Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - Counter Points #13: Hunter Biden investigations, Pelosi stepping down, Hakeem Jeffries, union strikes, crypto scams, DHS abuse of power, psychedelics & MORE!

Episode Date: November 18, 2022

Ryan and Emily give their commentary on Hunter Biden investigations, Pelosi stepping down, Hakeem Jeffries, union strikes, crypto scams, DHS abuse of power, psychedelics & 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/ Guest (Jonathan Lubecky): Veterans & Governmental Affairs LiaisonMAPSGuest(Marcus Capone): Co-Founder / Chairman of VETS Inc: Veterans Exploring Treatment Solutions& Founder / CEO of Tara Mind Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Hey guys, ready or not, 2024 is here and we here at Breaking Points are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it means the absolute world to have your support. What are you waiting for? Become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Welcome to CounterPoints Friday. It's been sort of an earthquake of a day of a 24-hour period in Washington, D.C. There's so much to get to. House Republicans are announcing first what they'll be

doing in a new Congress now that they have officially won back the House of Representatives with a slim margin. Nancy Pelosi announced her retirement. We have so much to get to. Ryan, you were writing your book this week. I was. I also took a break to write a little bit for The Intercept as well. But yes, so you'll have to catch me up a little bit. I don't want to spoil anything.

Don't spoil anything. I heard Nancy Pelosi did something. We're just going to do this, and you're going to learn about the news of the week. Because he was holed up in a cabin, basically. Unfortunately, the cabin had internet access, so I followed everything really closely. I pictured you with a quill. I wish. Just a quill dipping in an ink on parchment.

Actually, just hide, animal hide. You had killed the animals and needed their hides for paper. There was a wood stove, so that was fun. That's pretty close. Well, let's start then with House Republicans. We've got James Comer here. We've got Comer. So let's play A1, and then we're going to break down a little bit of what he said. We are releasing a report today that details what we have uncovered. We are also sending letters to the Biden administration officials and Biden family associates renewing our request for

voluntary production of documents relevant to this investigation. This is an investigation of Joe Biden, the president of the United States, and why he lied to the American people about his knowledge and participation in his family's international business schemes. National security interests require the committee conduct investigation and we will pursue all avenues, avenues that have long been ignored. Committee Republicans have uncovered evidence of federal crimes committed by and to the benefit of members of the president's family. These include conspiracy or defrauding the United States, wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices

Act, violations of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, tax evasion, money laundering, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. All right, so when you have a narrowly divided Congress, one of the major things that you can do, especially in a climate like this where bipartisanship is fairly hopeless, bipartisan legislation at least on big-ticket items is fairly hopeless, is oversight. And Republicans always knew that would be the case, so they've basically been preparing an oversight agenda for the last year. And one of the big ticket oversight items they're planning to do is look into what a lot of people think of as a Hunter Biden scandal. But I think Comer in that clip was interesting. He twice said this is not about Hunter Biden. This is about Joe Biden. That, I think, is very smart because there's plenty of evidence that Joe Biden is implicated in this. And to the extent that they are going to spend time, I know a lot of people are questioning that decision to say,

are you really doing much for the country investigating Hunter Biden? Well, the president of the United States, I think, is implicated in some very serious stuff here. And so long as House Republicans emphasize that, if the media won't tell the public that this is really a Joe Biden scandal, they should emphasize that. On its merits, I was going to call it the Hunter Biden scandal. They want to call it the Joe Biden scandal. The Hunter Biden scandal is worth investigating. It is a case of a family member trading on his name, trading on his access to power to enrich himself. And there are always questions to be asked when something like that happens. Who did you sell to? What did the person want? Did they get it? Was it illegal? Did it undermine U.S. national security?

These are all important and interesting questions. What might they still be getting? Now, if they're still getting something, now you're all of a sudden in the realm of relevance. From a political perspective, I think this is pitching squarely to the Republican base. And so for them to come out with their first one, there are an enormous number of investigations they could have done. Something around the pandemic. They will be doing that, for sure. Right, but the one that they put in the poll position is a signal of the one that they see as the one that they're going to put the most energy behind that is their top priority. Maybe there could have been something about the Biden White House's role in juicing inflation.

Maybe something about their energy policy. Like, you know, they were hammering on energy policy. Exactly. The reserve is all empty. Did Biden do this purely for political gain? Can they get emails that prove, you know, that emptied the strategic petroleum reserve just to, like, get a better result out of the midterms. There would be lots of these kind of broad-based things where they could try to back up the campaign themes

that they ran on and try to hit people in the middle. This is more for the conservative audience. Now, I say that as somebody who actually believes that there is merit in this stuff, but just politically speaking, it's in this cul-de-sac right now. Yeah, and it's funny because that's the—I wish we could both sit here and say the primary audience for this is the American people because it is relevant and germane to our politics that the President of the United States is. And just to be clear about the implications, I know that a lot of the people on the left, their eyes roll back into the back of their heads when they hear the name Tony Bobulinski. Tony Bobulinski has plenty of knowledge of Hunter Biden's business dealings.

Anti-Polish prejudice, basically. Yes, exactly. He has plenty of knowledge of Hunter Biden's business dealings because he was involved in them, didn't really have any incentive to speak out on this, and says the 10% from the big guy that came from that laptop, from that email, was referring to Joe Biden. But that's not all the evidence we have suggesting that Joe Biden was benefiting from Hunter Biden's relationship with CEFC, among other clients of Hunter Biden. But CEFC is a Chinese energy conglomerate. He was doing business with them, presumably, while Joe Biden was vice president. He took the Air Force Two to Beijing with Joe Biden while he was vice president. We know he was trading on the name. That much is

clear. We know that he was inviting plenty of people to meet with Joe Biden while he was vice president, whether they were Mexican lobbyists, not lobbyists, whether they were Mexican clients, whether they were Ukrainian clients, whether they were Chinese clients. We know that this was intentional on Hunter Biden's behalf, and we know that Joe Biden lied about having no knowledge of any of this. So all of that is to say, do I know whether Joe Biden is currently compromised by China? No. Do I have a lot of evidence in his China policy suggesting that he's personally getting any kickbacks or is too cozy with China? I don't know. I don't know

that that's what they're going to find. What I think will be more interesting is whether Joe Biden was intentionally getting his bills paid by Hunter Biden's insane lobbying fees while he was vice president and after the time he was vice president. That's what I think is on the table. Which comes from that text message that he sent to, what was it, Ashley, his sister, who said something like, well, you know, at least I won't take half like my dad did or something like that. Or maybe, anyway. To his daughter. You know, to his daughter. Okay. So you know what would be an amazing move that would force the media to cover this? And here I'm giving more free consulting to the Republican Party. I love how you do that. Pen and paper out, because this is good stuff. If they go up tomorrow and they're like, you know what? This is a matter of principle to us. And that's why we're going to explore the role of

Jared Kushner in the Trump administration. How did Jared Kushner get a $2 billion payout within weeks? How did Steve Mnuchin get hundreds of millions of dollars within weeks of, but forget Steve Mnuchin, that's small potatoes. How did Jared Kushner get $2 billion from Mohammed bin Salman when, as Ken Klippenstein reported over at The Intercept, everybody who looked at his investment proposal was shocked at how shoddy it was. It's like, there's nothing here. But there didn't have to be anything there because what was there was what he had already delivered and what he was going to deliver in the future.

Even Saudi Arabia's investment advisors, not just the ones on Wall Street that laughed, in Saudi Arabian investment authority advisors were like, this is crazy. This is not a good investment. They got $2 billion anyway. Why? What happened?

Just let's hold some hearings. Let's call some witnesses. And if you do that, first of all, the media would love that. But second of all, that then forces them to cover the other one. Because now you look like you actually are principled. But if you are only talking about Hunter Biden, when for four years you had the Trump family treating the White House as a piggy bank, and you're not going to do any hearings about that, it makes it so easy for the media. And whenever I talk to people on the left about this, like Hunter Biden, what about Donald Trump Jr.? What about the Trump Organization? And what about Jared Kushner? It's the same. And again, it's easy for you and I to sit here and say this because we're journalists. And a lot of journalists actually, I think, lack curiosity or even awareness that this is happening to the extent that it happens on the left. The Hunter Biden

story is as good an example as any. But all that is to say, Republicans have Mitch McConnell as their Senate minority leader, someone who is clearly and just obviously compromised by China. So when Democrats have failed to have any curiosity, like they investigated Trump. They overturned every single rock throughout the courts. But they didn't really go into that financial stuff because then that would have been asking questions that might have had difficult answers on their side as well. On their side, right.

Yeah, I would love answers about Jared Kushner. And there are a lot of Republicans who would privately tell you they would love answers about Jared Kushner. I think that's why the impeachment was over the Ukraine phone call rather than the broad-based corruption. Like, oh, okay, yeah, he did do it like 50% worse, but we kind of do it too, just a little bit more delicately. Lobbying is— More sophisticatedly.

This is the perfect window. Name-trading lobbying is the perfect window into the bipartisan corruption of Washington, D.C. It is absolutely, equally, 100% as bad on one side as it is on the other. It goes all the way to the top. So as long as the American people keep voting for both Republicans and Democrats at roughly 50%, there's going to be a lot of money going to one side or the other. So I agree with you, Ryan. I think it would be great if they wanted to look into Jared Kushner, but they're so deeply tied right now to Trump. They don't want to offend Trump voters. They don't want to poke and prod. Trump voters don't like Kushner, do they? No, actually, they really don't. But Donald Trump would be pretty upset if congressional Republicans started looking into his son-in-law because that could come back. I think the big guy might get a little more than 10% on that one. That big guy. I mean, listen, there's so many big guys. It's like we're in casino.

