Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - Counter Points #6: Russian Attacks, China's Party Congress, Happiness Survey, Dark Money, & More!

Episode Date: October 17, 2022

Ryan and Emily fill in for Krystal and Saagar, covering the Russian drone attacks, China's party congress, Happiness in America, Trump's anti-semitism, Dem dark money, Pfizer censorship pressure, & turmoil in Haiti!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://theintercept.com/podcasts/deconstructed/ 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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Good Monday morning. Welcome back to CounterPoints. Breaking CounterPoints. Breaking CounterPoints. I'm Ryan Grim. My co-host here, Emily Jashinsky. Crystal and Sagar are out today. They will be back. We'll be here tomorrow. They'll be back after that. That's right. And we'll be then back here on Friday as usual. So you're getting a heavy dose of the CounterPoints crew this week. Right. You see this Friday in here. Right. It says Friday.

We're just putting the Friday there no matter what because Friday's fun. Yeah. We'll bring the Friday mentality to Monday and Tuesday, and then Crystal and Sagar can bring the Breaking Points mentality and just reassure everybody with their calming presence. There you go. Nothing to it. Well, it's a tough show today, particularly if you're in the Belgorod province of Russia, if you're in Kiev in Ukraine, the war has taken an uglier and uglier turn. So we have footage of these suicide drone strikes that may have been Iranian provided. We don't know. We'll learn more about this. But this is footage from Kiev that is getting just battered by these drone strikes, which are, and when we say suicide drone strikes, it obviously doesn't mean there's a pilot in there. What it means is that the drone itself becomes the missile.

So what's interesting, yeah, you can see the video here. According to Ukraine, three deaths so far just this morning. These drones have a range of about 1,250 miles. That's according to Insider. Think about that. What that means for Russia with these drones is they're able to bring them to Kiev, to Kiev, from pretty far away, which is a huge advantage. Then again, they are fairly easy to be shot down, from what I understand. And with a range, if it's a suicide drone, it doesn't need to get back. Right. Like that's the end of its mission. Exactly. And, you know, this could be bringing open like an entire new chapter of contemporary warfare because,

you know, 1,200 kilometers or 1,200 miles even, most cities in the world could be hit by something like this. Yes. That don't, you know, like you said, you can try to shoot them out of the sky if you see them coming, but seeing them coming is the challenge. And if you send enough, like some are going to get through, you could see these hitting anywhere basically inside of Russia. You could see them hitting anywhere inside of Ukraine, Europe, anywhere. And that's without launching these intercontinental ballistic missiles. Right. Yeah. The drones themselves are

obviously, I mean, the implications of this technology, especially in a confrontation like this one, a land war, are fairly incredible. Then again, if they're easy to shoot down, it depends on the state of the region that's being attacked, right? Because it's obviously going to be fairly easy for some people to get rid of that front. Right. And the context here is, as everybody who's been watching this closely knows, much of the eastern front of Russia's defenses have just been completely collapsing. With the southern front now facing real challenges, the mud season and the winter is a thing that Russia is hoping is going to lock this down, plus their 300,000 conscripts that they're ramming to the front lines. The additional context is the bridge in Crimea being struck and being put briefly out of, still out of commission as far as it seems, which then was followed by a massive kind of Putin retaliation on Ukrainian civilian infrastructure, hitting power plants, hitting civilian centers, killing dozens of people across Ukraine.

He slowed it down, said we've accomplished what we need to accomplish for now. The other thing that he accomplished, though, is he massively depleted the Russian missile supply because of sanctions and because the missile supply just take such a long time to stock, they are getting down to the bottom of the barrel of their, specifically of their precision missiles, but also of missiles in general. So now you see the Iranian regime supplying weapons, supplying drones, supplying missiles. Well, I was going to ask you about the implications of Iran potentially being involved here. The Ukrainian officials have said that these are Iran-made drones. As you mentioned, that's obviously difficult to confirm at this moment. It seems likely that's the case.

What are the implications of that? What does that mean going forward? Well, it's another own goal for U.S. foreign policy in a significant way, because it comes at the same time that you have Saudi Arabia kind of siding with Russia and reducing output, which drives up fuel prices, which then funds Russia's war effort. And so Chris Murphy said on CNN recently that he laid out in the most explicit way the actual kind of U.S.-Saudi relationship. He was like, look, since World War II, this has been the deal. We will overlook all the different stuff that you're doing. And in exchange, when the chips are down between us and Russia, you side with us and give us all your oil. Right.

And that has been the deal. It was just unusual to see a sitting senator who's high up in the Foreign Relations Committee just say, that is the deal. And he's like, you guys broke the deal. So we chose in this conflict in the Middle East between Saudi Arabia and Iran, we chose the Saudi side because we believe that that was in our national interest. Now, chips are down. Iranians are siding with the Russians. Saudis are siding with the Russians. And so, you know, 70 years of support of the most brutal authoritarians over the world doesn't even get you what your stated outcome was, let alone, you know, all of the kind of moral injury that comes with supporting Saudi

