Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - Counter Points #15: Rail Strike, Kanye & Alex Jones, Georgia Runoff, Disney CEO, Oath Keepers, Health Insurance, Google Corruption, Afghan Central Bank & MORE!

Episode Date: December 2, 2022

Ryan and Emily give their commentary on the Senate rail strike vote, Kanye & Alex Jones, a Herschel Walker scandal, Disney controversies, Oath Keeper convictions, health insurance, and the Afghan central bank funds!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. 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, everyone. It's been an extremely busy 24 hours for breaking news, so shout out to our team for being so easily adapted, for adapting so easily to this wild news cycle. Yeah, absolutely nimble. How are you doing, Ryan? Well, Kanye is just blowing everything up, huh? Kanye is blowing everything up. We're actually going to talk about Kanye. We are. We're going to get to Kanye. We're going to get to the Georgia runoff. We're going to talk a little bit about Disney. We're covering all kinds of things on today's show, The Oath Keepers. We're talking about- We've got some Afghanistan news later in the show.

That's right. We'll have a guest on the Afghanistan news, somebody with very direct knowledge of the negotiations over there. But let's start with the rail strike. Huge news on this front breaking in the afternoon on Thursday when the Senate actually voted on the negotiation that Crystal and Sager have been covering very closely along with Max and other good folks. But this is, we want to start actually with Assad. So we're going to play the video right now. Here's A1 and we'll react to it. On this vote, the yeas are 52, the nays are 43 under the previous order requiring 60 votes for the adoption of this concurrent resolution. The concurrent resolution is not agreed to. So that needed 60 votes to overcome a filibuster. That was to include seven days of paid sick leave in the contract that they're forcing on the workers and the companies through the Railway Labor Act.

It's the Bernie Sanders amendment to the negotiation that Joe Biden punted to Congress in accordance with the Rail Act of what, 1923? Right, right. It's because you had 50 years of labor disputes on railways that led to basically wars, which were always crushed violently by the federal government, never leading throughout the 1860s and 70s to any significant gains for unions. It was just absolute nightmare. The federal troops, local cops, a vicious campaign of suppression, but it didn't stop workers from continuing to organize and push for their rights. And so eventually, in the 1920s, they passed this Railway Labor Act, which says that if the bosses won't agree to a contract, the president and Congress can come in and implement it. The thing I learned today is that actually it was written by union lawyers back in the 20s. This was actually written as a union-friendly law.

But today, it operates as a stick that the companies can use against the bargaining of the workers to say, look, here's what we're going to offer. And if you don't like it, we're just going to have the president and Congress, you know, basically put whatever deal, you know, force whatever deal we can down your throats. Now, so what the unions have done is they try to get close to President Biden and they thought, OK, well, Biden's our man, lunch pail Joe. He's going to he's going to be the one who's going to actually force a better deal on us and on them. Because it's a forcing, but it can go either way. That didn't quite work.

Biden made their deal a little bit better. He gave them one paid personal day, which bizarrely, wildly, was a red line for these railroad companies. They did not want to give a single day because their whole, and we've talked to Max Alvarez a lot about this, their entire business strategy relies on bringing down the number of staff on a train to as little as humanly possible. So therefore- It's called PSR. Yeah. If somebody calls out, their entire national system falls apart. It's a strategy that has them at literal record profits.

And they, on the one hand, want to say that the record profits have nothing to do with labor, they're just about our investments. But on the other hand, they have cut something like 30% of rail workers in recent years in order to optimize how much weight, carry more freight with fewer employees and fewer cars. So it's explicitly part of a strategy that makes it more vulnerable to if somebody has to call out sick, they actually require you to use a vacation day and you have to know like 30 days in advance. Right, you're going to be sick. Right. So if you make a doctor's appointment, you have to plan it for one of your days off or you have to, if you get down to something, you get really

sick, you have to plan it for a vacation. It obviously doesn't make any sense. A lot of workers said it contributed to the spread of COVID on the rail because people were not going out sick because you can't plan to get COVID. I mean, it's absolutely absurd, but that's why when they have record profits, they've been happy, for instance, to agree to these pay raises. I think the pay raises are still sort of unreasonably meager, 24% over five years in an environment with high inflation isn't very meaningful. But the one, their red line is the paid sick days because while they can funnel their profits down to employees, what they don't want to do is have to hire more people because that's where

the costs are really going to go back up. Right. And so there are a whole bunch of interesting political dynamics to sort through here. Let's start with this, that actually the fight is not over. And this is some breaking news we can bring, you know, exclusive to CounterPoints. fight for them is going to be to pressure the Biden administration to include railroad workers in the upcoming executive order that requires that federal contractors pay $15 an hour, all these different things, that requires paid sick leave. So it would require 56 hours of paid sick leave, which would be seven, eight hour shifts. In 2015, believe this or not, when Barack Obama implemented this paid sick leave for federal contractors, they specifically cut railroad workers out of it because of this system

and because of the way that the railroad companies have their fangs into both parties. And so what they're now pushing the Biden administration to do is to roll that back. Say no exception anymore for railroad workers. That brings us to the question of the strategy over the last few days, because I think learning that actually illuminates a little bit why they went for the fight that they did. And so what have you seen about, like, what are you curious about how like this has unfolded on the Hill? Yeah, it's been interesting because it ended up only getting the vote was, final vote was 52 to 43. One of the first Republican senators, probably the first Republican senator to come out against Biden's negotiation that punted the bill to Congress was Senator Marco Rubio.

He ultimately was followed by Ted Cruz, who said the complaints of the— Let's put a— Yeah, there you can see it right there. Yep, that's a tweet from More Perfect Union that says all Democrats voted yes except Manchin. All Republicans voted no except for six. So you had Mike Braun of Indiana, Ted Cruz of Texas, who said that the union demands were, quote, quite reasonable. Lindsey Graham, Josh Hawley, John Kennedy, and Marco Rubio himself all voted with the Democrats

on this. But that still leaves eight votes short. Five senators did not vote. Three Democrats. Three Democrats. Leave them five short. It was Warnock, Chris Murphy, and someone else. They're all yes votes. That's what happens. Yeah, that's not entirely unusual if they know a vote isn't going to pass. They just don't necessarily break away from what they're doing to come in and vote on it. But it's interesting that no Republicans voted for this in the House, I believe. Three, I think. Yeah, it was three. But they're probably all

outgoing. Yeah, it was a small, it wasn. Three, I think, actually. Three, yeah, it was three. But they're probably all outgoing. Yeah, it was a small, it wasn't like a, there was no significant Republican coalition. More support in the Senate. Yeah. Interesting. Which is super interesting. And Marco Rubio kind of couched it in free market language, which is also interesting to me, too, because he hasn't been afraid. How did he pull that off?

Well, it was interesting. I actually can pull up the press release. But what's interesting to me is that you have a lot of employees who have quit working in these conditions. Like, they have just walked out and quit. And what's happening is Congress, because of the act from the 1920s, is protecting the large rail conglomerates. It's basically protecting their monopoly power and protecting them against the forces of the free market by allowing free labor market. Yeah, exactly. By allowing Congress to step in. And that's I don't know if that's the argument that Rubio was going for. But from my perspective, there are a lot of senators who I think really should have gone for this bill. Yeah. So here's what Marco Rubio said. By now, everyone should realize nothing good

happens when Congress gets involved in issues best left to the private sector. So his argument against it was that this is Congress overstepping the boundaries of the private sector to negotiate between the companies and the unions. Right. And so let's put up A3 also, speaking of Ted Cruz. So Ted Cruz- You can see on the screen here if you're watching. It's pretty hard to see, but basically what you're going to see is Ted Cruz wander up to where Bernie Sanders is sitting at the very top and then end up giving him a fist bump. After voting yes. After voting yes to go with the workers. So you've got Cruz and the Democratic Socialists being all buddy-buddy together.

The only way to look at that, I think, truly is glass half full. Because 10 years ago, this vote is totally different. Maybe you get Lindsey Graham, maybe you get John Kennedy or something like that, although unlikely. But the only way to look at that, I don't mean in general, the negotiations for the workers. I mean, the fact that where this vote ended up falling, that's a glass half full that you are able to peel off that many Republicans. And that's a low bar. I understand that's a low bar. And the Republican Party, there's an open question

as to whether there's durability to this trajectory. They keep going in this direction. So if this vote were to happen 10 years from now, do you have six Republicans or 10 Republicans? Do you have 20 Republicans? I don't know. But at least by the standards of somebody like Sager or myself, that's on the sidelines and has that vantage point, that is an improvement from the low baseline that the Republicans have been at in the past. And having 52 votes in the Senate,

that means you have a bipartisan majority. You've got six Republicans and a bunch of Democrats. That gives them actual real momentum when they now go to the White House. And I think that what I was saying earlier, I think that illuminates the strategy. And it also puts the progressive caucus and the squad's decision-making around strategy over the last few days in a different light. And we'll see how successful they are to get Biden. but they certainly have raised attention on this issue and have shown that there's bipartisan support for it. So not to dwell too long on the squad here, but every issue in the House now immediately online becomes a question of, you know, did the squad sell out or not? And so the immediate answer from everybody is almost yes. So look, in this case, I don't think that they did. So on Monday, and I know that people, it's a lot easier to just lie

