Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - Counter Points #14: Colorado Springs Shooting, Chinese Diplomacy, Rightwing Grifts, House Battles, Trump Investigation, Election Denial & MORE!

Episode Date: November 23, 2022

Ryan and Emily give their commentary on the Colorado Springs shooting, China diplomacy, rightwing grift implosion, House inter-party battles, Trump investigations, overlooked foreign policy issues & MORE!To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/Ryan Grim: https://badnews.substack.com/ Emily Jashinsky: https://thefederalist.com/author/emilyjashinsky/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

Are you sticking around here this Thanksgiving? I'm heading to town. What about you guys? You're staying here? Be here in D.C. A little family coming over. Well, the weather's great. I'm back in Wisconsin.

There's five inches of snow, so I'll be contending with that. But you enjoy the temperate climate here. There you go. inches of snow, so I'll be contending with that. But you enjoy the temperate climate here. So Donald Trump, we just learned, has been told by the Supreme Court that he has to give his tax returns up to the House of Representatives. We'll talk about that later. We'll talk about his ongoing trial, well, not his trial, but his organization. A lot of global news to get to. But first, here in the United States, the hero of the Colorado Springs shooting has been identified as Richard Figueroa. Absolutely extraordinary, inspiring, and heartbreaking story. If we put up A1, I think the Times might have been

the first to kind of confirm his identity. His family had posted on Facebook detailing some of what had happened. We're learning more as he's done additional interviews. It's one of the most heroic and selfless acts that we've been witness to, I think, in this country in a very long time. He spoke to CNN recently. Let's play a clip of that. It may not even have been a window, but I saw a lot of people and this guy was there and I saw the ACU pattern, uh, black bets. And for me, that was like, there's a handle I'm getting it. So I ran across the room, grabbed the handle, pulled him down and then started to uh well actually i think i went for his gun with him his rifle flew in front of him um and the young man that tried to jump in there

with me um he he we both either pulled him down or whatever but he ended up at his head uh and right next to the ar and then with the ar he we i told him push the ar get the air away from him the kid pushed the ar i i don't know what his name was um and then i i proceeded to take his other weapon the pistol and then just start hitting him where i could but the armor's in the way and i just started i found a crease in his between his his armor and his head and i I just started wailing away with his gun. And then I told the kid in front of me, kick him, keep kicking him. And I was guided.

I was telling people, call 911, call 911. I brought him down. I was in mode. I was doing what I do down range. I trained for this. I don't want to ever do this. I didn't even retire because I was done doing this stuff. It was too much. It came in handy.

I got to protect my kid. I lost my kid's boyfriend. I tried. I tried to have everybody in there. I still feel bad that there's five people that didn't five people. There's five people that didn't go home. And this, this guy, I told him while I was eating, I said, I'm gonna kill you, man, because you tried to kill my friends. My family was in there.

And he makes, he makes a profound point. Five people that just went to a drag show on a Saturday night at a bar. Right. And never left the bar. Just utterly catastrophic and heartbreaking loss. And so many others with injuries that will live for the rest of their lives, live with the rest of their lives. And then others for whom this will probably, in terms of PTSD and mental health complications, never leave them as well. Well, Richard's wife said that she was worried that this was going to trigger his PTSD from his combat tours. He did three tours in Iraq, a tour in Afghanistan. As he said, you do 20 years, you retire with a pension. He did retire, but he didn't retire at

20 years because he said he couldn't handle it anymore. Amazing because he was a 15 year veteran. Right. 15 years. So you're five years away. And like that, that is a real sign of just how difficult this is for people. When you saw it in there, but he talked about how this was a reflex based on his experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan and his training. He says his reflexes kicked in and that's how he disarmed the gunman. He took the weapon away. And then you made a really good point on Twitter based on what was starting to come out of the reports that I think hasn't gotten quite enough attention. Oh, yeah. So and I don't. So let's talk about the police response for a moment. And I think we can all step back and say, look, none of us were there. We don't know exactly how or why the police responded in the way that they did.

And I think in moments of crisis like this, you have to give some leeway for split-second decisions. But it goes beyond this, according to what Richard Fierro told, you know, New York Times, Washington Post, and some others. I'll just read from the Washington Post. So here's the Washington Post report. It says, minutes later, the first police officer arrived. I was in the middle of a puddle of blood, Fierro said. After handing the suspect off to the police, Fierro went to find his friends, both of whom had been shot and were being treated with tourniquets by first responders. He says, I put her hand in his hand so they could be together. And then the Post reports, as other officers arrived, Fierro said they treated him with suspicion. They interrupted him as he gave first aid to a friend, he said, and quote,

dragged me out of there like I was the shooter. He said he was held in a police car for an hour or what felt like an hour before authorities released him to reunite with his wife and daughter. Police did not return calls seeking to confirm Fierro's account. So he knew that his wife and daughter had been wounded. He didn't know about his daughter's boyfriend, who he later learned had been killed. All he wants to know, all he wants to do is find out how his wife and daughter are doing. In his account that he gave to the New York Times, he said he had just spotted his wife and daughter across the room when police kind of tackled him and dragged him out. And like I said, I wasn't there. It's hard to judge. However, there were police officers he had already interacted with. There are witnesses on the scene who could say,

no, what he's telling you, that he's not the shooter, is the truth. And there just seems to be this kind of gap that develops between police and the civilians that they're out there to serve, whereas where police are starting to see everyone outside of the police as a threat to them rather than as perhaps an ally, somebody who's going to engage with them to neutralize the threat as he did. And somebody on Twitter said, you know, you shouldn't be surprised. He didn't have the complexion for the protection. And so you do have to wonder, was there some bias here? Like if this guy doesn't, if this is just a normal white-looking guy who looks like he belongs in a drag bar, maybe he doesn't get treated the way he got treated. Well, and this is A3. Ryan, you put it on Twitter in, I think, a poignant way.

You said, the hero of Colorado Springs was cuffed, left in a car, and ignored for more than an hour by police as he wondered if his family had lived through the shooting. They were wounded but survived. Now, you just made a point that I think is worth pausing on, which is that an hour, the hour after a tragedy is unfolding is one of the most crucial parts of an investigation. Why is the guy who tackled the shooter, I understand he probably had the gun, but why is the guy who tackled the shooter being isolated and not, why does it take them an hour? And granted, he was just involved in a tragedy. Maybe his timing is off. Maybe his concept of how long it was is off. But if it's the case that he really was sidelined for an hour with no knowledge of how other people were doing, that's a crucial hour in sort of putting the facts together as they're fresh.

Right. And like you said, the time might be off. The New York Times article first said more than an hour. It was then changed to what seemed like an hour. And so you can imagine time stands still. You're wondering if your daughter, if your wife, if your daughter's boyfriend had been killed. You're wondering what else is going on. You're handcuffed in a police car after you've been through this extraordinarily traumatic experience. And you took the step to neutralize the shooter. You're the one that did this.

