed signals, right? Like the soft landing

versus what he's going to do with, like people are expecting changes here, but the signal seems to be in one direction. And then it seemed to be walked back this week about where rates are going to go. What do you think that reflects about what's happening inside the Fed? I think they don't know exactly how to do this. And I think that they're trying to unwind an extraordinarily difficult situation because they did, with quantitative easing over a period of 10 years the same time, they're operating within a political context that can't get anything done, that can't build more housing when we have a housing shortage, that can't fix supply chains, that can't break up monopolies so that you don't have people price gouging. Because the amount of inflation that is, and maybe we'll get studies

about this 10 years from now, that is directly related to companies saying, we now have an excuse to raise prices and we have market power so we can do it. And so we're going to do it. Might be as much as 50% according to a decent number of economists. You're seeing, say, I think it was paint prices, wholesale paint prices started coming down. And on an earnings call, the paint CEO was like, our prices are sticky. And by sticky, they mean they're staying up there. And then he used another term. It's like the gap, the growing gap is just going to go to our bottom line. It's just profits.

So like wholesale prices are coming down. Economy is getting fixed in that sense. But these companies have so much concentrated power that they're like, actually, we like charging more for our product. And if you don't like it, oh, we're the only paint company. I don't remember if it was a paint company. And there are so many examples of companies saying this in earnings calls. Wholesale prices are down, but we're leaving prices where they are because we can. In a free market, that's not how it works.

Somebody else comes in and says, oh, wholesale prices are down. You want $10 for this paint? Yep. Here, I'll sell it to you for $9. And the consumer says, oh, hey, that CEO is a piece of garbage. I'm taking my business elsewhere. But when you don't have the choice to go elsewhere, you're totally stuck.

And there are examples of that from earnings calls going back months and months and months, and more specifically even about how they're just plainly not even passing it down to workers. Right. I mean, it gets so much worse than just, hey, the profits. Because profits can be good for workers if they're passed down to workers.

But we have specific examples of CEOs, and this is not every CEO. And I'm not saying this economy has across the board been bad for workers, because I don't think that's the case, or net negative for workers, because I don't think that's the case. I think it's been grossly unfair, especially in cases like that, where you see them specifically saying, we're doing buybacks. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, which is just completely just setting money on fire. So if we could put up B2, because this is the other interesting development on Jay Powell this week. So it's publicly known that his favorite thing to look at is what's called the inverted yield curve. And so it's starting... It's also your band name in the notes.

That's right, my band name. So it's starting to look inverted. And what that means is that it's a sign of a potential recession ahead. Basically what it means is that, so if you lend somebody money for 10 years, you are going to demand a higher interest rate. Because they're keeping, you know, it's 10 years. Than if you're just lending it for a short term. Short term, much lower interest rate. That's how it normally ought to be. When the curve on the yields there gets inverted, what it means is that you're nervous about that 10-year investment because you think there's a recession coming.

So all of a sudden, you're getting know, you're getting lower interest, it flips around. It gets inverted because you're expecting that bond prices are going to crash, which drive up, which drive, bond prices go down, yield curves go up. And so you're starting to see that now. And so what Wall Street is starting to think, okay, well, Jay Powell thinks that this is a sign that a recession is coming. Maybe that means eventually he's going to stop tightening. But we don't know when. But the more blaring red this sign gets, then the more likely you are to see him say, OK, we've done what we can. Yeah, the CNBC article that we showed on the screen said the Dow Jones Industrial Average has gained more than 13% over the past month, in part because of an earnings season that wasn't as bad as feared,

but also due to growing hopes for a recalibration of Fed policy. Treasury yields also have come off their highest level since the early days of the financial crisis, though they remain elevated. The benchmark 10-year note most recently was around 4.09%. Oh, so I flipped it. You want less for longer rates. I used to work on Wall Street, but I was also dyslexic. It's my favorite chapter in the storybook

that is Ryan Grimm's career is the Wall Street chapter. Yeah, my Series 7 license is probably still being used by some corrupt stock. All that is to say, CNBC added, there's little if any expectation that rate hikes will halt soon, so the anticipation is just for a slower pace. Right, and as you watch that,

the more it blares, then it might slow down even further. Right. Now, Ryan, tell us what is on your points for this edition of Counterpoints Friday. Here's my points. All right. So I'm going to talk about The Intercept. The Intercept this week, we published two major investigations that at first might seem unrelated, but if you look closer, you'll see that they're linked up in a profoundly important way. So one of them is a deep look at safety inside the labs that work with extremely dangerous pathogens. What our reporter Mara Fistendahl has uncovered is deeply disturbing. She writes, an intercept investigation

based on over 5,500 pages of NIH documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act has uncovered a litany of mishaps, malfunctioning equipment, spilled beakers, transgenic rodents running down the hall, a sedated macaque coming back to life and biting a researcher hard enough to lacerate their hand. Many of the incidents involved less dangerous pathogens that can be handled with basic safety equipment, and most did not lead to infection. But several accidents happened while scientists were handling deadly or debilitating viruses in highly secure labs,

and a few did lead to illness. Now, those illnesses, of course, have the potential to spread and to become pandemics. Now, some of what Mara reveals in her series is downright frightening, and I'd suggest checking it out at The Intercept. Now, the second story is an investigation by Li Fang and Ken Klippenstein into a sprawling new mandate that the Department of Homeland Security has adopted for itself to police the spread of, quote, misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation on the internet. The main targets of the truth police are, according to a draft version of a leaked DHS

quadrennial report, quote, the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine, unquote. And here we find the overlap between these two investigations. So for some reasons that I vaguely understand, and for some others that I still can't fully comprehend, the conversation around the origin of the pandemic and the efficacy of the vaccines have both become coded along a left-right axis. It is right-wing to be skeptical of the vaccines and to believe that COVID originated from a lab accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Meanwhile, it is left-wing to oppose any discussion around the safety or efficacy of the vaccines, and it is left-wing to believe that COVID jumped naturally from a host species, we inconveniently don't know which one yet, but let's set that aside, and jumped from a host into humans at a, quote, wet market in Wuhan where vendors sold wild animals. But why are these questions on that axis? Under what political logic are any of those positions either right-wing or left-wing? You could just as easily imagine vaccine skeptics being on the left. And actually, in my early career at the Huffington Post, I was embarrassed at how our blog side frequently gave space to those nutty California liberals like Jenny McCarthy, who were campaigning against vaccines, making tendentious links to autism while relying on junk science. But all of it was built on top of a traditional left-wing edifice, that big pharma is corrupt and profit-hungry and should never be taken at face value, and that the FDA is a victim

of corporate capture. Those are now the arguments being made by the right. And now that these mRNA vaccines aren't turning out to be as safe and effective as they were initially said to be, and are even less effective against new variants, vaccines in general are getting discredited, which is a true tragedy. And what about the partisan valence of the lab leak theory? I could easily sketch a left-wing or at least a partisan democratic argument for it. Here goes. President Obama, having been briefed fully on the risks of gain-of-function research, forced the NIH to pause such work.