and be like, yeah, squads, bunch of sellouts. But here are the facts of what happened here. So on Monday, after Biden says, we're going to force this deal on the workers, Pelosi tells her caucus, we're going to force this deal on the workers. There will be no changes allowed. We're just going to vote on it. And she had endless votes for this thing. I think it ended up, she ended up getting 290 votes. It wasn't close because you have so many Republicans were like, yeah, I'm not, I'm fine averting

the strike. I'm not, I'm not going to get blamed for this economic catastrophe, and I don't care about these workers, so fair. So there then becomes a public push by Jamal Bowman to say, if we're going to vote on this, let's at least add seven sick days to it. And there becomes enough pressure that in negotiations, Pelosi says, okay, if everybody agrees to vote for this, then I'll allow it. But I'm going to put up two votes. So the one vote on the tentative agreement, the second vote on the seven sick days. What that means is that they both go together over to the Senate. And then if the Senate rejects the seven sick days, they can still pass the original one and send it off to Biden. Otherwise, they would have to just basically pass the tentative agreement back to the House,

and then the House passes it. But that's the flaw in believing that the squad had leverage here. They passed it with 80 votes today, the Senate did. So the Senate could then just send it back to the House. And if the squad votes no, it still passes with 285 votes in the House. So you don't have any leverage other than public pressure. So they brought shame and they brought public pressure. So they win the vote in the House. Knowing the symbolism would be what was important. Right. So they win the vote in the House. Then it goes over to the Senate and there's a day or two of debating. And then you hear from Hawley, you hear from Rubio, Ted Cruz votes. And then once and then it fails. And then you say, look, look how much support we have over here.

Now we want Biden to add us into this executive order. It would be pretty impressive negotiating, actually, if they wind up with all of the raises and also the sick days. Because if you were going to get the sick days, they'd say, well, that's coming out of your raises. So if they wind up with both, that'd be awfully interesting. Some senators got interested in the last minute in this idea of passing a bill that would kick the can down the road for another 60 or 90 days for a, quote, cooling off period, cooling down period, something like that, that would allow the unions to continue negotiating with the companies, with President Biden and Marty Walsh. Obviously, all Democrats and Republicans sort of rejected that for what we have by this vote at the end of the day. But it's interesting to see how,

I mean, basically, if Ted Cruz is saying that the demands are, quote, quite reasonable, this should be something that gets the vote of not just every Democrat, but every Republican as well. And Republicans are sort of saying we shouldn't have Congress butting in to these negotiations. That's a fig leaf. That's that there are some people maybe who believe that sincerely, that this is the business of, you know, they maybe disagree with the original act, that this should be the business of the negotiators, that Congress shouldn't step in. But at the end of the day, this is people who are worked like dogs asking for paid sick leave. I mean, it's just insane. And Ted Cruz is somebody who, you know, knows which way the political winds are blowing,

right? So for him to sense, I want to be on the side of the workers here, suggests that at least there is that energy on the Republican side that people feel like there's some benefit there. No, and I mean, he's also somebody who's generally been a proponent of, I'm sure he's taken lots and lots of corporate money, just like Lindsey Graham has, just like Mike Braun has, I'm sure just like John Kennedy has. And, you know, they're saying it's in my interest politically, or because, you know, maybe they sincerely believe this. They're saying it's in my interest to take this vote. And the fact that, you know, again, like, I think it's a sign of progress and a good direction for the Republican Party. But it is pitiful that you can

only get six Republicans in the Senate on a vote like this one. They'll gladly vote for crony subsidies. They'll do that all day. But this, oh, no, no, no, Congress shouldn't be involved. I guess the last point I'd make on the squad side is for people who think that the squad made a mistake in promising to vote yes on the tentative agreement in order to get the seven-day sick vote. Would the unions, and by the way, the unions were pushing for that strategy. That was the strategy that they wanted at the last minute. That wasn't because Biden forced their hand. They're like, well, okay, this is the best we can do at this moment. So if they didn't do that, if they said, no, unions, I don't think that this is the right play.

We're actually just going to vote no. We're not going to force. It's against our principles to force an agreement on a union. So we're all we're voting no. And we're not going to put the seven days sick leave bill up for a vote because that would sully our conscience. Because that would that that makes us complicit in breaking this strike, in enforcing a contract on workers who've rejected it. So if they don't do that, then this week it just cruises through.

285 votes in the House, 80 votes in the Senate. It goes to the White House. He signs it. Strike is averted. And then the union comes to Biden and says, hey, we want to be you know, we want to be written into this executive order. It's like, well, where's your momentum here? Where's your where's the fight? Like, why why do you have capital at this moment that we're going to spend on you. And I think that they built up capital through this week that has, I think, substantially increased their chances of getting into this executive order. And if Joe Biden pushed really, really,

really, really, really, really hard for paid sick leave, the companies would have to take an L on it. Yeah. They absolutely would have to take it. Write it in the executive order. Then the Supreme Court could say that they can't do it. But they've already said that the other executive order is legit. Yeah. If they wanted to push on this, it's not. They're in the, the ball is in their court. The ball is in the court of Joe Biden and the government negotiators in this case.

It's not in the court of the companies because they don't want to go into a strike situation. They don't want to go into a shutdown situation at all. Yeah. No, they don't at all. All right. In some Kanye West news. So Kanye West made an appearance on a show by a man who was no longer, I think, allowed to appear on YouTube. Is that right? I believe that is right. I'm actually going to talk a little bit about that kind of thing in my monologue. In most places, in fact, is Alex Jones. So Kanye West, I think he did, what, three hours or something on Alex Jones? Whatever it is, it was long.

And I was taping a podcast and getting pings from you guys sending me these clips. And I went back and watched them as it had happened. Like, you guys were watching this stuff in real time. I went back and watched them. And just, it was a real journey from start to finish. Yeah. And we should start with some significant disclaimers here that Alex Jones, A, has been, has lost multiple libel judgments against him for defamation. Yes. In order to prove defamation in this country, you have to

have engaged in the most kind of reckless type of behavior. Super high bar. Yeah. It's hard to lose a defamation case as anybody. As a broadcaster. As a broadcaster in this country. And he's lost many. So the point here is not that Alex Jones is some type of a credible figure here. The point, as we play some of these, is that even Alex Jones in some of these clips is like, whoa, this guy is going too far. And this is a national story in a bunch of different senses.

One, it led to, bizarrely enough, did you see this? I forget which Republican, one of the major kind of Republican Twitter accounts had tweeted something like- House GOP. Kanye, Elon, and Trump or something. They just deleted that.

And they hadn't deleted it prior. This was before his descent into anti-Semitic madness. They had not deleted that tweet. And so now, finally, I thought it was an odd place to draw the line. If you're going to draw the line, now let's- Let's show where Republicans drew the line. Yeah, to give viewers- Not Republicans, but-

The Twitter, whoever operates the House GOP Twitter account. So to give everyone a flavor, because it's hard actually to encapsulate in a segment here exactly how bananas and awful this conversation was. Let's start with B1. You're not Hitler. You're not a Nazi. You don't deserve to be called that and demonized. Well, I see good things about Hitler also. I love everyone. And Jewish people are not going to tell me, you can love us and you can love what we're doing to you with the contracts. And you can love what we're pushing with the pornography. But this guy that invented highways, invented the very microphone that I use as a musician, You can't say out loud that this person ever did anything good. And I'm done with that. I'm done with the classifications. Every human being has something of value that they brought to the table,

especially Hitler. Really scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. And I think, Ryan, we should just roll into B3, which is another SOT. So keep the ball rolling on these clips while we're at it. I don't like the word evil next to Nazis. I think we need to look at... Oh, my goodness. Just because you don't like one group doesn't mean the other. I love Jewish people, but I also love Nazis.

Oh, man. Well, I have to disagree with that. All right, so we can put B2 up on the screen. I do have one reaction that I think might be, this might be one thing that is either controversial or maybe a take that others don't have. I'm actually glad that Kanye West is being confronted by Tim Pool,

is being confronted by Alex Jones in public view so that he's not saying this insane stuff to other powerful people in private, that he's not putting his money privately into insane places, and that we can see clearly the contrast. So when the media tries to shut down Alex Jones, for instance,

and no legacy journalist wants to talk to Alex Jones, you end up with him never being confronted in person and forced like he was in the Sandy Hook case. And it crumbled, right? His narrative crumbled when he was forced to confront the alternative argument. You can see with Kanye West here, I actually feel like through this segment, I got a lot of insight into where his ideology, this ideology of anti-Semitism that particularly that he's been espousing, I can sort of see the intellectual well that it sprung from, which is a poison well, and it's terrible. But it's good to force him to explain himself and go to the logical conclusions of these awful, awful arguments. And to be confronted by

Alex Jones and Tim Pool, I think, has showed a helpful contrast to anybody who might be like, hey, everybody's shutting Kanye down. That must mean he's on to something. He's not. Let's play the third one. The Nazis, in my view, were thugs that shook people down, did a lot of really bad things. But they did good things too. We're going to stop dissing the Nazis all the time. Okay. We're going to get to that. Like, is he serious? He is because he then said he, he then went into full Holocaust denial mode, denying the 6 million number, which is like, I mean, flagrant. And he seems to be, serious is an interesting word. He's clearly in the throes of a mental illness. And that's extremely sad.