And you're screaming and yelling in the back of a police car, handcuffed, probably wondering, probably glad at some point that they didn't shoot him. Although the Times also reports that he didn't shoot him. Although the Times also reports that he was giving first aid, like he was administering first aid, and he had gotten a tourniquet from an officer. And so I do think that maybe we'll get some body cam footage. There is some self-reflection that needs to be done here. And I don't want to come off as just knee-jerk criticizing the cops over this, but there is some self-reflection that needs to be done here. And I don't want to come off as just knee-jerk criticizing the cops over this, but there is some self-reflection. What was it that had them treat him like that in this moment? And how long was it?

Was there no opportunity for you to review what had happened? Talk to the people who were—he was treating his friends. You think his friends didn't say, yeah, he's not the shooter. You'd have plenty of witnesses, presumably. Right. Well, and this fits into a broader framework of institutional failure that we talk about every time we have to talk about one of these shootings. Here's from the Associated Press. A year and a half before he was arrested in the Colorado Springs gay nightclub shooting that left five people dead, The shooter allegedly threatened his mother with a homemade bomb, forcing neighbors and surrounding homes to evacuate while the bomb

squad and crisis negotiators talked to him in surrendering. Yet despite that scare, there's no public record that prosecutors move forward with felony kidnapping and menacing charges against him or that police or relatives tried to trigger Colorado's red flag law that would have allowed authorities to seize weapons and ammo. The man's mother said he had with them. It's every single time, every single time. There's some point where either the legal public policy safety net that we have set up fails or the social safety net fails. Oftentimes it's both.

Here it seems like it's a combination of both, but that's the problem. I mean, we can do laws until we're blue in the face and we should. There's a lot that can be done. But if we as a sort of society can't come together and make the laws work and make our communities work, this will never stop. And what likely happened here, just reading between the lines, is that his mother probably didn't want to press charges. Right. She got through the situation, we're going to move on. And without pressing charges, it becomes difficult to get the guns taken away or to get a red flag on there. If she had pressed forward or if the neighbors had pressed forward, maybe that could have been done. But certainly the Colorado Springs and those local county authorities,

the politics out there are not such that they're going to be pursuing on their own kind of red flag laws. But you would think that after you call in a bomb threat and you have SWAT teams out and you got the whole neighborhood, like, can we all agree that whether you press charges or not, you do something like that, you lose your Second Amendment protections for a little bit. You go through the due process of determining whether you should lose your Second Amendment. I mean, it's insane. Even if you don't want to go through the criminal justice system, look, it goes back to the smell test again. Like, this is just, it's not somebody that should have a long gun. It's incredible that somebody

who actually is calling in a bomb threat to the point where homes have to be evacuated and the police have to come and neutralize the situation, then who is clearly in a situation where he is unhinged to go on a deadly rampage inside a concentrated area like that, a period, has weapons and ammunition. I mean, it's just unthinkably stupid. And we already have a law

in the book to prevent it, but why didn't the law function as it was supposed to? Because our society and our law enforcement didn't act as it should have. Right. But also the gun rights lobby makes these laws, these red flag laws as difficult to implement as possible because they're worried that the laws, well, some people don't want them implemented at all. Like they are flat out opposed red flag laws, try to pass red flag law in a Republican state and see how that goes. The county wouldn't have passed one. It's only because, you know, it's only because Colorado has gone Democratic. They've been able to even put that into effect, despite the fact that the Aurora shooting was right now, that was right near their Columbine, isn't far from there. Like this, this is a place that has seen it's more than its,

more than its share of tragedy. It's still difficult to implement these things, but in the process of implementing them, the gun lobby, you know, puts holes all through them so that it, from their perspective, so that nobody, you know, innocent has their rights taken away. But in practice, it makes it very difficult to enforce them, especially if it's county by county. This is a case where it doesn't matter how stringent the red flag law was or was not. It clearly should have been triggered. There's absolutely no reason. Bomb threat?

And again, this is just 18 months. This is just a year and a half earlier. It's not five years in the past or 10 years in the past. It's extremely recent. And to the point we started this block talking about a nightclub, we've seen what happens with mass violence in nightclubs and areas where people are packed in so close together. What this man did, what Richard Fierro did, saved so many lives. Five dead, 17 wounded. I mean, that's incredibly high and tragic.

I think that would have gone even higher. I think almost certainly that would have gone even higher if he didn't act as quickly and strategically as he did. Absolutely. And to finish this segment up, what some people have noticed is that on his website, Atrevida Brewery Company, he co-owns a brewery in Colorado Springs. You can buy gift certificates there. And so he also has a bunch of really cool looking merch. Oh, cool. Yeah. If you go to, so it's, it's atrevidabeer company, beercode.com. You can, you can find that, but if you go to shop, you can buy a gift certificate. Obviously I don't expect many people out here are going to wind up in Colorado Springs

ever, probably. I'm sure it's beautiful. But if you buy the gift certificate and never use it, that's just a way of saying thank you for what he did. Yeah, absolutely. Well, let's talk about China. There's a lot of news on this front because President Biden met with Xi Jinping last week in Bali and apparently had a conversation about Taiwan. President Biden emerged from his discussion with Xi Jinping saying basically, and this is the BBC element that we have, there's no need for another Cold War. We'll get into all of that. There's, quote, no new Cold War with China. He says he does not believe Xi Jinping is imminently going to attack Taiwan. And what we also learned, this is one for this block, China is turning to

back channel diplomacy once again to shore up its United States ties. That's a headline in the Wall Street Journal just this week. And it's an interesting story for a lot of reasons. But one that I want to focus on here is that it talks about how Beijing had a delegation of sort of senior policy people and business people that came to New York. It was right before Biden met with Xi Jinping. And it was all set up by insurance exec Maurice Hank Greenberg, hugely successful American businessman in China. And here's actually from The Wall Street Journal. Wall Street executives have long held a special place in Beijing's corridors of power. Beijing has viewed Mr. Greenberg, 97 years old, as what Chinese leaders call, quote, an old friend of

China. Mr. Greenberg, a decorated World War II veteran and major Republican donor, is the chief executive of insurance and investment firm CV Star & Co. and former CEO of insurance giant American International Group. So also this article quotes— Wait, isn't that the AIG guy? The AIG guy. But there's more. Which caused the financial crisis, but yeah. There's more.

This article also quotes Mike Mullen, who was apparently at the meeting and is talking about how he's worried that there's increasing friction and tension between the United States and China. And he is in the article doesn't mention this at all, which is sort of classic corporate media that he's like on the board of GM and on the board of Sprint and has all of these, you know, other connections, external connections that might make his position on this compromise to say the least. But that's the problem that we sort of find ourselves in, in that on a sort of military basis, we can learn a lot of lessons from the Cold War in terms of how we handle Taiwan right now. Obviously, we've talked about this many times.