The Trump administration lifted that ban and was funding bat coronavirus work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, work that may have sparked the pandemic. Then Trump tried to downplay the pandemic. Voila. That's all Trump's fault. Instead, Democrats shut down the debate over its origin, suggesting that asking the question was only fueling anti-Asian hate crimes. But the alternative notion itself played on racist stereotypes and prejudice, blaming the pandemic on backward Chinese people eating bat soup. How is that the anti-racist explanation? But both of these questions should be outside of politics. Whether the vaccine is safe and effective on a particular variant is a

question that ought to be answered with data. The same is true with the origin of COVID. But everything is now political and politics is everywhere and everyone must choose a side. And if you're not with us, you're with them. The problem is the world keeps throwing problems at us, or perhaps more accurately, we keep making problems for ourselves. And those problems need to be thought through deliberately. These aren't all easy questions. Foreign propaganda and disinformation campaigns do exist. So what do we do about them? Governments and government agencies like DHS do try to expand their scope and authority relentlessly. So what do we do about that?

And gain-of-function research can for sure have social benefits, but also comes with existential risks. Consider this. Virtually all scientists who've looked into COVID's origins, with the exception of a few ideologues on either side, acknowledge that both explanations are still plausible. That means that it is plausible we did COVID to ourselves, and that alone should be cause for deep reflection and significant policy reforms. Instead, the number of labs doing dual-use research of concern has only mushroomed since 2020. So while Lee and Ken's story is going viral on the right and mostly being ignored or attacked on the left, Mara's story has not produced the sensation I think it should.

Many on the left don't want to be coded as right-wing for even talking about lab biosafety. Faith in science bleeds naturally into faith in all scientists at all times. And some on the right don't actually care about it as an issue beyond its usefulness as a weapon to bludgeon Fauci and the hated public health establishment. Here's how the White House responded to our story on disinformation policing when asked about it by RealClearPolitics reporter Philip Wegman. Yeah, there was a reporting in The Intercept about opportunities for the federal government to identify for social media companies, different posts that contained what was perceived as misinformation about the origins of COVID, the vaccine, other things as well, you know, such as, you know, Ukraine or the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan? Yeah, so look, I'll say this. The administration, the Biden administration remains fully committed to our mission to protect the security and resilience of our, you know, elections and safeguard election infrastructure. That includes combating disinformation. That is something that we are committed to. You know, we work to protect that,

protect Americans from disinformation that threatens the homeland, including malicious efforts spread by foreign adversaries. Adversaries, sorry, pardon me, began before the Disinformation Governance Board was established. In fact, some of that work began before this administration. So, you know, I want to be very clear that cross-agency work continues to this day. Don't want to get ahead of anything else. This is the Department of Homeland Security, so I would refer you to them.

And so essentially the White House is saying that yeah, we're doing this And if you notice in her answer she it leans heavily on election security The response on the left was interesting it was basically not touched for a couple of days and and then Tech dirt kind of an industry blog, kind of jumped out and attacked it. I want to talk about that next. I had to kind of like compare things because it's such a long, long response from Tech Dirt. But you're probably able to kind of pick it apart right away.

What was your reaction to the Tech Dirtbuttal alleged I mean it's it's a really really long screed and you and you're like wow this guy's really having a good time but then you look closer at you're like wait there's actually nothing here I thought that doesn't have anything to say so I could we could read some of it here I don't know if we have it in the teleprompter but I can also read it from here too. So, like, for instance, he writes, the article is garbage. And I usually wouldn't focus on a blog in an industry publication.

But what's happened is a bunch of progressives were just sharing it without reading it, being like, ah, good. I was right to be able to ignore this. Now I don't have it. It's fake news. I don't have to talk about this. Right. That's exactly what it was. It was like the release valve. Fake don't have, it's fake news. I don't have to talk about this. Right. And that's exactly what it was. It was like the release valve.

Fake news. Yep. And- You're fake news. I will also say, I think it warrants a response because I actually think, maybe you disagree, that it was written in good faith. I mean, it is a screed, but he says he's a fan of the Intercept usually. And I think he tried to engage with the substance, but his failure, I think, to rebut the substance was extremely telling. Because his fundamental problem is that there's a contradiction, and you'll see this as I read

this here. He says a couple of different things. One, he says, this is a nothing burger. He gives a giant nothing burger. Nothing new here. This is all old news. Tries to dress up old news as a big bombshell, but actually we all knew all of this stuff. And then he also says, and it ought to be retracted. He does say that. It's like, well, it can't be both. Like it's either old news and a nothing burger or it's false and should be retracted. And then he's like, and a lot of the interactions that you describe between the tech companies, the tech platforms, and the government are actually good.

So he's like, it's a nothing burger. It's false and should be retracted. Also, it's false and it's good. And where it's not false, it's good. Yeah, like, oh, sure, this stuff exists. We've just known about it forever. And by the way, yeah, we need to monitor people. And so he writes, the article is garbage. It not only misreads things, it is confused about what the documents

reporters have actually saying, presents widely available, widely known things as if they were secret and hidden when they were not. So the entire article is a complete nothing burger, blah, blah. He says, let's dig in. Back in 2018, then President Donald Trump signed the Cyber Security and Infrastructure Security Agency Act into law, creating the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency as a separate agency in DHS. While there are always reasons to be concerned about government interference in various aspects of life, CISA was pretty uncontroversial, perhaps with the exception of when Trump freaked out and fired the first CISA director, Chris Krebs, for pointing out that the election was safe and there was no evidence of manipulation or foul play.

