Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - Counter Points #4: Midterm Races, Elon Buys Twitter, MeToo Legacy, Chris Cuomo, Working Class Voices, & More!

Episode Date: October 5, 2022

On a special Wednesday show, Ryan and Emily explore baseball's relevance, swing state senate races, Elon Musk buying Twitter, MeToo after five years, liberal bureaucracy, Chris Cuomo's return, gain of function research, & working class voices!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/Chicago Tickets: https://www.axs.com/events/449151/breaking-points-live-tickets Ryan Grim: https://theintercept.com/staff/ryangrim/ Emily Jashinsky: https://thefederalist.com/author/emilyjashinsky/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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And Ryan... Let's not think too hard about it. Right. And Ryan is nothing if not a man of the people. So he wants to say we're listening and intro music, we're open to suggestions. We agree. We think intro music is super fun. And if you have suggestions, let us know.

Right. We got a number of pieces of advice. And one of the most useful ones was, hey, how about some intro music? So, yeah, if you have anything, recommend it to us. You can tweet it at us or you can put it in the comments. I had suggested like a little piece of Tweezer reprise. It might have like the upbeat tempo to it. He sent in a text with Sagar and Crystal. He was sending all of these fish videos.

Nobody responded. So we might just go with those because no objections. Yeah, that's right. We didn't object. All right. That's not how it works. Anyway, so last night, the big news. We're going to get to a lot of political news.

A little cultural news, you could call it, I think, last night. Aaron Judge, let's put this up. 62! Aaron Judge is the American League single season home run leader. BAL King, case closed. So that's Aaron Judge hitting his 62nd home run of the season. Everybody keeps calling it the American League record. Why do they keep calling it? It's the Major League record. Well, is it because... There's some American League chauvinism. Well, or is it historically...

Historically, okay, the American League has been around a little bit longer, sort of. The National League started as a different league and then evolved into the National League. Anyway, what I think is interesting about this, though, is the lack of kind of attention that mass culture is paying to it. Obviously, like millions of people care about this. But if you compare it certainly to, say, when in 1961, Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris were both chasing Babe Ruth's 1927 record. And he just beat, by the way, that beats Maris' record. And that beats Maris' record by one, even with a couple games left to play,

which he may or may not play, we'll see. The entire nation was transfixed by the Maris and Mantle rivalry and whether or not they were going to catch the Babe or not. It was what people were talking about in that fall, that summer and fall of 1961. I've been told it was not there. And even with Barry Bonds during the steroid era, even if you weren't a baseball fan, you weren't following it, you were still being made aware of it

because there was still enough of a monoculture that it was able by osmosis just to filter into people's lives. I bet a decent number of our viewers didn't even know this is happening. Yeah. I mean, I pretty much tune out of the baseball season at this point if the Brewers aren't doing well because I'm not as hardcore. Which means you pretty much tune out of baseball. Right. So yeah. Okay. So judge a hit number 60 off the Brewers. That was to tie Ruth's record. And yeah, at that point, of course, I'm tuned out. But I think what you're saying is so important because the next video you wanted to show is a video that's going to go viral. Oh, and this is a fun one. Right. But that's the thing, right? We used to have these...

We can play the VO of this sad sack. Check it out. Okay. So yeah, for people who are listening, Ryan, describe what just happened. So there's a guy about, what, 10 feet or maybe 10 yards off to the left of where the ball is heading. And I think he actually makes a smart play. He just dives, not head first. He jumps feet first into the bullpen on the off chance that one of these fans is going to drop the ball and that it'll then ricochet into the bullpen on the off chance that one of these fans is going to drop the ball and that it'll then ricochet into the bullpen and then he'll have this ball. A guy caught it. He had a glove. He was immediately escorted out by security. There were reports, I think Barstool Sports was

saying he's already gotten offers up to $2 million for this ball. So he was immediately escorted out so that the ball could be authenticated. And so everybody knows, okay, this is the ball. Well, so what I was going to say actually is that video is an interesting glimpse at this question of whether we still have a monoculture because just about everybody follows Barstool Sports or their stuff goes so viral that they see Barstool. Right. So that'll be the thing we remember. Right. Exactly. So the record itself, we don't share these cultural touchstones in the same way that we used to because we have more options. Everyone doesn't have to be, you know, if your dad

has the TV and he's watching baseball that night, you can go over with an iPad and watch Netflix. You can go watch The Real Housewives. You can do whatever you want. It's different now than it used to be. We don't share these cultural tensions in the same way that has advantages and it has disadvantages. But there is still, I think, a legitimate question as to whether with these viral videos and these viral Instagram accounts, whether it's Barstool or like F. Jerry or Fat Jewish, whatever it is, if those are the last remnants of monoculture, but still some form of monoculture. Although it's hard to make that case because, you know, it's really an age. At that point, we're divided by age. Which actually reminds me of the big monocultural event earlier this week.

Did you follow the dream face reveal? No. There you go. No. There you go. No. So I have young kids. Yes. Between 6 and 12, and all of them were interested in what became a major cultural event that Emily missed. This 23-year-old kid who is a big Minecraft streamer. Oh, I did see this.

And he's been streaming for years, never showed his face. He finally decided he's going to show his face. Do people like the face? Put the mask back on was trending, as was something like he's so ugly. Really brutal. Really brutal. I thought he was fine looking. Fine looking kid. The world is not a nice place. It's a cruel world. It's a cruel world. Well, speaking's a cruel world. Well, speaking of that, on that note, we're going to be talking about the midterms now, speaking of how cruel of a world it actually is. But we're doing a little bit of an update that I think is, again, quite interesting because some of these races that we were talking about in the summer are shifting.

Cook Political Report has moved Pennsylvania from lean dem to a toss-up, which is kind of a big deal in beltway circles whenever Cook Political Report shifts, because it can also be a sign of where money might be shifting. So the race between John Fetterman and Dr. Oz, I can't believe I just said John Fetterman and Dr. Oz, the two candidates, Dr. Oz. But anyway, that is really narrowing. And Nate Cohn has said, quote, on average, Republicans have gained... We can get Nate Cohn up here. Yeah, we've got this. That's a quick political report you can see on the screen. This is a quote from Nate Cohn at the Upshot for the New York Times. On average, Republicans have gained three

points across 19 Labor Day polls of the key Senate battleground states. Cohn points specifically to Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, where Ron Johnson is up against Mandela Barnes, and then Nevada, which is a race you've been tapping into a little bit too, Ryan, with Catherine Cortez Masso getting in a really close race that it looks like actually she might lose to Adam Laxalt. Right. And we talked about this a little last week. Laxalt is a standard bog Republican that is unobjectionable, doesn't scare away the suburban voters in the same way that, you know, some of the other, J.D. Vance or Blake Masters or somebody like, popular, kind of bog standard Democrat. Nevada has been absolutely annihilated by COVID. You know, the lockdowns, the economic shutdown was, you know, particularly brutal for the entertainment industry and the travel industry. And so, you know, when you have casinos that are just empty for a year plus, you know, you're going to have a lot of people angry and they're going to

take it out on the party in power. Well, how is Catherine Cortez Masto handling that? Because Democrats, I think their COVID messaging, you've seen a shift in it, I think very intentionally with Joe Biden saying the pandemic is over and then actually getting hit from the left for saying the pandemic is over and having to make excuses for it. But Democrats are intentionally, I think, shifting their messaging because they realize the public is genuinely ready for it to be over. And she's certainly been among the more moderate on this because she's on the ground. She recognizes how important this is to the economy of the state that she represents. But because of our kind of partisan divide and the partisan valence that all of this is seen through,