The national security risk to the United States if China attacks Taiwan is obvious, manifested in so many problems, beginning with our semiconductor industry, which takes a long time to reshore. And we're trying to do it now, but it's a huge process that will draw out over a decade at the very least. But it's now left to leaders like Hank Greenberg, who I believe he was instrumental in WTO. I believe he's been pushing for this stuff for years. And here we are relying on them, right? China's going to them to stop the tensions or to sort of pour cold water on the tensions. And it's

like, I want to avoid a military conflict as much as anybody. I'm not sure that's the way to do it, because it's just going to involve more selling out of the American industry and the American people to a hostile foreign power. Although I've been surprised at what a glass jaw Chairman Xi has shown to have over the last couple of weeks. This goes back to what we talked about on the show maybe last week or the week before about you mentioned Biden's kind of semiconductor policy, which was a real hammer blow to the Chinese economy. He for I think the first time for an American president, went beyond just tariffs and said, you know what? We are going to completely kneecap your semiconductor industry.

The parts that you need from us, we're not sharing anymore. Like it's done. And it sent Xi into this spiral. And just recently, for the first time in years, he had a face-to-face meeting with U.S. ally Australia, met with the Australian prime minister, and then he met with the Japanese prime minister as well, something that Xi had not done in a very long time. And both face-to-face meetings were portrayed in the press and kind of from Xi's people as a gesture reaching out to the United States. So you could imagine a world where Xi goes either way, that you really bring the hammer down on his semiconductor economy and he fires back with some type of shot, you know, point counterpoint.

Instead, you know, he gets hit and he just crumbled. And now Biden and he are meeting in Biden. So, you know, maybe he's moving. And we talked about this as well, that their strategy up until 2008, the code name for it was bide time and hide capabilities. And then after 2008, they began emerging publicly after the financial crisis, saying like, okay, maybe now we can actually compete. We don't have to bide time, hide capabilities anymore. Maybe he's just reverting back to biding time and hiding capabilities. But she does seem to sense that something isn't going according to this long game that they've been playing. Something went off and I think probably had something to do with Trump. Definitely. I think rattled them a little bit. Definitely.

And then they expected, we've got, and there's that famous viral clip of the Chinese guy doing a TED type talk where he's like, can't wait till we get Hunter Biden's dad back in there. We're going to be in good shape. And boom, Biden's been much tougher even than Trump has been on China. Tougher than Trump? Oh, yeah. Yes. Like this, putting Rush Doshai as National Security Council advisor for China and then following that up with this semiconductor plan. Like, you know, you play around with tariffs like that.

That annoys them. Start a little trade war, you know, that might can't that might or might not hurt them, depending on how who it hurts more. You kneecap their semiconductor industry. That's that is that's really going for the jugular and is not something that the U.S. had even really been contemplating before this. I think a lot of people see the chips bill as something that also had a lot of goodies in it for China. Well, that's separate from the CHIPS bill. The CHIPS bill is basically like

subsidizing U.S.-based companies who may or may not use that money to build capacity here in the United States, might just give it to shareholders, might build capacity somewhere else. That's the giant subsidy for American industrial semiconductor production. We'll see if it actually happens.

What this was, this was national security policy that said China cannot have access to these necessary components for its semiconductor industry. Oh, you're talking about the separate thing. I see what you're saying. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't know. I think a lot of that has happened because of pressure that came to Democrats after Trump. They can have it. I mean, the first thing Biden did was, one of the first things Biden did was cancel the sale of TikTok, the forced sale of TikTok, which was a pretty big handout to Beijing, if you believe that they're using TikTok in the way that

I think they're pretty obviously using TikTok. But that aside, it's interesting. I think your interpretation of this is really interesting that Xi Jinping is nervous and worried and thus sort of now engaging in diplomacy again. And I wonder if that is, I wonder if it's naive to interpret that as a positive thing. Not that you're doing that, but like my temptation is to say, are we learning lessons from the Cold War? Are we engaging in ways that are ultimately going to be beneficial to preventing loss of life and a loss of United States interests? Because we've sort of squeezed him on some of these economic measures in a way that actually brings him to the table. And to the extent that we're funneling a lot of our defense budget to Ukraine, I mean, it's in terms of percentage of

money of our defense budget, it's not a ton, but their stockpile of weapons that actually has a lot of military experts worried about depleting what we're able to do, depleting our capacity. If there's an immediate confrontation with China in our future, which there could be at any given moment, despite the fact that Biden says he doesn't believe there reason, like, is any of this reason for optimism or is it just sort of part of something we don't know how it's going to play out? I mean, I think the whole thing's a shame that it's difficult enough for people, eight billion people now on this planet to figure out how to survive, how to feed everybody, how to make everybody prosper, and how to do so without destroying the planet. And then to also have these powers grappling with

each other. It's like, guys, do you not see the existential threats around the corner here? I think that China had laid out this long game from the late 90s to early 2000s and had been rolling along unchecked and has all sorts of dystopian tendencies embedded in its approach to people. It's a pressure that makes the United States more responsive to calls for treating the world in a more humane way. Great. You have to compete in Africa for hearts and minds? Okay, good. That's better than war. We did just enter into the climate reparations deal. It's a UN deal, isn't it? And that would probably involve,

because China is still listed as a developing country, reparations to China from the United States over climate issues. And that's probably another example of, I don't know, that has to be part of this. Sure. Yeah. And like when the Soviet Union was around, the US had, you know, at times was nicer to some countries that it wouldn't have been nice to because it was trying to win them over. Other times it would just coup them and then go all in with the full occupation and colonial approach. But other times it meant a more balanced and delicate approach. And certainly back here in the United States, it pushed the U.S. to live up to its ideals more. Well, we'll obviously continue to be on top of that story. The next story is kind of more fun.

So sad for all of our Glorify consumers out there. You know, there's a serious angle to the story. So here's the story. We can put up the first element, Glorify, which I hadn't actually been following that closely, but it was the anti-woke bank you may have heard about from Candace Owens, or you may have heard about from Crystal's just absolutely beautiful, pitch-perfect takedown of Candace Owens. But it was an anti-woke bank that was intended to combat ideological capture in the financial industry, which is actually a very real thing. From the Wall Street Journal, it reported they raised about $50 million from this top group

of investors. In July, they had announced this deal to merge with an acquisition company. And it just sort of, the wheels came off over the course of the last several months, especially in the fall. The Journal had a big piece, I think it was just in October, about mismanagement at Glorify. And so whether this is a response to a lack of demand or monopolistic market forces, or is it just mismanagement is an open question. But it is really interesting that Glorify, with all of this money, I mean, it was valued at $1.7 billion in that deal. $1.7 billion. Which shows the hollowness of valuations a lot of times. Well, at the end-

You just get a lawyer and some people write down that it's worth $1.7 billion. And they show you a couple charts, and the charts go like this Oh, how about that? 1.7 billion. It's nice. And then that though said they had to raise $60 million in extra cash. So that was sort of a blow at the time because that's a lot of money to have to raise. But at the same time, to your point, the valuation was super high. I think the valuation is high. Maybe not that high if we were being real. Well, zero now. Well, no. yeah. But I meant in theory, the valuation for a company that can do what it's doing should be high. I don't know if 1.7 billion high exists. But there's also an interesting question, I'm curious for your take

on this, about whether this alternative economy that was talked about so much over the last couple of years by people, including myself, although I always saw it as a temporary thing. Like the alternative economy ramps up because there is a demand for, for instance, like razors that aren't like what The Daily Wire did with Jeremy's razors. Like people really don't like what Harry's was doing. What were they mad about with that? They had Harry's responded to. Somebody was mad about woke razors.