Arabia. There was a pivot away from Saudi Arabia under the Obama administration, where the Iran nuclear deal was a huge part of it. There is a world in which we have much closer ties to Iran. Iran has an actual functioning kind of cosmopolitan middle class that is deeply supportive of the United States. That, like, despite everything we have done to Iran, supportive of the United States. After 9-11, which the Saudis were involved in, there were massive candlelight vigils all over Iran. And you step back and you look at that, like, what side did we pick here and why? And so now, here we are, we've kind of jammed

the Iranians into a kind of forced alliance with Russia, which is, you know, coming back to bite us. And the drones, by the way, one of the things they can do is send just like a flock of them, essentially, to the point where it overwhelms. You can shoot down five and five go through. Yeah, exactly. And they explode upon impact. So basically those things can come over into Kiev. I mean, a civilian center. And it's a totally different ballgame. And the Iranian question here, Ryan, in this context, in this sort of immediate context of this week or this month or this moment in the war, assuming these are Iranian drones, what is the sort of chain of cause and effect? How did the Iranian drones end up getting from Russia into Ukraine? Russia is buying the drones from Iran and then from Russia sending them into Kiev.

And Russia is basically trading oil for these weapons. Right. And Iran is happy to do it. So Iran gets cheap gas. Right. Russia gets to replenish its stockpile here. That's the deal. And ultimately, and our friend of the show in Moscow, Yegor Kotkin, has made the point that this war now is no longer necessarily in Russia about Ukraine. Putin is

now fighting it for domestic purposes. So everything he's doing is now about managing kind of the fallout of the end, of the eventual end of the war. And so— The speech he gave just a couple of weeks ago was a very clear indication of that. Right. So he's punishing Ukraine right now in order to just get—in order to get the Russian people to say, okay, we see some successes here. You had a lot of the hardliners pleased with his week of bombing of civilian infrastructure, but then angry when he stopped and saying, well, what's the point? If you're not going to absolutely flatten them and send them back to the 9th century,

then what are you doing here? In other news on this front, there are U.S. intelligence officials who have relayed to the Washington Post recently that Iran has agreed to send more weapons to Russia that could include surface-to-surface missiles and more drones, we're told. So to your point, Ryan, that you made earlier is that we could really be looking here at a new chapter. Right. And they will eventually run out, though. Right.

Even the United States stockpiles, it turns out, can be drawn down significantly. And I don't think that you can just drone and missile Ukraine into submission. Right. No, absolutely not. I mean, if you look at what happened in World War II, London was bombed for years. Right. No, absolutely not. I mean, if you look at what happened in World War II, you know, London was bombed for years. Right. And they didn't one day finally say, okay, you know what, enough of that. We surrender. We're done. Like that's not how wars end in this era of total war. This is going to have to end with negotiations. Ukraine now is, aside from the Crimea strike, which we don't precisely know who carried that out, Ukraine was certainly celebrating it afterwards. We still don't have clear information on the Nord Stream.

Don't have information? Yeah, that's the other thing about this war, and all wars, really. But in the Belgorod region of Russia, you've had a couple of major developments as well that are changing the character of this war. And the first, and we have footage of this too, yes. So the shooting, and we'll go to the footage in a second. So this was a mass shooting carried out at a training center. Now, the Russian government has been explicit in trying to say that these were all recruits and volunteers. These are not draftees. They don't want the impression out there that these are people who have been conscripted into the war, and as soon as they get to the training center, start shooting people full metal jacket style. Now, take that

with a grain of salt. These very well could have been conscripts. What they're also saying is that these were Tajiki men, which plays into the kind of ethno-nationalism that is at the heart of Putinism, saying that these are kind of outsiders and others who are attacking the motherland or something along those lines. But what you have is at least 11. That's what they're admitting to. People, soldiers who were supposed to be getting trained and during a live fire drill, these two men just turned on everybody, just start blowing them away. So what was your reaction when you start?

Because, you know, ever see a mass shooting, you're like, oh, that's a United States story. Well, I mean, I want to ask you on that point what this says about, actually, you mentioned this just a couple of moments ago earlier, about Putin's sort of new messaging campaign for his own country about what this war is about, especially as he is having to rely on sending conscripts into war and kind of, you know, going to Iran, all of these different strategies. To you, what does this say about his ability to like really seriously carry that out? Which which I mean, clearly he sees that as a central aspect of his strategy, being able to muster this nationalism as a weapon, really, a massive weapon in terms of morale. There's a contradiction in it because he is relying on the kind of outer regions, the other ethnicities inside the Russian Federation,

to make up a disproportionate share, just like we do here in the United States, of his military. So he's trying to have it both ways, and it's not going to work. I think this mobilization is going to prove to be disastrous for him, because as has been talked about by a number of different commentaries, what was so successful for Putin over several decades of his rule was mass demobilization, was to make a contract with the Russian people that says there's going to be a significant level of security, stability, both economic and just crime.

And, you know, I'm going to cut down on crime. I'm going to cut down on economic insecurity. You're going to have pride in your country again. And in exchange, the deal is basically don't worry about politics. Like, don't run candidates against me. They'll be kicked off the ballot or they'll be jailed or they'll be killed. And then we'll be cool. Like that was the deal.