And it's playing out in public view. It's hurting him. It's hurting his family. And the bottom line is that one of the most popular artists one of the most famous celebrities of this century is now espousing outright nazism essentially not even essentially like it's like yeah yeah no outright nazism um essentially for the whole in front of the highways the microphone i mean it i mean the highway is not that great anyway. So, like, that's all you've got.

And the microphone. I mean, microphones. I think we would have a microphone without the Nazis. I just. Not that I'm going to engage, like, in the point by point. Well, no, but you know what, though? Someone is. Like, someone who can go through the history and, like, has the time to do it and will do it is who can go through the history and has the time to do it

and will do it is going to go through the history so that when people are curious as to, Kanye West is being mocked by all of the people that I distrust and all of the people I hate. Well, they can see these point by point refutations and show the deeply anti-Semitic well that they spring from. And I think that's a good thing. I mean, I think it's ultimately a good thing. And I think, you know, at a certain point it has to stop at a certain point. You've heard enough, right? A certain point he said all that he can say. We understand. But I think this was, you know, a step towards showing exactly how gross this is. And I hope people connect to just how ludicrous it is. And rather than, my big fear would be that people would see this and say, well, I love Kanye. And so then they like go down a rabbit hole themselves and come out the end with, you know, shrouded in all these like anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

That to me is the biggest concern about the platforming of this, but I hope that it goes the other way, that the sunlight kind of exposes it for the evil and the insanity that it is, and that people who would have been tempted otherwise are like, oh, okay, that actually seems crazy. Like he's on a ski mask. When you can spout off, so I saw somewhere that Nick Fuentes, somebody looked at the increase in his Rumble views before Kanye started aligning with him and with Milo at Yiannopoulos and after, and there was a big spike. I think some of that comes from like disproportionate media obsession, but not in this case. I think it's very clearly

Kanye West. Like you blame Kanye West for that bump because again, one of the most successful artists of this century suddenly starts hanging out with a guy named Nick Fuentes. People are going to go and check out what he's saying. And, you know, just statistically, some people are going to say, especially on those videos where you just have one crazy person talking into a microphone for a really long time, when you just have one bigoted person talking into a microphone for a really long time and just spouting off all this nonsense about highways and microphones, and you don't have people being like, hey, wait a second, what book did you read that in? And then you sort of, everything can unravel.

That is genuinely a very, very serious offense on Kanye West's behalf, not just what Kanye West himself has said, but by boosting the profile of people like Fuentes. I guess we'll get to find out what the repercussions are going to be. Yes, we will. Let's move on to Georgia, where the Senate runoff is coming this Monday, no, Tuesday, December 6th.

Say next day. So we'll get to some early voting numbers in a moment. But to start with, the funniest news out of this race, which has been funny all the way through, has been Hershel Walker straight up admitting that he does not live in Georgia during the campaign. And so K-File, Andrew Kaczynski's team over at CNN, got obtained audio of him addressing the Georgia Republicans. We can put C1 up here. What is C1 the SOT or C1? Yeah. Yeah, C1 is the SOT. Let's play this audio that CNN obtained of this is Walker addressing Georgia college Republicans during the campaign for Senate in Georgia, which is a key point to bear in mind as you listen to this.

Everyone asks me, why did I decide to run for a Senate seat? Because to be honest with you, this is never something I ever, ever, ever thought in my life I ever did. And that's the honest truth. But I was sitting in my home in Texas. I was sitting in my home in Texas and I was seeing what was going on in this country. You know, I live in Texas. Yeah, I went down to the border often sometimes. So K-File also reported, according to publicly available tax records that Andrew and K-File reviewed, Walker's claiming to get a tax exemption, that his primary residence is in Texas. And what I heard Walker say in that clip is lived in Texas. It sounds like he says, I lived in Texas, not I live in Texas. I listened to it a couple of times. Either way, the tax exemption totally, it doesn't matter if he said live or lived,

if he's claiming the tax exemption for a primary residence. I heard live because I, to me, the context fit where he was saying, like, I live in Texas. And if it was hard to hear, he's saying, I live in Texas. I've gone down to the border a couple of times

and I can tell you that the border is a terrible mess. So he's like using his authority as a Texan, which he'd been for 20 years, to then have a claim about his position on the border. I don't think this hurts Walker that much, except maybe a few people who might have otherwise like come out to vote are like, you know what, Skip, this is so absurd. I'm not even going to bother doing this. But like if you're, if this is the thing that gets you off the walker train. Well, you know, he's like, he is to Georgia what Marion Barry was to D.C. He's a Georgian for life.

Yes. Well, he also is a Georgian for life. You know, he's born in northern Georgia. He was a high school football star. He was a star at Georgia. So, like, those things, I think, in some ways make you a Georgian for life. Like, Dr. Oz doesn't know anything about Pennsylvania.

We were, when we were talking about this segment earlier this week, it was an interesting, we were thinking it was an interesting contrast with what happened in Pennsylvania because it was absolutely, hugely damaging to the Oz campaign that he was not a Pennsylvanian, that he lived in New Jersey. Everyone sort of knew that. He didn't have any of the like real hallmarks of Pennsylvania residency,

didn't seem to be all that familiar with the state. He got the melody wrong, as Ryan reminded me on Fly Eagles 5 during the debate. He just was out of place and it felt exploitive and opportunistic. And what was funny is that Dr. Oz tried to like he sprinted away from that. Right. Like he didn't want to talk about it at all instead of just kind of owning it and being like, yeah, well, you know, I'm a super millionaire. I don't live here. He spelled his alleged town wrong. Dr. Oz did. Right. It was his in-law's house or something.

Herschel Walker is just like, hey, I've lived in Texas for a long time. He's claiming he's getting the tax exemption. The best case you could make for him would be, I was in my Texas home. And so that's a rich person who has like eight different homes. Yeah. But then when you take the homestead or primary home exemption, you kind of undermine yourself there. I want to put C4 up on the screen. Ryan, this is something you flagged and you've been looking at over the course of the last week and have found some, I think, interesting data from it.

This is early voting in the Republican and Democratic side in Georgia, general elections and runoffs over the last four years. What did what stood out to you here? Yeah. So if you want to follow along at home, this is targetearly.targetsmart.com. This is a democratic data firm. So they pull together lots of kind of consumer data. They pile it on top of voter registration data and voter information. And they were the ones that really nailed the midterms. They were getting made fun of as mongers of hopium and copium all throughout the election because they were saying, what we're seeing does not comport with a red wave. So what they're seeing right now, so far in the runoff, and this is updated as of just now, it's 1,145,000 votes, which is a ton. It's crazy.

If you look at the runoff from 2021, that was a total of, a quarter of the number of people who voted in the Warnock and Ossoff runoff elections two years ago have already voted in this one. Now it's truncated. They had an extra month. So now you're going to have a ton of turnout pushed onto election day. Now, a key thing to remember is that young people tend to vote very late. And so that's why Democrats actually ended up as it went along. That's the other thing. Republicans tend to vote late. Right. So both of those. So the young people and the Republicans voting late balances it out. The remaining votes should lean Republican, so the young people and the Republicans voting late balances it out. The remaining votes should lean Republican.

But because young people also vote late, that hurts Democrats. And here's an interesting thing to keep in mind Tuesday night. The next time we see you here, the election will have been over. But, oh, actually, no, that's not true. We're filling in next week. Right. But the interesting thing to watch for is that young people will vote possibly by mail on the last day. So that's where, as you're looking for returns,

Republicans may vote in person last day in higher numbers, whereas young people may vote by mail in higher numbers. And that will affect the numbers as they're coming in. So according to the numbers that are up so far that Target Smart has here, so it's 54-38, right? It's breaking down. They don't know who they voted for, but 54.1% have been Democrats and 37.8% have been Republicans, which is what, about a 16-point lead. So Republicans, like I said, as you know, on election day, that's a more Republican turnout because they think voting by mail is, you know, fraudulent and all the ballots are going to wind up in Venezuela. And so, but to overcome with only three quarters of the vote left to overcome a 16 point gap

is going to be tough with a lot of the youth vote still out because they've also been able to model that the youth vote that's in so far is significantly lower than the youth vote that voted overall in Georgia. So that means a lot of them are holding on to their ballots. Yeah. And, you know, keeping the momentum for a runoff is obviously always a very difficult thing to do. But Republicans are—so a good example is Nevada. On election night, you were saying you had sources in Nevada saying, Laxalt takes this if there's no snow. Right.

And then there's snow on election day. And Republicans, according to that theory, turn out in lower numbers because of the snow on election day. And so a lot of people on the right have spent, you know, basically the last month saying early voting is not going anywhere. Adapter guy. Yeah, do it. Last point on this and we move on. For Democrats, they're a pretty united party at this point. You know, the center, the center right,, center-left, the far-left, they all like Warnock. Like, the Republicans in Georgia, not so much. So where does not having Kemp on the ballot, what is not having Kemp on the ballot or Raffensperger or these other Republican kind of establishment figures that the suburban Republicans, like, liked?