Right. One person, a person with like very few followers tweeted at Harry's that they were upset about something Michael Knowles, one of the Daily Wire's podcasters, had said about gender ideology. And Harry's canceled its Daily Wire advertising because of that one tweet. And so then they responded with Jeremy's razors, which had this ad campaign that was basically like no politics with the razors. It did pretty well for the Daily Wire from what I understand. They were selling their own razors? Yeah.

They created a razor brand. And it worked. How hard can it be? There's demand for it. I mean there really is a demand for it. No matter how stupid or silly you think it is, people are so sick of this stuff. But I always saw that as like a temporary thing, right? The alternative economy, it sort of starts up, things like glorify startup, and there's a course correction in the old institutions, whether it's a course correction enough to actually change the culture back to a

healthier place, I don't know. But I wonder if this is part of that too, of a cooling, a cultural cooling since Trump left office. I don't know. But I wonder if this is part of that, too, of a cooling, a cultural cooling since Trump left office. I don't know. If it worked, it'd probably be bought by J.P. Morgan and then just, you know, continued to be run as this kind of like right wing independent thing. I use an ideological bank aspiration. So it's a thing. If you can kind of attract enough people who want their money going toward things that they support, you can build up enough of a consumer base to make an ad. But it's a niche product in the end. It's not going to replace the, it's not going to be a large enough economy to kind of compete with a JP Morgan. It's just going to be a thing that happens kind of off to the side here, I think. Yeah. And in the scheme of a J.P. Morgan,

$1.7 billion is niche. Like, that's totally a niche. Right. That's a fake $1.7 billion, too. Yeah. So I think there's the niche demand for that does exist. But it's interesting that they couldn't execute on it because of all of these different sort of like internal problems. Well, and the CEO kept getting accused of being a day drunk. Yeah. It was just raging. It worked for Mad Men. No. Did it?

No. I mean, they had a monopoly. It works with a monopoly, basically. Well, and that's exactly what they're kind of trying to undercut. But that's one of the interesting things about these alternative economies, whether in Hollywood or... So Operation Chokepoint, which was an Obama era thing, is what really scared a lot of people into trying to take action on this. And it was the same thing with Google's ad monopoly that was flexed several times during the course of the Trump administration, including to the Federalists in a totally BS way, that's what people started

trying to create, the conservative internet. And we've already seen them have a huge amount of problems with that. I mean, actually, Trump wasn't paying the bills at one of the companies that was supposed to build the conservative internet. And if anything, I think those concerns are still very real, that because of the ideological capture, because of the way we define things, and we'll talk about this in our Thanksgiving segment, broaden these definitions so the powerful people can lump dissidents into these categories of hate and bigot and whatever else, that creates serious problems when everyone who works at J.P. Morgan thinks the same way, and so do the people at the other banks and the other big banks for

that matter. So I get the demand for the product, but it's not surprising to see it crash and burn ultimately. Well, once you saw that the bank was calling itself pro-capitalist, it's like, oh, that's, yeah. What other kind of bank is there? Anyway, on Mad Men, you ever think that basically every one of those guys was in World War II and they're just self-medicating all day long? That's a really good take on Mad Men. There wasn't a diagnosis yet of PTSD. I think shell shock may have been a term that was tossed around every now and then. But yeah, there was an entire generation that just self-medicated PTSD, drinking constantly. Yeah. That's a good take on Mad Men because it

was also, there's a time when people are seeking a lot of material comforts too, in ways that were new. And frankly, oil and plastics and all that good stuff that they were literally selling was brand new. I don't know how we got onto Mad Men, but I have a lot of pleasant Thanksgiving memories around Mad Men because that's when I first started binging it. Not that anyone cares, but since we're talking about Mad Men and it's Thanksgiving. So there's a war brewing between Kevin McCarthy and Ilhan Omar. Kevin McCarthy, and we could put up, we've got D1 here. Kevin McCarthy has vowed that he's going to kick Ilhan Omar off the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

I don't know if he has singled out any particular offense. Benjamin's tweet. He said anti-Semitism. Right. He's just generally calling her an anti-Semite. The Democrats had kind of, had stepped across this line and had kicked, what, Marjorie Taylor Greene off of her committee assignments? Right.

By a vote. And so this is, and they've also suggested, are they going to kick Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell off the intelligence committee? Do you know if they're still going to do that? Yeah. So what McCarthy told me back in September is that he was booting for sure Ilhan Omar and Eric Swalwell off their committees. I've heard Schiff floated as well, and I think that's probably going to happen, frankly. But where this is interesting is that it's a response to Pelosi's, what a lot of people see, even people who follow congressional procedure in the history of it, see as a centralization of power in the Speaker's office during the course of the Pelosi era. And one of those ways was booting

people of the opposite party off their committees because she did it with Marjorie Taylor Greene, and then people were upset with what happened at the J6 committee. Now, Kevin McCarthy, according to people that I checked with on this, cannot unilaterally just boot people from the committee. It would have to be a full vote. And if Republicans have the majority, they can vote down a committee assignment that has Ilhan Omar on it. Or they could vote for and create committee assignments that don't have Ilhan Omar or Eric Swalwell on them. So that's what it would actually look like in practice during the vote. So it's kind of a technical question, but they can do it. And it seems like they're poised to.

To me, it's outrageous to kick her off of a committee. A committee is a place where people who were elected by residents in their district, by voters in 1916, 1917, voters from, people can look it up, Montana or somewhere, elected a woman who was against the World War I socialist. Congress refused to seat her. Two years later, they sent her back again. And for a long time, they refused to seat her again. Like, who are you to tell the voters in this district, I think, whether or not this person gets to represent you. If you don't like it, I'd say run a candidate against Ilhan Omar, move to Minneapolis, vote against Ilhan Omar. But to start saying that because of a person's views, which you then

characterize as anti-Semitic, that they can't be on a committee just annihilates the entire idea of Congress as a place where you're deliberating in order to write laws. Even if you said, oh, she's anti-Semitic, I don't think she is. I think that there are Republicans, and actually she said this in her statement, if we could put up D2, Ilhan Omar's kind of response. If you guys, you could pause this and read it to yourselves. I'm not going to read it to you. And if you're on the podcast, you're going to have to Google and find it. It's really long.

We're talking about like a 500-word statement. Right. She quotes several people, several Republican members of Congress saying explicitly anti-Semitic stuff about like Jews buying Congress and things like that, that if she had said it would lead to weeks of controversy. But if a Republican member of Congress is able to say it, it says it, it's just, oh, well, this is their take. So I think on the merits, it's it's wrong. But I think on the principle of it, it's it's deeply dangerous to the what's left of the institution. you to tell the people that elected this person, you in Washington, a member of your party leadership, who are you to say this to the voters of the Minneapolis area? 100 percent, I agree with that.