And so that is demobilization. And so to mobilize the entire country on behalf of what is now unmistakably a war, which he spent so many months saying is just a special military operation, then undoes the entire bargain that has kept him in power. You have to think, why did he call it a special military operation if he thought this was going to be popular? And one of the reasons is he wants it to be a sideshow. You can continue to be demobilized. Sit at home, put a Z on your door, support the war, support your country,

be a patriot. And that deal held for the first almost year, six months. He's obviously very capable of controlling the flow of information in the country, and that's been a buildup over the course of years. So when he feels that confident controlling the narrative, you know, we are denazifying Ukraine and the country is going to believe that. Who could be against that? It's a special military operation to denazify Ukraine. And now the speech just a couple of weeks ago he gave sort of broadened the scope of it though, and said, this is about the West. This is about us versus this rotting sort of ideology that is creeping onto our land from

the West. And that's what we're taking a stand against. So it is, you know, I feel like that was a broadening to an extent of the way he was willing to frame the war. And it's retconning the whole mission, too. Because you don't get to launch a war and then six months into it say that, actually, we're doing the war for this reason. Well, actually, it is a war. Right. And actually, it is a war. Although, you could argue that that has happened in the past.

So, if you take the U.S. Civil War, for instance. Sure. That was initially a war to preserve the Union. And Lincoln and the other Republican leaders were being very clear, this is not about ending slavery. But then in the cauldron of the war, it reshapes itself. I don't see any way that this comes across, though, as anything other than face-saving at this point. You can't lose a war and then start saying, well, actually, this is an existential war against Western civilization. You can if you control the flow of information in your country. It's much easier to make the claim that that's what's really happening. But controlling the flow of information is harder when things are happening inside your borders. Absolutely. Like the fact that they immediately acknowledged this mass shooting at this training center. And another thing going on inside their borders, we have footage of this Ukrainian strike in the Belgorod region. So this is, you know, for the first six months of the war-ish, Ukraine, you know, very much refrained from attacking, you know, inside Russian territory outside of, you know, forget who controls it, Donbass or Crimea.

Right, right, right. Inside what everybody understands to be Russia's borders. But here we have missile strikes hitting a civilian center, again, which is ugly. Because if you have civilian strike against civilian strike, they hit an airport. They hit a power utility. Yeah, it's that. Okay, so if you could connect the dots for us between the first thing we talked about, which is these potentially Iranian-made drones coming in from, you know, they have a range of something like 1,200 plus miles coming

into Kiev. What is the sort of connection between A and B there? What does it mean that we're seeing both of these things happen within the same time frame? Well, I think Russia is certainly going for kind of maximum pain on, you know, to inflict on Ukraine in order to, to pump up domestic support for the war to show that like this is, you know, we're still capable of raining destruction down on Ukraine. And the subtle implication is always, and we're holding back. Right. Like that's a central component of the Russian messaging, which is that we actually could be doing a lot worse to Ukraine than we are, and you should be grateful that we're not. And if we're forced to,

if we're backed into a corner, we will do much worse. And that's where the nuclear saber-rattling comes in, too. That's where it all comes down to, at the end of the day, the willingness to deploy, for instance, tactical nuclear weapons. And that's why, if you haven't watched Ryan's monologue from Friday about the dire urgent need for negotiations and our foreign policy establishment's disinterest in actually really meaningfully approaching the negotiating table, go take a look at that. It's really fantastic. And Ryan, this actually- I took a very courageous stand against nuclear war. It was really bold. I was surprised to hear Ryan coming out in favor of peace. Yeah, against annihilation and Armageddon. Right, yeah. The

destruction of the world. Controversial position here in Washington. It's controversial. Somebody's got to say it. Somebody had to do it, and you were willing to. You rose your hand and you said, I'll do it. Well, actually, that's probably a good transition point into the big news this week out of China, which is that their Congress, the party has opened a Congress, and this is where they will almost certainly, well, we could probably just say certainly, re-elect Xi Jinping to be chairman of the party. Now, this is from the Associated Press. Chinese leader Xi Jinping on Sunday called for faster military development and announced no change in policies that have strained relations with Washington and tightened the ruling Communist Party's control over society and the economy.

So that means, and by the way, the Wall Street Journal's editorial board came in also, I think this is from today, and said, the most important election in the world this year is no election at all, it's a coronation. This is when the CCP anoints President Xi Jinping for a third five-year term this week. It will confirm China's combination of aggressive nationalism and communist ideology that is the single biggest threat to world freedom. If Mr. Xi becomes convinced China has an advantage in hard power, he will find a moment to act against Taiwan or some other strategic interest. The journal continues, the U.S. must rally its confidence and resources and soon, if it doesn't want a world dominated by Xi Jinping thought.

Ryan, do you think that's, do you see in the comments that Xi Jinping made on Sunday and basically sort of putting that in the context of the Taiwan conflict that seems to be growing more urgent every single week, do you see that as being what's on the table or do you disagree with the journal there? I mean, they might be a little bit over the top on what China is actually kind of capable of and what Xi's ambitions really are.

But I think there is a line that he used in his speech that he's been touching on a bit for the last couple of years that a lot of China scholars see as really signaling where he sees China's place in the world. And the way he put it in this most recent speech was, at present, momentous changes of a like not seen in a century are accelerating across the world. So that's a play on a Qing Dynasty phrase that was used to describe the kind of collapse of Chinese hegemony. And it is embedded with the sense of humiliation that drove the kind of nationalism and populism that really fueled the Chinese Communist Party, because it was first and foremost a nationalist party. You're talking about Mao.