He says, while CISA has a variety of things under its purview, one thing that it is focused on is general information sharing between the government and private entities. This has actually been really useful for everyone, even though the tech companies have been quite reasonably cautious about how closely they'll work with the government because they've been burned before. Indeed, as you may recall, one of the big revelations from the Snowden documents was about the PRISM program, which turned out to be oversold by the media reporting on it, but was still problematic in many ways. Since then, the tech companies have been even more careful about working with the government, knowing that too

much government involvement will eventually come out and get everyone burned. So he's saying, and later he makes this point over and over in this long piece, that the tech platforms are doing a good job of resisting the government pressure. That's the best part. But there is no government pressure. It's like, hey, buddy, what are they resisting? Right. And that's the other thing. Do you not know how reporting works? You report this stuff because it's relevant to what it could become, right? So in its early stages, in its infancy, we should be so lucky as to catch tech executives like some of the ones that are texting. There's text messages in the Intercept piece and government officials even flirting

with ideas that are this, like, authoritarian. I think, and if the government wants to influence the public debate, they should just do it the normal way, have their spokesperson put out public statements, put out data. I'm glad the CDC puts out a lot of data, put out more data, put out all the raw data. Like, that's your role if you want to do that. The behind-the-scenes meetings, emails, portals, that's not – and that's what – and we can put this ACLU thing up later. That's the point. You can't use private entities to get around the First Amendment. Let's read one more paragraph.

So this is all the time. I mean, you very much can. He says, with that in mind, Cesar's role has been pretty widely respected with almost everyone I've spoken to, both in government and at various companies. How is this a debunking of the story? So he's spoken to a bunch of people in government and at various companies. How is this a debunking of the story? So he's spoken to a bunch of people in government and at various companies. He says, it provides information regarding actual threats, which has been useful to companies, and they seem to appreciate it. This is what this guy's writing. Like the Colorado account's actual threats. The guy with Lucifer in the profile picture,

in the banner picture, who literally identifies himself as a parody account when you go to the account, has no followers. This is a parody article. He then says, given their historical distrust of government intrusion and their understanding of the limits of government authority here, the companies have been pretty attuned to any attempt at coercion. And I've heard nothing regarding CISA at all. What? What? tuned to any attempt at coercion, and I've heard nothing regarding CISA at all. What is, what? The Facebook portal was something that, again, like he uses it, and this is one of the things when the Intercept Report, I think, lays out in most disturbing detail. At TechDirt, they're saying, listen, that Facebook portal, the meta portal, where government officials can easily just drop anything they think constitutes disinformation

in there. And at one point in the TechTurt article, he says, and only 35% of the complaints from the government are like, nobody does anything about, you know, 75% of them. Just that 35%, that's a huge freaking number. Am I wrong? 35%? And it should be public. It should be. And later he says, he accuses us of using a blurry version of meeting minutes when the actual meeting minutes were public. And it's basically, he's accusing, he's concocting some conspiracy that we would like blur the minutes so it looked like we got something. And he's like, here are the minutes. I found them by Googling. It's like, go read the minutes. Those are different than the ones that we published. They're actually different? They're different. Oh my gosh. And he updated, he didn't correct. He updated his piece and said like, yeah, okay, fine. So here's it. He says updated

to note that not all of the meeting minutes published by the Intercept were public. They include a couple of extra subcommittee minutes that are not on the CISA website. So, okay, thank you for correcting your piece. Updating it. Yeah, updating his piece. Did not update his tweets about it. Elon hasn't let him yet. Oh, so anyway, do we have Edward Snowden here? So then he got all mixed up in a fight with Edward Snowden, who was like, what are you doing? I think that's C3, is that right? I don't know. I don't know if we actually have it. Oh, yeah, I'll read this one too.

So this is the part here. So the next paragraph to the Intercept piece then provides an email that kind of debunks the entire framing of the article. Quote, platforms have got to get comfortable with government. It's really interesting how hesitant they remain. Microsoft executive Matt Masterson, a former DHS official, texted Jen Easterly, a DHS director, in February. That is so inappropriate. Right. And then he writes, Masterson had worked in DHS on these kinds of programs and then moved over to Microsoft.

But here he's literally pointing out that the companies remain hesitant to work too closely with the government, which is exactly what we've been saying all along. Again. But a Microsoft executive isn't. Right. Right. A Microsoft executive isn't. And what are they hesitant about? They are hesitant about what the government is doing.

What is the government doing? The government is creeping into their space. Content moderation is extraordinarily difficult. And I don't want to say that this is easy stuff. But we don't need the government engaged in the content moderation process. And the tech platforms are hesitant not of nothing. They're hesitant of something. They're resisting something

what are they resisting they're resisting the exact thing that this guy described in the article but the thing is he doesn't find anything wrong with it which is fine that's his opinion he can have that opinion oh yeah well and and he seems to have just taken umbrage uh viscerally with the idea that like he already knew a bunch of this stuff because you can't step on somebody's feet i've learned that yeah exactly well i think that's actually what was a huge part of why he wrote this it seemed that he was saying like i knew all of this and we in this community knew all of this and we're cool with it but one thing my sources are cool that i talk to people at the companies and i talk to people the government they all think this is

fine yeah he says it's a big deal here says, if you look at the actual details, it shows some fairly basic and innocuous information sharing with nothing even remotely looking like pressure on the companies to take down information. But the bottom line here is that that happens all of the time

in media and reporting, and it has to because everyone can't pay attention to every detail all at once. So you have to lay out things that are maybe sort of public on some database, government database, that only industry people ever pay attention to, which is how they bury a lot of this. And it's how a lot of people never know. I mean,

go to the FARA database, go to FARA.gov, type in any random country and click on one of the disclosures and you will learn a hell of a lot as a private citizen that the media is not telling you. These things just sit on government databases, and you need to then flesh it out in reporting. That's what I want as a reader. That's what readers want. They want it all sort of put in one place on a long article like that, which must have been some 3,000 words. That's just a guess. Yeah. And so, is the next element the ACLU one? I don't know if we have that one. If we don't have it, I'll just read it. It says, the ACLU, in response to our story, said, the First Amendment bars the government

from, nice, thank you, from deciding for us what is true or false online or anywhere. Our government can't use private pressure to get around our constitutional rights. And so it comes down to the question then of what is pressure? And is a phone call, a conference call from the Department of Homeland Security to accompany pressure? He seems to think it's not. It's just helpful government. But at the same time, they're resistant to it. So what are they resistant to? They're resistant to pressure.

According to the ACLU, this is something that the government cannot do around the First Amendment. And our tips dropped into a government database by government officials and mass pressure. Yes, because they're coming from the government that has power to regulate you. If the government wants to do that publicly, then they should do that publicly. If they have some massive national security thing, like, hey, just FYI, somebody published the nuclear codes, fine, okay. Also, change your nuclear codes.