I think what Republicans are doing is like trying to zero in on people that are the easiest examples to follow Pelosi and give Democrats a taste of what they see as their own medicine for centralizing power and changing norms, what people saw as norms of the House. And I get why sort of tactically you zero on an Ilhan Omar, because you can probably get Democrats even to join that vote. You can probably get a Josh Gottheimer to get in on that vote for a foreign affairs committee that doesn't include Ilhan Omar. There's a difference between standing committees and select committees like January 6th. Foreign affairs is a standing committee. That's why it requires a full vote. And you can get basically every Republican united in favor of booting her. The real thing that they'll probably, I mean,

if they're smart, what they'll zero in on is her tweet where she she walked this back, but it basically equated the Taliban with Israel and America. And again, she walked back. That was a bad tweet. We talked about that. She was saying that they everybody commits human rights abuses. Yes. Oh, that is what we talked about. And we've talked about it many times since. But that's the one that's the foreign affair. Like in terms of whether someone should represent us on the Foreign Affairs Committee, that's probably Republicans' best argument. That said, one of the things that drives me insane about the Marjorie Taylor Greene discourse is that, and it's the same thing with Ilhan Omar, and I would hope that Ilhan Omar would extend this to Marjorie Taylor Greene, no matter how much they may dislike each other,

and, you know, even have stronger emotions than dislike towards each other. I would hope that they would both see how the sort of Washington mentality of isolating both of them, using power, weaponizing power, abusing it to isolate both of them, how that's bad precedent, period. Because once you do it to Marjorie Taylor Greene, you can do it to Ilhan Omar. And even if the threshold for an offense is different, because you've set the precedent and you make one party kick back because it got kicked. So it's going to kick back because that's what its voters want it to do. And you change the precedent to make it happen, because that's the thing that drives me nuts about the Marjorie Taylor Greene discourse is, frankly, she is a very, she was, she's talked about this, a low trust voter, right? Like she had zero trust in any

institutions. And that's not irrational. It is not irrational for anybody to have no trust in institutions. It's not an apology for any of the crazy stuff she said or an excuse for any of the crazy stuff she said. It's just that what ultimately people like Nancy Pelosi don't like about the Marjorie Taylor Greene's of the world and even the radical, not like I don't mean radical in a pejorative sense, but like actual leftists that make their way into Congress. What Nancy Pelosi doesn't like about them is that they don't trust anything. They don't trust. There are people who are 9-11 truthers who got into government from the Democratic side of the aisle. And Marjorie Taylor Greene was one of those people, by the way.

They don't trust anybody. And that is, to borrow a phrase, representative of the American people. And so, yeah, the House of Representatives is going to have some problematic people in it because we're a country where there are problematic people. And it's not entirely the fault of every single problematic person because the government has given them no reason to believe anything that they say. But how does Kevin McCarthy square this with the GOP panic about cancel culture? So when Ilhan Omar first got, you know, raked across the coals for her Benjamins tweet, then the point of her tweet, which is all about the Benjamins, it was actually about Kevin McCarthy because Kevin McCarthy was Yes. You interviewed her about that. Uh, I did. Yes, I did at some point. Yeah. Um,

and what she was saying is that she believes that the amount of money that AIPAC is able to raise and spend in elections influences Congress. Somehow that's a controversial thing to say. I think that's clearly obvious. Like that's a controversial thing to say. I think that's clearly obvious. Like that's why special interest groups raise and spend money so that they can have influence. She then met with a bunch of her like Jewish friends who were like, look, yes, like this, those, those facts are true. Here's history here, the tropes here, the reasons that this is heard in this particular way. She's like, you know what? You're speaking to me in good faith here. I can see that you mean what you're saying. I'm sorry. And she put out a public and I think like heartfelt

apology and explained why she had gotten to a place where she said, you know what, I'm sorry that I hurt people with what I had said. It was not my intent. And has not said that since then. Now, I think to say that Israel and the United States, Hamas and Taliban all commit human rights abuses, I think is just true. Like she's going to say things like that. I don't think that's anti-Semitic. Uh, but. Well, she walked it back because she said, I didn't mean to apply that the scale was the same between all of them. Right. And so, right. But it's not anti-Semitic. Right. Right. But it's not a, it's, it's not a case of whether it's anti-Semitic or not.

Right. No, I agree with that. But in terms of foreign affairs. So if you say that you're against cancel culture, somebody does something that you find offensive. They grow from that. They say that they apologize for it. Yeah. And then two years later, you kick them off a committee for that thing. I think it's ridiculous. You're a hypocrite of the highest order. You know, I think this is less about what Ilhan Omar said and more about kicking back at Nancy Pelosi. I genuinely think that's what this is about, is like making a point to Democrats that the way they weaponized the House and House rules and procedure and changed House rules and procedure while crying about norms during the Trump era is going to come back on them because Republican voters are sick of it. I think that's what that

I think that's ultimately what this is about. That said, I actually think outside of Congress, I mean, I don't expect partisans to not be hypocritical. They're always hypocritical. Republicans are Democrat. Kevin McCarthy, Nancy Pelosi, they're going to step into hypocrisy because it's about power. But I think on an ideological front, yeah, it's a huge problem. And it's been a huge problem because the definition of anti-Semitism is inflated beyond where it should be a lot of times. And that's not to say there aren't very real problems. I think Ilhan Omar, as you just pointed out, stumbled into one of them, which is using these tropes in that context. It's extremely obviously a problem. But when people especially, and another thing,

I don't want to be in a position where I'm defending Marjorie Taylor Greene because I'm really not like trying to defend the Marjorie Taylor Greene. She walked back her QAnon stuff and explained exactly why she got it wrong. Talked about the fact that she was just basically a small business owner mom in Georgia who had no faith left in the government. And the media should have covered that way more than it did, because it's actually an interesting thing that I think happens to people frequently that get kind of sucked into, for understandable reasons, those types of conspiracy theories. But I think one of the biggest manifestations of elite bias in Washington

is against conspiracy theorists, because people have good reasons to stumble on those conspiracy theories. It doesn't make the conspiracy theory right, but it also makes your patronizing approach to them unhelpful and unconstructive and actually counterproductive because there's no justification for what happened and what's happening to the country as a whole. So yeah, I think the definition of antisemitism

is inflated unhelpfully. There's no question about it. I think this is more just about power I think the definition of anti-Semitism is inflated unhelpfully. There's no question about it. I think this is more just about power politics at the end of the day. And I would love to try to see them justify it. But, you know, obviously, I agree. I think it's hypocritical. Yeah, they're just going to say she's this scary anti-Semite lady and kick her off the committee. Yeah. It's cowardly and atrocious. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a handful of Democrats who go along with it. Josh Gottheimer, we'll see. Well, I mean, I think Jeffries, I mean, this is like people that absolutely any criticism of Israel, you know this better than I

do. Jeffries as leader is going to be in a difficult spot. You know how he wants to vote on that. Exactly. Exactly. All right. So in Trump news, the trial of the Trump organization continued. Actually, they rested their case. They're headed towards the end of this one. This is the charge that the Trump organization was engaging in all manner of tax related shenanigans in order to rip off the government and enrich itself. A bunch of different schemes included monkeying around with the value of properties. All of a sudden, if they're looking for a loan, the property is worth millions and millions and millions of dollars. Then when the government comes and asks what it's worth, it's worth just a tiny amount. Don't worry about it. That old thing, that's not worth anything. Right. To illegal compensation. Like, basically...