if you're a Democrat, you get branded no matter what. If you're a Republican, no matter what you're saying, you're going to get branded by whatever the Republican approach to this is. So there's only so much that she can do to kind of separate herself from the national party. At this point, I think she and Democrats are just hoping that abortion, that Dobbs and Roe v. Wade is going to be enough to push her over the top. But in Nevada, it might not register in the same way it does around the rest of the country. Right. But then another factor, as you mentioned and alluded to, is in some of these races where you have a J.D. Vance or a Blake Masters or a Dr. Oz, who I think it's kind of an open question as to whether he's a net benefit or a net loss in suburbs. Someone who's been popular in homes across the country was actually sort of hand

selected for daytime television by Oprah herself. So, you know, it's an open question, I think, to that extent. But he's been closing in on Fetterman. Fetterman has not been himself, clearly, since he suffered that stroke back in May. And I think it's been really difficult for him post, after that happened, and as his health is still, you can see, kind of faltering. He's not the same guy. It's hard to make some of those punches land in the same way that he's trying to really go on offense against Oz, but I'm not sure it's easy when you can't have these videos of you being sort of out on the trail and in interviews being as you need to be in a situation like his, really having the wind at your back and energetic and just going in for it. And that's

tough in a situation like Vetterman's. Yeah. And the news story, and I think we can put this up, Jezebel reported, there's a cliche in American politics that a politician will say, they're accusing me of everything, including hating puppies. Raphael Warnock even ran a really great ad where he was saying, look, they're accusing me of everything, including hating puppies. And look, I love puppies. And he picks up a puppy. And then there was a scandal that it wasn't actually his puppy. Which is a bold-faced lie. But the scandal with Dr. Oz is he would have killed that puppy. No, he would have experimented on the puppy and then killed the puppy. He would have experimented first on it and then killed it. Now, he personally, personally apparently was not doing the actual executions of these puppies.

Right. But he was overseeing and responsible for animal experiments that killed more than 300 puppies and which appeared to be in violation of the Animal Welfare Act and which Columbia paid a fine for in 2004, though stood by Dr. Oz as a good doctor. But I guess mistakes were made times 300. And again, like this is all public, in the public domain, basically, and it has been since, for what, 20 years, basically, at this point. And so it feels like an October surprise type situation where Jezebel, you leak it to a liberal outlet like Jezebel, some dumb group leaks it to them, but you don't really have to leak it because it's in the public, but you just say, hey, check this out. Have you seen Dr. Oz's puppy experiments? I don't know, Ryan. I don't think that makes a dent in the race. What about you?

It's going to be, I think it's going to be a super close race. We'll see. Last week, we skipped Wisconsin. Yeah. Your state, which I think, which feels like it's slipping away from Democrats at this point. When Mandela Barnes won the Democratic primary, polls had him up by something like 7 to 10 against Ron Johnson. And I remember thinking, he needs a 12 to 15 point lead with six weeks left against Johnson to feel comfortable with A, the likely three to four point polling error that we've seen so many cycles now in a row in Wisconsin in favor of the error and favor of Democrats, Republicans doing better. But also Mandela Barnes, it's one of the first successes of the left in electing kind of quote unquote one of their own.

But Barnes really came from kind of the kind of cultural left and kind of the activist left. And there was another candidate in the race, this guy Tom Nelson, who's a county commissioner, I forget which county, a Trump County in Wisconsin that you would know of. He's like a Bernie crat who kept winning county executive as a lefty. He was most famous for a paper plant shut down in the district. And he worked with the county and with the union and reopened the plant as kind of a worker-run business. And wrote a book about this turnaround, remained very popular in that area. And I wonder how Ron Johnson would be doing against him. He never really took off in the primary. Everybody lined up behind Mandela Barnes. He kind of cruised.

He's young. Primary. He's been marked as a rising star for a long time. But in order to win that kind of activist support over the years, he has said and done a bunch of things that now Ron Johnson is hammering him over. And the relentless negative advertising against him, seizing on defund him over and it's, and, and the relentless negative advertising against him seizing on defund the police and all this other stuff does seem to be dragging him down in a way that it might not be able to have affected somebody like Tom Nelson. He's like, look, I, I,

I already won all of these Trump voters by standing up for workers. And some people might say that, uh, Republicans are having a similar issue in the Wisconsin gubernatorial race, just from the different sides. Somebody who's really in with the activist base in a way that's not going to appeal to the average voter. Which is the only shot that I think Barnes has, that Ron Johnson is such a weird, bizarro figure. Well, it's an important point that this is a state where the polls have been pretty off in recent years. Ron Johnson famously had sort of been left behind by Mitch McConnell and has a chip on his shoulder because of that. And Wisconsin polling has been, you know, it's been a question because of that for a long time. And, you know,

people are aware of it now. But Mandela Barnes, my first thought when he won that race was about all of the activist stuff, because when you're known as somebody, especially when you went through the year 2020, as somebody generally in the activist, the Because when you're known as somebody, especially when you went through the year 2020, as somebody generally in the activist, the left activist camp, I was like, he's going to have all kinds of problems when the money starts coming in in September and after Labor Day. And that's exactly what happened.

And that's exactly what we're seeing happen in all of these different races. When Republicans start putting money behind a candidate and have the ability, the opposition research in some of these states, they've had the wind at their back for the last month. And with a month to go, it seems to be trending in that direction going forward. Right. I think 538 has Johnson up by a little less than two.

Yeah. But if you're Barnes, you want to be up by three or four. More than, I mean, I would say even more than that. At this point, and you want to expand, with momentum, you want to expand that. You want to be up by three or four. More than, I mean, I would say at this point, and you want to expand, you want, with momentum, you want to expand that. You want to be up, you know, eight, nine, going into election day to feel comfortable. What was Biden up in Wisconsin? Like eight, between eight and 17. A healthy lead. Different polls. Yeah. And he won it by, you know, tens of thousands. Right. Or according to Trump, he did not. Trump is wrong. Yes. In fact, all of the, all of the courts looked at Trump's challenges to Wisconsin and rejected them as without merit, including Lindsey Graham, who's like, you say you won Wisconsin.

Just give me a tiny bit of evidence that I can point to because I love nothing more than defending you. I mean, nothing. Although Wisconsin is a good example, though, of all of the Zuckerberg money going into Democratic counties intentionally. That said. Which is a different way. That's like organizing the structures to your benefit. Although, is Zuckerberg even a Democrat?

It depends on how you define Democrats. He loves Ben Shapiro and all those guys. Those are the only people he hangs out with. I don't know. They're like, Zuckerberg won it for Democrats.

I'm like, really? Since when is Zuckerberg a Democrat? This is weird. He's like a libertarian kind of curious right-wing dude. He's a surfer. Is he? I can't see him surfing. You don't remember that? See, this is the death of monoculture that we started the show talking about. It was a super viral picture of Mark Zuckerberg with all of the, you remember it now. I can't, yes. I just can't get the picture of him in a truck in Iowa when he was pretending he was going to run for president. He went to a truck stop in Iowa.

Yeah, that one's burned into the brain. It's like, so teach me how to AI this truck. Well, before we run, we want to play the clip of Christian Walker, who is one of Herschel Walker's children, his son, who's something of a conservative TikTok influencer. This was seen as kind of a big October shakeup in the Atlanta Senate race. Here's the video from Christian. I stayed silent as the atrocities committed against my mom were downplayed.