We'll do that too. You get the two-factor verification. Two-factor on your nuclear weapons. At the bare minimum. But before we jump off of this segment, I want to say one final thing, which is I think the foundational issue here is a foundational issue in our society period,

which is that identity politics have been exploited by oligarchs and by powerful people to abuse our rights and to encroach on our rights, which is to say they use identity politics to expand the definition of what constitutes hate, what constitutes disinformation. And I'm not saying this is the case always, but it is part of it, that they have been able to expand the definition of what constitutes disinformation. And I'm not saying this is the case always, but it is part of it, that they have been able to expand the definition of what constitutes disinformation, what constitutes hate speech, what constitutes bigotry and incitement to a level that implicates ordinary people across the political spectrum and encroaches on their rights and allows the government to encroach on their rights. And until we can find consensus definitions for those terms,

we haven't always had them, but until we can come back to a place where we have consensus definitions on those terms, we're going to continue to be, that's going to be exploited by powerful people from here on out. But the attempt to arrive at these consensus decisions should not involve the government. And it certainly should not involve the Department of Homeland Security. Right, behind closed doors, unelected people, absolutely not. Absolutely not. Anyway, what's your point today? All right. My point is it's a pre-midterm point. So in a last ditch midterm move, Joe Biden doubled down on Democrats' dubious campaign strategy, a little alliteration there unintentionally, Wednesday night, waxing poetic about the fate

of American democracy, invoking January 6th and condemning, quote, extreme MAGA Republicans. Now, on its face, the strategy seems silly given that Democrats continue fixating on January 6th and, quote, semi-fascism when voters are moving away from them on the generic ballot and seem clearly more interested in hearing about candidates' plans to deal with inflation and gas prices and urban decay. But as we've said here repeatedly, while the legacy media often simplifies these issues into super clean narratives, it's really not that simple. Midterm elections are about turning out your base. Democrats think the democracy message raises the stakes for their voters. They think it's the thing that gets people

who prefer Democrats to the polls rather than sitting Tuesday out. Now, there are two big problems with that strategy I want to highlight because I think they bode very poorly for the future of the country. First, all of Biden's primetime babbling about democracy is inflammatory because he's asking the American people for trust his party does not deserve without even explaining why they deserve it, in his opinion. Let me read an excerpt from Biden's speech on Wednesday. Quote, I hope you'll ask a simple question of each candidate you might vote for, Biden said. Will that person accept the legitimate will of the American people and the

people voting in his district or her district? Will that person accept the outcome of the election, win or lose? The answer to that question, says Biden, is vital. This is extremely inflammatory because when it comes to Biden himself just a few years ago, the answer to every single one of those vital questions was no. The Russians hacked our election. Russia hacked our election. Russia hacked our election. Russia vital questions was no. Most young Americans consider Donald Trump an illegitimate president. He's an illegitimate president. Why is he illegitimate? He just won an election. He's an illegitimate president in my mind. That's it.

I absolutely agree. Experts urge Clinton Kemp to challenge election results. We will see how illegitimate his victory actually was. He's an illegitimate president. Russia hacked our election. Russians hacking our election. Hacked our election. Russians hacking our election. Hacked our election. Russia hacking our election.

I don't see the president as a legitimate president. Trump is an illegitimate president who stole the election. He is not a president. He's illegitimate. And my biggest fear is that he's going to do it again with the help of Vlad, his best pal. He's terrifying. Would you be my vice president?

It wasn't just Biden. It was Hillary Clinton, Karine Jean-Pierre, members of Congress, Stacey Abrams, talk show hosts, and millions of Democratic voters who signed petitions

for the Electoral College to swing the vote to Clinton. And a lot of that was based on a full-blown conspiracy theory about Russian hacking and collusion. Remember when much of the legacy media insisted John Fetterman was relatively sharp and

healthy until he actually went into the public without a filter and that spin just crashed and burned in real time? The lesson was about more than just one Senate race. The lesson was huge. Our media has the power to construct false realities. This obviously aligns with Chomsky's famous manufacturing consent theory, but remember that what they're actually manufacturing is all of reality now. They can make crime seem better or worse. They can make wars seem just or unjust. They can make food seem healthier, unhealthy.

Election denial is owned only by extreme MAGA Republicans, while Democrats' hands are just totally clean. Now, because of new media, they're starting to lose some control of the narrative. Holes are getting popped in the bubble. You don't have to be a Fox News viewer to see videos of Democrats in their own words demanding funny business from the Electoral College and engaging in the same nonsense Trump did, even on the same level from Hillary Clinton and former President Carter themselves. Now, did it lead to a riot at the Capitol? Thankfully, no. But the media also memory hold the riots and the rioters that smashed

windows, threw bricks at cops, and set fires in the streets during Trump's inauguration in 2017. I know at least one journalist who went to the hospital, but nobody really cared after the dust settled. That Joe Biden, Democrats, and journalists are asking the public to trust them to stand up to, quote, election deniers without taking any accountability or even offering an explanation for this ostensible hypocrisy is an abuse of power, a grave political error, and a blow to institutional legitimacy. Now, of course, while we should expect purportedly neutral journalists to hold everyone accountable equally, we don't really expect politicians to hold themselves to that

same standard. But Joe Biden is clearly, clearly not the person to make this message, nor is his press secretary, his high-profile candidate in Georgia, his many other high-profile surrogates like Hillary Clinton or others. But hey, they do it anyway. Now, the second problem with the democracy strategy was illustrated really well this week by a CBS news poll. Quote, we asked simply what concerns you more, whether the U.S. will have a strong economy or have a functioning democracy, reported CBS on their own poll, adding the nation is closely split. That doesn't mean people don't want both, but those more concerned about democracy Okay, so that false binary is very, very telling. Let me again read CBS's own words. We asked simply what concerns you more, they said, whether the U.S. will have a strong economy or a functioning democracy.

That they separate these two priorities is, of course, in acceptance of Biden's false premise, but it's also an illustration of what the political establishment does not get. While they're preoccupied with abstract conversations about the soul of America, much of the public sees the failure of American democracy as an economy that doesn't work for the middle class, as cities that are getting more dangerous and tragic. So while CBS says, hey, actually, yeah,

people can want both in theory, the democracy champions in the administration and the media never, ever talk about those two things in the same breath. Ever. A functioning democracy and a healthy constitutional republic should mean an economy that supports upward mobility and a healthy middle class. It means cities that are safe, not dominated by one-party rule for decades that leaves no room for debate or difference or improvement that bucks the partisan orthodoxy. It means a public square not threatened by a public-private partnership to censor dissent. It means an intelligence community narrowly focused on direct security concerns, not encroaching on people's freedom to speak and organize because they disagree with the political establishment. It means a media that doesn't say what it does

is balls and strikes, just calling balls and strikes neutrality, and then treats everyone without fear or favor. It means a market that rewards corporations who contribute to the common good and punishes those who abuse their power over workers and politics. But, of course, that's not what Democrats and journalists and media executives mean by, quote, functioning democracy, to borrow CBS's words. They want to purge their distractors, especially the working class ones, rather than actually dealing with their concerns, because that would mean admitting sometimes the people they look down on have a point. That CBS News poll was too good for me. So the family of Paul Pelosi announced last night that Pelosi had finally left the hospital. How many days after the attack? Thursday.