And then let's say they come out, they voted for them, and then they're like, well, I like Walker better than Warnock. So they cast their vote for Walker. But without them being on the ballot this time, do you think there's going to be less Republican turnout as a result from the people who are like, eh? Yeah, I mean, it's hard to say because comparing the enthusiasm and momentum for one candidate in a general as opposed to another candidate in the general and then comparing it to one candidate in a runoff, it's just hard because it's probably going to be a different sample, basically, of people who are coming out. I mean, certainly it's going to be a different sample of people who are coming out. The question, though, is whether Walker voters, there are enough enthusiastic Walker voters. That's one thing that I would be looking at to kind of remember Alabama and with the Roy Moore vote. There were a lot of people,

and he obviously ultimately lost to Doug Jones, but there were a lot of people who, you know, were coming out, might be Richard Shelby voters, Katie Britt type voters, but were coming out and saying, we're just going to, we're coming out, we don't want to do this, but because of abortion, because of that specific issue, we're coming out to vote for Roy Moore. And obviously, Herschel Walker and Roy Moore are very different characters, but I think it's kind of similar in the respect that you have the high profile, high stakes type of one-on-one dynamic. And maybe that's enough to energize single issue Republicans to go support Walker in high numbers. And we'll see. Yeah, it's a tough one.

Let's move on to Disney. Actually, speaking of Georgia, Disney has a great relationship with the state of Georgia because of the crony subsidies that they dish out. We're going to be talking about CEO here, Bob Iger, past CEO, now CEO. Once again, they ousted the other Bob last week after disappointing earnings over the last quarter, even though they had just voted to reinstate him. Now, Bob Iger came out this week and spoke to employees. Chris Ruffo got some video of it and posted it to Twitter. So let's go ahead and roll D1 here. Here's a virtual question. Many cast members had wished that Disney stayed out of politics. Will Disney stay out of making political statements? You know, I think there's a misperception here about what politics is. And I think that some of the subjects that

have proven to be controversial as it relates to Disney have been branded political, and I don't necessarily believe they are. I don't think when you are telling stories and attempting to be a good citizen of the world that that's political. Just not how I view it. Do I like the company being embroiled in controversy? Of course not. It can be distracting and it can have a negative impact on the company. And to the extent that I can work to kind of quiet things down, I'm going to do that. But I think it's important to put in perspective what some of these subjects are and not just simply brand them political.

OK, so can we put up D3, please? perspective what some of these subjects are and not just simply brand them political. Okay, so can we put up D3, please? Because a lot of conservatives were doing victory lap, taking a victory lap after this, interpreting it as the fact that Bob Iger said, to the extent that I can quiet things down on the political front, I will. They were interpreting that as him doing sort of a pivot from what his predecessor had done when it comes to politics, getting entangled in the fight with Ron DeSantis over his bill and putting out a couple of movies that inflamed people, sort of Christian groups, conservative groups with LGBT themes. I think what Bob Iger is very clearly saying there, and it's one of the most, one of the biggest problems in our politics right now. As I tweeted, the powerful proponents of this cultural liberalism, cultural progressivism, don't see taking these stances as political. And you probably agree with them on some of those things, like taking a particular stance on LGBT issues as a matter of human rights as opposed to politics.

I don't think those two things are mutually exclusive. I think human rights are political and there's really no way to get around that. We've litigated that a million times in our country. And I think what he's saying is actually a great example of why this problem is going to continue to be front and center for Disney, which is that in this country, people cannot even sort of agree right now on what is basically like, what is human rights? What is politics? What is violence? We're tussling over that right now. And that's going to be a problem going forward. And so I think it's a, what you're seeing, I think there's a lot of truth to that, but I think it's a function of kind of our society's inability to do normal

politics. Like normal politics would be, you know, fighting over the resources and the distribution of income pre, post tax, like who, you know, what tax rate are we going to hit the rich with? You know, what should be the minimum wage? You know, we feel like child poverty is a problem. We're going to deal with child poverty, and here's how we're going to deal with that. And we're going to have elections. People are going to put up ideas about how we're going to make our country a better place for everybody. Those people will get elected. They will pass laws. That will happen. That's what we used to think of as politics. But, you know, our political system has stripped all of that away from the ballot. Like, you can't vote on those things.

There aren't. The court will decide. The court will decide. Congress won't decide. The Federal Reserve. The president. Will decide. The parliamentarian will decide.

Department of Education. The filibuster. Yeah. Like, yes, right. You don't have to pay for that. We've run out of time. The system just does not deliver the things that voters give lawmakers mandates to deliver on. And here's another really important point. And Stoller has made this about Disney under Bob Iger. Matt Stoller has made this on his sub stack, Goliath, which is, or it's called Big. I'm sorry. The book is Goliath, about Bob Iger a lot, which is that he basically

under Iger, he was the CEO of Disney for a long time, transformed Disney into like a hedge fund with an entertainment or with theme parks. Because what they did was just buy up all of this other stuff. And there was so much consolidation under Iger. Similarly, while he was overseeing Disney, they filmed Mulan in Xinjiang, thanked Xinjiang authorities at the end of that film. That is where we know the oppression of the Uyghur Muslims is happening. Disney does that. And meanwhile, he says, we're pulling out of Georgia because they, you know, he threatens to pull Disney's huge business out of Georgia. They film a lot of stuff there because, as I said earlier, Georgia does give really huge lucrative subsidies to Hollywood. Atlanta is basically like L.A. at this point because it's become so cheap to film there. He said, we're pulling our business

out because we don't like this abortion bill that was passed. And he'll happily do the business that he does in China. Now, Ron DeSantis brings up this issue of consolidation and monopoly power, talking about a tussle this week between Elon Musk and Tim Cook, because Tim Cook says, if Elon Musk's free speech stuff goes this way, maybe they don't belong on Apple's App Store. Well, that's a huge monopoly power that Google and Apple sort of both have. But it relates in the same sense that as DeSantis gets in, Apple right now has people fleeing a Foxconn factory in China because of the zero COVID policy and how horrible it is to workers. And meanwhile, Tim Cook's going to be like, oh, Elon Musk, he sort of wants to bring back these different speech boundaries on Twitter. Maybe we'll take you off the app store.

Although, which apparently was made up. Yeah, right, right, right. It didn't actually happen. Right, right. But let's pretend that it happened because we all pretended it was happening and Ron DeSantis responded to it. And I think this clip from Ron DeSantis is a great example of the way that our politics has moved away from the actual and into the cultural. Let's play this. When you also hear reports that Apple is threatening to remove Twitter from the app store

because Elon Musk is actually opening it up for free speech and is restoring a lot of accounts that were unfairly and illegitimately suspended for putting out accurate information about COVID. That's like one of the main things that's being reinstated. So many things these experts were wrong at. And you had people on Twitter that were calling that out. And Twitter, the old regime in Twitter, their response was to try to just suffocate the dissent. And Elon Musk knows that's not a winning formula, and so he's providing free speech. And so if Apple responds to that by nuking them from the App Store,

I think that that would be a huge, huge mistake, and it would be a really raw exercise of monopolistic power that I think would merit a response from the United States Congress. Oh, would it merit a response from the United States Congress? Are you kidding me? There is a bipartisan bill in Congress that cracks down on exactly the thing that he's talking about that Apple is doing. Ron DeSantis has not endorsed this bill.

It's not even clear that he's even aware of it. It's a huge deal. Chuck Schumer was protested on Thursday night because Schumer is refusing to bring it to a floor vote. He was protested at a fundraiser on Wednesday night. Schumer's daughters work for Facebook and Microsoft? And Amazon, I think. Amazon, okay. And I don't know if you saw it this week.

There was a group that's pushing for Schumer to put this on the floor, put out. We don't have it here, but they put out a deep fake with Mark Zuckerberg. Did you see this? Yeah, I did see it. It's kind of disturbing. At the end, he says, thank you for helping me and all my friends. And I was like, oh, that's not him. Doesn't have friends.

Doesn't have friends. So there's all this pressure being put on Schumer to put this on the floor. Because if it goes on the floor, and we've talked about this on the show a bunch, if it gets to the floor, in the light of day, it's going to be hard for senators to vote against it. It is hard for Republicans to vote against it, and it is hard for Democrats to vote against it. And so Ron DeSantis could be putting pressure on Chuck Schumer to put that on the floor because there's an actual thing that could happen to address the thing that he claims he's upset about. But instead, he just wants to have a press conference and make a cultural grievance point. Well, if you take Twitter off the App Store, it'd sure be cool if Congress did something about that. Like, wow, you're so close. Like, you're so close. Apple does indeed have too much power.

Like, the fact that they can take people on and off the App Store with no check, that they can walk away with 30% of the revenue is absurd. Congress should do something about it. Well, and that's one of the things here is DeSantis is the least of my worries when it comes to this particular bill because obviously he can't vote on it. It has nothing really to do with it. But there are Republicans. who would love to talk a really big game about big tech and who understand all of the problems with the fact that Apple and Google wield this much power over the app stores. And one really interesting thing Tristan Harris told me on my podcast over at Federalist Radio a couple months ago, he's from the Center for Humane Tech, is basically that Apple has so much monopoly power at this point, they could refuse to have apps on their app store that are intentionally addictive beyond reasonable boundaries, right?