Right. It was kind of nationalist first and then communist second, I would argue, in its earliest incarnations. And the actual kind of people that were calling themselves nationalists, the Chiang Kai-shek's forces, were seen as kind of sellouts to Western imperialism. And that's really what helped give the CCP its advantage among Chinese people. And to this day, it still does. And so what he's been doing the last several years by redeploying this phrase is saying that the momentous changes not seen in a century are the decline of the West and the rise again of China. And he argues that the way to exploit this

is to invest heavily in the domestic industries, particularly in tech, and to rely on kind of the West's inability to think strategically for the long term. Like, he genuinely believes that polarization in particular, he has an analysis of political polarization that would fit in with all the pundits that you hear in the United States. And he says it just makes things completely dysfunctional here in the United States in particular, but also in other Western European states. You have leading Chinese communist scholars who love to point out the fact that there are things here in the United States that 80 plus percent of the public support.

They'll often talk about gun control and things like that, that can't even get close to getting passed in Congress. Like to them, a system where 80% of the people can support something, but the government cannot deliver on it is functionally broken and is fundamentally undemocratic. Like they believe that, not that they allow elections or anything like that, but that there is a closer connection to people there and policy than there is here. That here elites kind of have broken the democratic process, and elites actually kind of dictate policy for their own benefit, whereas— Against the interests of the people. Against the interests of the people. Against the interests of the people.

Right. So that's his argument for why the next century is going to be China's. And, you know, obviously it's important to note they actually do have this sort of expansionist mentality that you can see with Belt and Road. And that's a huge question. It was a huge question in the Cold War, obviously, in ways that we answered very poorly. But in the case of Xi Jinping, in the case of this 21st century, where they can actually sort of, one of the things they like to do is talk about the

kind of irredeemable natures of America. They like to make those arguments, right? They will take the sort of arguments of, you know, the, I don't mean this in a Clinton respect, the irredeemability of America in a historical respect, right? That it is fundamentally a poisonous country and a poisonous influence on the global stage. And that's an argument you can sort of implant, not just with money you spend on Belt and Road and, you know, bring into Africa or South America or the Middle East, wherever you're going. That's an argument you can make now on social media. It's an argument your diplomats can make. It's an argument that you can make with soft power through Hollywood, which we know that has been an ambition of theirs. So, Ryan, I'm also wondering, you know, this was a speech, Xi Jinping's speech on Sunday was a speech that was very heavy on bluster. Not unpredictably so. This makes a lot of sense. It's very heavy on bluster. What does that mean for his relationship with Vladimir Putin?

Because we were just talking about how Putin is in some ways being forced to scrape what feels like the bottom of the barrel. It may not be the bottom of the barrel, but in the moment it feels like it is the bottom of the barrel. Xi Jinping seems to be sort of displeased with the course of the war. We know that there has been some supportive relationship to an extent, but when Xi Jinping has got an economy that's, I think you could say, arguably slumping, he's not overseeing the best economy right now, but would like to undercut the West, would like to undercut the United States going forward, what do you think him going into this third term means for Putin, means for Ukraine? Well, I mean, we know that the Chinese approach so far to expansion has not been

to launch military invasions like that in general. Right. You know, their crackdowns are, internally, we know what their crackdown looks like in Western China. But as you talked about, with their attempt to kind of push their power, their severe of influence beyond China into the surrounding kind of Indo-Pacific countries, that's been done, you know, mostly financially. You know, trying to use, you know, they're trying to use the power of their economy as leverage over them. Right. And the same in Africa. That is a much different thing than sending troops in to occupy. Oh, of course.

If you have two types of imperialism, that's the much better kind of imperialism, that somebody's going to come in and build a road rather than blow up a road. You'd probably prefer that. Yes. But they run into problems, one, because there is so much corruption embedded in the system. All systems are rife with corruption. But the Chinese one has a particularly difficult time in rooting it out because people are telling everybody up above them what they want to hear. And just oftentimes just making up numbers because if you don't deliver the right, you're better off delivering good numbers than you are delivering honest numbers. And so a lot of these roads that they build are famous for collapsing within like three months.

It's just they pave a road somewhere in Africa and it's just absolutely just destroyed. Yeah, and they charge an incredible amount of money for it and put those countries into debt. Right, which is the old World Bank, IMF kind of strategy too. It's a classic. But that's backed up with the dollar

and with the American military. So you're trying to do it without that. It's a little tougher. Bold move. Right. So yeah, I think this is a huge story to watch this week. I know we'll continue to watch it. But three terms of Xi Jinping. We're getting into this pretty serious consolidation of power.

I mean, obviously that's always been there, but this is an era. This is the era of Xi Jinping, and it is an era of sort of soft power expansionism around the globe. And his economy right now, I think, is going to be a sticking point for him at least this year. And we'll see how he's able to turn around. But they're obviously still dealing with zero COVID problems, right? They have the zero COVID policy. Which he said he's sticking to. Sticking to zero COVID problems, right? They have the zero COVID policy. She said he's sticking to. Sticking to zero COVID. And there's, I think maybe some rumblings that this could crack his

support or his control over the Chinese people. But I don't think we've seen that prove to be the case in any situations. And in fact, when I've asked China experts, we've seen those videos out of Shanghai, for instance, of people protesting zero COVID in ways that are just difficult to watch. I mean, it's painful. Actually, they have made a very persuasive argument that that's good for Xi Jinping because it gives him an opportunity to exert his power, to flex his muscles. And instead of showing cracks in the foundation, what it shows is that he's able to easily just smooth over the cracks in the foundation.