The Democratic big guy is selling himself short probably. So let's move on to Nancy Pelosi. This is an earthquake in Washington, D.C., really. I mean, people knew it was coming but weren't sure. It was one of those times in the news cycle, I felt today, where genuinely nobody knew how it was going to shake out. It kind of felt old school. Whereas in the age of social media, there's so much dripping and dripping that you kind of get a good inclination of what's going to happen before it happens. But this time, Nancy Pelosi came out today and said she was stepping down from her leadership position, but remaining in Congress. Let's take a look at B1.

My friends, no matter what title you all, my colleagues, have bestowed upon me, speaker, leader, whip, there is no greater official honor for me than to stand on this floor and to speak for the people of San Francisco. This I will continue to do as a member of the House, speaking for the people of San Francisco, serving the great state of California, and defending our Constitution. And with great confidence in our caucus, I will not seek re-election to Democratic leadership in the next Congress. For me, the hours come for a new generation to lead the Democratic caucus that I so deeply respect. So she's stepping down from leadership, but she's going to remain in Congress representing San Francisco. So she'll sort of maybe be able to mentor the new leadership that's coming up behind her.

That's charitable. What you were saying about the people didn't quite know, people expected but didn't quite know, reminded me of 2010. So after Democrats got wiped out in the Tea Party wave of 2010, So that's the first time that she loses her speakership. The entire city is wondering, is she going to stick around? A lot of people thought this is probably it for her. And the RNC ran a very heavy campaign. Fire Pelosi. Fire Pelosi.

Yes. So I was on paternity leave, and I get a call. Like, the speaker wants to do an interview. Oh, my gosh. Were you at HuffPost at the time? I was at HuffPost at the time. And so I get called in, do an interview. Oh my gosh. Were you at HuffPost at the time? I was at HuffPost at the time. And so I get called in, do the interview. And I learned later that her staff had no idea whether she was going to stay or not. And it was driving them crazy. They're trying to

figure out, do I need a new job? Do we need to get a whip operation going? And she was being so mum about her future they're like let's get Ryan in here and he'll ask they used you they told me to mediate their in their office their own boss to try to figure out their own boss oh my gosh and she wouldn't explicitly in the interview come out and say that she was staying saying staying but she said uh, I'm making a lot of calls, and I'm very pleased by what I'm hearing. There are a lot of people who are telling me that they want me to stay, and I'm going to continue to make those calls. She made it 99% clear, and so I published that. And then it was off to the races, and she locked down support very quickly. It was only years later I learned that they literally had no

idea what she was going to do. And the only way they could think to find out, because she just wouldn't say, was let's bring a reporter in here. You're the best person I could think of to ask about the legacy of Nancy Pelosi, because you've covered this from, I think, a genuinely fair vantage point, as opposed to the press really has always loved Nancy Pelosi. Does she get tough treatment sometimes? Yes. But if for evidence, read Molly Ball's book on how the, that's a great example of how the press in general treats Nancy Pelosi. Your experiences over the course of the last couple decades, Pelosi wise, looking back now, she's stepping down. What's the legacy of Nancy Pelosi? Well, I mean, Obamacare would be her legacy, I think, because that's the thing that she salvaged from complete wreckage.

So great how we got the public option. Well, she did get it through the House, actually. That's right, she did. But the fact that she used to do interviews with me, despite the fact that the Huffington Post was constantly kind of hammering her, shows the kind of amoral power player that she was. People misunderstand how you get access in Washington. Access comes from power and from forcing people to have to talk to you rather than from being nice to them. Because if you're nice to them, then they don't have to talk to you anyway because you're just going to be nice to them anyway. Or it comes from the staff needing to know whether or not she's going to run.

So there's this myth about Nancy Pelosi that she was a housewife. She's from Baltimore. Her dad was a mayor. She's a housewife. Her kids go off to college. Then she jumps into politics. That really obscures how political a person she was from the very beginning. And her dad wasn't just mayor. This big Tommy DeLisandro.

Her grandfather. Right, her grandfather too. And her father, yeah. And her father was a New Deal congressman, as well as then a big city boss in the 1940s and 50s, which meant, and I looked at his FBI file from my book, a lot of mob connections. It doesn't mean that he was part of the mob, but publicly, there are all sorts of mobs. Every mayor of a big

city back in the 40s and 50s, these machine mayors, they had to deal with the mob. Not a lot of Baltimore. And especially port cities. An Italian-American hub, super industrial, and thriving at the time. So as a child, Nancy Pelosi and her mother, because her mother was a piece of this machine as well, and so that's one way that she learned. Like, oh, this is for women too. They would keep these lists and these files of who needed favors and who was on the bad list. Because that's both the good and the bad of a machine. That a machine that actually functions

is going to deliver things for people. And in exchange, the public is going to keep reelecting them to office and overlook their corruption. Like that's the kind of bargain. Bargain broke down when the machines actually stopped delivering for people. People are like, oh, so now you're just corrupt?

No, no, no. You want to do the corruption, you got to like, when I call you because I got a problem, my trash isn't getting picked up, you get my trash picked up. So she learned from a real party boss. And so people think of her as a California liberal. No, she's like a Baltimore boss.

So when she goes over to California, she had been married to Paul from very early. They move out to California, and she meets this guy, Phil Burton. Do you know Phil Burton? Yeah. The fight, and there's this great book, Rage for Justice, about Phil Burton, just an incredible figure. He died young in 1983. Had he lived, I think the Democratic Party is a little bit different in the 80s and 90s. He probably would have been Speaker of the House. So they meet, and he sees this mansion that she lives in. What could we do with this? And he's like, this would be an incredible place for fundraisers. She's like, you got it. And so she starts, by the 1970s, fundraising and meeting all of these power players.

And Phil Burton, most powerful man in California at the time, rises to become one of the most powerful Democrats and calls himself a fighting liberal. And what he means by that is he's kind of cutthroat, but he's also progressive. He basically pioneered gerrymandering. It goes back a couple hundred years, but he's the one that really brought it to scale. He's a didn't Elbridge Jerry. Yeah. He was such a sicko, he even drew a district for his brother. That's just being a good brother. Just being a good brother, John. And so, he also pioneered the idea of raising tons of money and giving it to other members of Congress. Like that was new.

Like today, that's how you rise up in the ranks in Congress. It's pathetic and it's sad and it's at the root of the rot in the system. But the people, and Hakeem Jeffries is rising to the top. One thing he's really good at, raises a lot of money, distributes it to other members of Congress, buys their friendship, buys their loyalty, moves way up. So he pioneered that. He also took on the Dixiecrats. He was the one who really kind of denuded their power in the 1960s and 70s, taking on these kind of old racist, the white segregationist kind of wing. And so the whole time, she doesn't like to have him called her mentor.

She's like, I don't need anybody to mentor me. That was her ally. Let's call it the ally. So 1983, he dies suddenly. His wife takes over for four years. She then dies fairly suddenly, but of cancer. She's in her deathbed, and she makes an endorsement. She's like, I want Nancy to take my seat.

That's how it's told in all the stories. And then she just walked into the seat. Not at all true. This was a very competitive primary, and she ran against this guy, Harry Britt. Oh, that's right. Who was appointed by Feinstein to replace Harvey Milk. People remember who Harvey Milk was. He was the radical gay council member who was murdered.

They don't call him council members in San Francisco. Whatever they call him out there, he's murdered. And Britt replaced him. And Britt was also Democratic Socialist of America, vice chair for the city. And so, it was a true kind of establishment because she represented the kind of rich liberals in the city. He represented the socialists, the gay rights movement, and the kind of radical element of San Francisco. And she won in a kind of, with like 35% of the vote to like 32% of the vote.

Yeah, it was really close. And so everybody, and she's like, you know, don't tell me about being progressive. I'm from San Francisco. And what people didn't understand is you won by beating the left. And so she's been fighting the left while also understanding it because she's both. She started as one and really became the other. And she has to, if you're on the left, to her credit, she has been ahead of the curve on certain things that progressives champion. She knows what the political winds are blowing. And I think she also has fairly socially progressive values. It's a different story on other things, but socially progressive values. And that's, I think, one of the most interesting through lines of Nancy Pelosi's career is that she, in terms of her legacy, and there will be buildings named after her in the city, believe me, and it'll happen soon, I'm sure.

But she put muscle, even when she didn't want to, because she knew where her bread was buttered and the political winds were blowing, she put muscle behind some progressive causes in Washington, D.C. Oh, for sure. Yeah. As a Baltimore Democrat. Right, for sure. You combine those two things, power politics coming out of the old school Democratic Party with progressivism, she's really been invaluable to that cause.

Yeah, and Burton too got a ton done. I think he did Social Security, a supplemental Social Security. You look through his list of accomplishments, minimum wage, like a ton of like really big stuff that he was able to get through. By being this like really cutthroat Machiavellian power player who remembers who has done what. And Pelosi just has this steel trap of a memory. And members would say that nothing would get past her. So they'd be in some meeting, and she'd be like, oh, hey, Donna. Yeah, you voted on that prescription drug amendment in Energy and Commerce a couple weeks ago.