I stayed silent when it came out that my father, Herschel Walker, had all these random kids across the country, none of whom he raised. And you know my favorite issue to talk about is father absence. Surprise, because it affected me. That's why I talk about father absence. Surprise, because it affected me. That's why I talk about it all the time,

because it affected me. Family values people, he has four kids, four different women, wasn't in the house raising one of them. He was out having sex with other women. Do you care about family values? I was silent lie after lie after lie. The abortion card drops yesterday.

It's literally his handwriting in the car. They say they have receipts, whatever. He gets it's really worth talking about this example is because I actually don't think this changes the Senate race at all. I think it's sort of baked into Herschel Walker's character at this point in a similar way really to Donald Trump that people knew by the time the Access Hollywood tape came out, nobody was surprised by what it revealed about Donald Trump's character. And Dana Lash, who I know and I like, says she, quote, doesn't care if Herschel Walker paid, quote, some skank for an abortion, quote, I want control of the Senate. That is truly insight into the mind of Republican voters. And in Washington, people don't want to hear it. But especially, I'm not making a comparison

between Herschel Walker and Roy Moore, but it was the same thing. You had the Beltway media asking, why are polls still showing 50% of Alabamans are going to vote for Roy Moore? And it comes down to abortion. It really, at the end of the day, it comes down to abortion. If you are Raphael Warnock and you support abortion, people are still going to be voting for Herschel Walker because that is that important of an issue if you're a Republican voter. Dana also said, I don't care if he paid to abort a bunch of baby bald eagles. I think something like-

Bald eagles? I think so, yeah. Oh, wow. She went for the bald eagles. She's like, I just want to win. Winning is a virtue. Which then wouldn't you say things that are going to help you win? Like, that doesn't sound like... I mean, she's not running for office. She's not running for office, but she's still... Anyway, she can do whatever she wants. And I appreciate her being honest about this. I do think it's true that, you know, a lot of Democrats...

Well, actually, I was going to say that if the same thing came out about Warnock, that a lot of Democrats would still stick by him. But I think that that's it's true. But there's enough on the margins that would say this is this undermines what I knew about him. And they would either stay home or they'd vote third party or they would leave that leave that one empty. I think Democrats don't quite have as much kind of partisan glue that holds them together at this point because so much of their coalition is new, like these suburban voters who were liberal Republicans up until, you know, they might have voted for Mitt Romney. And so they don't

have the kind of, you know, ride or die loyalty that some of the Republican base might have. But on the other hand, that, what's his name, that you mentioned, the Alabama pedophile guy. Oh, Roy Moore. Yeah, Roy Moore. He lost. So there was a margin of Republicans who were. But that's a good example because it's like Raphael Warnock in this hypothetical, it cuts against the sort of consensus narrative about his character, right? So Raphael Warnock in this hypothetical, it cuts against the sort of consensus narrative about his character, right? So Raphael Warnock is not a high-flying ex-NFL superstar or a reality television show host who is a tabloid fixture.

And I think that's the same thing. With Roy Moore, it completely cut against this character that he was running on and that people felt they knew. And it would be the same thing with Raphael Warnock, whereas with Donald Trump, it's like, you know, maybe they pretend to be, you know, all about family values or character or whatever, but I don't think anybody really believes that at the end of the day. But if part of Walker's shtick was that he was fallen and a sinner, but he's now redeeming himself. This confirms that for him. He can use it to say, I made a mistake. Made a mistake. But what about having his very popular son, Christian son out there?

That's bad. Like, because that's today. Like what he's saying is today, Herschel Walker is still a liar. That this whole myth that he's trying to present to you of a man reformed is a lie. And I'm telling you as his son, that it's a lie. As a son who was, who tried to be supportive, who tried to like swallow so much of this stuff. So that, so you think that could be a point or two? It depends on how much people were actually buying what he was selling about being reformed and being a sinner who has found grace. And I think that's a- He's just a Republican. I think that's a fair question. I also think in the context of abortion politics, and there was this idea, Democrats really believed after Kansas that this was going to be what would help them get over the hump in the midterm elections.

And I think in some of these states, especially somewhere like Georgia, the more you can point to extremism and you can point to places, you know, in the same way that the Democrats can point to places where Republicans and conservatives, myself included, are legitimately in the minority compared to public opinion. They can absolutely do that on abortion. There's no question about it. But you can do the same with Democrats. And Carrie Lake went super viral on the right this week for having an answer to a reporter who asked her in Arizona. And she said, I never hear you asking my opponent about why they believe in essentially late-term abortion. And that's become, I think, a really big issue in some of these races in some of these states that's actually helping Republicans. And I think that's where, you know, with the Herschel Walker, it still comes down to, for voters, for Republican voters, that's a key issue. And it's an important one, so important, like Dana Lash said, that people really don't care. They don't have a lot of voices in the media. You know, there aren't a lot of people in the media who make that argument, but it is a sincere argument that people make.

Right, and ultimately, Dana, I always thought it was Loesch. It's Lasch. Lasch, yeah. Dana Lasch is right in the sense that you're voting for policy. Right. You're not voting for a person. You're voting for a person to enact policy. So if you trust a person to enact policy that you want, you, I guess, shouldn't care if they like to abort bald eagles or whatever. Well, and that's the Donald Trump moment, right? Like, if you think you're voting for a person, how naive, right? Like, these are politicians. And at the end of the day, no matter what a good game they talk, they're politicians. And speaking of actually

people that I think public trust is maybe mixed on, we have news on the Elon Musk Twitter front that's actually very different. Musk is now offering the original price of $54.20 a share to buy Twitter. That was the original offer, and it's now back to that after he lost a series of pretrial rulings that didn't totally work out in his way as he attempted to back out of the offer he had made, 5420, to buy Twitter. Yeah, and the problem for Elon Musk is that we are not yet a complete banana republic when it comes to our capital markets. This Delaware court is known as being quite serious, that if you've made a deal, if you've put it in paper,

if you have a contract, if you've agreed to close on a certain day, this is America, this is global capitalism. It depends on you following through on that. These contracts matter. This is not Azerbaijan where you can pay somebody off and just not show up for the closing and be done with it because that ruptures and fundamentally undermines the system of global capitalism that everybody, you know, like Elon Musk uses to buttress their wealth. And so he might have thought that he could say, hey, you know what, actually there's all this fraud with all of these bots and I don't actually like Twitter anymore. And then that he could just move on, just like, you know, post his way through it,

like he does with so many other controversies. And they're like, no, no, no, no, you signed the document here. And you even waived, like, all of this stuff. So stop. And so, and the judge, you know, wanted to move very quickly, because we're talking about $44 billion on the table here. And like you said, it has not been going well for him. And so then yesterday he sends a letter.