I mean, the more outlets you have for dissent, then in some ways, the more stable your regime ultimately is. It's the regimes that have no outlets whatsoever that all of a sudden you think are completely solid and then they just collapse the next day. Right. that have no outlets whatsoever that all of a sudden you think are completely solid, and then they just collapse the next day. Right.

I think China's probably somewhere in the middle of those two, because there aren't that many outlets for people to protest in a way that can actually affect. But there's a lot of support also for zero COVID. Yeah. Otherwise, it's not as if there's no responsiveness whatsoever to public opinion. Right. Right. No. And it's obviously very, very difficult for us to gauge what public opinion is in China. It's extremely difficult and some of that is intentional. But this story and the way Xi Jinping sees himself and sees his country on the world stage has implications for the prices that we are paying right now. It has implications for the war.

It has implications for nuclear negotiations over the war in Ukraine. There's no question about it. And it has implications over our military, the way that we're addressing the war in Ukraine. It should heavily be influenced by the way we're thinking about the urgency of an invasion of Taiwan, where obviously a lot of semiconductors and other essential equipment is made. So what we're seeing from Xi Jinping this week is extremely, extremely relevant to what's happening here in Washington, D.C. and what happens, what trickles into the rest of our lives on a sort of immediate day-to-day basis. We know that with supply chains. We know that with pricing in general.

So just an important storyline to follow this week. Now, on that note, Ryan, last week was so packed with news. One of the stories we didn't get to. We wanted to talk about happiness. And a new survey released by, it was the 2022 American Family Survey. You combine that with a new poll from YouGov and Desiree News that found liberals are about 15 percentage points less likely to be, quote, completely satisfied with their lives. Ryan is laughing. This is from Unheard, Brad Wilcox, a great Brad Wilcox whose work you should follow. He says, quote, liberals, especially liberal women, are significantly less likely to be happy with their lives and satisfied with their mental health compared to their conservative peers aged 18 to 55. More from Brad, quote, the survey goes on to find that liberals are about 18 percentage points less likely to be completely satisfied with their mental health than conservatives, but the problem appears to be especially acute for liberal women

who register the lowest level of satisfaction with their lives and mental health. Indeed, only 15% of liberal women in the age group surveyed are completely satisfied with their lives, compared to 31% of conservative women. Likewise, only 15% of liberal women are completely satisfied with their mental health, compared to 36% of conservative women. This is incredibly loaded data because it depends on how you define terms like complete and satisfied and then the combination of them being completely satisfied. It depends on how you define mental health

and your own satisfaction with mental health. What does that look like? So if you believe mental health is sort of a more pressing daily problem that needs to be addressed, as many people on the left probably do, then you may be less likely just to be completely satisfied with your mental health, even if you're mentally healthy. So this is like a very, very loaded sort of series of questions. And there are a lot of variables to parse here. That said, when you're able to see gaps, there's something there. What do you

make of it, Ryan? I mean, one thing off the top I would say is that liberals are more likely to have college degrees, more likely to have graduate degrees. People with college degrees and graduate degrees are more likely to be the types of people who are going to actually something to death or nitpick the kind of definition of it. And so if you say to somebody like that, are you completely satisfied? They're going to overthink it in a way. They're completely satisfied and they'll have some philosophical rationale. Is anyone ever completely satisfied? If I say that I'm completely satisfied, does that mean that I have no aspirational satisfaction in the future? So I can see a non-trivial number of liberals just obnoxiously quibbling with and overthinking the question and then refusing to take part.

Some are going to do the not sure or just going, they're just going to refuse to participate in something that takes something as nuanced as the meaning of life and tries to chunk it into a single polling question. And so they're going to be gone from that number. Where I think on the conservative side, you just

get more people that are like, yeah, completely satisfied. Sure, things are good. Yeah. Google's won are good. Yeah. So Brad does a lot of really interesting work. And he's the author of the Unheard article on marriage and children and the way that they do create some measure of what you could call satisfaction in people's lives. And his theory in the Unheard article is that liberals are clearly less likely to be married and less likely to have children. And that is eating away at their ability to come to that answer that, yes, I'm completely satisfied with my life. Women, the Institute for Family Studies, Lyman Stone over there has done some really interesting research on how American women are actually having fewer children than they say they want to, which is an interesting point. And we know that as the marriage rate has gone up, that's also becoming an issue for women

in terms of whether they're able to enter into that institution. And there's a lot of actually research correlated that shows a correlation between marriage and happiness. Now, children is another question. There's some research that shows in certain periods of parenthood, happiness is not at its peak. So there's sort of a different question there. But Ryan, I wanted to ask you, one thing we see, especially in sort of urban areas, you actually have a long marriage and a lot of kids. I do. That's not super common on the left.

Do people look at you like you're a freak? I mean, sometimes. Yeah. What are you doing, man? Yeah, a little bit. Especially among millennials. I mean, especially in the younger left. Sure. Yeah, a little bit. Right, right. You have to have explanations. What is your explanation?

I don't really want to get into all the explanations. Kids are fun. But you kind of need them. Then it's like to get into all the explanations. Kids are fun. But you kind of need them. Then it's like, oh, okay, okay. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah. But I think another potential piece of this, because I was trying to think how I would answer this. Yeah.