And it was an interesting vote. And they're like, how are you even watching? How do you remember that? Like 435 members, 230, 40 Democrats, like thousands of votes being cast every week. You're like, they felt like they could not get away with anything. And workaholism is something that is an underappreciated trait. Like she basically never slept and was just constantly on the phone, you know, either browbeating or whispering sweet nothings or, you know, just, you know, making sure that she had everything in a row.

We all laugh about how funny it's going to be to watch Kevin McCarthy kind of manage this conference with just a handful of votes. She had like a three-vote majority for a lot of this, and it wasn't even that funny. It was just like she just had everybody in line. Here's another interesting thing. So Hakeem Jeffries is set to, it looks like, we'll get into this, but is set to... You want to move to Hakeem Jeffries and the Democrats?

Yeah, let's talk about Hakeem Jeffries. So, we can put B, I think this is B4 up on the screen. It's a tweet from Jake Sherman of Punchbowl. Clyburn ends up assistant Democrat leader. This is all, again, like that's with all of these sort of dominoes falling. This is an earthquake in Democratic politics. This is a huge shakeup. Steny Hoyer, Nancy Pelosi's longtime love-hate relationship with Steny Hoyer goes back years and years. They dated. They went on a date in the 1950s. You couldn't write it. They interned for the same senator, Maryland senator. You couldn't write that stuff. Yeah, both Marylanders. And they have been a little hostile to each other since

then. He was elected in like 81. She was elected in 87. And she was always sort of usurping him. Yeah. Right. And this goes back decades. I'd love to know what happened on that day because she's... You should have asked her about that? Hopefully I'll get another interview. But she doesn't answer. She does not entertain questions about that. Yeah, I'm sure she doesn't. So all that is to say, Hakeem Jeffries is...

She won't even confirm that a date happened. That's just Washington lore. All right, well... We do know they interned together and they have beef. Yeah, well, you can sort of fill in the blank there. So think about Nancy Pelosi. And I heard this described actually by Philip Wegman, who just before we started talking here was on Special Report and mentioned that Nancy Pelosi, quote, had bent the institution to her will. And coming in, when you have new leadership coming in, they saw what Nancy

Pelosi has done in the House over the last half decade, just this most recent bid as, or this most recent tenure of Speaker. And she absolutely has bent the institution to her will. She got rid of the motion of vacate, which is very controversial among Republicans right now. Recommit, right? Vacate is the one that almost got Boehner. She got rid of the motion of vacate? Yeah. And so there's a- I thought Republicans were trying to get rid of that. Republicans are trying to bring it back. Bring it back. Okay.

Right. And so, yeah, she booted people off committees, which Republicans see as a huge red line. Yeah. Although they're going to do it themselves. Does Hakeem Jeffries, and this is, by the way, coming from Nancy Pelosi, who is a little bit of both Baltimore Democrat and San Francisco liberal, and who did put a lot of muscle into the January 6th committees and sort of neutering Trump's Republican Party over the last half decade. So does Hakeem Jeffries step into this vacuum should this election go through as people expect it to? Does he step into this vacuum having learned from Nancy Pelosi? And Nancy Pelosi is going to remain in Congress, she said today. Another thing people didn't know whether it would be the case. What's their relationship like? One thing that Pelosi has

not been good at has been grooming, and this is probably intentional, but grooming successors. Rahm Emanuel stepped aside. Now, I'm not saying I wanted these successors to take over. Rahm Emanuel stepped aside. Now, I'm not saying I wanted these successors to take over. Rahm Emanuel was somebody who wanted to be Speaker of the House. He gave up and left. Chris Van Hollen wanted to be Speaker. He gave up and went to the Senate. Tons of them just were like,

you know what, these people aren't going anywhere. So I'm just getting out of here. And so Hakeem is a relative latecomer on the scene here. 10 years in the Congress, 52 years old. And also, he was Joe Crowley's protege. And Joe Crowley was her rival. Because Joe Crowley, when AOC beat him in 2018, was busy organizing a coalition to challenge her for speaker. And Hakeem was very much a part of that coalition. But like I said, she's a political player. She's not going to hold that

against people. Also, Hakeem has it kind of locked up. So in some ways, it doesn't matter. She probably couldn't stop him even if she wanted to. I've seen a lot of people saying, how are progressives allowing this to happen? It's like they got beat, and they got beat a long time ago. It seems like he has the votes. The same thing happened with Kevin McCarthy this week. Is Kevin McCarthy the ideal choice of the Freedom Caucus, which very much mirrors what the squad is on the left?

Absolutely not. Is Tom Emmer, who's the head of the NRCC and really infuriated a bunch of people on the right, the ideal choice of the Freedom Caucus? No, but they got beat. Right. And so Jeff Rezo is not the vote counter, the whip, the kind of political power player that Pelosi is. Now he has two years to try to figure it out. The big question for him is going to be, will he continue to wage an open war on the kind of progressive flank in the House? That's what's so remarkable about Jeffrey's becoming leader and assuming he gets in without any opposition, that he's in such an open war

with the left that he tweets about it publicly. He created an entire pack, the Team Blue pack. It's a priority for him. That goes and plays in primaries against progressive Democrats. When Joyce Beatty won her primary in the 2020 cycle against a Justice Democrat-backed candidate, Morgan Harper, he did this huge spike of the football publicly. He was like, you're trying to come for us. We crushed you. And then we're going to crush you in New York. Elliott Angle's next. We're going to crush Jamal Bowman. Jamal Bowman actually ends up beating Elliot Angle, even though, embarrassingly,

Hakeem Jeffries had called his shot and then lost. But Jamal Bowman today said that he's going to support Hakeem Jeffries for leader. How does that happen? Well, one, personal relationships. Like, people underestimate the strength of those. Kevin McCarthy and Jim Jordan. On Capitol Hill. Right. Knowing somebody and liking them. And then you also don't know what people do for each other. Right. And not even in a corrupt way. Personal.

Like just, and just the vibing together. Like it's together, it matters. The house runs on vibes. The house runs partly on vibes. Well, it has to, to some extent. Right. And so why is he cool with Jamal Bowman, but he's not cool with AOC? Right. It's somewhat significantly about vibes because their politics are pretty much identical. Jamal Bowman was asked, what do you think of having two New Yorkers potentially in leadership today? He said, that'd be gangster. The other one being Esbayat,

who would run, I think, the DPCC, who represents kind of part of the Bronx in Manhattan. So, right. So, you have him in open war with the left and the left supporting him for this leadership position. So, then the question is, does he continue the war? And he's like, well, I smell weakness. How pathetic is this? I openly fight them and they still won't stand up to me, so I might as well just steamroll them. Or does he say, I'm at the top now. I have to behave differently. I run this entire party. And if I want to be speaker, I need everybody pulling together. That's what I'm so curious about,

because that's what Nancy Pelosi and Kevin McCarthy actually both have. And Nancy Pelosi has it unlike anybody else, right? Like she really is, in the history of American politics, one of the people who has been able to combine the power of the establishment with doing favors for the base and for the activist wing and the ideological wing of her party when she can and when she knew she had to. It's not to say Nancy Pelosi is some sort of virtuous beacon of progressive charity. Her relationship with Ilhan Omar is a good example. She calls her immediately after she wins. Omar's like, I need a change in the house rules so that I can wear a head covering on the floor. Otherwise I won't be able to go onto the floor. She's like,

I got it for you. She called her every week up until the election. She's like, I'm going to get this done. She gets that done. And then when she was getting in trouble for the Benjamins and for the other stuff, she would call her and say, look, we're going to put out a statement. I know where your heart is. Here's my advice on how you can stop getting caught up in your own axles like this. Don't take it personally what we're going to put out. And then when Trump came after her, she called Omar and invited her on a trip to Ghana, if you remember this. So they went, you know, Pelosi and Omar and then a handful of others, and spends time with her. And so then when people are coming to Omar and saying, we need to overthrow Pelosi, or you need to challenge her on this, she's like, we went to Ghana?

She's had my back vibes when people have been coming after me yeah well yeah and to some extent you're right like vibes is sort of a pejorative

in this context but really truly like it matters who people think that they can get the most out of and if you want to bring stuff back

to Minneapolis exactly having her on your side Kevin McCarthy and Jim Jordan Jim Jordan sees Kevin McCarthy they have a good relationship

Kevin McCarthy sees Jim Jordan as someone who can just be an absolute bulldog on the oversight committee. This is back in 2018. And Jim Jordan says, well, if I have a good relationship with Kevin McCarthy, that's good for the whole Freedom Caucus. Now, that causes internal quibbling. But is Hakeem Jeffries going to be somebody who steps into these massive shoes of Nancy Pelosi, this legacy, and says, what I'm going to do is stop prioritizing my attempt to quash the squad and the progressive movement and recognize that in order to advance the power of the party as a whole, it's a give and take, which is a very, like that's a pivot from somebody whose priority is doing the opposite. He's going to be pressured to do, to stay the course because he's extremely

tied in with, with AIPAC and with the pro-Israel lobby here in the United States, which their number one priority seems to be to annihilate the left wing of the Democratic Party. And he has, and he has worked in coordination with them against Summer Lee, against Donna Edwards, against others. It's a fault line that when you elevate him to this massive position of leadership could rupture into, it could create a crater. Yeah, but the left wing of the Democratic Party is so small. It'd be like a pothole.