He says, okay, you know what, actually I will buy it. And Twitter's response has been, okay, write the check and we'll see. But they're not going to drop the case until he writes the check, until this is done. Does he have other options to back out? Sure, he can continue to back out and try to fight the trial, which I think starts October 17th, but he's getting hammered so far in all the pre-trial stuff. But he, yeah, I meant like, are there any other avenues besides this one? Because on this front, it seems like actually what's happening now is that it is going to happen because he's come out and said, like we just said, he's saying 5420 a share, let's do it. The other option for when these cases

arise is a settlement that you say, look, I blew it. How much do I have to give you to drop this case? Because like, I don't have, let's say he didn't have $44 billion and he thought he could get it together. He didn't. You know, That happens in business. You get a closing day, the financing doesn't come in, then you owe them money. He might owe him X shares of Tesla. He might owe them $3 billion or whatever either a judge would assign or Twitter would agree to. So that would be another option, but it seems like he's saying at this point, let's go for it. So where have you been on this Musk buying Twitter? Are you hopeful that it actually happens? You think it can't get worse, it might get better? Where are

you on? I think Twitter is a scourge on American society, American politics, and American culture. And I don't think any person who opposes big tech should really be cheering on what Elon Musk wants to do with Twitter, which is make it more popular and make it good again. I agree. I think there's a lot that can be done to make Twitter a better experience for the users. I think Elon Musk is totally correct about that. I don't think making Twitter a better experience than making more people want to use Twitter, which is something that Elon Musk has explicitly said is his goal. A better health site. Twitter is one of the best examples of how social media is run like a slot machine. Aesthetically, it works that way. It is one of the best examples of exactly what they're doing

to our brains. And so I have no interest in anybody reforming that institution. You'd like them to buy it and shut it down. Yeah, I would love that. Buy it, shut it down. A little catch and kill action there. But that said, I think a freer Twitter is a better Twitter. But at the end of the day, it's still Twitter. And I think if he does buy it, and I've talked about this before, the major conflict of interest he has is that he is heavily leveraged by China, the Chinese Communist Party.

Huge problem. Because of the materials he needs. And this is not a judgment of him. This is just a fact. It's a huge problem. Materials and financing, labor force. Tesla is heavily dependent on its relationship with China, which... With the government.

With the government, which the government could turn the screws on at any moment. The government also has a famous lack of appreciation for the freedom of speech or dissent. And so it is going to want to put pressure on him to, you know, A, suppress dissent wherever it's found among Chinese dissidents, whether it's Hong Kong, the United States, Canada, wherever anybody is posting things critical of them. They're going to want to try to find ways to kind of crack down on that. And, you know, a bunch of Saudi engineers, Saudi Twitter engineers were recently on trial for having been bribed by the Saudi government. Yes, we've seen how this can happen.

We've seen that there are already mechanisms that are in place, buttons that can be pushed. So at minimum, he needs end-to-end encryption and a security situation by which China can come to Elon Musk and say, I need information on this account. And Musk would have to say to them, I can't give it to you. Not that I won't give it to you, but I can't. I physically do not have access, like the way that Signal works. I physically cannot, technically cannot do the thing that you're asking because that kind of pressure is just too much for any person. It would be too heroic to ask somebody to say, to protect a dissident that they don't know up against their entire business, their entire company, future, everything. For security purposes, we need to see the direct messages that this dissident has been

sending. Right. And, you know, this is... No, I can't. We don't have that capacity. Right. It's essential to Chinese national security. We really need access to this. No, I think that's... Look, I agree with you. I'd love to share the information with you, but I'm sorry. I just can't. The text messages that came out as part of this pre-trial process were really interesting. And I think overall flattering to Elon Musk. I don't think they showed him in a bad light at all. I think they actually showed him as somebody who was very sincerely and honestly trying to have conversations about what makes a better Twitter and what makes social media better in general. He was talking about things like Signal and how Twitter can be run in a kind of Signal-esque way.

There were some hilarious exchanges with Gayle King, although I shouldn't say exchanges because it was mostly just Gayle King begging Elon Musk to give her an interview. And Jake Sherman popped up in there. What a hustler. I love it. Yeah. No Ryan Graham. What were you doing, man? I never texted him. No, it didn't even occur to me. Well, no, I think the text messages actually to everything you just said, Ryan. Listen, it's like what we talked about in the last block. If you're putting your trust in public figures, people who are very powerful, you're probably putting your trust in the wrong place because power corrupts. And that's very obvious.

You don't need to read Machiavelli to know that. But all that is to say, I think there are a lot of positive signs from Elon Musk. I think there are a lot of clearly negative red flags. So at the end of the day, I don't know how it shakes out. My position is just Twitter is terrible and it should go away. The one thing that upped my appreciation for Musk in those text messages was his dismissal of the use of blockchain for Twitter that Sam Bankman-Fried was proposing to me. He's like, really? This guy's got $3 billion liquid? Okay, I guess I'll talk to him, but please don't make me have an argument about blockchain with him. And Musk is fine with blockchain, but he's like, it's not appropriate

for this. He's like, I'm not going to sit at the other side of the bar and listen to Sam Bankman phrase, extol the mergers of blockchain. I feel seen, finally. Yes, in Musk, I finally feel seen. His one good idea, I thought, a good idea he had in there was letting people DM all of their followers for a fee. And he's like, Twitter will make a bunch of money. The user will love it. And they won't abuse it because if you over DM your followers, they'll just all unfollow you. No, I think more small cost barriers on social media in general are a good thing that make people less reliant on Google ads and whatever else. Right. Which then makes it less important

to jack up the algorithm to just create more toxicity to keep people more engaged. Let's move on. It's actually, believe it or not, and I was pretty surprised by this, the five-year anniversary of the beginning of the Me Too movement, which started in early October of 2017 when the New York Times dropped its report, its investigation, into the allegations against Harvey Weinstein. And that then launched the entire movement. It became a snowball careening down the hill and really, in my opinion, got completely out of control, but leaves a very interesting legacy behind. The New York Times, we have this element to put up on the screen, did a very long reflective piece on it by reporters who wrote some of that excellent journalism about Harvey Weinstein. The Harvey Weinstein story was the story of a lot of Me Too, Ryan, which was also crucially a media story.

It was about how he had bought off and charmed the media into silencing these stories for years. And bullied. Yeah, bullied. And a good amount of bullying, too. Yeah, absolutely. It wasn't like total complicity from the media. There was some of that if you look at what happened at NBC, according to Ronan Farrow's reporting.

But he was like completely bullying people. There's a story, someone wrote about it in The Cut. I forget who wrote about it in The Cut. It was a great story about how at a party in the 90s or in the early aughts, Harvey Weinstein took somebody's camera when they photographed him having a meltdown on a sidewalk outside a book party. And I think it was Rebecca Traister. Rebecca Traister wrote about this. And the photo never got published.

But it's out there somewhere, you know, presumably. So all that is to say, Ryan, it seemed to go off the rails in that January with the Aziz Ansari story. That was a really big turning point in the Me Too movement. I think everybody— That was really early, too. Yeah, that was a— A couple months in. A couple months in. Yeah, a few months in.

But a lot of heads had rolled by that time. And some for good reason. but it was a frenzy. I have never seen anything like it before, and I'm curious for what your take was on it. I think there was a lot of good, especially in the early days that came of the Me Too movement. There was a lot of necessary corrections that were happening. But at the same time, by the time the Aziz Ansari story rolls around, it was like really low-level gossip was getting traded as much traffic is like much more serious and as though it deserved a place in this pantheon of great Me Too reporting. And it didn't deserve to even see the light of day. Yeah, the Aziz Ansari moment was an interesting one because it also, it was reported by, if I'm remembering the name, it was babe.net.

Yeah, babe.net. Nobody had heard of babe.net before, nor since. I love babe.net. It's not around anymore, but I used to regularly check babe.net because it was hilarious. Pre-Ansari, you were a hipster? You were a babe.net hipster?

No, no. But after I became aware of the existence of Babe.net, they bragged in a piece after the Aziz story dropped. They bragged in a piece about how they were editing it at brunch. They were editing. They had like a mimosa in one hand and their laptop in the other. And they were editing the story about accusing a man of sexual assault, which is what was in the Aziz on Story Story. Sort of. Story Story. They never was in the Azizan story. Sort of. Sorry, story.

They never really. Yeah, they did, though. Well, I mean, it says sexual assault in the story. And so it's. They just didn't put anything in there that would back that up. Well, that's the thing, right? And so like powerful people, powerful men need to be held to account. There's no question about that.