Like, they could turn that off with a switch. But all our politics is talking about is culture war stuff, right? Like, we're mired in this conversation. It's not to say that the monopoly power isn't important because the consolidation has allowed them to do all of this different stuff. But it's like, we can see the forest for the trees and our politics is operating right now. Like, it's actually kind of meta, no pun intended. It's kind of meta, right? That the reason we can't have productive policy conversations about this stuff is because what these apps are doing to our political discourse, period. And because our political system doesn't allow democratic participation

to result in actual things being done, then you wind up just lobbying Disney to do something, or you beg Apple to do something, or you buy Twitter. Well, and it's the same thing with Disney buying up all of these different places, right? Like Disney ABC. So that means ESPN, that means Hulu, they have huge stakes, controlling stakes in all of these different places. And that means the same way that you see Facebook snatching up Instagram and snatching up all of these different things as well. What you have is then a very small, a much smaller group of people is in charge of way more of our political discourse. And so what they think is going to be

the boundaries in a way that, you know, what Bob Iger thinks is, quote, being a good citizen, what Bob Iger thinks is politics, then becomes way more powerful than if Bob Iger is just overseeing theme parks and a film studio. It has way bigger implications because then it trickles down into ESPN, it trickles down into ABC, Good Morning America, Hulu, like all of those things are going to be downstream of what the C-suite over at Disney thinks. And Stoller makes this point a lot too. That is, from a conservative perspective, what that has done to our politics has been, from my perspective, horrific.

Right. And the wave of consolidation that Disney was a huge part of is the thing that has created this congressional pushback, which I wonder, and I'm curious if you're taking this, I wonder if the kind of tech stock crash has taken a lot of the gas out of it. Like, Facebook doesn't seem like the behemoth and the monster anymore in the eyes of some in the public, I would imagine, where several years ago when you're starting the drafting of this bill, now they still own WhatsApp. They're still an absolute behemoth. And I don't think the regulation, the antitrust enforcement is any less relevant. But I wonder if kind of publicly, politically, the collapse has led people to say, well, I guess Facebook took care of itself.

Zuckerberg broke up Facebook. I mean, their mergers have already happened. And there's no real— You can unwind them. But there's been no real movement on that front. That's the thing I was going to say. So their mergers have happened. And yeah, a lot of people like Elizabeth Warren or, I don't know, some Republicans will say break up Facebook.

But in terms of that actually happening and retroactively sort of, that's one of the things where I haven't seen. Probably better off. The companies themselves, WhatsApp, Instagram, they probably, it feels like being under that one giant meta umbrella has left them to wither. I agree completely. I mean, it gives them a lot more room in their books to sort of experiment. And meta, for instance, with its Oculus, has taken a hit recently, although I'm not as convinced that that's permanent as a lot of folks are. I think that technology is much more powerful than some people realize, and there's already conversation, actually. Just this week, I was reading a story about how they're already working

with different workplaces to see how they can integrate. Are we going to have an Oculus show eventually for how that's going to work? I mean, you can watch us on the YouTube app on Oculus, but we won't be all around you. We would have to film with the 360 camera to do that. But there are already divisions over at Meadow working to like integrate this into people's work lives, which is one of the things that should be stopped immediately. All that is to say, they are, I think, what Iger doesn't get, but what he's flirting with. And the same way you're saying the Republicans are so close to being there in antitrust, woke corporatists, you're so close to being there. Like, your business is not helped by making these sort of, like, genuflections that are obviously insincere in so many cases. That is not helpful to your business.

People just want to, you know, watch the NFL to watch the NFL. You can still be a good steward of your community and of the country and socially responsible without shoving it down people's throats. But because some people were convinced at the tippy-tippy top that they had to do that. Yeah. And I think had there been more competition in that space in the last five years, I actually think a lot of this stuff, a lot of the kind of cultural strife would have been worked out in the marketplace. But consumers don't have that power. They don't have the power to vote with their wallets right now because what, you're going to boycott Disney? Good luck.

Like, good luck. Right. There was this moment where Elon Musk tried to marshal that energy. Remember, he said he was going to name and shame all the corporations that were pulling their audience away. It's like, eh, I'm not so sure that's going to work. The right-wing audience on Twitter is probably a little bit older. It's not the demo that these corporations are going for. They're not going to be browbeaten into actually making ads. It was funny because I'd never seen that before. All the protests in the past had always been pressuring companies not to advertise, not to spend their money on X, Y, or Z.

This one was, do spend your money on this. money. Well, in speaking of Elon, we should say before we run that he actually met with Tim Cook this week after these reports surfaced, the ones that DeSantis was responding to. These surfaced from Elon Musk. Yes, yes, exactly. He said, among other things, Musk said, we resolved the misunderstanding about Twitter potentially being removed from the app store. So all of this sort of came up to the surface on Twitter, which again, it's just such a meta critique of Twitter. It makes all of this stuff impossible. He met with Tim Cook, resolved their differences, and that's everything that played out this week, basically. Also ironic that Elon Musk would take what maybe was an automated message.

Because today, for instance, or this week, you've had a whole bunch of liberals and leftists who had their accounts suspended. It created all this conspiracy theorizing about whether there was some political agenda behind it. It looks like there was kind of a bot purge, and they just got swept up in it, like Dean Baker. This is like a progressive economist.

The amount of times people have pitched me stories, and this is from the right, on being shadow banned, or it's just like an algorithmic accident. It doesn't mean it doesn't happen. It seems like that's basically what happened to Twitter and Elon Musk. Yeah. Ignore that email, man. You're not getting kicked off of the App Store. They should still be busted up and regulated, though.

Yeah, absolutely they should. All right, let's move on to the FBI and the Oath Keepers. Per the New York Times, it's the development, or actually per NBC News, a federal jury in Washington on Tuesday found Oath Keepers founder Stuart Rhodes and Kelly Meggs, another member of the far-right organization, guilty of seditious conspiracy in connection with the January 6th attack on the Capitol, a victory for the government in a case that involved a rarely used Civil War-era statute. And that Civil War-era statute is seditious conspiracy, was used in this case, obviously, successfully. Three other members of the group were on trial. Jessica Watkins, Kenneth Harrelson, Thomas Caldwell, all found not guilty on the charge of seditious conspiracy, but they were all five found guilty of obstruction and aiding and

abetting for what happened on January 6th. And then there's another trial that's starting early this month in December of four other Oath Keepers who were charged in conjunction with Rhodes. This comes on the heels of what we learned last week, that an FBI informant named Greg McWhirter, who was an Oath Keeper's vice president, had been secretly reporting to the FBI about the Oath Keeper's activities. This is per the New York Times again. In the weeks and months leading up to the Capitol attack. He was called to testify in this trial as a defense witness, but had a heart attack on the plane on the way. And it was just, he can't testify anymore. He was supposed to testify as a witness for Rhodes. And the New York Times wrote, that's an unusual move that suggests Mr. Rhodes' lawyers believe he has information that could have helped Rhodes' case.

But what the lawyer ended up saying, he had been taken off a plane when he was traveling to Washington to testify after having a heart attack. Yeah, you just can't make that stuff up. It's like you're writing the script for people to believe everything about everything. Exactly. Stuff like that happens. So it seemed like what the verdict was saying was that they did not believe, the jury did not believe that the specific act of sacking the Capitol was drawn up and executed kind of A to Z. Yep. up and executed kind of A to Z. But that when that opportunity arose, they tactically maneuvered their way into a situation where they could execute on that and were waiting for the word from Trump to arm themselves and to go further than that. And his argument was, hey, I was just

supporting the president and the president never told me to arm up. And so we backed down. So come on. One thing that was very bad for their case is that they had a stockpile of weapons in Virginia immediately. I mean, and there were messages that were revealed as part of the case where they were talking about like very violent things happening to Nancy Pelosi, basically saying, you know, this is, we're in a revolution. Yeah, we're in revolutionary times, similar to what our founding fathers were in. And, you know, the president needs to know that we're ready to, like, fight, all that kind of stuff. Now, McWhirter would have been an extremely interesting witness in this case because there's the open question when we learned also this month that the FBI had as many as eight

informants per the New York Times inside the Proud Boys in the months before January 6th, as many as eight. And so that's where I'm interested to know. My impression reporting on it as it was happening is that it really was this like awful mob mentality that just snowballed out of control because bad actors were whipping people into a frenzy. The question of whether this was actually anybody had sat aside and architected it, I think McWherter would have known because he would have been relaying that information to the FBI. So I would love to know what the FBI knew. committee looking into January 6th, this was reported in like CNN, are upset because she has scuttled, and her spokesperson said that the reports of this were correct, information about law enforcement failures on January 6th. Yeah, they declined to look at that. And that's where it's like, you're telling me a guy who might be testifying against the FBI, an FBI informant who might have been testifying against the FBI, has a heart attack on his plane on the way to testify. It's very strange, obviously, but the broader point is that's where those informants, Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, I would be really curious what they knew because I also think it suggests that this was a case of mob mentality that got wildly out of control. It doesn't say,

as this verdict found, it doesn't mean that people weren't drawing up some plans, but a plan to intentionally sack the Capitol. I mean, they may have had very violent, they had a stockpile of weapons in Virginia. They may have had very violent plans, contingency plans, whatever it was, intentions, whatever it was, but specifically to sack the Capitol and to stop the vote. I don't think that was ever the clear design of what they were going to do on January 6th. But I do think a lot of them whipped the crowd into a frenzy when they realized it was attainable because of law enforcement failures. When you see them breaking past the small guards, the small number of guards that they had, throwing that female Capitol

police officer to the ground where she cracks her head on the back of the steps, they started to feel really emboldened. Yeah, you're right. So, you know, if they did have detailed drawn up plans for, you know, which doors they're going to hit and how they're going to actually get into the Capitol, and they still came out with that tiny amount of Capitol Police protection, then that in itself is extraordinarily scandalous. So that would be why, A, either people like Cheney aren't going to look into that and aren't going to find the evidence of that. Or more likely, I think people like Rhodes just didn't think it was reasonable to expect that even thousands of people were going to be able to break through the Capitol. Because they've been to protests in Washington, D.C.