I don't know. I mean, small, but AOC is extremely high-profile and influential, as is Ilhan Omar. Rashida Tlaib is also very high-profile and influential. And we could do an entire segment on how Rashida Tlaib kind of got boxed out and have that conversation too. But we've been talking for a long time. We can move on to the strike wave. That's right. Not quite a wave, but a lot of strikes. There have been so many conversations about how to define a wave recently that I don't know if we need to get into it because I think it's probably fair to say

this is one part of a larger strike wave over the course of the last year or so. So let's put up, what do we got, C1 here, Starbucks workers planning a strike, calling it Red Cup Day. Starbucks calls it Red Cup Day, right? That they give out, it's one of their busiest... Oh, they're striking on Red Cup Day. On Red Cup Day, right, when they hand out the red reusable mugs to... Shows how much I've been going to Starbucks lately. Right, to qualify customers. So it's one of the busiest days of the year. And there, again, this is...

111 stores. Yeah, it's a lot of stores. And obviously, this is part of a bigger thing that Starbucks has been dealing with, again, for a little over a year, probably 18 months. And Howard Schultz actually stepped back into the role as head of Starbucks after sort of flirting with a run for presidency by going on the Goop podcast with Gwyneth Paltrow. Shockingly, that didn't work out. But he's back, and he is trying to crush the unionization drive at Starbucks badly. So this probably doesn't make that any easier. Well, one of the things he's been doing has been closing some stores.

If they're unionizing and they're kind of on the fault line of making money or not making money, maybe you would keep it open. You're like, you know what? They got a union and they lost money the last three months. Let's get rid of them. He's not messing around. Yeah. He has come in with a very heavy hand and done some like really typical tactics, for instance, saying that, sure, we'll do more benefits. Oh, yeah. Breaking all sorts of labor laws. It's just explicitly saying like, if you're not in a union and if you don't support a union, then you get X benefits. Like, you cannot do that.

Like, that's against the law. He's just like, okay, arrest me. Right. And the thing about Starbucks that's really interesting to me is I think of it in the context of the underemployment rate around the country, which I think affects a lot of Starbucks workers. Now, Starbucks has really good benefits in general. People have a lot of problems with the way that they're scheduled in different stores. They have a lot of problems now that the technology over the course of COVID, I mean, everybody is customizing their drinks to a freaking T and mobile ordering them. Also, customers have gotten so much worse than they were.

Not just their persnickety orders, but they're just jerks. Right. This is not Ryan and I just messing around. This is like the Washington Post followed Howard Schultz around on a tour of all of these different locations. And these big themes kept emerging when he was talking to workers. Customers have gotten worse. It's impossible for us to make these drinks as customized and as quickly. So he said, all right, we can get some more machines that will help you do this faster, and it'll be easier for everyone. And you can spend more time talking to customers and getting to know them is actually a thing he said. Because his original vision for Starbucks was that it would be kind of a community hub, that it would be this calming oasis and a real sort of espresso experience. He was inspired by the cafes of Italy to bring that to the United States. And if you walk in near local Starbucks, I don't know if you experience that depending on

where you are anymore, but he has really pulled out all stops to to quash the unionization um but his workers i mean again like he's he he offers tuition he offers health care but there are still so many problems and i think it's indicative of how hard it is um in the sort of way that people our age um you're an older millennial technically right i think i'm I'm Gen X. Oh, you're Gen X. Okay. Young Gen X. That counts though. So young Gen X and millennials have been conditioned to see their sort of career pathways and what that looks like when you're 25 and in a really bad situation. It looks like getting screamed at, dealing with, as Howard Schultz says, I don't think we're going to be able to keep our bathrooms open. That's a huge complaint that workers have. I always reference the Jacobin story that said,

we're being asked to function as untrained social workers. I mean, that's a huge, huge concern. Right. Yeah. And I think people just want to feel a sense of dignity while they're at work. And that's the thing that is, I think, really driving the unionization campaigns. And they don't feel like they have protections, too. If a customer complains, like, you mess up a drink order, you're not as super polite to this super rude person as you should have been. They complain that you're getting ducked and the manager's on you. They want some protections up against all these vicious forces that they're confronting. Because like you said, people are still doing all of their online orders that they were doing during

the pandemic, but people are also coming into the store, yet you have the same number of workers. So how's that work? I would love to know what Howard Schultz is like, how closely and Starbucks in general thinks about the ingredients that it uses in their food. And this is like industry wide. It wouldn't just be singling out Starbucks. But a huge reason that the American people are miserable is because of, frankly, what they're eating, like period. And that's a huge role is played in that by the executives who make these decisions.

And Howard Schultz, I say that because in the Washington Post profile of him that was published last month, it's really interesting. He wants to turn all of the blame around from Starbucks to the culture at large. And there's absolutely truth that it's getting harder and harder to work in the service industry in this country that we're all a part of and in this culture that we're all a part of that is increasingly miserable. And again, that's not just us sitting in this nice studio and saying it. There's statistics that back up the fact that our happiness has been going down. Arthur Brooks has put these statistics together and you should go check them out. So it's of course going to get harder and harder for people in the service industry to exist in the service industry. And one of the ways that corporate executives can start dealing with that,

they're just tinkering around the edges. That's all they want to do. They want to quash the unionization, throw some more superficial benefits people's way, and not deal with any of the fundamental issues because that would be a serious blow to their bottom line. God forbid. Right.

And anybody who's watching this who works in the service industry understands that. They don't need us telling them that. But if you don't work in it, stop taking your frustration out on people at Starbucks, at restaurants. Don't do it. They don't want to hear it either. They're not your problem. Right.

And people are just stressed in the country, and that's what Howard Schultz came away from this listening tour with. And we can just quickly pop C2 up on the screen because I think it's relevant too, especially in that kind of broader context. 48,000 California academic workers strike for higher wages. So this is grad students all over California that are striking. They say they're making like, and actually you see right there, we make about $23,000 a year. This is a quote from the story, and that's unlivable in many parts of California. That's from one of the graduate students in the history department at UC Santa Barbara who was talking to Al Jazeera. That person is the recording secretary for the Santa Barbara branch of the UAW, And that's one of the unions representing the academic workers, which, you know, that's how that works out. But in this context, Ryan, you've probably

covered a decent amount of grad student unionization drives. I was actually in one. Oh, you were? Yes. All right. So what do you make of this? This is, I mean, that's like we said, tens of thousands of people in California right now. I went to University of Maryland for grad school and we had an organizing drive. It ultimately failed. But I had, I think, 98% card signers in my school. I was in the public policy school. So I was proud of that. And it was a lot of fun because you could see how the different graduate students would respond to you. When I would be organizing history grad students, I'd be getting a history of the labor union. If I was in the philosophy department, I'd be getting,

what is a union? What is solidarity? What is work? When I was in chemistry, any of the sciences, the math, I would just explain it to them. And they'd be like, oh, more power, better wages, more protection. Okay, yes. Right, the math works out? Yeah.

The numbers? Yes, we're for that. All you basically had to do, it would take five minutes on the hard sciences, chem side, all of that. The literature people, the philosophers, just impossible. Just absolutely impossible. Right. Public policy, they're like, yeah, sure. Let's do that.

So in California, they're saying they're demanding a wage that's something over, I think it's like $54,000 a year, which again, like California is a stupidly expensive place to live. I mean, just stupidly expensive. It has driven the middle class out of California. And I think one of the reasons the strikes at these schools is interesting is because that's the policies of the sort of party that is kind of a patron of organized labor in California. The Democratic Party has made it extremely expensive to live in California because it's beholden the corporate interests in the same way that the Republican Party in California is beholden the corporate interests. California is a corporatized,

almost dystopia in certain parts of it. And again, like these broader forces, people are just like, why are these white collar unions popping up? And it's like, because things are miserable. Yeah. Like you can't afford to live. Rent's too damn high. The rent is too damn high. All right. So we've got a fun little FTX update. Ryan is so excited about this because of the text message or the DMs, the DMs. Yes. So I've heard him called now Sam Bankrun Fraud, which is pretty good. It's still SBF, so that's perfect. SBF, Sam Bankrun Fraud.

The former CEO of FTX did an interview with a reporter at Vox, which he was funding a Future Perfect, Future Something section of Vox. We can put D1 up on the screen. The reporter was, so the reporter DM'd him to, I had this up, here it is. Yeah, Kelsey Piper. And the part that I wanted to focus on, the entire text exchange that she publishes

is just absolutely extraordinary. This is a guy who's sitting in a beanbag in the Bahamas just incriminating himself all up and down, just in an incredible way. But he also indicted all of society with this one exchange. And so she's asking him about his effective altruism and all of the good works and all the talk that he was doing about making the world a better place and just wanting the best for everybody. That's really what he's all about. And she starts—

Making money to give away money. That's the effect of altruism. And she starts to see that he's like—she's like, so wait, so was all of this just a front? And he's like, yeah, it was a front. And then she asks him—she says, you were really good at talking about ethics for someone who kind of saw it as all a game with winners and losers. And he writes back, yeah, he, he, I had to be. It's what reputations are made of to some extent. I feel bad for those who get effed by it, by this dumb game we woke Westerners play where we say all the

right shibboleths, and so everyone likes us? Shut the hell up, dude. Seriously, because that's... Don't you want him exposing this? No, I mean, yes, of course, to that, right? But like, it is so incredibly shameless, because he's also, like, exposing the people who aren't in on it, right? So how many times did the media... In fact, he's actually still scheduled to speak at a New York Times event this month for like top thinkers,

which I'm gonna talk about in my monologue. But that's what's amazing, right? Is he understands what he was doing and he's exposing himself as being completely shameless. But the media was covering him as though, he was on the cover of what, Fortune? As though he was like, he was being talked of as JP Morgan,

this guy that was snatching up all the feelings and the just like organizing and helping everyone save the industry basically. And here he is saying these text messages, F regulators, they make everything worse. They don't protect customers at all. And so yeah, at the end of the day, he's exposing that it's basically all about money. It's a smokescreen to make more and more and more money. But we were told for how long that if you disagreed with effective altruism and what did he say in the West, the shibboleths that we all have to abide by, which in this case is the full pantheon of like cultural leftism that you couldn't say a

word against in 2020. If you did say a word against it, you were a bigot. You were a bad person. You weren't just a political disagreement. You were a bad person. And there were billions of dollars built on the back of that effort. And it has gone a long way towards just utterly destroying the country. So while it's somewhat gratifying to watch him crumble, it's also just profoundly sad. And he's also an idiot. Do you know how many FDIC-insured bank accounts have gone bust since the FDIC was created? Zero. Nobody who had money in an FDIC-insured account since it was created during the New Deal has lost a single penny. So what do you mean regulators don't protect customers?