Off the books. Off the books compensation where you're handing people apartments, cars, other trips. This one also includes private school tuition for people's relatives. Yeah.

Yeah. Tom Daschle had his entire career ended because when he was a lobbyist, a car service came with his salary. So in order to go from K Street down to Capitol Hill, the company had black cars that would take you around the city. And that turned out that that has a value. Shockingly. around the city. And that turned out that that has a value. Maybe 10 bucks a ride, 50 bucks a ride, 100 bucks a ride, whatever the value is. By the end of the year, it was worth thousands of dollars. He didn't mention it on his taxes because then he would have had to pay

taxes on that benefit. That showed up. Max Baucus actually hates him. That's the backstory to that. He was chair of the finance committee and knifed him, finished off his appointment. He was not made HHS secretary. Just for like not putting these little cars, car trips on his tax return,

the Trump organization is just doing this as a matter of course all the time for everybody or everybody that they want to benefit, it seems like. I'm shocked. Did you see the Trump organization engaging in something like this?

Well, so the former CFO, Alan Weisselberger, is the one who's on trial. And he said he did this of his own accord. Of course. The Trumps are such nice people. Why are you going to make them pay more? Well, what the prosecution needs to prove is that he did it on behalf of the Trump organization. And what he has said straight up in cross-examination that he did it on behalf of the Trump organization. And what he has said straight up in cross-examination that he had not conspired, this is from the journal, with any Trump relative and had acted solely for himself. But prosecutors heard that and decided not to call their other witness, guy Donald Bender, who worked for a firm that was doing outside accounting on behalf of the Trump organization. And so they have to be able to

prove that this was intentionally on behalf of the Trump Organization. Now, obviously, they brought out that it benefited the Trump Organization. So is that enough to meet the legal standard, even though Weisselberg said he was doing it for himself? I was doing it for me and nobody else. I don't know. But the Journal seems to believe that because they didn't call Bender, it signals that the prosecution against Weisselberg is feeling pretty good about their case and that there could be a ruling against the Trump organization, um, or maybe just against Weisselberg by next week. Um, which again would be two weeks after Donald Trump announced his, uh, 2024 presidential

right. And I guess prosecutors, uh, would, would say that it's just so absurd that that he would say this like that he's just doing this for himself no through no i mean you're the cfo yeah that uh that they're like you know what nobody's gonna believe this so we got him to admit that it was happening yeah and that's enough right because no person in their right mind is just gonna break all all sorts of laws without telling other people that you're breaking them on behalf of. Right. Well, in Donald Trump, this is baked into the Donald Trump package.

He actually said repeatedly when he was running the first time that I alone can fix this. Basically, I know how the system is rigged because I benefited from the system being rigged. So I don't think this changes a single political calculus on behalf of any voter whatsoever. This does not change anybody's mind. Donald Trump himself isn't in severe legal jeopardy over this at all. It could change people's mind if they thought it through. And as Chappelle laid out in his monologue, it's like a star was born when he was like, we're doing all the things in the house that you think we're doing. And if you don't like the way I do it, change the law.

But you're not going to because all your donors and all your buddies exploit the same laws. That's undermined a little bit if he's actually breaking the law. Right? I mean, he's saying that you're the one that designed the laws this way. I'm just following the law as you've written it. And then you come to find out, actually, you're breaking the law. Now, what you could say is that you're allowed to break the law because the system hasn't set up sufficient white collar enforcement. Well, I was going to say, well, yeah, like I think that's the reason that like, let's say even Weisselberg was just doing this for himself.

That's the reason he was. I mean, he's not stupid. He's the CFO of a major company. He knows what the laws are. He knows what you can and can't do. But there's no real fear. I mean, he didn't know when he was doing this, presumably, that Donald Trump was going to run for president

and become the biggest political target that's ever existed in American history in terms of one single person. And that's how you end up getting caught for this sort of stuff. But under normal circumstances, you know, this is, this is by the way, 17 counts, tax fraud, conspiracy scheme to defund and falsification of business records. That's a, this is a big case. And so I assume that it was just not a there was no inkling that this was really going to be a problem. And by the way, Donald Trump has has wiggled out of different things in the past, too. So it's a it's part of it. And it's why, again, I think the biggest failure of the Trump presidency is you have Paul Ryan walking around saying we're going to get your taxes down to a postcard, which is an actual populist goal, no matter how much the left hates it. Being able to do that with a tax code is something that makes it much, much, much, much harder, if not impossible, without serious changes for wealthy people to cheat and to not

pay what they owe. And that's a really big deal. But of course, what happened? The law got watered down to the point of absolute meaninglessness and was in some ways a handout to major corporations. So that's what happens. And in related news, Trump has been required by the Supreme Court to turn over his tax returns to the House of Representatives. You think that anything in there will shed light on any of these shenanigans? It's a good question. I mean, I assume he was probably, again, like Weisselberg, clever enough to do some of this stuff in ways that make it hard and obfuscate much wrongdoing. But I don't know. Who knows? That remains to be seen.

What do you think he's hiding? I don't know. Why doesn't he want to? I mean, he may be hiding his net worth. His net worth might be too little. Yeah. And like his annual income might be, for whatever years he's giving the tax returns over, might be embarrassingly low for him. I'd certainly love to see actual books of the Trump organization while Trump was in the White House? Like, where was all this Saudi money going?

Where was the UAE money going? I'd love to see that. What kind of licensing deals were they kicking off around the world? We've seen some of them. It doesn't look good. No. It doesn't look good. Well, and speaking of around the world and countries that are,

some of our elites have comprom compromising relationships with Ryan. Well, Dr. Oz. Yeah, right there. Ryan, what's your point today? So back in the fall of 2014, the world was captivated by an extraordinary last stand carried out by the Kurdish people in the city of Kobani, which lies in northern Syria, just south of the border with Turkey. ISIS at the time was on the rampage, and they were expected to make quick work of the Kurds hold up in Kobani. But then the city didn't fall. Weeks of withstanding the onslaught turned into months, and the Kurdish forces eventually pushed ISIS back and even retook control of the surrounding countryside. It was widely seen as a turning point at the time, the high watermark of the ISIS caliphate, and the Kurds were fighting

on behalf of their self-declared nation of Rojava, the only state set up along anarchist principles, even if those principles are far from implemented perfectly. The main fighting force of the Syrian Kurds, the YPG, works together with the U.S. against ISIS in Syria, but it is also considered a terrorist organization by the Turkish government, which also labels as terrorists the PKK, which is a Kurdish force operating in Turkey. Now, earlier this month, a bombing in Istanbul killed six people and wounded dozens, with the Turkish government immediately blaming the Kurds, who denied responsibility. Other Turkish officials have said it can't be ruled out that ISIS carried out the attack. Still, Turkey vowed to attack the Kurds in response,