And journalists are the ones who should do it. But the standard for what became publishable allegations, I think, lowered. And then when that happened, people realized, I mean, some of the allegations that came out against Brett Kavanaugh and the New Yorker that Michael Avenatti was trafficking in, there was no proof. The Julie Swetnick stuff, you had Julie Swetnick's word and no other proof than that, that Brett Kavanaugh was a gang racist. They aired that on NBC, I think. Yeah. They aired that interview live on, not live, but taped on NBC. And that was, to me, even, that was a more seminal moment than the Aziz Ansari divide, even? Because it was like, oh, they just,

because her story just literally didn't add up. Right. Like, okay, what's your birthday? You're saying you were at this senior week down in Ocean City. You would have been like 23 or something. Like whatever, you can look up the number. It just didn't square. Like the basic facts,

in the same way that the University of Virginia story that Rolling Stone wrote about, the basic facts in the same way that the University of Virginia story that Rolling Stone wrote about the basic facts. You're like, OK, this is all awful. But then you're like, was there a party this night? And then these are like basic facts that you can ascertain. It turns out there wasn't. Now, I think that and so the time story, I think, is worth reading. And there was another one, maybe it was in Fortune, I forget where, that asked the question of whether or not the kind of cancellations or the consequences of the punishments that have been doled out to so many as a result of Me Too were sticking.

Because there's a sense among a lot of people that they're not. That you face 20 minutes of kind of, or you get your 15 minutes of infamy, and then you recover. And people point to Louis C.K. and others. This piece went through, and the Times mentions it as well, on a case-by-case basis. Actually, Louis C.K. was a massively dominant figure in our pop culture. Now he's just kind of doing direct-to-consumer stuff. Yeah, he won an award, an Emmy recently. But that's nowhere near where he was. As the Times and others point out, he's not directing films.

He's not where he was. So I think that people who are huge fans of MeToo underestimate some of its impact. Now, I think the goal of the movement to create a world where women can walk around freely in society without fear of being harassed, or not without fear, but with less of a chance of being harassed, and particularly without being assaulted, required a radical kind of shake-up. I don't think there was any way that you were going to go from where we were to a place of more gender equity without a massive kind of shakeup of society. And so when you're going to do that, people are going to get picked up unfairly along the way. You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs, would be. And some of the innocent people caught up are the eggs that were probably broken to make that omelet. And again, none of that is a judgment.

That's just a kind of observation of the way that the phenomenon kind of had to unfold if you're going to really strike back against it. Now, if you go too far and break too many innocent eggs, then you're going to produce your own backlash and you're going to be right back where you started to be at the beginning. One thing that I've thought about a lot during Me Too is how women's mass participation in the workforce and especially in jobs that are really similar to men, right? So like to participate in the workforce right now, it's not like, for the most part, you don't have to be doing manual labor and there are jobs that men and women can do with the same ease that are just, you know, at cubicle jobs, whatever it is, a job like

this, for instance. You know, it's, women are mass participating in the workforce in a way that didn't really start happening until what the last like roughly half century. Right. After women were going to college in larger numbers. And listen, I'm glad. I think that's great. I'm here. But I also think we didn't iron out. We thought things were going much more smoothly, or we had expectations that things had gone much more smoothly.

And Me Too really gave women an opportunity to say, actually, no, when I am just trying to do my job and when I am trying to participate in my job, for instance, by going to a happy hour so I don't miss out, then yeah, it's a problem. It's a problem if my boss wants to take me to, my older married male boss wants to take me to dinner at a restaurant alone to talk about my future and do X, Y, and Z. Yeah, like that stuff is problematic. And I think it was important to, you know future and do X, Y, and Z. Yeah, like that stuff is problematic. And I think it was important to, you know, as they say, have that conversation.

All that is to say, though, this was already happening on college campuses during the Obama administration, the terrible Title IX reforms that the Obama administration had done, which thrust college campuses, and I know because I was on one at the time, into chaos.

And it made a lot of men feel like what we were talking about last week, I did a monologue on this, a lot of men, you know, over what was like 50 something percent of single men are too afraid of being perceived as creepy to talk to women. And that, I think I said last week that in some ways that was irrational. What I meant by that is like women actually do want to be talked to, but it's not that sort of level of fear posts me to. I don't know that it is entirely irrational because there were a lot of instances that I think kind of had a chilling effect on sexual politics in this country. And I don't know where it goes from here. COVID changed everything in ways, everything about the workplace, everything about dating. And so we're kind of in a totally different direction now anyway. Yeah. And I don't know if we'll find a balance because it's hard to know or whether the pendulum just keeps swinging back and forth. But I think

you're right to identify the female surge into the workforce. And particularly, women have been graduating from college and from graduate schools at higher rates. And also because of the way that the patriarchy, you could call it, has allowed men to enjoy kind of like high-level jobs, while women have been forced, you know, prior to this into kind of lower-level organizational positions. Women came out of with higher graduation rates, both undergrad and grad, but also with better organizational skills because of the kind of cultural window that we had given to men to just let women do things for them. And so they're coming into the workforce, oftentimes just better equipped to do the work. And I think sexual harassment, and in some cases, sexual violence became a way to try to enforce, reinforce, reproduce that kind of male

dominance that men felt threatened by. Now, I don't think they were doing that consciously necessarily, though some might have been. It's interesting in the era of the sort of trans conversation about Title IX that the right is reflexively sort of defensive of Title IX now. But the conversation about Title IX up until about 2015 was, or 2016 actually, was basically that Title IX had cost men some opportunities in sports. And whether or not you think Title IX was a net benefit or a net negative, whatever it is, that was a huge part of the conversation. And it's an example of how women also have been set up for success in ways that recently we talked about this. We talked about Richard Reeves. Stogger

and Crystal had him on the show, actually. Men are struggling in society in some ways because, as a correction, we redesigned our education system and we redesigned society in ways that would lift women. But what we didn't see happening is that it would be at the expense of men and at the expense of men in some ways. That's also the expense of women. You can't have one side sort of fall and the other stay. It hurts everyone at the same time. And I really do feel like some of those changes were probably at the cost of men, which is ultimately at the cost of women, too. And so a story that we did want to get to today is from the American Prospect.

Put that element up there that—I don't have my glasses. Redeeming or redefining or reclaiming? It says you're actually wrong about both. It's reclaiming. Okay, you got it in the third try. So reclaiming the deep state. This is a story about OIRA, which is an office that was created to try to kind of coordinate between different agencies as they're producing regulations. Ended up becoming one of the

most powerful executive agencies that nobody has heard of. And in the 1980s, and then also as the prospect writes during the Obama years, it was used actively to thwart the regulatory apparatus, to slow down regulation. Under Biden, and actually significantly under the influence of Elizabeth Warren, as the story kind of, the undertone of the prospect story makes clear, because these are all kind of Warren people who are making the, for the most part, that are making these moves. And her philosophy has always been personnel as policy, and she's trying to get her people into the particular position so that they can then enact the, and she's trying to get her people into the particular position so that they can then enact the policies that she's for. She has always cared far more than

kind of Bernie Sanders, for instance, with the administrative state, with using the levers of power that exist. You know, she most famously burst onto the scene with her idea to create the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which now exists. She's shepherded into law, and she set it up as its first kind of director, and which has become the bane of Wall Street and the bane of a lot of corporations that are kind of pushing the envelope on the way that they're allowed or not allowed to scam customers. And so what's going on now in the Biden administration is that this agency, which has for so long been designed and deployed to slow down regulatory activities, actually now been emboldened and empowered to work with agencies to try to speed up the process and toughen regulations. And people