I actually didn't realize that he had still been in the hospital from what would that be early Sunday morning until Thursday? Well, no, it was Friday morning. It was Thursday night that he went. Okay. Right. Okay. So nearly a week. Right, because it was, I remember, yes. And a surgery. Yeah. That's, I mean, obviously a very intensive medical intervention. He was in the ICU. As we talked about last week, a serious head injury like that, and he left with a fractured skull,

can lead to enormous amounts of swelling inside the brain, which then can be fatal. It makes sense, of course, for an octogenarian who had gotten a blow to the head from a hammer to be hospitalized for a long period of time to require the ICU, to require surgical intervention. So it's not necessarily surprising. But we are still really trying to piece together details of the story because actually the amount of information that's been public, it's sort of getting parceled out day by day as we kind of try to put the puzzle pieces together. And one of that is, you know, the condition. One of those pieces is the condition of Paul Pelosi. There are a couple of others that we wanted to talk about. And we'll start with first the fact that David DePape, the suspect in this situation, is in the the country illegally I believe he's Canadian

it's like all these stories turn into like culture war bingo and he's an illegal immigrant as the Republicans are now hitting him with and sanctuary state so everything getting caught up in so yes he was a Canadian citizen

who went to Mexico entered in 2008 into the United States through Mexico. Yep. 2008 on a visitor's visa across the border. Which often is, I think, a six-month stay and stayed. Yeah, so he came in on a B-2 visa. And that typically allows, if you're Canadian, that allows you, I think, for like six months to stay in the country. Was it a B-2?

Yeah, according to Fox News, it's a B-2. That's a temp work visa. It says it typically allows Canadian visitors to stay for six months, and then he then overstayed that B-2 visa. Oh, a B-2 or V-2? B-2. B-2, okay. Anyway, so yes, he was here illegally.

By the way, our system shouldn't be this alphabet soup of nonsense. Like it's just so convoluted that this is exactly how you get people overstaying different visas because we've just confused the system to the point where enforcement is virtually impossible. Now, of course, in this case, being in a sanctuary state made enforcement literally impossible. It's also the dirty secret of immigration policy is that a wall does nothing about this. It does very little. And visa, well, it does literally nothing about visa overstays. About visa overstays, about crossers. So what the wall does, and Border Patrol says this. Right, but it crossed legally. It funnels

you to. It stayed illegally. Right, yeah, exactly. So the purpose of the wall, as people say, is it funnels you to a certain point of the border, which makes capture easier. So you don't have people who are crossing without security having any idea and not sort of registering and saying this person, this person, this person. All that is to say, the visa process isn't a mess. We talked about this in the damn semi-chips segment last week. We can't even, it's such a mess, we can't even get people. People can't hire people if they need to, you know, to build the... Semiconductors. Yeah, the industry that we say we want to build.

That's a tangent, but... There was also new reporting about the role of the Capitol Police. So it turns out that the Capitol Police did install cameras outside of Pelosi's San Francisco home. Pelosi was in Washington, D.C. It sounds like it was one of those movies where the security guard is like looking away. The way that the Washington Post described it here is that a Capitol Police guard came back, saw lights outside of the home, and then was like, uh-oh. And rewinds the tape and then sees DePape smashing his way in with a hammer.

But they have not put this video out. What I think that the authorities need to start realizing is that every second that they're not putting information out, somebody's filling that vacuum with speculation. And so I think that they have to just change the way

that they relate to public disclosures of information. Like they do not have a monopoly over attention anymore. If they don't put a video out, someone else is going to, like Dinesh D'Souza is going to be like, well, 2.27 a.m. must have been like a sex worker. So I think I'm curious also in the Washington Post article, it says some security. So what happened is Nancy Pelosi left home and the Washington Post says some of the security, it may have even said most of the security went with her. I'm still very confused.

Well, she was in D.C. Right, right, right. So, right. Most of it went with her to D.C. So when you're using words like some and most, that could mean a lot of different things. And I'm still genuinely very curious about the situation with the security at the Pelosi home, and not for conspiratorial reasons, but because, hey, not great for the social fabric if we get into a late 60s situation where people are being violently targeted and attacked, and God forbid it gets even worse.

So from that perspective, it's very curious to me why the Speaker of the House's husband was at their home, and somebody is able to break into a glass door with a hammer that's very strange to me and the security the extent of the security they had was footage was cctv across the country at the capitol police like that what can they do i mean they can dispatch security right away but there there should be security. If they had called the police right away, maybe it doesn't escalate to what it got to. I'd still like to know whether there was security on the campus or on the property and the residence, period. Whether that was private security, whether it was public security, I'm very curious about that. It seems super strange to me. What continues to seem strange

to me is how, according to the report that was filed, the police report that was filed, the officers opened, they knocked, they get there, they knocked and they're told to come in. They open the door and DePayne and Pelosi are struggling over a hammer. And it's when they say, is everything okay? Like what the heck is going on? DePaype says weirdly, like, yeah, we're all good. Um, which sounds like something, uh, like criminal drug person who's like tripping on something might say. Um, but then it's, it's, he's able with the police right there to take the hammer from Pelosi and whack him in the head without police intervention. I mean, sure, it's

plausible that this all happens really quickly. But to your point, I actually still think there are some dots that need to be connected. And I feel like there has been an unwillingness to be forthcoming with information, while at the same time, Joe Biden is perfectly willing to use it in his speech. But we still don't actually really know how some of this happened. It's very strange. I mean, I do think they should put the body cam footage out as soon as possible, but he himself, David DePayne, has been very clear that, and he is in it. He said what his motive was. Right. Right. And he's an example of this increasing phenomenon of the hippie to QAnon pipeline.