It's just idiotic. Well, you know that his father helped Elizabeth Warren write a tax bill. He comes from a family of people who are politically involved. And I think that's where he got a lot of his cachet. His mother is Barbara Freed. And then obviously his dad is Bankman. And both of them in their own right were very well respected kind of rock star academics. Because academia is this weird hierarchical place too where you can rise up to like rockstar status. And they had, the poignant part about this last quote here though, is by this dumb game we woke Westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us. His parents are effective altruists. Like they're the ones who taught

him these shibboleths. And that part at the end where he says, everyone likes us, I thought of his parents and him just being a child wanting the approval and love of his parents. So he speaks this like language that they've taught him. And then that was the first time I ever kind of like felt like some pity on a human level. It's like, wow, what a- In your life? What a wounded, yeah, ever in my life. No, but for him. Right. Like what a human level. It's like, wow, what a- In your life? What a wound, yeah, ever in my life. No, but for him. Right. Like what a wounded child.

I thought when he said that of Elizabeth Holmes, immediately I thought of Elizabeth Holmes. And actually another thing you can still see on the New York Times website for this deal book summit that, what's his name, Andrew Ross Sorkin has been involved with for years. They brag about some of their former speakers and one of them is Adam Neumann. Adam Neumann, Elizabeth brag about some of their former speakers,

and one of them is Adam Neumann. Adam Neumann, Elizabeth Holmes, Sam Bankman Freed, you can go down the list, but these are people that the media fetid. The media served them to us on a silver platter, did advertising for them, essentially, not being forced to do advertising for them, but for their own purposes. The media boosted these effective altruists, these people who said they were going to change the world and make money to give the money back. And they were all doing this in the name of the common good, et cetera, et cetera. And all it was was an intentional deception. That's it. And effective altruism is an attempt to justify inequality, to say that inequality exists, but it's a good thing because it's shepherding all of these resources to these people who have proven by the way that they have fought and clawed their way to the top,

that they are the most effective and the smartest people in society, and that they then have this obligation to distribute the money around rather than we should collectively come together and say, you know what, how about a much higher tax rate for these billionaires? And so they would say, actually, no, the billionaires like me need more money because I'm going to be so good at distributing it. He actually distributed, or I don't know if we've gotten any of it, he distributes some of it to the Intercept. Yes. We take foundation money. Yeah, absolutely. And he's got a foundation.

It was relatively new. I don't even know if the first check cleared before the whole thing just... Just crumbled. Just completely crumbled and blows up. So I assume that that's not coming. Well, it's a good example also, though, because I don't think he expected

to exert any pressure over the Intercept's coverage of crypto. I think. Or Vox's coverage of crypto. But I think it was. I wonder. So the foundation focused on pandemic stuff. And so what they did is they were like, you guys are doing great work on the NIH, on EcoHealth Alliance, on LabLeak, on pandemic stuff. Here's extra money to continue doing that sort of work.

So I think the people, obviously the people that the foundation hires to go spend this money, they actually care about this and they want that to happen. I think, I mean, clearly he doesn't believe in this stuff. It's all fake. I think his hope is, clearly he doesn't believe in this stuff. It's all fake. I think his hope is that if he just spreads enough money across the entire world, that when he gets into some trouble, that he'll have his hooks in people and they might be a little bit gentler on him. Now, you fall cataclysmically like this from grace, then your hooks are all yanked out. Also, he clearly doesn't give a damn. As long as he's making money, he clearly didn't care. And that's the thing, because this was all a smokescreen. And he says it over and over again, all the dumb stuff I said. That's in one of these text messages, which you can go read them,

or DMs, you can go read them at Vox. He continued to go back and forth with this Vox journalist, who had previously been writing a profile on him, so had an existing relationship. But when all of this is crumbling, he's just talking to this one reporter over direct messages. Right, and I think it is a longer game, because everything, every single piece that we wrote about him that ever mentioned him was negative.

Exactly, exactly. But I think he's okay with that. Like, these super rich people are okay with that because they're trying to capture the entire system. And the little people are like criticizing them along the way and they're like, that's fine. The one like broad point that I'll make here is people have done analyses on what are called super zips from the 1960s to I think the last time this was coming apart must have been like 2012. And you can go and look at how people lived together

in the same communities, despite having like pretty dramatic income differences in the past and how they do it now. And it's a very big gulf between how we used to live and how we live now. And so people like Sam Bankman-Fried, the ultra rich, really don't know regular people. And so people like Sam Bankman-Fried, the ultra-rich, really don't know regular people. And so his idea that he's just going to dress like an average Joe or Mark

Zuckerberg's just going to dress like an average Joe, it's always been sort of, I think it's kind of projection, right? That like, I can pretend to be normal or I can be normal in some way or another. But what they're doing is saying, we're going to use our inequality to fix inequality, et cetera, et cetera. But they never want to do anything, anything that actually would cut into, like, change the tax code. So you can stop cheating on your taxes. Like, not cheating, but you can stop gaming the tax code in your favor. But from their perspective, if you're so good at gaming the tax code, then you deserve that money, and you're probably going to then spend it better than the

government would. It's what Trump said to Hillary Clinton. He was like, he cheats on his taxes. And he was like, that makes me smart. And the difference between Donald Trump and Sam Bankman Freed is that Donald Trump will say this, not just in DMs, but in a presidential debate where Sam Bankman Freed is out there talking about how he's just doing this for the greater good. Give me a break. And that's where you get people drawn to Donald Trump. Right. Because we also know instinctively, intuitively, that all the people that are at these Met Galas and at the entire kind of gala circuit in New York City, they don't know what – they barely know what the cause is for that dinner that they're going to.

Just another Chipriani. Right. How much, some of them like the opera. Others are just, you're just supposed to pay for the opera. You just give the money to the opera. That's what you do. This is one of the first where he just says it outright. The best example.

It was just a front. The best example of that is the Black Lives Matter Global Foundation, which if you are somebody who is a donor of multi-millions of dollars, you would pause before giving that group money because they were opaque in ways that were sketchy from the very beginning, and that has now all crumbled. But they raked in tens of millions of dollars from people like Sam Bankman. I don't know if he gave specifically, but in 2020- I don't think he was rich enough by then. That's the other reason he got so much media coverage. He was like, nobody buys a Bitcoin, turns it into $30 billion overnight. So the media is just going to be fascinated by that. And they're like, oh, and your parents are famous? Fascinated, but also very favorable to it in a creepy weird way. Oh, and you're giving

money to Democrats? Yeah. And against pro- That's the thing. A lot of his money that he was spending for Democrats was in primaries against progressive Democrats. And Stoller has pointed out that his business partner was giving big to Republicans too. So this idea that they were, it was just all a Dem grift, I think is a little off the mark, although he definitely gave a lot of money to Democrats. But the point is, like, he does, like, it's a virtue, these millions and millions of dollars that empowered, I think, some destructive forces in our culture was a smokescreen for corporatists to make an F-ton of money, basically. Great. Now that we've established that, let's move on to the DHS. This is an interesting story that actually hasn't got a ton of pickup. We can put the first element up on

the screen. It's from Gizmodo, which did a long report on another report that was released by or made public by Senator Ron Wyden recently. And this is the headline Homeland Security admits it tried to manufacture fake terrorists for Trump. I think that oversells the story a little bit. I'm not sure that they were trying to manufacture fake terrorists so much as they were overstepping the boundaries of their authority to monitor and to monitor and sort of make a bigger claim about the security threat than actually existed and that's not to say in in 2020 there was a huge security threat in Portland. There's no downplaying that.

DHS though seems if you read this report, which I actually did because I got here a little earlier today, which is unusual, and too early, in fact, like an hour early, and read the entire report, you see that a sort of ill-equipped DHS is monitoring protesters who are not implicated in violence in order to kind of have dossiers on people in Portland that summer. And so, you know the book Three Felonies a Day? No. So it's this book by a lawyer that the point behind it is that every person in America commits three felonies a day. Probably a slight exaggeration, but maybe not. Because our federal code is so expansive and so interlocking that... You're speaking my language. Yeah, that just walking down the street can get you caught up in some type of federal code in the hands of a creative federal prosecutor. That's why there's that famous saying that a good prosecutor

in front of a grand jury could indict a ham sandwich. And so now you have a bunch of ham sandwiches running around Portland and Trump demanding that they find these terror groups. Because if you remember at the time, he's scaring the whole country about Antifa. Antifa. Antifa. Well, Antifa is scaring the whole country about Antifa because they were actually burning Portland.