are saying that they've never seen anything like it, that a regulation would come to OIRA and OIRA comes back and says, I think you can do better than this. Come on. Like, come on. Crank this up a little bit. Like 30 parts per million? Move this to 100 parts per million. People are going to die. And the agency is like, really? It's an per million. People are going to die. And the agency is like, really? It's an interesting story. I was glad that you sent this around, Ryan, because there's an interesting story when you juxtapose it with Jonathan Swan's report in Axios just about a month ago about how a huge priority of another Trump administration, so say he ran for president again, was elected. And this would,

by the way, be if Trump didn't run, any other Republican would basically pick this up on, what is it, Schedule F? Yeah, Schedule F. Basically dismantling the so-called deep state, the administrative state, the bureaucracy, the federal bureaucracy, call it whatever you want. That's a huge plank of the conservative plan going forward. And that's why I think the language here even is really funny, reclaiming the deep state from whom? Because in my perspective, any sort of conservative or Republican claiming ownership over the deep state or over the administrative state is fundamentally not conservative or Republican because there's nothing conservative or Republican about sort of the sprawling mass of unelected, powerful officials that are now

essentially regulating in ways that used to be reserved, with powers that used to be reserved for our elected officials in Congress, and it's spiraled so far out of control that that's why Republicans say, if you have a Republican president, it is like trying to turn the Titanic around in four years at the administrative state. Because in Washington, D.C., everyone sort of knows so-called careers in the cabinet agencies are overwhelmingly left. That doesn't mean that they're all leftists. It means that they're sort of center left for the most part. But that means that if you're Donald Trump or if you're Jeb Bush for that matter and you take control of the EPA, good luck doing anything with that EPA. You might be able to do some things here or there, nibble around the edges, but the EPA still exists. Right.

So from your perspective, it's going to be like four years of trying to turn the Titanic around. So what you have to do is start working on it. Just got to sink that Titanic. Well, I don't know. And then build a new one. Everybody can get a raft. And if you don't get a raft, then hey, you sink or swim. I mean, listen, we just talked about in the last segment, Title IX. And it's a great example. The Obama administration changed dramatically what was happening at every single publicly

funded school. And actually, basically every school because of the legal precedent that it kind of established, with a letter called the Dear Colleague Letter from John King that it reinterpreted Title IX on sexual assault and reinterpreted Title IX to include gender identity. And so a lot of these fights that we're having about transgenderism in local schools and sports, whatever it is, would probably have been better litigated at the local level. But because they were changed in one false swoop by the Obama administration under people's noses, I think it was Camille Paglia who said, she was like, I knew Hillary Clinton was going to lose as soon as I saw what the Obama administration did out of their education department.

So conservatives steed that stuff and say, well, we get into the education department, maybe it doesn't need to be abolished, although Betsy DeVos, I think, recently did say that. But what is the point of just taking back a letter that then Joe Biden is going to get in office and use the education department exactly like Barack Obama did? I think that's a slightly different case because those are fundamental policy differences that you're carrying out as an executive, whereas what OIRA is doing here and what the deep state and the administrative state are fighting over are kind of who gets to set the policies and what the process for them is. I just think that's a policy in and of itself.

It is. And the way that it expresses itself in a partisan divide, on the left, say, who are we reclaiming it from? We're reclaiming it from corporate America. We're saying that corporate America has, through the 70s and 80s and 90s, has basically captured these regulatory agencies, that they're wholly owned subsidiaries of the corporations that they're supposed to actually be regulating on behalf of the people. And so we're reclaiming it for the people. I'm curious how the right would define it, but in the best light, you'd say, well, Trump, yes, well, let's say Trump wins. Therefore, Trump's allies ought to be able to set whatever policy they want.

And then the left will be like, well, yeah, but it's just a bunch of CEOs and corporate VPs and lobbyists that you're installing in all these places. It's like, hey, elections have consequences. And then we'd be like, well, how is that populist? Like, where's the people power there? Well, remember, yeah, this is my favorite thing to look back on how the head of the State Department, the Secretary of State, was the CEO of Exxon. People were like, he has no experience in this. Like, no, the CEO of Exxon has plenty of experience that's relevant to being the State Secretary of State. Oh, he knows exactly what he's doing. Yeah. A hundred percent. Yeah. No, but the point that I would make is post-Wilsonian, the post-Wilsonian sort of post-

Rooseveltian administrative state, the corporate capture of it, I think is absolutely real. And that's sort of fundamentally an argument against it because there's really no way to have a bureaucracy that is this vast and even hard to quantify. Although this is one way. Well, is it though? I mean, is it plausibly something, like is it legitimately a bulwark? Say it happens. And this is a great question, actually. I don't have a good answer for it. If it happens, is this an impenetrable bulwark or is it just a sort of stopgap? Everything I, is a stopgap because the war never ends and the fight never stops. But you're seeing on the regulatory front,

you know, significant wins that industry is really pissed about. So in that sense, it's at least working for now. I mean, it's really interesting going forward to see what would happen, whether it's Joe Biden in the second term, whether it's Kamala Harris in the second term, what would happen if they took seriously plans like this to, as you say, reclaim from corporate America the bureaucracy. Yeah, we'll see because they're definitely going to try to – corporate America is going to try to undermine this badly, kind of destroy all these individual people. That's the problem with personnel policy because then they just destroy the people. Yeah. Speaking of corporate America and destroying people. Yeah, the man we would like to see report this story, none other than Chris Cuomo, whose show debuted. Let's check in with our sort of former colleague over at Rising, right? Because Nextar owns News Nation, which Chris Cuomo is now

anchoring for. Here's Chris. So this show is going to be different than what I've done in the past because I'm different. And I've spent a lot of time looking and listening on the sidelines. It's obvious to me that we need people in my position to do more, to not just play or even referee the game that is plaguing our politics and society. That means exposing the game, show when it's played, show how it's being played, and also to be more transparent about where my head is on the issues that we cover. I also have a new appreciation for exactly how unique my situation is. Most people in my business know politics from the outside.

I know it from the inside. No, Chris, everyone is begging you to do less. Nobody wants people in your position to do more. And if that's how you're reading public opinion, it is a great glimpse at exactly how obtuse and disconnected from reality you are. I thought that, so, News Nation is a cable channel. It exists. Yeah, we've both been on it. It has a channel and its ratings though so far have been utterly abysmal. You know, the equivalent of kind of the cat like accidentally stepping on the remote and winding up at that channel. Although that's not terribly far from where like MSNBC is and CNN is right now too.

In certain demos for sure. I thought though that they have the right initial diagnosis of the problem with the media, which is that nobody trusts cable news. I think they're right about that. Their answer though was that they're going to be the one you trust. They're going to be kind of centrist or center-right, and they're going to tell you where they are. They're going to be as transparent as possible, and they're not going to use the term fair and balanced because that's gone, but that's the kind of ethos that they're going for. They're going to be fair and balanced. And I just don't think there's an audience that believes that. I think the right hears you say that and they code that as liberal. And I think the liberals already have MSNBC and to a lesser degree now, CNN.