Yes, yes. So a lot of people who haven't been paying attention to the transformation of our politics would be surprised. And next segment we'll play Jesse Waters talking about how he was an Obama voting person. A nudist. Right. And if you haven't been paying attention, then to you it's totally surprising that a person who is like pro-nudist and like an Obama supporter would now be a right wing QAnon person. By the way, that pipeline is is greasy as hell. People are sliding through there super fast. 100 percent. And it's been like that for a few years. And if you haven't been paying attention to it, pay attention to it,

because it's especially been accelerated by vaccine mandates and by covid, the hippie to QAnon pipeline or even the hippie to QAnon pipeline, or even the hippie to QAnon sort of horseshoe theory. Right, because the hippies already had the skepticism of authority and the transgressive counterculture attitude. There's not a place for that as much on the left, except in proscribed ways. So you kind of have to go over to the right now to get your freak on. So people don't think that Ryan is like speaking in anything but reverence for hippies. I feel like you are speaking as a...

Yeah, yeah, right. No, 100%. You have not gone full Q. You haven't gone even a tiny bit Q. But you understand where the sort of appeal is to the hippie that sort of says, and by the way, like old school leftist, and we've seen this happen with some old school leftists who seem, you know, to go off the rails because they're looking around and they cannot find a single institution

that is worthy of their trust. And that puts people in dangerous directions. Right. And, right. And there was a, and I believe this guy was part of it, the whole 9-11 conspiracy, which I think to the kind of American left's credit just tamped that down. Like no, stop it. Stop it with the steel plates melting in the towers and all of this nonsense. I don't think the left really shut that down

very effectively. But you't think the left really shut that down very effectively. But you're saying the mainstream left. Yeah. Like the, and anything resembling like a remotely respectable left. Like you had one member of Congress who floated it and they primaried her and ended her career. Cynthia McKinney down in Georgia.

Whereas Republicans, you can, you can say whatever you want nowadays, and it's probably going to help you in the primary, right? Well, Marjorie Taylor Greene, also from Georgia, was forced to walk back Q, was forced to walk back 9-11 trutherism. And that's actually kind of an interesting parallel with Cynthia McKinney, and someone should write it if they haven't,

that the parties pushed both of them to disavow the fringe conspiracy theory. And at the same time, that if, I think corporate media has really struggled to understand DePape. We've got better conspiracy theories. Wait till you hear about the P-tape. But I think David DePape, I think a reason a lot of the corporate media struggled to sort of square the circle of the hippie, nudist, and not even just corporate media, conservative media, failed to square that circle is because despite the fact that they have highly paid disinformation reporters on their freaking payrolls, they don't actually know a damn thing about Q. They truly don't know what the makeup of the fringe right and left are because they operate on crude stereotypes. Even when it's their job to troll Reddit, they can never challenge their priors enough to let go and see. Actually, some of these people are legitimately from the old school left.

They're legitimately coming at this from the perspective of people who have been hurt by our system, who have been through pain at the hands of our system, and who don't trust a thing anymore. Right. The media hears Q and they expect they're going to get a bearded guy with a stained t-shirt, like an AK-47 and a gigantic flag on his pickup truck. Yep. And then they're surprised if it's a hippie looking dude. And if you've been paying attention, you're like, no, no, no. It's those hippies who are making up the backbone in some ways of the far right. Look at the shaman being like one example, often like blended with,

you know, acute and also like prolonged mental health crises. Like that's a significant portion of what's going on here as well. But the shaman, what on earth is this? You know, I think the thing with the pape is there was similarly, I think it was also like a release valve. As we started to get more information, and reasonably so, right? Like we could say there was a lot of sort of celebration, I think, on the left and saying like, listen, we know the details. And now we're going to stuff the conspiracy theorist's face in the dirt and just smear it around and say, you idiots, et cetera, et cetera. But the fact of the matter is people have lost trust, and they have lost trust for good reason. A lack of institutional faith is reasonable. You are unreasonable if you have faith in the

Department of Homeland Security and in our intelligence community and in our FBI. That's the unreasonable position. And that's not to say conspiracy theories should be legitimized whatsoever, but the people in the legacy media whose instinct is just to shove people's face in it and rub it around instead of saying, actually, we kind of understand why people were like, wait, wait, wait, dude busted into the Speaker of the House's home with a hammer and beat her husband in front of the police. It sounds weird. It's a weird story. Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, though. But I do think that the folks who dabble with and engage in these conspiracy theories aren't at all directly responsible for the individual agency of a particular person, but you're creating an atmosphere that is likely going to produce more violence

and more lashing out. And so in that sense, there is some responsibility. And so we can head in different directions. We are all, we're a society that does have agency. We're not just kind of directed in a particular way by immovable forces. Like we can decide to kind of pull back from the brink on some of this stuff. So it doesn't mean necessarily to rub people's face in it, but I do think there's got to be some way to say,

look, this is serious stuff. Like, if she were home, he probably doesn't get in. So the chance that he could actually have killed her. Well, hopefully, but we don't know. And he didn't want to kill her. He said he wanted to break her knees. He wanted to hold her. It shows, like, another level of mental illness.

The thing is, like, we don't know what would have happened had she been there. We know there would have been more security, but we actually don't really know what the security lapse was yet. And I think we will, and I can be patient for all those details. We don't need to get them all in the first week. But Capitol Police, that was a security lapse on January 6th. We want to be making comparisons, and we need our law enforcement, obviously, for the sake of social fabric and the fact that we're all paying our money into the systems to protect the people that we can't demand answers from people in positions of power. And I think the reflex to treat people like that as conspiracy theorists is unhealthy. But I also think, yeah, I agree with you. The fact that we can't be reasonable about some of this stuff, it's

dangerous. It's outright dangerous. And speaking of the hippie to QAnon pipeline, there was some reporting that the place where he was sort of living had served as a basically makeshift Ibogaine clinic. And so we're going to talk about that with the country's foremost Ibogaine expert in the next segment. Stick around for that. So the fairly obscure drug Ibogaine has made a cameo into the story around Paul Pelosi and his alleged attacker, David DePape. Let's roll this clip from Fox News' Jesse Waters. So people are saying DePape was an Obama supporter who was psychotic and paranoid and a heavy drug user. And neighbors say DePape was taking a psychedelic drug called Ibogaine that made him imagine invisible fairy friends.

And he often ranted on his blogs about not being able to buy a fairy house with doors. I think this is the first time that our friend Jesse Waters has heard of the drug. He mispronounced it. But to get a real 101 on it, we wanted to bring in really the country's foremost expert on Ibogaine. So joining us now is Alan Davis, PhD. He's the director of the Center for Psychedelic Drug Research and Education, assistant professor at the College of Social Work, Department of Psychology at Johns Hopkins University. Did I get all of that right? Or any additional titles to throw on there? No, that sounds good enough for tonight. Thank you.