Yeah, every night, 50 to 100 of these kids would come out all dressed in black and like throw bricks through like the Bank of America window and they set the mayor's building on fire. They were setting fires. Like, no, it's not cool at all. And I would get beat up by the lefties all the time because I would constantly be like,

can you guys do something with some purpose here? Yeah. Can you stop this? Like, who are you doing this for? The autonomous zones— You're just doing it for yourself. Those turned out to actually be very dangerous, and there were more than a dozen people by certain metrics that actually died that summer because of this. And I don't mean to belittle it, but it's still tiny.

And every death is a tragedy. Yes, yes. Although what we're seeing here— But it wasn't a nationwide uprising. And if you read the report, I think what we're seeing here— But it wasn't a nationwide uprising. And if you read the report, I think what we're seeing—oh, I disagree with that because it hits— Okay, well, for that month. But that wasn't Antifa. They were at the things.

And what's frustrating about this is the same thing, actually, that we see across intelligence communities. And again, the intelligence community grift is a bipartisan one. We talked about that earlier in the show with lobbying, but it's the same thing. A lot of the people in the intelligence community that abuse their power, they're both Democrats and Republicans. I think we've seen it more from people who tend to be Democrats in the last couple of years than what was on display during the Bush administration. And some Republicans were not open to hearing about how these were actual abuses of power. One of the things we see the FBI consciously involved in right now is expanding the definitions and expanding the scope of inquiries in order to implicate more and more people, in order to

monitor and to surveil more and more people, in order to have more power and more funding, et cetera, et cetera. What the DHS was doing here actually seems to fit that narrative pretty perfectly. So how has the right been responding to this? Nothing. I mean, I haven't heard anything about it. And maybe that's because it's a, well, first of all, we know one. That's because there's double standards, obviously. But secondly, probably because it's a minor concern in the scope of what the intelligence community is doing right now in terms of domestic terrorists and their classifications of domestic terrorists. Um, but people like Rand Paul, I haven't seen if he said anything about that you would think,

um, would, would have concerns about this as well. Right. Because that's what the right has to do. If, if they're going to, again, going back to what we were talking about in the first block with Kushner and Hunter Biden, if you're going to complain when they surveil and call you domestic terrorists, you got to do the same when the shoe is on the other foot. And this is Trump's DHS. So I think a lot of people would say, you know, today there's too little focus on violent left-wing rioters and still in Portland, for example, and so, et

cetera, et cetera. That's what you would hear. That's for the cops. The cops are just on strike out there. At what point is the right going to be like, hey, guys, okay, enough. Get back to work. I don't know. We get that you were upset.

You didn't like the way you were treated in 2020. It's almost 2023 now. You're on salary. One of the unsung stories of last week is that a Republican was almost elected governor of Oregon. It's a very exasperated state and for some good reason, but I'm with you. I mean, I think a consistent Republican party would be upset about this. Although I do think it's small in comparison to some of what we've seen in recent years. It fits that same pattern. And it speaks to,

I think, the broad rot and a mindset, actually, that Dwight Eisenhower and people were worried about forever as we were building up these apparatuses, like, this power is going to be abused. Yeah. All right, Ryan, let's move on to your point for today. All right, so when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez upset Joe Crowley in the summer of 2018, the political environment on the left was drastically different than today's. The Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016 had brought together disparate progressive forces and merged them into something resembling a political movement. That energy buoyed AOC in what would come to be known as the squad

and only grew stronger throughout 2019 and into the next presidential race where Sanders won the popular vote in the Iowa caucuses, finished on top in New Hampshire, and blew the other candidates out in Nevada, producing a meltdown among the party establishment and on cable news. The party brass recovered quickly, consolidated behind Joe Biden, the head of South Carolina, came from behind on Super Tuesday and finished Sanders off. Over the next year, the ecosystem that came together, increasingly organized around YouTube shows and podcasts, began splintering off. Some followed Tulsi Gabbard as she drifted out of the party, while others worked to build an alternative to the Democratic Party, while others still gave

up entirely on electoral politics. So at the start of her career, Twitter was a place where Ocasio-Cortez could be seen to be leading an army of supporters, but often today it seems more like she's fighting off an army of critics from the left. Others in the progressive ecosystem who still support Ocasio-Cortez complain that she isn't invested heavily enough in building infrastructure or supporting candidates early enough for it to matter. So I asked her about her relationship with the left in a recent interview for the Intercept podcast, Deconstructed, and here's the first clip of it. It's interesting. So when the left was totally out of power from, say, like, you know, 2015 up through, I guess, you know, the election

of the squad, that unity among kind of the national grassroots online left was, was really strong. That, that unity has really frayed. You can feel it on, you can feel it online. What, what do you,

what do you think brought that about and what do you think can be done to, you know, recharge it? Well, you know, again, I think, um,

I think a lot of it has to do with, you know, it's one thing to be united in what's wrong, but it is a much more complicated, nuanced thing to navigate uncertainty. And so then once you have the responsibility of power, you have to make decisions on a daily basis about what to do with it. And, um, and that takes a lot of communication and frankly, maturity and understanding and discussion. And I think sometimes like, you know, the, the, the responsibility of wielding power for people requires a lot of discussion and debate and also disagreement and how we manage disagreement. If someone makes a mistake, it's not the same thing as someone selling out. Like there needs to be a differentiation between an individual decision and a record and a pattern and and so you know I think in the initial aftermath

of gaining power having to have these conversations require a lot of growth and it requires a lot of debate and yeah I mean I think sometimes it's very easy to like turn on each other and have people turn on each other and oftentimes mistake a disagreement with malintent or lack of character and so I think that that's kind of what we saw for a little bit, but I actually am also sensing a moving beyond that. Of course, much of that is still going to exist, but I actually do sense a growth in that. Like if you look at the growth in national DSA, for example, like, of course, these periods of growth can look messy, but actually public debate and struggle is what allows there to be the transparency and also trust necessary in decisions. And to be able to hash out these disagreements but then understand that despite disagreements a person may have made a decision but it doesn't there's a you know understanding

when to draw the line between there being a difference of approach or a difference of strategy even if it's one you vehemently disagree with and a and just like someone acting, like someone who's just like not on our side. Those are two different things. And I think that there's a greater appreciation of that. I think that there is more movement building that's happening. And I think that that is evident with the enormous electoral gains

that progressives are making down ballot. I mean, if you look at these state senate seats that we are picking up in places like Georgia and other areas across the country, like this is nothing to sniff at. I really do think that we're building a bench and that it's it's trending in the right direction i think electorally we are setting ourselves up for good things um but yeah i think online discourse is you know we can grow up like we can and i don't mean that in a in a you know in an accusatorial way but i think that we can become more sophisticated. And I think that we are becoming more sophisticated.

But it definitely takes growing pains. So I want to ask you, one, what you thought of that. But two, if you ever see parallels on the right with, say, Tea Party or Freedom Caucus types who come under criticism from the much further right for going to Washington and becoming a giant sellout? How do they handle those criticisms? Yeah, there are definitely parallels there. But I thought that was really interesting because it sounded almost cathartic for her to have that conversation with a reporter because it's something that I think she really desperately wants people to understand, that when you get to Washington, she's repeatedly saying, and you have the

responsibility of power, and you have to, on a daily basis, make decisions for the country and for your constituents, it changes your mindset. And it changes the way that you approach some of these questions, whereas activists genuinely, and I say this, have the luxury of being able to have ideological purity on every bill, on every issue, because they're not the ones that are jockeying for a seat on the committee or a voice in X, Y, and Z. And I'm not saying that's the way the system's supposed to work, but it's interesting because when she said that quote, we can grow up, I thought if I were an activist on the left, I'd actually be really offended by that because the implication is that your consistency, your ideological consistency is immature. What was interesting though about that quote is she seemed to be

including herself in that. She caught herself and seemed to be saying almost that, like, I'm trying to grow up too. Like, I'm an activist, bartender, made my way into Congress, and hey, things are different here. And I know you've been a part of conversations like that about Medicare for All. And those are conversations that I think when you have the unfortunate daily job of seeing how the sausage gets made, you sort of know what people are doing and the system shouldn't work the way that it does, but it does. And I think that's what she was getting at. And I think you've seen similar things happen when Marco Rubio joined the Gang of Eight. He comes in on the Tea Party wave, joins the Gang of Eight on immigration, and just has his career almost decimated for five years. And now he's a very different senator than he was then.

But another just a good example of how that can happen when you're somebody who's elevated by the activist wing and then comes here. Certainly people come here and are outright corrupted all of the time. I actually asked her, do you include yourself in that we need to grow up? Play that second clip. When you say we, are you including yourself in that too? When you look back, are there any things that you think your critics got right? Like if I were trying to pinpoint one, I'd say the Amazon warehouse fight that was being waged where they were trying to get a whole bunch of support and didn't. Like if you had to do that over again.

Or are there any things that you would have done differently if you could do them over again to try to like rebuild that communication and trust? Yeah. I mean, I guess like the thing is, is like, I think it's really about like intro left relationship. Right. So like,

if you look at that incident, I mean, now we're, we're all good. Like, you know what I'm saying? Like that relationship, like we're cool like we dove in and it wasn't just about like showing up at a press conference like we have offered very

like we have offered infrastructure support but but there really is a difference between asking one person to be there for every single thing. And then when they can't make it for one thing that like, oh, it must be because they abandoned all principle. Like there's a difference between that and just like, hey, okay, yeah. like hey okay yeah like we like we missed it on this one because there were literally 800 other things that other fights that people were asking us to to take up and like okay but you know what we showed up and we're back together again and actually like the discourse of that moment is so out of step with the reality of what played out because we've continued to support and do everything we can to, you know, make sure that we're up on that. And, you know, we're good now.