and this week began bombing Kobani, the site of the resistance to ISIS. Turkey also bombed Kurdish facilities in northern Iraq, drawing a strangely worded rebuke from the U.S. State Department. Said Ned Price, quote, the U.S. expresses sincere condolences for the loss of civilian life in Syria and Turkey. We urge de-escalation in Syria to protect civilian life and support the common goal of defeating ISIS. We continue to oppose any uncoordinated military action in Iraq. So by uncoordinated, Price seems to be saying, hey, Turkey,

please stop freelancing and bombing our allies. Now, not to be outdone, Iran has taken the opportunity of the uprising inside its borders to continue to attack its own Kurdish minority just across the border from Iraq. And so for people who haven't followed the history of this, nobody perhaps got screwed more after World War II than the Kurds. What's your point? Well, at any given moment, the media can elevate or suppress information. This rankled progressives during the midterm cycle when it came to crime. Some thought the focus was disproportionate to the point of being Republican propaganda. We know the media isn't staffed by crypto Republicans, but if it bleeds, it leads isn't just a rhyme. It's a business philosophy

that can lead to some really bad outcomes. Because of technology, it's harder than ever to kind of exist outside the corporate media bubble. And while technology is also making it harder for them to control the narrative, it's making it easier for their narratives to control us. Because news is everywhere, even on the platforms we use to just keep up with friends and family. And the legacy press is still the most powerful press.

A few short years ago, daily headlines fixated on whether Donald Trump had been compromised by Vladimir Putin. Nobody batted an eye when Hakeem Jeffries said in 2020 that Trump was not a, quote, legitimate president, that he was trying to, quote, steal the election with his, quote, buddies in the Kremlin. Hillary Clinton did the same thing. It was basically the Democratic Party's official line. In the wake of his elevation last week to Nancy Pelosi's successor, conservative media started referring to Hakeem Jeffries as an election denier in headlines.

That's not just trolling over the obvious double standard for people like Stacey Abrams and Hillary Clinton and Jeffries himself. There's a legitimate point to be made right here. Now, of course, some of you pointed out after I did a monologue a couple of weeks ago that far fewer Democrats and with less mainstream support from their party voted against certifying electors in 2016. And there was no organized plot to overturn the results through different legal processes, nor was there an assault on the Capitol from, say, Clinton supporters. That is true and a totally fair point. There is a difference. Instead, though, of abusing the electoral college or the election system itself, Democrats turned to the FBI. They sicked Robert Mueller on Trump's campaign and his administration,

leaving no stone unturned in an effort to prove Trump, to borrow a phrase from Jeffries, was not legitimately elected. Even before Trump won, FBI agent Peter Strzok was referring to the Trump Russia probe as, quote, an insurance policy against Trump's election. That probe would come to dominate Trump's presidency and clearly, clearly contributed to the institutional distrust that brought people to the Capitol on January 6th. And the FBI, by the way, knows that because we're learning more and more every week about how many informants they had in groups that found themselves heavily involved on that day. Now, that is far from an excuse for rioters, but it's not true that 2016 election deniers aren't also a very serious threat to the democratic system. Weaponizing the FBI on the basis of an illegitimate investigation to undercut the duly elected president is very, very bad and very, very anti-democratic.

Plus, it then gave the FBI more power and more perceived justification for encroaching on the freedoms of average Americans with beliefs that don't comport with the beliefs of elites. That's where this all goes, and it won't be good for regular Democrats either. Hakeem Jeffries has a lot of problems beyond parroting the Democratic Party's line on the 2016 election, but it really is worth imagining how the media could be covering him and other Democrats who told the American people for years that Donald Trump was illegitimate right now. For so-called neutral reporters to treat literally every Republican who even questioned, let's say, Zuck Bucks in 2016, not even the voting machines or any of the other conspiracy stuff, to treat them as, quote,

election deniers, but say nothing about Jeffries, is a worse threat than Jeffries himself just being a partisan hack. If the media were actually neutral and skeptical of power across the board, we could have had news cycles in 2016 on the abuse of the FBI and news cycles now on Democrats elevating an election denier to House leadership. If reporters were just honest about their biases, this artificial construct of neutrality that we all live in wouldn't be a lie and would be a lot less damaging. And it would also destroy the incentives for people at the FBI and in the Democratic Party to abuse their power. Without a check from the press, partisans are going to do whatever they can to cling to power. Republicans have plenty

of their own issues, but media's coverage of some of their bad behavior is actually helpful when it's done fairly because it disincentivizes that bad behavior. Politicians need that. Without it, dangerous ideas promoted by Democrats are metastasizing. Speaking of conversations like this one, we're going to transition into a conversation now about conversations, a conversation about conversations, a little meta. Thanksgiving is around the corner. It's Thanksgiving week. And Ryan and I wanted to talk a little bit about what it's like to talk to people at Thanksgiving. We could give people advice on how to talk to people who are wrong about stuff since all day long, here we are talking to people who are wrong about stuff. Since all day long, here we are, talking to people who are wrong about stuff and doing it in a civil way. Yes.

Because that's what you're going to have to be doing Thursday at the dinner table. Because you can try to avoid it, which is probably the best path forward. But if you can't, what's your strategy for when you wind up next to a woke aunt or a liberal uncle and they want to talk about Russia, they want to talk about Trump, they want to talk about whatever they want to talk about?

I think we have a problematic bias in this case because we're here for the reason that we enjoy those types of conversations. And so I've never honestly really ever thought about how to talk to people that disagree necessarily, like in my family or like a Thanksgiving type context, because I like that. I don't have the sort of like typical aversion to talking about politics or religion, because I think that's how you connect with people in the strongest types of ways. Like when you're able to have a really civil conversation about politics and religion, um, that's means that you're, you're connecting with a person in a healthy, deep way. And I really honestly just personally enjoy that. Um, but the more that I think about it, the more that you have to, I think it's the bottom line is

that you have to fundamentally like on a very human base level, respect the person and like the person and genuinely believe that they are just as human as you are. And they've come to those conclusions for just as human reasons. And that's where it has to start. And if you don't have that, I just don't see what the point is. Like if you, if you think that the other person is, is fundamentally a bad human being, like if you're talking to an actual, there are some really like touching stories about people who've talked to like actual new Nazis, KKK members, changed their minds through kindness, et cetera. I think that's really going to be a rarity. And if you're talking to somebody who's genuinely a bad person, you're probably not going to change their mind. Do you have some liberals in your, in your family? Definitely. I don't know.

Left, liberal, progressive, like where do your blue members of your family fall down? You know, part of my family is sort of working class, Milwaukee, you know, like union. Pro-union. Yeah, Democrats, Catholic Democrats. And it's pretty much across the spectrum, as I imagine a lot of people's families are now. I imagine that's the same for your family, Pennsylvania, rural areas. A bunch of Oklahoma. They're all Republicans out there.