Another potential piece of it could be liberal guilt about the state of the world. Yeah, absolutely. So if you asked me in my personal life how I would answer this, I would say completely satisfied. But then I would immediately feel guilty for saying that because— I can't be happy. The world is such a miserable place right now. So how dare I? Because my satisfaction has to also be connected to other people in the world.

We're social beings. If one person isn't free, then nobody's free, that kind of approach. So if one person isn't satisfied, nobody's satisfied. And so for a lot of liberals, they really aren't satisfied unless they feel like the world is moving in a positive direction, because they feel a responsibility for the rest of the world. Where I think conservatives probably have what is a mentally healthier way of approaching it, which is to say, I'm looking out for me and my family and the rest of you are kind of on your own and it's not my responsibility and it's not my burden to worry about that. I don't think they would say it's not their responsibility or their burden so much as they would say that it's the sort of immediate question of satisfaction and happiness is one that they have to. And not that they don't continue to do charity.

There's research that shows conservatives tend to be more philanthropic and more charitable. But that the question of happiness is not one that they can control for other people. You can sort of do different things, but not necessarily be able to control other people. That said, the mental health question is a really interesting one. I think there's some pretty convincing and persuasive research that social media use, which is increasing for a lot of different reasons, one of which it depends on how you kind of define social media,, which is increasing for a lot of different reasons, one of which, it depends on how you kind of define social media, but even things like Gmail. We are all using these apps on our smartphones and on laptops more and more and more.

And if those are demonstrated to show a decline in mental health, if you are more likely to be educated, you're more likely to be, the more educated you are, the more likely you are to be liberal. And that means you're probably more likely to have educated, you're more likely to be, the more educated you are, the more likely you are to be liberal. And that means you're probably more likely to have a laptop job and, or Zoom, so being what we would now post COVID called the Zoom class, which means you may be more likely to spend time on social media, on your smartphone and working. And that I can see very much being correlated with dips in mental health, especially compared with people who are more likely to be doing manual labor, people who have kids to worry about and can't necessarily, can actually have a good excuse to put the phone down going forward. So, yeah, I mean, it's a difficult thing to sort of parse out. I do think there's really something to this question of mental health and lifestyle that is hitting the left harder than it's hitting the right at the moment, given the way the sort of working world is organized. This is a deeply disturbing number, 15% of liberal women saying they're completely satisfied with their mental health. That's a really small number.

It's a really small number. The 21% for liberal men is not a whole lot better, but 15 is just brutal. It's interesting that you're more than doubling it when you get to the question of conservatives as well. And so, yes. It's still only a third of people. Only a third, right. But the fact that it's more than double based on ideology is striking. And again, it's something that I don't think trickles into the political discourse at all. You hear a little bit of it from actually AOC, who talks about, you know, this sort of, I think she kind of channels the sense of like millennial misery in ways that you don't have a lot of figures on the right. Other than maybe Trump, who talks about American carnage and that sort of language, or speaks in that sort of language, is tapping into.

I think it's Marianne Williamson who talks about this idea that if you look at birth rates or people not wanting to have children, what does that say about the mindset and the mental health, frankly, of people going forward as well? And so, yeah, these are really big questions. I don't think they're questions that our politics is super focused on addressing. I know you would agree with me on that. We would have different ways of addressing it. But yes, we'll see what happens in the future. But interesting numbers. And I would encourage certainly any politicians who might be watching this to pay attention to that because the country can be going into some really dark places when you have people in abject misery, basically. Speaking of unhappy people, right?

That's right. And speaking of the political consequences of unhappiness, Donald Trump is, I always want to say tweeting, but truth socialing. Truth socialing. We have this post that we can put up because I actually want to read it. This is from the former president of the United States. He truth socialed this over the weekend. No president has done more for Israel than I have, Trump said. Surprisingly, however, our wonderful evangelicals are far more appreciative of this than the people of the Jewish faith, especially those living in the U.S.

Those living in Israel, though, are a different story. Highest approval rating in the world could easily be PM. U.S. Jews have to get their act together and appreciate what they have in Israel before it's too late. That's what he true socialed. And it's just, of all of the posts from Donald Trump on social media, there are a lot of bad ones. This is up there with the worst. Yeah, they need to get their act together, huh? Before it's too late.

Yeah, this is Donald Trump. Also, says he would be prime minister of Israel, unless it was stolen from him, I'm sure. Right, right, right. It's straight up anti-Semitic. Fully. Straight up, full on anti-Semitic, that he's done so much for these ungrateful people. It's just, it's horrifying. And he's classifying it based, I mean, it's the question of anti-Semitism, an interesting one,

but he's classifying it based on whether you're an American Jew or an Israeli Jew, which is just wildly inappropriate as a former president to attribute characteristics to people like that, as this sort of bulk characterization of American Jews and Israeli Jews. Obviously, he doesn't have overwhelming support from Jewish voters in the United States. He's never been on the ballot in Israel. I mean, it's just a ridiculous thing to get into. Right. I guess I don't even know where to start with a guy like this. So it's hard to be surprised by something that Donald Trump says.