First of all, thank you. Thank you so much for joining us. You've done so much academic work on Ibogaine. First of all, what did you think when you saw it kind of bubble up in the national media for this one blip of a second? Honestly, it was a little bit surprising. I think in the hype of what's been reported on about this incident, that was the least thing I thought was going to come up in the media. So a little bit surprised. And so tell us a little bit about Ibogaine. What is it? So Ibogaine is a dissociative psychedelic drug. It is broadly in the same category as other things like psilocybin and LSD, although it does differ somewhat in how it's used and in what kinds of experiences it brings about in people.

And can you tell us more about what those experiences might be for the average Ibogaine user? And then in that context of Jesse Waters aside, what could have possibly been happening if the attacker had consumed Ibogaine in the time before the attack? So one thing that's important to keep in mind is that Ibogaine is very rarely used recreationally. In fact, I would hazard a guess that it's almost never used recreationally. In general, Ibogaine is used as a therapeutic drug in places outside of the United States to treat addiction and other types of mental health problems. For those that do perhaps use it for non-therapeutic reasons, maybe for their own psychological or spiritual development,

it's often used still with that kind of intention. So the idea that Ibogaine would be used as a recreational drug, ongoing, misused in that way, seems very unlikely to me. And more to the point, and you've covered, or I don't know what the academic word is, for a lot of treatment sessions. And so to me, the idea that somebody on Ibogaine could even leave where they were strains all credulity. You are so kind of

debilitated by the drug for so long that it seems implausible that you could do anything at all. Can you describe what it's like to go through the experience? Yeah, that's a great summary of it. Honestly, the experience with Ibogaine is something that usually people are lying on a bed. They are immobilized to a large degree for most of the acute drug effects. And again, because it's used with this therapeutic intention in most cases, it is a time for people to reflect inwardly. They are potentially having hallucinations. Often they're getting psychological insights. Typically, they're reliving some of the most difficult and challenging times of their life. This is not your kind of run-of-the-mill

club drug. This is something that is frankly quite difficult for a lot of people to go through because of the things that it brings up psychologically. So yes, it would be very surprising to me if someone was, you know, quote-unquote on Ibogaine and able to, you know, be mobile and doing things. Yeah, and I think also one of the reasons Ryan and I know wanted to cover this is to ask what therapeutic benefits exist with ibogaine, which is not legal, to my knowledge, in the United States. I believe it's legal in Mexico. But there's evidence, as I understand, that ibogaine, as a sort of therapeutic intervention

for folks, can be powerful and can have some efficacy. Can you tell us about what the evidence suggests? I mean, a lot of people probably think as we're talking about drugs like this of ayahuasca, which is much more commonly known in the States, but what is the evidence when it comes specifically to ibogaine? So there is a growing body of research that has been looking at this very question in part because people, including some of the research I've done on U.S. military veterans, have been going to Mexico and other places abroad to get treatment for mental health problems, in part because they viewed the current treatment offerings in the United States as insufficient. And what we're seeing in the research is that for people with

addiction, for people with PTSD, anxiety, depression, for a whole host of different problems, people are reporting that after they have an Ibogaine experience that they are feeling better, that their symptoms are improved. And it's even to the point where now there are several clinical trials that are in the planning phases in order to start testing this in a medical system here in the US. And when you talked about the way that you're completely immobilized and that people aren't doing it recreationally, I think an important layer of context to add to that is that it's utterly, from what I understand, I've done ayahuasca, but not Ibogaine, utterly terrifying, like horrifying, like an experience that people are only undergoing because they've tried everything else and they've hit rock bottom, but they desperately want to change. There's

been some reporting that Hunter Biden went to Mexico and was able to successfully, and to credit this with helping him become sober with apparently the blessing of his father. What do you know and what do we know about Hunter Biden's experience with Ibogaine? Well, I think what we know is that it's consistent with the reports that we're finding in the research studies that we've done following military veterans and other people who are seeking out treatment in Mexico for the same reason, because the treatments that they've tried to date have not worked for them. And you're absolutely right that these experiences can be quite difficult and for some people even traumatic, but it's worth it to go through it for some people because it does bring about, for those

that experience benefit, a positive outcome. I should mention, though, that it doesn't necessarily work for everyone. Some people are not going to respond to this treatment. But at the same time, it seems that it's working better for some than the treatments they have access to here in the States. I have a two-pronged question, which is, are there dangers to having it criminalized and illegal in the United States? That is to say, is the sort of black market for Ibogaine something that should concern us? And the second part of that question is, if you could just tell us, what is Ibogaine in nature? How is it harvested? Where does it appear in nature? And what's the experience of sort of physically ingesting it? What does that involve typically? So to answer the first question about the illegal drug market, I would imagine that the illegal drug

market for Ibogaine in the U.S. is very small, in part because it is readily accessible in neighboring countries and because it's relatively unknown. Very few people know about it. And given the difficult types of experiences that can come up, it's again, not something like alcohol or caffeine that can be widely abused. So I think that when I think about the illegal drug market, I think about the fact that the real dangers that we have with our drug policy system here in the States is the fact that we classify these drugs as very dangerous and illegal.

And in fact, they're safer on average than many other drugs like tobacco and alcohol that are freely available and regulated. So yeah, I think from that perspective, we're talking about substances that have very little risk compared to others. To answer the other question, Ibogaine comes from a shrub in Western Africa. And the alkaloid that Ibogaine is, it's typically extracted from there and ingested. And the effects can come on and last over the course of 24 to 72 hours, depending on the amount that's consumed and the metabolism of the

individual. Typically within 24 to 36 hours, people are on the tail end of their experience. But during that time of the acute effect, people are almost in like a dreamlike state where they're experiencing these flashes, these memories, these emotional experiences, as well as for some, especially if they're dealing with withdrawal from another substance like opioids or alcohol, they might be experiencing some withdrawal symptoms. Although interestingly, people report that the withdrawal symptoms after using Ibogaine, withdrawal from the drugs that they're trying to get off of, are actually quite reduced or almost completely gone, as opposed to other treatments that are available, which people have to suffer through experiencing those withdrawal symptoms, which is one of the benefits that people describe from seeking this

treatment out. And I've also heard of reports of heart complications related to Ibogaine. At the same time, though, most people who are going to be using Ibogaine already have severely compromised systems just from whatever health trauma it was, addiction crisis brought them to this point. So maybe that plays a role in the reports that you get around the heart issues. But what do we know about the cardiovascular question? So we do know that there is a small risk for people, likely people who already have cardiac complications, that there can be a cardiac risk to consuming this drug. In fact, when the centers that provide this treatment abroad in legal context, when I'm evaluating whether or not that's a center that's likely doing this on the up and up

and not just trying to take people's money and not doing a good job, one of the things that I try to look for is whether or not they're providing consistent cardiac monitoring and screening for heart risk ahead of the treatment, in part because of this risk that does exist. And it's a little bit of an unknown question right now whether that risk is due to the fact of the drug and that it's just going to, with some predictability for some people, produce this problem. Or like you said, is it a combination of people's background and perhaps misusing of other substances that's creating this possible risk? But either way, cardiac

monitoring is recommended for people who are seeking this treatment. And that brings us back to David Pape. When I saw that picture that I think, was it Michael Schellenberger that first posted the photo, it said, you know, miracle drug treatment. And it was a reference to the kind of compound where he was living in the Bay Area doing these Ibogaine treatments. I was like, oh my God, that's horrifying. Like, well, it's horrifying on a couple levels. One, it's horrifying to think that people will be going through these treatments or these journeys in that type of setting without the kind of medical backup that you're talking about. But it's also, if there is a market for that, that's also terrifying.