Oh, there you go. Well, and how do you deal with, I mean, some of this is just based on, without getting personal, what I know in your family, some of this is probably very personal. People's politics are important to them for legitimate reasons. For everybody. For others, it kind of seems more like entertainment and as fired up as they are. What I have found and what tends to work is that the less partisan you are, the more you can have a political conversation. And what you can also do, but that doesn't mean don't be ideological and don't have a viewpoint, but don't make it a blue versus red or even conservative versus liberal thing.

If you can make it top versus bottom, that's always the easiest. But you can also usually identify villains that you have in common with somebody. I've noticed that, so like for years, the Republicans in my family were pretty supportive of the right wing of their party and also their party leadership. That has changed recently. Now you can kind of have your yucks about Mitch McConnell or make fun of dearly departed Paul Ryan. Or if they've heard of Kevin McCarthy yet. You can identify figures that they consider rhinos or something like that. Yeah.

You can have fun with them. But for years, the corporate Democrats were such a nice, ripe target. Right. That that was an easy thing to kind of bond over. And then go from there and say, look, the things that you're saying are actually the things that the left has the same critique. But here's the left solution. And with health care, you can often do that one. Because the right, when it comes to health care, and I bet you're happy to admit this, doesn't really have a solution.

No. It's one of the biggest failures of the Republican Party over the last 20 years. Yeah. Because no solution works within an honest kind of right-wing free market frame that also covers everybody. That's absolutely true. You just can't do it. Absolutely true. And you know who learned that? Mitt Romney. Yes. And he was like, well, I guess we'll have to do the kind of left-wing market weird combination thing that's going to involve a lot of subsidies that eventually, if you leave it alone long enough, should basically evolve into like a single-payer thing. It's like the Medicare and insurance companies collude together on pricing and then they become single-payers eventually. Like that's where our system rationally grows in that direction. And so you can reach people, I think, in kind of a rational way.

Like you hate these things. Here's what your folks say you should do that wouldn't work. Here's what the left is saying. And then you have to allow for, okay, what are the criticisms of that? And as long as you're open to the criticisms of it, then usually you can keep it kind of cool. Yeah. Well, that's an interesting point because I do think I don't ever see these conversations as like vehicles for persuasion necessarily. And I also feel like that's helpful.

Right, it's just for having a conversation. You should genuinely be interested in what the other person has to say. And I think that's a huge secret to Sagar and Crystal's success. And another huge, like none of this works if, and this was probably the biggest handicap of Crossfire back in the day on CNN, which I think actually had a lot of merits despite how ridiculous it became at times. The biggest handicap was that you really did have red and blue. It was Democrat and Republican. It wasn't conservative and liberal. It was Democrat and Republican. Partisan talking points versus partisan talking points. Exactly. Like literal talking points in certain cases. And that's not really going to get you very far because you always have to create double standards to justify what one of the parties is

doing. Obviously, we know people in power are problematic, regardless of what little party they identify with. But you should really just genuinely be interested in what the other person has to say. And if you're having a conversation that you're willingly entering into, not that if one's forced on you, this is different, but you should be genuinely interested. Or you can force it on them because they're right next to you. One of the biggest like I haven't been around journalism. You know, I don't mean I know I make jokes, but Ryan being old, this is not one of them. As long as as you have. But one of the early lessons that I learned very fast was how important humility is to journalism, because you're constantly trafficking in facts that change, arguments that change, information that

changes, frankly, because things move so quickly. And your arguments are never going to be static from point A to point B over the course of 10 years, 15 years, 20 years. And that necessarily means you have to communicate in a way that reflects the reality. Things will change. You will change. And so to have conversations, whether you're in the public sphere or just out of Thanksgiving dinner table, as though you definitely have the truth on your side. And I would say this even in a conversation, I'm 100% sure I have the truth on my side when it comes to a very personal political issue. Let's say, for instance, transgender ideology. I am 100 percent on that. I feel very

confident if you're talking to not bringing that up at Thanksgiving. Yeah, don't do that. Not going to abortion either. That's fair. But if I'm talking to another person who also feels that way, I assume that they feel that way for very legitimate reasons and that they also are very confident in their evidence and that they have been thoughtful about it, and that they believe that for reasons that comport with their own moral compass. And, you know, this isn't to say truth is relative, because I'm also pretty much 100% sure that it's not. Have you seen any political evolution on your union-loving, working-class, democratic family out there? I don't know. I mean, I don't know. I would say...

Do they watch? Are you allowed to speak freely? Well, I don't want to speak for people who... Tell them you're talking about a different aunt. Yeah. No, I mean, I've noticed that in general in Wisconsin, though, one of the biggest signs in 2016, I was actually rollerblading a super rural area

in northern Wisconsin. And it wasn't just like Trump science you know like little yard science it was homemade side of the barn side of the barn like giant plywood handmade hand painted Trump stuff have you noticed any change

one of my uncles he's definitely gotten more right wing yeah any Hispanic change?'s definitely gotten more right wing. Yeah. Any Hispanic change? Democrats have gotten more. That's interesting. Yeah.

Well, so I have a bunch of in-laws down in South Florida, as you know. And the Hispanic television down there, Spanish language TV is wild. Maria Elvira Salazar is actually a representative. It came from Univision and is now a pretty MAGA representative. I mean, talking to one relative and he was spouting all of this like Q adjacent stuff. And we're like, so you're into Q now? Is that what I'm getting? He's like, what's Q? Yeah.

I had no idea. But a lot of the Spanish language news shows have taken kind of the outlines of it, stripped the Q out of it and some of the crazy, but like are still feeding all the like, all the rest of it in a way that I think is more disorienting to our politics than people understand. So that's, and that is actually, and that's the kind of thing that's nice to like find out as a journalist.

Because like, otherwise, I don't have a whole lot of entree into how that's affecting regular people who are watching those programs. That's so true that if you – and this is like if there are journalists watching, that's one of the most important things about like going and getting out of Washington. Like even just out of the news cycle for a little bit and talking to other people. Man, like – It's crazy out there. The biggest bias in media is working in media. Once you sort

of get out of the news cycle, you realize that people have a whole lot of other concerns that aren't whatever Ben Collins just tweeted. Who's Ben Collins? He's the like dystopia guy at NBC News. Oh, yeah. He was very upset about Twitter recently. Yeah, I did see that, yes. All right. Well, we hope everybody has an enjoyable Thanksgiving. You know, none of this is to say you should be bringing up politics, but if you want to, I mean, there's a way to do it with it being very constructive. And I think the narrative that, like, you must stay away from religion and politics,

you don't have to obsess over it. But I feel like you can have really constructive, healthy relationship conversations through it. And maybe you can move people. That's right. Maybe you can. I don't have to obsess over it, but I feel like you can have really constructive, healthy relationship conversations through it. And maybe you can move people. That's right. Maybe you can. You never know. I think you've changed my opinion on several things. There we go.

All right. Maybe we'll get into that sometime. Or maybe we won't. Be too embarrassing. I can't admit it. Have a great Thanksgiving, everybody. This is an iHeart Podcast.