I think the bigger surprise, perhaps, and maybe this shouldn't be surprising either. I'm curious for your take on this. There hasn't been much. How much reaction have you seen on the right? Not much. Yeah. To allow this to just stand. You know, if Ilhan Omar says, you know, if she says something or Rashida Tlaib says that, you know, you can't be both progressive and support Israel's apartheid government.

Everybody loses their mind on her. He says this, and it just gets a complete pass. I did see a lot of people on the right. I think there was the combination over the weekend of Kanye West going on that podcast and talking about— How he out-anti-Semitic-ed Trump. Easily. I mean, what was coming out of his mouth was incredible. Not entirely surprising, but incredible from somebody with the level of celebrity that he has. I mean, you've heard it from Ice Cube and Nick Cannon before, but the level of celebrity that Kanye West has to be

giving such a high-profile platform for these arguments to find such a high-profile platform in Kanye West. And he's buying Parler. Did you see this? Yeah. That's actually new today that he's agreed to buy Parler for some reason. And whether that becomes a sort of Elon Musk, like back and forth with Twitter is a different question. But this is, I did see some concern sort of with a combination of those things, you know, stepping in and saying this is, and Trump is interesting because the guy has, his beloved daughter is Jewish and he has Jewish grandchildren. And so I don't know that this is necessarily motivated by some sort of like racial animus, but it is anti-Semitic in the respect that it's the sort of bulk characterization of people

by nationality, ethnicity, religion. That's just inappropriate, period. It's the sort of bulk characterization of people by nationality, ethnicity, religion. That's just inappropriate, period. It's just completely inappropriate. And then to add it with before it's too late. Listen, I know what he's getting at, I think. I think he's getting at this question of the country, right? The country before it's too late to sort of rescue your country, your great country. But it's just not a way for a world leader to express themselves to a historically

marginalized community that in the memory of people still alive today have been systematically genocided on a mass scale. I mean, it's just a wildly insensitive and inappropriate thing to do. And I mean, we all know how Donald Trump talks. And there are instances with the media runs away with what he's saying and goes in different directions. I mean, actually, one of them I thought was the recent one about Mitch McConnell and Elaine Chao. He said something that was interpreted as a threat by the media that I didn't think actually was a threat. I think it was pretty obvious. Again, he was talking about the country itself.

That said, it's just whenever he strays into this territory, it's a reminder of just how bizarre the last, what, since 2015, since he started running, how bizarre and how our standards continue to just shift in ways that speak to a desperation for change, for something. And this is also coming on the heels of this. Do you see the news in Maggie Haberman's book about Sheldon Adelson basically paying to move the embassy to Jerusalem? Yeah. I followed it a little bit, but what did Maggie report? Basically that Adelson used a $20 million donation to a super PAC to pressure Trump. This is from Eli Clifton, his write-up in Responsible Statecraft. Sheldon Adelson used a $20 million donation to a super PAC to pressure then-President Donald Trump

to adopt the highly controversial decision to move the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Israel. That quid pro quo is described in Haberman's new book, Confidence Man. Adelson's singular focus was Israel, wrote Haberman, effectively acknowledging the foreign president's biggest funder was most interested in promoting the interests of a foreign country. In Trump, he saw a chance of enacting change in American policy toward Israel and gave $20 million to a super PAC working to elect him as a candidate Trump run. Anyway, so basically that $20 million exchanged hands in order to pressure Trump to move the embassy. Trump talks about having moved that embassy to Jerusalem all the time.

Why? It was in that embassy to Jerusalem all the time. Right. It was in that post even, right? Yeah. What did you make of his reference to evangelicals? Because it's clear he has contempt for American Jewish people in this tweet. He also has contempt for most people. And it seemed to be kind of contemptuous too. He still just doesn't understand these evangelicals.

He's like, somewhat surprisingly, they seem more excited about me moving the embassy. Well, and that's what I think is really interesting when we're talking about this question of shifting standards, right? So to your question of why there's a freakout on the right about a Trump tweet like this? And I think the answer is because American evangelicals, you know, they signed a statement in the late 90s about how character is an essential part of a politician that evangelicals should support. And we remember what happened with Bill Clinton and evangelicals. But why is that not reflected when you see a tweet like this from Donald Trump? Well, it's because people feel so desperate. Times feel so dire.

And I think for good reason people feel like times are dire and times are desperate and urgent that Donald Trump is this imperfect vessel for a policy that is desperately needed and craved by the evangelical community. And again, I think for some really good reasons. People do feel like they're in dire straits. And again, that's reasonable to some extent, whether or not the decision to support Donald Trump's very, very, what's the word I'm looking for, just very utilitarian relationship with the evangelical community. Both sides know, right? And there are some people, you get your Paula Weitz of the world, there are some people who have bought into Trump and are close to Trump and really genuinely love Donald Trump. On the other hand, there are a whole lot of people that sort of know what's going on here. This is a transactional relationship

where he will advance policies like moving the embassy, for instance, that are good for the evangelical cause. Thus, it's fine. You can talk about evangelicals in bulk and talk about them in this very transactional way, in the same way that you're talking about American Jews and Israeli Jews. That's how I think Donald Trump, it's the mind of Donald Trump as a politician. It's like people, you're selling products to people. They're just pure consumers. They are these transactional, you have transactional relationships with them. And that's how a lot of this is like gets to a central question of Trump isn't like, that's how politicians see you, period. Donald Trump is just talks about it in a way that makes it really obvious but that's how a whole lot

of politicians see you anyway well charges of anti-semitism gets cynically weaponized so much in our politics that it is striking to see actual genuine anti-semitism on display from Trump here from Kanye West I mean that was so Kanye West is one thing, but from the former president of the United States. To say things like, before it's too late, without explaining what you mean in the context of a tweet about ungrateful Jews, it's just like bizarre. But again, I think it speaks to this sort of naked calculus of Trumpism, which is that he's not hiding the fact that this is transactional, that he sees you as someone who's going to get a benefit out of this. And that's why the Sheldon Adelson story, I think, is interesting and a relevant sort of journalistic inquiry. Like his pitch to black voters in 2016. It's exactly like that. What do you have to lose?