There's phalanx after phalanx of armed riot police. Yeah. Who you're not going to get through with a bunch of unarmed protesters. It's no easy feat. But apparently nobody at the FBI or Capitol Police was checking Facebook or Twitter or Parler or anything else. And we've talked to people who have done some reporting over at The Intercept about what happened in the Gretchen Whitmer case. What we know is that the FBI informant was involved in the organization of the plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer. And The Intercept's reporting on all of those cases in years past where it was happening to Muslims and the years after 9-11.

It's an echo of that. And that's not to say the FBI organized January 6th. There's an open question as to what the FBI knew was going to happen on January 6th and whether law enforcement should have been much better prepared for what was going to happen on January 6th because McWhirter was the vice president of the Oath Keepers. If the Oath Keepers had a specific plan to do this, he would have known. And if they didn't, he would have known, and thus the FBI likely would have known. So it's just a really, really messed up set of circumstances. And of course, this is all being reported in the New York Times now, but if you had said it before the New York Times touched it in the last several months, you were a conspiracy theorist. And as the details have emerged,

it really looks like there was just a colossal failure of law enforcement. Yeah. Ryan, we have your points coming up next. And they're in my home state of Wisconsin. So I'm looking forward to that. Yes, indeed. Today I am talking about your home state of Wisconsin, and specifically Dunn County, which is a Trumpy area on the western side of the state, not far from central Minnesota. So this year, Senator Ron Johnson notched a 14-point margin there, roughly the same that Trump put up in 2020. But Dunn County voters also had a unique

referendum to vote on, asking them if they thought the federal government ought to fund a non-profit national health insurance program. It ended up passing 51-49 and ran 11 points ahead of Democratic Governor Tony Evers, who was re-elected statewide, and 16 points ahead of Democratic Senate candidate Mandela Barnes, who lost to Johnson. Now, Wisconsin is one of just 10 states left that has yet to accept the Medicaid expansion included in the Affordable Care Act. Now, John Calabrese, a Dunn County board supervisor, told me that the toll health insurance takes on the county budget helped persuade his fellow board members to allow the referendum to go forward. The county has roughly 350 employees, he said, and insuring them costs roughly a half million dollars every month.

On the day that the county heard arguments about whether or not they should put the measure on the ballot, residents showed up to tell stories of their nightmare experiences either with insurance companies or without insurance. It also happened that the state had just released its annual health and human services report, and a state official was on hand to walk the county lawmakers through the budget. Now, the board's most conservative member is a guy named Larry Bjork, and when it came time for him to question the state official, that's when the tide changed in favor of the health care program. Let's roll a bit of that. Supervisor Larry Bjork. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I was fortunate enough to serve on health and human services for a number of years

and really recognizes the talents that Chris has. And she's heard me say many, many times, where does the money go? Well, it blows my mind when I look at the financial statement, Chris, and we spend 30%, 38% of our budget on behavioral health services. And when in health and human services, and we look at where the money goes and we see the money going to other counties for bed space, for mental health.

I guess my question to you is, in listening to the presentations from the public today about universal health care. Do you think there would ever be a universal can the counties get out from underneath some of that 38% of mental health care by a federal program of any sort? So the state HHS official in her answer talks about the details of the various programs for a while and she also notes that

before Obamacare was passed, Affordable Care Act, let's not get partisan here in the Wisconsin-Dunn County Board, the county was spending about a hundred thousand dollars a year for uninsured patients at local facilities, whereas that number is now down to about ten thousand dollars. So she concludes with this. But in direct answer to your question, if people had affordable health insurance available to them and coverage to get them the care that they needed when it wasn't a crisis or emergency, it seems hard to not conclude that there would be cost savings to that. So on election night, organizers noticed a trend. The first was the obvious one, that the referendum was doing better in the county seat of, how do you say it, Menominee? Menominee. Menominee, okay. It's a town of about 16,000 people than it was doing outside of it.

But they also noticed that in the small towns where they had taken a day or two to talk to people, the numbers were startling. In Boyceville, Wisconsin, for instance, voters went 239 to 132 for Ron Johnson over Mandela Barnes, but they supported single payer by 183 to 171. In Wheeler, Wisconsin, Johnson won 52 votes to Barnes' 27 votes, but the referendum carried by 40 to 37. In Elk Mound, Johnson won 190 to 142. Pretty comfortable win there. But National Health Insurance won 184 to 124. So, Emily, after I wrote about this referendum for The Intercept, you responded to it by saying this. Lack of Republican attention to workable health insurance policy solutions will handicap the GOP for years to come. What did you mean by that?

And are Republicans at the top levels kind of recognizing this problem? Or are you shouting into the void here? Shouting into the void. What was interesting is a consultant who works particularly... What's your point today? So Google and YouTube are, according to a new press release, quote, investing in fact-checking. The release announced the company was awarding, in its own words, quote, a $13.2 million grant to the International Fact-Checking Network at the non-profit Poynter Institute to launch a new global fact-check fund

to support their network of 135 fact-checking organizations from 65 countries covering over 80 languages. All right, so this sounds great, right? It sounds like corporate responsibility, like a massive tech company doing what it can to make its products less harmful. This donation basically doubles Poynter's 2021 revenue, according to its 990 form, which reports about $13 million in total revenue last year and about $14.6 million the year before. Alphabet, Google's parent company, brought in some $257 billion in 2021 for what it's worth, this grant

is really no sacrifice for Google. It's a shrewd and cynical business move that will give the company more cover for censorship on its platforms, and it will make the media worse. Why? Because the Poynter Institute is one of the most poisonous peddlers of disinformation in all of media, despite being one of the loudest and most sanctimonious critics of it. Under the absurd pretense of non-partisanship, that's a quote from its 990 actually, Pointer, which operates PolitiFact, undermines the credibility of journalism that cuts against the establishment narrative. Its fact checks are propaganda. They are used by major corporations like Google and Meta, which you'll be surprised to learn also funds the group to suppress counter-narrative information.

Poynter weaponizes its elite clout and neutral pretense to enable big tech censorship. looked at the group's record and found by simple counting that over Biden's first 20 months in office, he had gotten 58 fact checks while Biden critics had been fact checked 338 times. Overall, this is per Newsbusters, there were 5.8 fact checks of Biden's critics for every one of the president himself. A lot of the problems with PolitiFact stem from what's called selection bias, choosing constantly to fact check every claim from anti-establishment voices and not fact-check every claim from, say, high-profile Democrats. The fact-checks themselves are terrible, too, often engaging in these mental gymnastics to give cover to Democrats and engaging in mental gymnastics then to undercut conservatives. Back in July, Robbie Suave in Reason walked through how PolitiFact fact checks on mask efficacy, COVID survivability, and even the definition of a recession were misleading at best and flat out wrong at worst. When PolitiFact rated a claim that said,

quote, the White House is now trying to protect Joe Biden by changing the definition of the word recession as containing, quote, false information, That claim was then suppressed with disclaimers on Facebook and Instagram, and they rely on Pointer to credential official fact-checking organizations. So Mark Zuckerberg outsourced fact-checking to these groups to take some heat off of meta. An analysis published last year in the academic journal Journalism Studies found that out of an 858 sample of PolitiFact fact checks, 33% quote, checked a complex proposition and assigned one truth rating to it. This is problematic as the reader might interpret the truthfulness of an individual claim, the authors wrote, adding that 11% of the sample were fact checks the author deemed uncheckable. Uncheckable, the authors wrote, adding that 11% of the sample were fact checks the author deemed

uncheckable. Uncheckable, the authors of the study said were uncheckable. Those were defined as statements, quote, whose truthfulness cannot be defined in practice, e.g. claims about the future and vague claims. So that's 44% of the sample in total, nearly half of the fact checks then that are utilized by corporate gatekeepers. There are way too many examples to count, but let's look at one more. After the horrific shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde earlier this year, PolitiFact tweeted, quote, beware of misinformation about red flag laws, including critics who say they lack due process, which is not accurate. Another false claim is that the laws allow people with a grudge, such as an ex-spouse, to take guns away. Whatever you think about red flags, even the liberal ACLU has raised concerns in recent years about due process and legislation in both Rhode Island and California. And as the Washington