So who's the audience here? I think that the right kind of treatment for what they've diagnosed accurately is something more like this, where you're not telling somebody, just trust me. I'm giving you the truth. You're giving people multiple perspectives at the same time and then letting them digest that and come up with whatever they believe. It's treating the audience with a little more respect to be more of an independent thinker. Trusting the audience, trusting people. And yeah, with Chris Cuomo himself trying to have this moment of self-reflection and saying, listen, I know politics from the inside, and that's part of the issue, right? He said, I have new appreciation. He's

spinning what is actually that he was lying and misrepresenting his involvement in a story that he covered for months, a pandemic that has killed over a million people in this country. He was lying and misrepresenting his relationship with a very powerful politician, his brother, who happened to be overseeing policy that was literally a matter of life and death. And I think for any news network to hire Chris Cuomo is really shameful. I really think that's the case. And I remember actually, Ryan, this was a day when we were at Rising. We played a clip of an interview that Chris Cuomo did on News Nation, which again is owned by Nexstar, which is the company that owns The Hill and Rising.

And I remember watching it and thinking in my head, oh my gosh, they're going to hire him, aren't they? I'm so dense it never even occurred to me. It's just, it's not, I mean, again, like he's not offering contrition there. He's saying, I have new respect for my position. He's so arrogant. He can't bring himself to fundamentally reckon with the problem. He's actually saying, and listen, by the way, I think there's benefit to people who are really close to policymakers having platforms in the media because it's a great way to tell what the spin is. But that's not what he's, he's saying

he's going to be going beyond refereeing. He's going to be telling you where his head's at because everybody wants to know that. And I can see why he's doing it because I think that he has a story to tell, I think, that is sympathetic to an audience that doesn't know the whole story. If all you know is that, hey, he gave his brother some advice while his brother was going through difficult times, then 90% of people are going to be like, you know, that's fine. I would give my brother advice if he's going through a difficult time. Just because you have a particular job doesn't mean you have to completely ice out your entire family. But it's so far beyond. It went so far beyond that. So I think what he's trying to do is reframe what his crime, what his sin was as being too close to politics, being too inside, just giving his brother some good advice as he was going through a scandal. And that what he's

going to do is he's going to turn that to the viewer's advantage and share all of his insights transparently with people in real time. When the actual sin was not what he said to his brother, but what he said to the public, said things to the public that he knew were untrue. And as a newsman, as a news gatherer, a news person, you cannot do that. No, no, you can't. And whether or not it's your brother, we don't know if that stops with it just being his brother, because this is the one thing that we've really gotten insight into. But this is basically how media works. And I think the more the audience learns about how the media works in New York and DC, the more they understand that there's really no trust left to be had. And I agree, there's a huge audience for things exactly like breaking points for that purpose. It's that like, trust

the audience, say what your opinion is as somebody on the left, somebody on the right, trust the audience to kind of, you know, compare and contrast and, you know, come, maybe they agree with you, maybe they don't. But I do also think there's an audience for like the version of wire reports that is, that used to be something like CNN. Because people did like that a lot. And I think that's what the new head of CNN, Chris Licht, is trying to go for. I think he has research, for the most part, that likely suggests that's the case. I just don't know that it can actually fundamentally be done anymore. And the Katie Halper case study we talked about last week, which is also a Nextar story because it happened at a Hill property and went to the very top. We know that it went to Nextar.

And that Nextar is the one that basically pulled the plug on Katie's rising appearances. And hiring Chris Cuomo are two really good examples of somebody as a network that's trying to be both entertaining and informative in 2022 that is trying to do the sort of fair and balanced right down the middle approach to news gathering. It's almost impossible. It's almost impossible. And almost every experiment is doomed to fail. So, you know, it's probably better to be to err on the side of honesty anyway. Trust us, we're going to be transparent, just definitely not on Israel. Yeah, yeah. Which they didn't really even just say it.

And by the way, some of us, like, we were really good friends with the governor. So, you know, sometimes we're going to pull the punch. Former governor. Yeah, former governor. Well, whoever it is. I mean, to pull the punch. Former governor. Yeah, former governor. Well, whoever it is. I mean, it could be anyone. Future governor. Yeah.

So sometimes we'll pull punches, but hey, just trust. We know when you need the truth. When Anthony Fauci is, sometimes Anthony Fauci has good reasons to tell people that masks don't work. And when you're ready to hear the truth, we'll let him give it to you. On yesterday's show, Sagar talked about a new NIH grant given by Dr. Anthony Fauci on his way out the door to none other than the organization EcoHealth Alliance, which is run by Peter Daszak, that is at the heart of the controversy over the origin of the pandemic. Now, as Sagar noted, even though the mainstream media now treats this question as if it's been settled, most of the scientific community now acknowledge its origin is at minimum an open question.

Here's Sager. And the medical journal The Lancet have retracted its declaration that there is no way COVID came from the lab and at least admit today it is just as likely that it did, just as likely that it didn't. Sager has a great rundown of the history of the last two years of this, and it's well worth going back and watching it if you missed it yesterday. But I want to focus on two different elements of this outrageous grant. First, the new grant comes after the NIH in August. This August terminated a subaward to the Wuhan Institute of Virology that had been part of an earlier grant to EcoHealth Alliance, telling the House Oversight Committee the organization had refused to turn over laboratory notebooks and other records as required.

Yes, you heard that right. Less than two months ago, the NIH terminated an EcoHealth Alliance award because it has repeatedly refused to turn over lab notebooks and electronic files that the NIH had demanded. Those notebooks are essential to understanding exactly what kind of research they were doing and could hold clues to the origins of the pandemic. The lack of that very specific evidence is the main thing that people who dismiss the lab leak as a conspiracy like to point to. But we don't have all the evidence because EcoHealth hasn't turned it over. So they then lost their grant. Here's what the NIH said in a letter to the Oversight Committee, quote,

NIH has requested on two occasions that EHA provide NIH the laboratory notebooks and original electronic files from the research conducted at WIV. To date, WIV has not provided these records. Today, NIH has informed EHA that since WIV is unable to fulfill its duties for the subaward under the grant, the WIV subaward is terminated for failure to meet award terms and conditions requiring provision of records to NIH upon request, unquote. And just weeks later, this new grant gets given out. Now, the other thing I want to talk about is the danger of the kind of surveillance research they plan to do with this new grant. The aim of the new research, the stated aim of the new research, is to identify areas of potential concern for future pandemic emergence to help public health authorities suppress an

outbreak before it breaks containment. But the process of performing the research introduces the risk of sparking an outbreak that would not otherwise have occurred, a concern highlighted by The Intercept last year. As Sharon Lerner wrote, quote, virtually every part of the work of outbreak prediction can result in an accidental infection. Even with the best of intentions, scientists can serve as vectors for the viruses they hunt, and as a result, their work may put everyone else's lives on the line along with their own, unquote. The new grant proposes to collect samples of viruses from wildlife and then, quote, rapidly supply viral sequences and isolates for use in vaccine and therapeutic development, unquote, likely meaning that researchers could ship live viruses around the world.

Dr. Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist with the Waxman Institute at Rutgers University, told me this, quote, it is disturbing that additional funding continues to be awarded for the same high-risk research that may have caused the current pandemic before there has been a national investigation of the origin of the current pandemic. He said, referring to multiple ongoing grants of eco-health alliances. Another eco-health grant, quote, study of Nipah virus dynamics and genetics in its bat reservoir and of human exposure to NIV across Bangladesh to understand patterns of human outbreaks, also involves high-risk collection of viruses. That Southeast Asia hotspot grant was awarded in June 2020 at the height of controversy over the grant covering work in Wuhan. Democrats in Congress

have paid very little attention to the NIH funding controversy, but Republicans could soon be in charge of one or both chambers. Representative Kathy McMorris-Rogers, the top Republican on the Powerful Energy and Commerce Committee, is in line to chair the panel in the event of a takeover. On Monday, she slammed the NIH for its continued funding of DASAC's organization, telling me in a statement, quote, EcoHealth Alliance and Peter DASAC should not be getting a dime of taxpayer funds until they are completely transparent, period. This is madness, unquote.