And so I think there's a temptation and we have to be aware of the role that even algorithms play in this right like youtube twitter all of it is designed to make us fight with each other like that is rewarded algorithmically and so i think with the awareness of that and it's not to say that we shouldn't ever you know we're better with sound criticism but I think we really need to be grounded in strong citation and not just incitement of emotion like like let's talk about um having really thorough arguments to make each other better. Like, that's what political struggle is all about, and engaging in that, you know, with one another as a movement. I think she's right about the algorithms.

We're up against a hard stop. Do you have, like, a 15-second thought on that? I just think it's fascinating. I mean, of course, people come here and have all kinds of issues with us, whether it's money or power or just, you know, trying to do what you think is right, which is rare. But that sounds to me like somebody who was elected in the social media generation understands social media and is dealing with challenges that are different than really what any other generation of Congress has dealt with. All right. Well, the full interview

over at Deconstructed, we're going to have more in a minute. All right, Emily, so what's your point today? Well, it's been a hopeful week in Washington, like the dawn of springtime instead of creeping winter. Finally, finally, the Beltway thinks that American populism is beyond resuscitation. Donald Trump's sleepy presidential announcement landed with a thud, while right populists faltered in the midterms. Ron DeSantis, according to Wall Street and Paul Ryan, presents a plausible and palatable alternative to Trumpism so the page can finally be turned. Well, no. They'd like the power to turn that page, sure, but they don't have it yet. I've said before that while I generally disdain politicians, period, I am favorable to the argument for Ron DeSantis. It's hard to say where he lands on populist economics and foreign policy as of right now, although his willingness to throw a middle finger up at the most powerful company in his state was a promising sign. But what we do know is that American happiness is declining. We know wages are stagnant, that the rising tide of the stock market is not lifting all boats. Mental health is worse. Suicides are up and births are

down. We know war and energy and personal technologies have us on the brink of crises. TVs are cheap and people are miserable. In other words, whether he stays or goes, populism isn't tied to the fate of Donald Trump or Blake Masters or even Bernie Sanders, for that matter. It's here to stay because times are bad. Now, in the scope of human history, times should feel much better.

We are freer, wealthier, and healthier, and more prosperous than most people who have ever lived. But we're also declining on many of those measures from one generation to another. When you ask people to choose between a traditional politician or someone who says the system is rigged and acts like it too, it's not irrational for them to throw their chips in with the guy willing to accurately diagnose the problem, even if he happens to be a cranky Vermonter or maybe even a reality TV show host. Remember when the chattering class salivated over J.D. Vance after the release of Hillbilly Elegy? They'll talk until they're blue in the face about the opioid crisis and income inequality and rural decay, but their solutions are either easy band-aids or trickle-down

economics. They don't want to take hard stances or tough votes. They want to talk and tinker around the edges. That's pretty much exactly what Obamacare amounted to, for instance. What have Democrats and Republicans done with their power recently when they've had both houses of Congress and the presidency? A half-assedassed healthcare bill and a half-assed tax bill. Obama wanted a public option. Paul Ryan wanted taxes on postcards. You may say, sure, but this is a feature, not a bug, of Madison's checks and balance system.

Well, that's true, but again, both those bills passed, not with divided government, but when one party had total control of Congress. We're paralyzed by institutional capture in government, media, and business, and our daily lives are worse because of those declines. Trump disrupted our politics in some good ways and in some really bad ones.

But when elites gleefully cheer his demise, they're cheering for the demise of all of those disruptions, the good ones and the bad. They don't just want calmer news cycles, they want disempowered poor people, rural and urban. They want to monitor your expression and punish you when they disagree. They want a tax code that can be cheated, happy defense contractors and pharma executives and agricultural conglomerates. They want disproportionate control of the voting process,

like Mark Zuckerberg. They want oligarchy with the veneer of republicanism. So the work of serious reform is left to less than serious politicians like Matt Gaetz because nobody else has the stomach for it. I believe that no member of Congress by house rule should be allowed to accept a donation for their campaign from a federal lobbyist or a federal political action committee. That money all has strings attached to it. And anybody who tries to tell you otherwise is lying. And when members take hundreds of thousands of dollars from lobbyists and PACs, they work for them more than they work for their constituents. And guess what?

I intend to offer that amendment on the House floor in January, and I already have Democrats ready to vote for it, maybe even all of them. The second thing I would suggest is that if someone is a member of Congress, they should be prohibited from lobbying for life. Why is it so hard to say that you should choose one side or the other to be on? You're either in the lawmaking game or you're in the influence peddling game. And those who choose to be in the influence peddling game, go ahead, but you should sacrifice that when you get the privilege to represent 750,000 people. I intend to offer that amendment on January 3rd, and I expect that there will be Democrats voting for it. I will also introduce an amendment to have a ban on members of Congress trading individual stocks. How can we say that that is not something

that dilutes our trust in markets and in governance when people are essentially able to bet on the outcomes that they have an ability to somewhat control? And I expect Democrats to vote for that. And finally, I would observe something that has really worked well in the state of Florida, a single subject rule. A bill coming to the floor

should only deal with one subject. I was incensed as a freshman when I had to vote on the farm bill and whether or not to authorize war in Yemen in the same vote. And we could still have broad bills that relate to insurance or education or appropriations, but the notion that we lash all these things together does not serve our constituents and the American people. And I would expect if we're in the majority, Democrats will vote for my amendment for a single subject rule. I don't want to hear a word from Farmer or from Kevin McCarthy or Hakeem Jeffries about populism or decay or divisions until they start talking like that, because that's what it would take.

Trump's boomer stop the steal BS, among other things, was harmful. If his third presidential bid fades, I hope that stuff fades with it. But unfortunately, we live in a low-trust country, and people who have the luxury of not following politics closely know they're being lied to and are right to believe little of what they hear. The irrational position is having high trust in our institutions right now. And what are those leading institutions doing? Well, they're gathering for the New York Times Dealbook Summit this month, sponsored by Accenture and Walmart and more. What's the summit, you may wonder?

It's a gathering of, quote, today's most vital minds on a single stage. Naturally, that means the highest profile cronies of BlackRock and TikTok and Meta and the Fed, including Zelensky and Sam Bankman-Fried himself, are coming together under the banner of the paper of record. Surely they'll get some tough questions. There's no doubt Andrew Ross Sorkin will play the role of serious journalist as best he can,

but he won't treat these folks like they should be in prison or stampeded out of polite society, which in a healthy country is exactly where some of them should be. I'm sure everyone will have all kinds of pleasant sentiments to share about unity and peace and healing our cultural wounds, but until they start talking more like Matt Gaetz did in that last clip and seriously take steps to relinquish some of their own power. They're only going to get more division and unrest, and they'll deserve it too. A new bipartisan caucus is forming in Congress focused on the treatment value, the therapeutic value of psychedelics. Joining us now to talk about this new caucus for the

first time are two of the people that have helped to organize it. I want to welcome on here John Lubecki, who is the VP of Communications for Apollo Pact, also Marcus Capone. He's a co-founder and chairman of VETS, which stands for Veterans Exploring Treatment Solutions. Both of you, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for joining us and so john can you talk a little bit about what first of all for people who are just watching this who aren't kind of hill rats what what is a caucus first of all and what what is this caucus going to be who's going to be in it so a caucus very simply is a group of people in the House who all work on one thing. You've probably heard of like the mental health caucus. There's a veterans caucus.

The biggest ones are the Democrat caucus and the Republican caucus. So some of them are very partisan. For example, the Republican and Democrat caucus. This is an entirely bipartisan caucus. There's two co-chairs, retired Lieutenant General Jack Bergman, who represents the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and Lou Correa, who is a congressman from California. Both of them stated that the reason they joined is because it touched their family and they see how mental health is not just affected their personal families, but they see it in their communities as we all do. And they decided to come together and, you know, psychedelics, drug policy,

these have typically been things on the left. It's great to see people like Jack Bergman step up from the Republican side, as well as there's actually been a lot of interest by members. We don't have a set list other than the two chairs, because every Republican that wants to join has to go find a Democrat. Every Democrat who wants to join has to go find a Republican. So we've had some Democrats and several Republicans show interest in this. And I spent a lot of today telling them, go find a Democrat, go find a Republican. Some of the people who have shown interest is Andy Barr, Rutherford, Nancy Mace, Earl Blumenauer from the Democrat side. It's going to be interesting.