Examiner pointed out, one study of Connecticut found 32% of confiscation orders are ultimately overturned. Again, it does not matter whether you love or hate red flag laws. What matters is that PolitiFact and Poynter present themselves as neutral actors, and then corporations launder that neutrality to suppress the free press. The red flag tweet on its own is clear disinformation. Worse yet, it's disinformation peddled by the self-appointed guardians of accuracy who are weaponized by corporations. It linked to guidelines from Poynter itself on how to cover firearm legislation. Their training materials, which are used by newsrooms around the world, are garbage,

and Google is going to help spread those guidelines even further. I would actually have zero issue with all of this if PolitiFact and Poynter didn't claim to be nonpartisan and didn't do so in cooperation with ideologically monopolistic corporate actors. They're the useful idiots of corporate power that doesn't really give a damn about the free press, but they're also totally on the same page as their billionaire benefactors when it comes to certain topics that demand rigorous journalistic scrutiny like COVID and Russian collusion and puberty blockers. This week when Bob Iger was asked about his stance on Disney and politics, he gave an answer some conservatives cheered saying, quote, do I like the company being

embroiled in controversy? Of course not. It can be distracting and it can have a negative impact on the company. And to the extent that I can work to kind of quiet things down, I'm going to do that. But he also said some issues, quote, have been branded political when they're really just about being, quote, a good citizen. That's where we get to a deeper problem. We know the personal is political. Some people disagree with Disney's stance on LGBT issues, and some people think, though, that makes those folks bad citizens. But that question is absolutely a political one. Pointer's guidelines on trans athletes, for instance, are inherently opposed to the stances people on the left, like Tulsi Gabbard, have taken on that issue. Again, whether you agree with that position or not, it doesn't matter. Claiming the mantle of neutrality while taking a specific ideological

stance is not healthy to the free press. It is actually wildly counterproductive. Doing all of this with admitted biases, because it is actually subjective, would at least be less destructive. But that would require people to acknowledge things they don't see as biases really are. In a 2021 article on PolitiFact, botching a lab leak fact check, Matt Taibbi wrote, quote, when companies dragged fact checking out in public and made it a beast of burden for use in impressing audiences, they defamed the tradition. Google just boosted that defamation to the tune of $13 million, and the guardians of the fourth estate over at Poynter are proud to help. Meanwhile, all the politicians who take money from Google, which gives away campaign

cash pretty equally, will either complain about the press or wax poetic about how essential it is to a functioning democracy. They're right on that count, of course, but they won't say anything about Google's $13 million grant to make the media worse. Ryan, you might disagree with me on some of that, but it is really concerning to me how corporations... About a year and a half ago, the U.S. withdrew fully from Afghanistan as Kabul fell to the Taliban. And one of the quiet moves that has had enormous repercussions since then came from the Biden administration when they froze

the entire reserve fund of the Afghan Central Bank and encouraged the European Union to do the same, so it froze $7 billion of Afghan Central Reserve currency here at the New York Federal Reserve and $2 billion over at the EU, which created a man-made economic catastrophe, the likes of which perhaps hasn't been seen since the potato famine in the 19th century. Under pressure, the Biden administration, finally, we can put up this element here, finally allowed some of the funds to be distributed to what they called a fund for Afghan people, which they set up in Switzerland. That would be a way of going around the Taliban to try to release some of these funds to help to do what a central bank is supposed to do,

stabilize the currency and do monetary policy. Now, a board member of the Central Bank of Afghanistan is here to join us. This is Shah Mehrabi, who has also been named as the co-chair of the Board of Trustees of the Fund for Afghan People, which met just, what, a week or so ago, Dr. Mehrabi? Yes, the meeting took place on Monday, November 21st in Geneva, Switzerland. So what can you tell us about the outlook for this fund and whether it's going to be able to meet the challenges of the Afghan economy that were created by the seizure of these funds? The first meeting was, there were not substantive issues discussed. More specifically, the issue of disbursement will be discussed in detail later on the policy and procedures.

All of that is going to be discussed in the next meeting. The first meeting obviously discussed mostly on trying to, how to launch this foundation that has been structured in Geneva. Mostly discussion was on the legal services that are provided by the Swiss law firm, and then also to make sure that there's a high degree of transparency. Hiring of an audit firm was, the decision was made to hire a particular reliable firm, as well as the decision with regard to hiring someone to do the administrative work, what specifically, having or constructing a committee of Afghan people, what is called advisory committee of Afghan, advisory committee mostly consists of, almost all consists of Afghan. So the important issue of disbursement will be discussed later on, as well as what we

discussed also investments. So another important point was since the funds in the United States, based on the decision of the investment committee of the Afghanistan Bank, they were invested in the portfolio consisted of instruments where it really allowed a high rate of return to be earned. And the decision was made where to invest them within the structure of BIS and then make certain that we pick up those diverse, at least portfolio that will continue to allow DAP to earn an Afghan fund to earn a high rate of return. So in a situation like this, where the economic urgency is obviously paramount, what does the timeline look like for the Afghan people? What is the sort of disbursement and investment timeline look like going forward, having gone through that first meeting?

When can people start to expect that to sort of happen? The important point here is to pinpoint that none of this fund, the $3.5 plus $36 million interest that was earned on this, none of these funds will be used for humanitarian purposes. I think that needs to be pointed out clearly because I think there's misconception in the mind of many people that these funds would be used for humanitarian. So it will not be used for that. The main purpose of these particular funds, as I have argued all along, is to be used for price stability and reduction and volatility of exchange rate. I think those are the main reasons why these funds were managed and invested by the investment committee and the main purpose for why these reserves should be utilized for that, for recapitalization of the central bank of Afghanistan. In the meantime, the purpose of the Fund for Afghan People is to protect and preserve these funds until the

decision is made with regard to where should the disbursement be done. The ultimate goal is to be able to help the economy and how can the economy benefit from this particular fund, but definitely not in the area of disbursement. It should not be geared in the areas where the burden and responsibility of payment should be at the hands of the Ministry of Finance or equivalent to the Treasury in this country. So, more specifically, for example, payment of arrears. That was the interim Taliban administration already paid the last arrear for the World Bank in June. And now the new arrear that is due in December, that negotiation is going on so that as long as they fulfill their particular obligation, then there should not be any need for this

particular reserve to be utilized for any other purpose but capitalization of the central bank and for auction purposes to bring about price stability. Yeah. And just to underscore that point for people here, I think a lot of people, when they hear humanitarian funds or humanitarian relief, they think good, that must be a good thing. But in fact, the situation was such

that the Biden administration, by seizing these funds, created this absolutely enormous financial catastrophe. And then to come in on the backside with a couple hundred million dollars to then feed people or do humanitarian gestures is, A, a little bit cynical, but B, not long-term thinking. It's a Band-Aid. Yeah, right. It's a Band-Aid.

And eventually you run out of Band-Aids. The reserve funds would be gone and you'd still have the fundamental economic crisis going on. But I've heard you talk a little bit about how the price stability crisis and some of the other volatility may have been alleviating a little bit. You were recently in Kabul. What is Kabul like today? I think this is a little bit. You were recently in Kabul. What is Kabul like today? I think this is a good question. I was very surprised and happy to see an environment that was safe, at least clearly by my observance.

Remember, this is anecdotal. I didn't spend my time. I was mostly in meetings. But at least when I was driven to different meetings, I saw people were very comfortable in roaming around without at least what Western media has at least categorized as unsafe environment. I did not see that. I saw cordial greetings by the police, much cordial than encounter that were done by the prior administration police. And then also in my hotel, I saw many women who were eating breakfast, young women, as well as

during the night, many women with their family, children, and husband who were eating dinner. So those are some of the, and also obviously the girls issue needs to be resolved and the schools need to be open. And clearly I raised that particular issue at the Ministry of Finance, at Ministry of Foreign Affairs at a higher level. And they clearly, at least that they are working on, on coming up with a path to open this. And most of the bottleneck has been created as a result of at least not completion of some of the construction of new school building

that's currently underway, at least that was explanation given to me overall. And as far as the safety, as a chair of audit committee, as I've said, our audit department continuously, they have to go ahead and perform audits of the administration and operation of not only the central office of the Afghanistan Bank, but also all the branches that exist in 34 provinces. They could not do that in the prior administration. Now,

they are freely able to go ahead and visit all these branches and make certain that the laws and regulation of the Afghanistan Banks are followed and adhered to. So that was another important point. The other thing that I saw, there was a lot of construction was going on. I usually walk in the morning or jog in the morning, and I was pleasantly surprised to see the construction of the, at least of the park that was in total decay, that they were being asphalted and work was going on, that the necessary repairs were made.

And as a matter of fact, the other thing was that the bathrooms, which is very important, is that they were very clean. I was trying to look at all those areas and some improved. But also the other point that I was somewhat surprised beside the park construction is the new construction that were going on. And then the old buildings, they were refurbished. So that's another thing that I saw overall beside the fact that there was also less pollution.