Because that means that there are so many people in the Bay Area that have hit rock bottom that are trying so desperately to get off that they will see this sign and then just use this kind of off-label back alley Ibogaine. And so what is the path from here to FDA approval? Do you think it is possible? Is there anybody who is kind of trying to push this through the process at Johns Hopkins or anywhere else? Well, I think part of the challenge is that with any psychedelic right now, what we see are continued publications coming out about psychedelics and their therapeutic benefit.

And because they have not been approved yet by the FDA and they haven't been rescheduled by the DEA, part of the challenge is people are going to continue seeking out these, you know, quote unquote treatments in settings where they are not offered from medical professionals. And unfortunately, people who come in contact with folks in this, you know, underground market might actually have no idea what they're actually taking. You know, someone could be saying that it's Ibogaine and it might be some other kind of research chemical because, again, it's unregulated here. So I think, you know, I hear quite often from people who have, you know, found an underground practitioner to use 5-MeO DMT or psilocybin and then ended up with, you know, debilitating anxiety and in the emergency department because they weren't

properly screened or monitored or followed up with clinically. So unfortunately, these problems will continue to happen until we have, I think, FDA approval and we have legal access here to safe administration and medical oversight of psychedelic experiences for therapeutic purposes. The path forward to see whether or not any psychedelic will be approved will have to involve academic research, and we're involved in those clinical trials now. The first two candidates that will likely be approved in the next two years are psilocybin and MDMA. However, Ibogaine is much further behind in that process. And unfortunately, there's likely at least seven to 10 years worth of research that needs

to be done in legally sanctioned university settings here in the United States before the FDA would have nearly enough information to make it available to the public. And meanwhile, 100,000 people a year plus are dying of opioid overdoses while our kind of abstinence-only treatment industry utterly fails them and rakes in money and is getting rolled up by the private equity industry. Meanwhile, the president of the United States is okay with his son doing it in Mexico. That seems fair, right? I mean, and that's overdoses, let alone the suicide numbers, the spiking suicide numbers. Right. Any final thoughts on this question? Well, that's the biggest challenge that you've just called out, which is that right now there

are a few select privileged individuals with the finances and the resources to be able to access these treatments in legal, safe contexts. But until we change our drug policy and our mental health treatment system here in the United States to one from criminalizing drug users and criminalizing and putting people away into systems that don't actually treat the conditions that they're diagnosed with, until we move from that into a public health model of drug policy where we actually look at any kind of substance as something that has benefits and has risks, and people need to understand what those benefits and risks are in order to make informed decisions. And once we get to that point, like Portugal or other countries that have moved to that model, then we can actually probably start really addressing the deeper issues of why people have these addictions

to begin with. All right, really last thing. To me, the people or the interest groups that could actually make a difference here are the insurance companies. It could be Medicaid, but Medicaid is completely disorganized and can't make itself anything of a political force. But the insurance companies are getting absolutely taken to the cleaners by these scam artist treatment industries for these $30,000 a month, 28-day miracles that don't work, and then they bring them back again, charge them another $30,000, charge the insurance company another $30,000. Seems like the insurance industry actually has a real incentive to push this along. Are they at all interested in this? You know, it's a little bit of an unknown question. There are conversations underway right now to determine whether insurance will be open to psilocybin and MDMA therapy, in part because they're the closest to FDA approval right now.

And there's actually been a federal task force that's been created to start collaborating through conversation between DEA and SAMHSA and other agencies that will oversee the dissemination of psychedelic therapy, in part to answer this question of whether insurance and Medicaid will cover it. I think that the writing's on the wall for how effective it is. We've had several phase two and now phase three trials underway with psilocybin and MDMA showing consistently favorable results and more powerful treatment effects than the current available treatment. So hopefully, insurance will get behind that. Hopefully, we know, we can within four to five years have this treatment available to more people. But with related to Ibogaine, it's going to be a lot longer

until we can get those studies done. It all comes down to funding though. You know, unfortunately in this society, if the science isn't funded, then the science just takes forever to get done. Yeah, if I were UnitedHealth, I would just fund it. Professor Alan Davis, thank you so much for joining us.

Really fascinating. Thank you. Good night. All right, and that does it for this CounterPoints Friday. I guess happy election Tuesday to you. Happy election. We'll be here on Tuesday. Tune in to Breaking Points Tuesday night. That's right.

We'll be here with the whole gang and are looking forward to breaking down those results as they come in, in a way that you can expect the legacy media absolutely not to. So we're excited to do the sort of signature, be a part of the signature Breaking Points election night coverage. Should be a good time. Maybe I'll bring beer. There you go. No, Sager can't drink it. All right. Have a great weekend. Over the years of making my true crime podcast, Helen Gone, I've learned no town is too small for murder. I'm Catherine Townsend. I've heard from hundreds of people across the country

with an unsolved murder in their community. I was calling about the murder of my husband. The murderer is still out there. Each week, I investigate a new case. If there is a case we should hear about, call 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I also want to address the Tonys. On a recent episode of Checking In with Michelle Williams, I open up about feeling snubbed by the Tony Awards.

Do I? I was never mad. I was disappointed because I had high hopes. To hear this and more on disappointment and protecting your peace, listen to Checking In with Michelle Williams from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What up, y'all? This your main man Memphis Bleak right here, host of Rock Solid Podcast. June is Black Music Month, so what better way to celebrate than listening to my exclusive conversation with my bro, Ja Rule.

The one thing that can't stop you or take away from you is knowledge. So whatever I went through while I was down in prison for two years, through that process, learn, learn from. Check out this exclusive episode with Ja Rule on Rock Solid. Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Rock Solid, and listen now. This is an iHeart Podcast.