And one of the best parts about this caucus is it's got a very tight focus on advancing research, funding for research, removing barriers to research. And then when that research is all done, making sure we have access to all those therapies. Yeah. Marcus, what are some of the, John just sort of got into it a little bit, but what are some of the big kind of ticket items that this caucus can help advance sort of immediately in a new Congress? We know the margin is going to be slim, which is great for bipartisan efforts and especially great for bipartisan efforts that have specific legislative items on their agenda. So what are you most hopeful for and what do you hope that they're looking at right away come January? Well, I think the most important thing that the public just needs to understand is that we're

just trying to advance research in the field of psychedelic medicine. You know, I think, you know, in the 50s and 60s, psychedelics got a very bad name because these were medicines that were used as recreational drugs. We need to steer completely clear that these are, you know, medicines that need to be applied with therapeutic use and medical application. I think if everyone can wrap their head around these being medicines that need wraparound preparation, integration support. I think all of us can agree when they're applied in a controlled environment, as we're starting to see in some of the research that are coming out, these are medicines that provide true healing compared to some of the current, I guess, old treatment modalities that we've been using now for almost 35 years. Are you, are you facing any opposition from the pharmaceutical industry, John, or, uh,

are, are they still, uh, seeing, or are they still not threatened by the, the kind of the rise of, of therapeutic psychedelics? Um, they're, they think they can get in on it? I will say I think they think they can get in on it. I mean, let's look at big pharma. A lot of what they do is they go buy companies who have new technologies. They don't really create new things themselves. They just go buy them. So I do think that some of these companies may eventually be bought out by a Pfizer

or a Merck, especially the for-profit companies. That may not happen. They've pretty much stayed out of it. They haven't invested their capital and their lobbying time and all of this. We're not part of big pharma in any way. And they've stayed away from us. They know it's eventually coming, but there's also delays, but there is opposition. You know, a couple of weeks ago, you were talking on this show

about some things that Jess Waters had said on Fox News. And there's other pushback in part due to negative outcomes because these substances aren't always used in a therapeutic environment. They aren't always used in, you know, with proper integration, proper preparation, properly trained therapists and other people who can help people heal. And both of you can speak to this, but I'll start with you, Marcus, how it's specifically beneficial to talk about the experience of veterans who are helped by these treatments. I mean, obviously the evidence suggests a lot of people can benefit from these treatments, but I imagine, especially when you're going to members of Congress, being able to talk about the experience

of vets has to be a powerful tool for advancing that cause more broadly. Yeah, it's extremely powerful. You know, we've been, my wife and I started vets five years ago after, you know, my successful experience with treatment down in Mexico at a reputable retreat. I had been on from that moment, I'd say seven years straight of antidepressants. And at one point I was taking up to 10 prescription medicines to include, you know, medicines to focus, new vigil and pro vigil and antidepressants, SSRIs, SNRIs, medicine to go to sleep. The day I, or I'd say the week that I went to this retreat, I haven't touched an antidepressant or another pharmaceutical now in five years. The healing was so profound. We felt really necessary that we had to pay it forward to my community, the SEAL community that was coming back from 20 years of sustained combat.

You know, many of my friends are struggling the same way I did, and we felt the need to pay it forward. And what we thought, what we wanted to get 12 individuals the first year, I think we funded 35. And now to date, five years later, our nonprofit has funded at roughly 5,500 per individual, almost 700 other special operations veterans to receive the same treatment. And, you know, the testimonies that we get are unbelievable. It makes us keep going. These medicines, again, as, you know, Jonathan pointed out, done in a controlled environment, life-saving, life-changing. It's keeping families together. It's making individuals connect back with their spouse, their loved ones, their children, and this is generational healing. And so we just need to continue on and do this smartly. We don't want another Timothy

Leary moment to happen. Marcus, did you say Ibogaine? Is that? I didn't say anything, but you did. Oh, okay. Do you have any... If people are... You have to do this in Mexico or somewhere else. You can't do this in the United States. It's legal.

Yeah, we can't fund anybody where these medicines are not legal. So in countries where they're legal, certain medicines are legal in Mexico, some in Costa Rica and Peru, certain medicines are legal in Mexico, some in Costa Rica and Peru, some countries in Europe. And so we just have to be very careful. Do you have any advice for people who are suffering, who are trying to search for medicines, solutions outside of the country so that they stay safe? What are the ways you can identify facilities that are safe versus ones that are just in it for a buck? Yeah, there's plenty out there, as you can imagine. All of a sudden, there's a lot of quote unquote, you know, pop up medicinal shamans that all of a sudden think they know what we're so early. This is, you know, ground floor, even though there are, of course, different communities that have been using these medicines for thousands of years.

But they've they've grown up, you know, using these medicines and individuals have to be really careful. You know, I definitely don't recommend, you know, somebody just hopping on a plane and going to a random place and hoping, you know, they they get a life-changing experience. I mean, we've put a lot of effort, a lot of research, we're using experts at a lot of the top medical institutions, Johns Hopkins and Stanford and Harvard and Mount Sinai to help us. But it's so early on, we really need to see the research. I wish I can say, if you're really struggling, go hop in a plane and find one of these places,

but it's not the way to do it. I think we have to be really careful,, again, there are risks to these medicines, if done incorrectly. John, before we run, can you tell us, you know, there are a lot of causes that aren't able to organize to the degree that this one really is starting to. And now with the addition of the story that Ryan and you guys broke here tonight, what does this add, the caucus, sort of what does it contribute to the momentum of the movement going forward? What does this mean for the movement overall? Well, the biggest thing is it's both sides coming together and having a voice and being

able to push out and talk about one of the things I know the caucus is planning on is four briefings next year on various topics involving psychedelics to inform all members of Congress. They'll eventually be legislation and, you know, amendments and other things. The biggest thing is this is the left and the right coming together saying, look, medical shows this amazing potential to change lives. We need to get the research done, get the answers we need, and get people the help they need. Then we can deal with some of the other larger questions on spiritual use and other things. but this prevents things from going off the rails the way they did in the 70s that led to a backlash and all these things being made illegal and unavailable and unresearchable. Having a caucus, you know, led by people like Lou Correa and Jack Bergman,

with what they bring to the table, as well as some of these other people who have shown interest, it's the way to keep things on the straight and narrow and preventing, you know, as well as some of these other people who have shown interest. It's the way to keep things on the straight and narrow and preventing, as Marcus said, a Timothy Leary moment where everything goes off the rails. Everybody says, nope, stop it. Because the second that happens, I know I have friends that that's what that sentence for. I know Marcus has friends, the same thing. And I can't personally allow that to happen.

And Marcus, about 20 years ago, I was a lobbyist, state-level lobbyist for medical marijuana. And one of the things that we had to overcome at the time was kind of the laugh factor, the chuckle factor. Like people didn't really take it seriously. Today, so many people know so many people who are cancer patients and others who are seriously benefiting from it that that's no longer an obstacle for those policy advances. What kind of familiarity with the therapeutic value of psychedelics are you finding when you talk to people on the Hill, I'm curious both when it comes to staffers, but also when it comes to members of Congress, have they heard enough about it yet from people close to them that they're taking it seriously,

or are you more often just getting jokes? Yeah, you know, that's a great question. Definitely don't, you know, I don't want to get in cannabis. I don't really, you know, it's a great question. Definitely don't, you know, I don't want to get into cannabis. I don't really, you know, I don't understand the cannabis fight, but I do understand the psychedelic medicine fight. We're getting, we're seeing things across the board. So we are seeing individuals that have been hearing about the research. We definitely know there's a lot of staffers, I think because they're younger and they might be connected to individuals that have been, you know, have attended these retreats

or have done say, you know, ketamine assisted psychotherapy here in the States that was, you know, being used legally off label in clinics. There's definitely most of the leaders, you know, on Capitol Hill have at least one degree of separation of an individual that has been in the military, that has served, that has come back, and that is struggling with mild traumatic brain injury or PTSD. You know, many that we have talked to have taken their own lives, others that are just really struggling with opioid or alcohol use disorder. And so, you know, they've been through the kind

of Western medicine approach of these antidepressants and mood stabilizers and brain clinics and talk therapy. It's just not working for a lot of us. And, you know, when you find something that is so healing, you know, you just want to be able to share and be able to introduce it to everybody else so they can also, you know, enjoy the life that, you know, I feel like I'm living right now and Jonathan and others. And so, you know, we'll do everything we can to, you know, I think the biggest thing, we 100% need the science. That's going to happen. We know for a fact this won't happen without science and research, but we do need a lot of storytelling. A lot of these anecdotal stories are very real. You know, my wife and I every day receive, you know, text messages and emails and

say, hey, you know, you saved my life, you saved my family. I don't know how much more you need than seeing those. And it kind of what keeps us going every day. And so, you know, with the introduction of this caucus, you know, the introduction from Dan Crenshaw with the NDAA amendment that, again, will hopefully release federal dollars to study these medicines more. I think we're on a really good track and in a really good place. And again, we just have to be careful in how we roll this out and make sure we're doing it safe and to protect everyone.

Well, Marcus and John, you guys are doing the Lord's work. Thank you so much for joining us and congratulations on the advent of this new caucus. Thank you so much. Appreciate the time tonight. Yeah, hopefully, they call it Noah's Ark on the Hill, you know this, where they go two by two. So if you're going to come on, if you're going to join the caucus, you have to bring a Democrat with you. And so they're trying to get people who are considered to be kind of moderates so that it's something that gets taken seriously.

Because if you could get 10, 20 folks on this caucus, that's a swing block that can then go to McCarthy and say, look, you won our votes, then we just want you to free up some ... or just ease some of the laws that allow the funding to flow. You don't necessarily even need taxpayer money. Well, yeah, the importance of it is what you just said. It can be a swing block. So good for them for organizing. Like you said, they're doing the Lord's work. Well, thanks for watching another CounterPoints Friday. It's next week, Thanksgiving. That's right.

We're going to tape it a little bit early. Right. So there'll be, I believe, a Wednesday show next week. So we can send you to your families with plenty of fodder for a dinner table discussion. Yep, there you go. Be well behaved. Not everything has to be a fight. Well, we can give that advice next week.

Maybe next week what we'll do is give our Thanksgiving throwdown advice. How to pwn your uncle. Yeah, exactly. Have a great weekend, everybody. This is an iHeart Podcast.