There were not those gas guzzlers that existed and the bureaucrats who were driving them. They were all gone. There was a small cars of Toyotas and Hondas that were on streets, but there were not as many. So there was less pollution and there was a clear sky, blue sky that I used to see when I was a child in Afghanistan. And obviously, those are some of the points. Yeah, go ahead. No, that's really interesting. A lot of people

would hear that and they would think a healthier sort of economy in Afghanistan means a more powerful Taliban and a more powerful Taliban may feel more emboldened to encroach on human rights, et cetera, et cetera. Having actually been in Kabul and been involved in these negotiations where I'm sure the Biden administration has raised plenty of concerns to that effect, what degree of concern should exist on that question? And it's obviously a really sad sort of situation and line to have to walk in general, that people's economic stability would then be sort of seen and wielded in national security terms. But what concerns should people have when it comes to that dynamic? Well, this is my main, at least professional job, is to be able to make certain that Afghans do not suffer from paying higher prices for necessary items that they need to have access

to. I'm talking about food, oil, sugar, cooking oil, and fuel. And at this stage, while the prices are not at the 50-52% that existed a few months ago, there has been some reduction. The price is nevertheless, the price is some 27%. That is very high at a time when unemployment is extremely high. So the Afghanistan bank, the central bank, is one of the main responsibility of that entity is to be able to make sure that the prices, stability in the prices come, that inflation is reduced

to make all items available, affordable for people. And that, you know, because inflation hurts most of these people, women and children who cannot afford to pay for bread. And as a matter of fact, many of the bakeries, that's one thing they also noticed, was that the bakeries, you saw a lot of women and children who were begging and trying to get access to a piece of bread, or those who were purchasing and had the ability to purchase, for them to hand out some of the particular piece of bread or loaf of bread for them. So while this could be, this would relieve some of the hardship that exists on Afghan people.

I think the central bank, based on our consultation, has done a fairly good job in terms of auctioning off. In the last few months, almost six months, between $13 to $17 million have been auctioned that have brought some degree of stability in the exchange rate to a level where the exchange rate of Afghani to dollar is somewhere between 86 to 88. Now it's today was 88.17 and so on. So those are the way that you can reduce the hardship on people, on women, as well as on children. Now, the other part of the,

moving away from the DAP area, then the expenditure and the area of fiscal area where the Ministry of Finance is responsible, at least they have been addressing the issue of education and health quite vigorously. They are making the payments and also the World Bank help with regard to payment to the personnel in the health sector had resumed

and that has also been instrumental in reducing some of the hardship on people. And also the cash inflow by UNAMA and United Nations for payment of their employees and other expenses have also brought about some degree of stability in the exchange rate. And did I hear you right that you said that you were talking to top officials at the finance minister, top Taliban officials at the finance ministry, and that they're moving towards reopening schools for girls. And do they understand that as something of a kind of condition for global acceptance? Is that what's pushing them in that direction?

The reasons for what, I do not know the reasoning behind what explanation was given to me with regard to the schools opening. They said that we are in the process of trying to construct buildings because there's going to be schools that will be segregated. You will have different schools, segregated school for male and female. And there are two obstacles they say they're confronted with. One is that they're in the process of completing construction of new building, and second, to get personnel to be able to teach female separately than male in both of these tasks. This takes time, but they are moving. At least this is explanation for Ministry of Foreign Affairs is that they are moving in this aggressively and trying to address this issue so the school could

open. We'll take it with a grain of salt, but it'd be encouraging if that happens. Last quick question. What about the migration crisis? There had been reports previously of up to a million Afghans fleeing because of the economic crisis. What's your sense of what the outflow of migration is now? Well, there are many reasons for why people migrate. Obviously, there's loss of jobs, and unemployment is very high, and that is prompting many people to go to Iran and some to Pakistan. And Iran has been actually sending them back, so there hasn't been clearly a smooth flow

of migrants to reside in Iran for a long period of time. That is, again, has created a lot of hardship on many families because of lack of job and lack of income. The current government cannot provide it. The private sector has been not very forthcoming in creating job yet because of the uncertainty in the mind of some. And the investment obviously has declined. So there's another reason for this migration. Obviously, some are being helped and encouraged by many different groups to move out of Afghanistan,

whether it's the United States government or those proxy groups within this country in Europe have also been instrumental in trying to get some people. Based on the explanation that I was given, one of the reasons for brain drain has been because the encouragement by Western countries to allow these people a speedy exit from Afghanistan. And that has created some degree of at least a brain issue within certain ministries. Well, Dr. Mehrabi is a member of the Central Bank of Afghanistan, co-chair of the Board of Trustees of the Fund for Afghan People, and a professor of economics at Montgomery College here in suburban Maryland. Really, thank you for joining us.

Thank you very much for inviting me. Good talking to you. So what do you make of that? It feels like... So he's in... Anyway, I don't want to get ahead of my skis here. What do you think? I think it's really tough because there's a humanitarian crisis that our military operation in Afghanistan, absolutely, our botched military engagement in Afghanistan over the last at least five years, if not more, exacerbated. And then our Bash exit exacerbated. At the same time,

I think it is true that an empowered Taliban will be an empowered hostile power that is oppressive to its own people. And the reports about how the Taliban, and not just in Western media, but the reports about how the Taliban is treating political dissidents, treating women are harrowing. And so I understand why the Biden administration is hesitant in this case. But even though this isn't humanitarian aid, a stable functioning economy is a humanitarian cause. So it's incredibly difficult. It's an incredibly difficult situation all the way around. And the way that we handled our military engagement in Afghanistan is how we got here.

Yeah. To me, I just feel like it's not our business. I'm glad that we're returning the central bank funds. If the Taliban shows any signs that they're going to harbor al-Qaeda terrorists who are going to attack us like happened on 9-11, then I think it very much becomes our business. But if the Taliban is governing in a way that offends our sensibilities, we have ways that we can pressure that. We can, like, you know, the ways that an empire does. We can tell the World Bank we want to put pressure. And it seems like actually some of that is working.

If what they said to Shami Rabi is correct, that they're planning on building girls' schools, that the way that they're getting around their queasiness around that sexism is that they're going to do separate but equal schools, then okay, that's better than no schools. And is it worth a 20-year occupation? Right. Well, yeah, exactly. And that's the key question. And you get into, obviously, al-Qaeda, harboring terrorists, aiding and abetting terrorists is our business because there are no borders anymore, essentially, in this world where you can attack a country as a foreign power, not just a rogue agent. You can attack a foreign country without a military occupation. You can

fly planes into buildings. You can do like terrorism on the ground in another country without having to have some giant military operation or anything like that. So that does become our business. And I think there's a serious concern that the Taliban will posture to get money and to sort of get all of that situated and then turn. And we don't see any of the promises fulfilled when it comes to anything else. I don't know the answer to that question. I think it's a real concern. I don't think, though, that the money that we froze is, I think the right thing to do is obviously unfreeze the funds in this case, given the way that we ended up in this situation with the funds. It reminds me a little bit of when I went to Vietnam in the mid-2000s.

So this would have been 30 years after we left. We're booted out. Yeah. 30 years after we left, were booted out. And I remember looking around, there's giant lit up corporate signs all over their central squares. And I remember thinking, what was this for? And the most frightening thing is all the trees were the same height and they looked about 30 years old. We just completely, completely denuded the land top to bottom. And for what? We lost. Viet Cong took over and they got a functioning country. Is it the exact country that we would have liked? Maybe not. Although the right-wing brutal dictatorship that we were propping up might not have done any better by the Vietnamese people.

But even if they would, what was it for? All those American lives, all those Vietnamese lives, all those Afghan lives, what for? is going to take control of the country and is going to deliver services in a way that Kabul is stable and people are no longer worried about getting their doors kicked in? A clip of us went viral one time of you saying something like, we were talking about this last week, but what we were talking about

is a tweet that Ilhan Omar, something Ilhan Omar had said, and you said like, well, wait until you find out who funded the Taliban. And the answer to that is like, at the same time that all of this is going down, I think I agreed with it at the time, although some people cut the clip. Without my agreement. You can't trust those liberals for those clips.

Without my agreement. But that's the same thing. It's like, we have so much culpability in the suffering of these people. And that does not mean that their own bad leaders don't share in some of the culpability of those problems. It doesn't mean that America should be dismissed as a force for good, anything like that. It doesn't mean that, but it does mean that we do share culpability in what happened. And Afghanistan and Vietnam both are clear examples of that. Yeah. And our seizure of those funds has led to people starving to death. Like the people that he talked about outside the bakery begging for food, like that is a direct result of basically seizing what was the Federal Reserve. We built

their central bank of Afghanistan and then we shut it down. And their economy completely collapsed. Prices went absolutely through the roof. Nobody had cash. People's paychecks weren't, people weren't getting paid who were going to work. Things shut down and people were selling kidneys, you know, selling furniture, burning furniture to stay warm. Just absolutely bleak a situation. That was a man-made economic crisis. And so I'm glad that this money is starting to flow. And we'll see if it brings about any good behavior on behalf of the Taliban. But at least hopefully it can get some bread in the hands of people who are starving. I mean, as of a few years ago, the Washington Post was reporting that CIA-produced textbooks were still in use in Afghanistan that were encouraging particular ideology in Afghanistan. Still in circulation.

Well, Taliban likes those ones. Yeah, that's exactly it. They went back and got them. Yeah, still in circulation. Great work, CIA. Yeah, no, that's exactly it. They went back and got them. Yeah, still in circulation. Great work, CIA. Yeah, exactly. They just got a wellness, a chief wellness officer, first one. So that should help.

Yeah, so that'll be good. Anyway, so next week we'll be here a couple times filling in for Crystal and Sagar because they'll be doing their live shows as they remind you of, right? They're on tour. You don't miss that. We'll be here, what, Tuesday and Thursday? Something like that. I think. Who knows? Okay. So CounterPoints Tuesday, CounterPoints Thursday. This was CounterPoints Friday. That's right. Hope everybody has a great weekend. Have a good weekend. This is an iHeart Podcast.