This further, quote, this further intensifies our extensive commitment on the Energy and Commerce Committee to ensure accountability from the NIH for its role in supporting taxpayer-funded risky research without proper oversight of its grantees. And so you have both the Oversight Committee and the Energy and Commerce Committee. America sadly lost one of its great artists yesterday when Loretta Lynn passed away at the age of 90. She deserves to be remembered truly alongside George Jones and Hank Williams as one of the defining voices of country music, a genre that's much more complicated than many media critics realize. They marvel at how someone like Lynn could be so progressive and quote ahead of her time on divorce and birth control, but support politicians

like Donald Trump. I'm not kidding. The Washington Post literally wrote that yesterday, fast enough to publish within hours of her death. The paper's pop music critic said, quote, if coal miner's daughter was Lynn's hallmark, the pill is her triumph, and its legacy in a post-Roe America has become more complicated than previously imaginable. What? A decades-old song about birth control leaves behind a more complicated legacy because Roe was overturned? Whatever you think about abortion, that kind of analysis is a good example of the pseudo-intellectual babble that earns people paychecks in the legacy press.

The song's legacy is no different now than it was a year ago. Absurdly, the Post article continued, Here's something even messier. Lynn was an early and avid supporter of Donald Trump, the candidate-turned-president whose Supreme Court appointees in their eventual overturning of Roe v. Wade would help strip away the very rights

that her art ultimately fought for. How do we begin to understand that? Well, it's not that hard, and it's not that messy. Like millions of Americans, Lynn somehow managed to enjoy the popular comforts of modernity while simultaneously thinking Trump was, quote, the only one who's going to turn this country around, as Lynn said back in 2016. That's a quote from her directly. Agree with her or don't, but the position is entirely reasonable if you understand what's happened to America's working class. Coal Miner's Daughter is one of the great class-conscious anthems of the American songbook. The Pill, which actually became one of the legendary songs

banned by country radio, is fine, but it's hardly Lynn's triumph, as The Post put it. Womanhood got weird in the 20th century, and it's still weird now. In some ways, it changed for the better, like for women who can get the hell out of abusive marriages and hold men to higher standards of respect. In other ways, as women have fewer children than they want, lament the pains of hookup culture, and struggle to find marriageable men, things are changing for the worst. Social scientists have actually referred to this as the, quote, women's happiness paradox. A Guardian article published in 2016 explained that two

researchers, quote, discovered that American women rated their overall life satisfaction higher than men's in the 1970s. Thereafter, women's happiness scores decreased, while men's scores stayed roughly stable. By the 1990s, women were less happy than men. This relative unhappiness softened after the turn of the century, Rated X, and of course, Coal Miner's Daughter. challenged conventions around sex and marriage. Why might a woman from rural Kentucky have progressive takes on things like divorce and pill in the 1960s and 1970s? Well, because the consequences of surprise pregnancies and bad marriages are even more difficult to handle when you have fewer resources for nannies and lawyers and income sources. Lynn's class interests happen to intersect

with the radical chic politics of the time and of today, so journalists are comfortable celebrating her, although with caveats. But when working class politics aren't quite as chic, today those same journalists and cultural gatekeepers don't believe working class voices should have any representation in corporate media. It gets messy, to borrow a word.

Now, support for abortion, for instance, declines with income and education. The same is true of same-sex marriage. Go on CNN and talk about why the media is corrupt and see if you're invited to cocktail parties. Speak out against feminism or extreme gender ideology and see what happens. In her video for Look What You Made Me Do, former country star Taylor Swift depicted people opposed to LGBT rights as literal toothless rubes. Like, she literally knocked the teeth out of the actors, mocking their class way more than their ideas. If you look at the pictures from that video, or go look at the video yourself, they are incredible. At the time, though, Pew found the cohort with the highest opposition to gay marriage was actually black Americans.

But Swift wanted to mock poor white people because it's easier right now. So speak out in favor of Black Lives Matter today, and the country music industry will celebrate you, as they did with Mickey Guyton. That's all well and good, but that wouldn't happen to someone who took the opposite position because, again, it's all about class at the end of the day. Gatekeepers hate Trump more than Bernie, but they hate both more than Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush. If your politics are acceptable to elites, you'll be just fine. If not, well, as Loretta Lynn might have said,

you're rated X. And that's a shame, because country music was one of the few places left in American culture where working class people were allowed to have a voice in the mainstream. Still better than other places, sure, and trucks and beer are great, but they're easy. Country music has a long political history. Some of it good and some of it bad, some of it progressive and some of it conservative.

But the legacy of doing less with more, of singing about an unfashionable lifestyle without shame, that's being left behind as Nashville becomes just as risk-averse and just as classist as the news industry, the entertainment industry, Silicon Valley, Washington, D.C., and Wall Street. Whether you like Trump or Bernie or Hillary or Jeb, that should concern you. The working class isn't a monolith. This is so much bigger than politics. This is about elites bulldozing American culture by rating everyone X if they subvert the dogma

of their educated betters in C-suites and newsrooms. It's not healthy, and it's not going to end well. So when you think of the coal miner's daughter, think about what she actually represented. Ryan, one of the things I really agree with the left on is the concept of representation. I think racial representation... Well, this has been a rare Wednesday edition of Counterpoints Friday. Yeah. Don't expect it. Right. Well, we're both planning on being out of town for what is being called Columbus Day Weekend or Indigenous Peoples Weekend. We were talking about this earlier.

Columbus, if anybody deserves to have his name stripped from a holiday, it's Columbus. He's a guy who, in his own time, people were like, that guy is awful. Like, that guy is really bad. Like, you know, some people, you know, end their lives in prison unjustly and are treated unfairly because they were just ahead of their time. Christopher Columbus was recognized in his own time for the absolute demon that he was. And yeah, I don't disagree with Christopher Columbus being an absolute demon. I do generally disagree with the idea of stripping all references to the absolute demons who often played big roles in building a country just because it's important that we look back, right, and that we confront some of this stuff honestly. Now, you know, there are good reasons for some of the reconstruction statues, for instance, my god in Richmond, some of that stuff, like by all means. I don't know.

I'm sort of ambivalent on the name Columbus. Maybe you can find a different Columbus. I think if you can keep names the same and just kind of reorient who it's honoring, like the high school in my neighborhood, Wilson High School, has been renamed to Thomas Reed or something like that. But it's so confusing because everybody thinks of it as Wilson. It's like, there's a million Wilsons. Pick another Wilson. Pick the volleyball. Pick another Wilson. Yeah. Ask Wilson if they'll just sponsor it. Yeah. And then you can tell that story. It's making a teachable moment to students. Tom Hanks can be the commencement speaker. It's still Wilson High School, but it's not that Wilson. It's this Wilson.

And here's why it's not. But it's still Wilson. No, but it's, yeah, I think telling the stories at least. And telling the stories in all the contexts that they need to have is important. So on that note, we wish everybody a long weekend. If you've got a long weekend, hope you enjoy it. Hope you enjoy the fall weather. And, you know, we'll be back on Friday as usual.

Part of the problem with doing it on Wednesday is that we don't instill the Pavlovian response that we want. It's sort of our conspiracy. Make people like, ooh, it's Friday. We're riding Emily. But Crystal and Sagar will be back as usual after the long weekend. We thank everybody for tuning in and we will see

you next Friday here on CounterPoints. This is an iHeart Podcast. you next Friday here on CounterPoints.