It's exactly like that, right? He's selling a product. And again, that's how most politicians see us. But he doesn't hide it really as much. And that's another, with the Sheldon Adelson thing, the money aspect of it is interesting. But I also think Donald Trump could be convinced without money to do that. I think that there were a lot of people who saw him as, they had their own transactional relationships with him in the administration and saw him as like the vessel for these policies. And he could have been persuaded and to negotiate that anyway. So. He'll take the money. Yeah. Well. Ryan. Speaking of Israel. Yes. Speaking of Israel, what point do you want to make today? So in May of 2021, in the midst of the Gaza War, protests were held around the country.

In Orlando, anti-war activists assembled downtown for a rally and a march and were joined by Maxwell Frost, an organizer who later went on to win the Democratic nomination for the area's congressional seat. It's a heavily blue seat, so he's heading to Congress. Here he is. And like I said, the last thing I'm going to say again, and y'all are going to hear me say this over and over again, we have to demand, not us, we have to demand that all of the years see the world through the eyes of the most vulnerable and use that all to make every goddamn decision they ever make. Thank you. Frost was an active member of the group that organized that march, Florida Palestine Network, and once he started his run for Congress, according to multiple sources I spoke to for a story just published in The Intercept, AIPAC and an allied organization, Democratic Majority for Israel, took extreme interest in his pro-Palestinian activism. In January, DMFI endorsed his opponent,

Randolph Bracey, who expected to get big money spent on the outside to support him. But that money never came. Over the ensuing months, Frost, according to sources on his campaign, worked hard to moderate his position on Israel-Palestine in order to keep that big money in the big money pro-Israel groups from spending him into the ground. He also landed his own super PAC support from crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, whose super PAC Protect Our Future spent a million dollars on his behalf. By the end of the campaign, Frost had significantly evolved his position. He had begun as a supporter of BDS, which stands for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions, and is a movement that

tries to pressure Israel to end its settlement activity and its occupation of Palestinian territory. He ended by severely criticizing BDS as, quote, extremely problematic. Quote, I believe that the Boycott, Sanctions, and Divestment movement is extremely problematic and undermines the chances of peace and a two-state solution. Additionally, it hurts both Palestinians and Israelis who suffer economically from it. Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine have been designated by the United States as terrorist organizations, and all these groups are a part of the central BDS movement's council, he said, which in my eye delegitimizes the entire organization and movement, unquote.

He started out opposing military aid to Israel and finished saying he was fully supportive of the 10-year military spending plan laid out by Obama and continued by Trump and Biden. And DMFI and AIPAC decided not to spend against him. I was told by a source with direct knowledge of the situation that his new position is what persuaded them to stay out. But this isn't really a story about one candidate who changed position during a campaign. That happens a lot. It's about how a handful of mega-rich donors operating through super PACs can now often dictate who can win competitive primaries in ways that are fundamentally different from just a few election cycles ago. Now, depending on where you date it, whether it's Ned Lamont and Donna Edwards back in 2006, or the first Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016,

or the rise of the Squad and Justice Democrats in 2018, there's been an insurgency brewing on the left flank of the Democratic Party that has legitimately reshaped its politics and also briefly threatened to fully take over the party. That didn't happen in the 2020 presidential campaign, but the progressive wing continued to make major gains and did significantly shape Biden's legislative agenda in 2021 and 22. They didn't get everything they wanted, of course, but the answer to that was to come back and primary some of the worst Democrats, build power, and then push harder.

It worked in some cases. Jamie McLeod Skinner in Oregon overcame millions of dollars spent against her to beat Kurt Schrader, who was a blue dog leader and was central in the effort to tank Build Back Better. But in many of the critical races, the candidates or organizations backing them ran up against an obstacle they hadn't fully seen coming. A flood of money from private equity executives, hedge fund barons, and other titans of industry organizing their efforts through those super PACs that say American policy toward Israel is their primary purpose. They were also joined by a tech billionaire, Reid Hoffman, and that

crypto billionaire, Bankman Freed, in many of the races that they played in, and they have fundamentally reshaped how primaries are contested and what is possible for the progressive wing of the party. In doing so, they give us is possible for the progressive wing of the party. In doing so, they give us a look at the real harvest of the Citizens United seeds that were planted back in 2010. These big money groups may be able to cut progressive candidates off at the knees, but their victories are artificial. The energy that had fueled those progressive candidates doesn't just go away, it just goes somewhere else. Where it goes, we don't exactly know. But anytime we eliminate the potential for people to productively express their anger or their hopes through legitimate democratic processes, bad things happen. So my last super

long piece for The Intercept, which is called Elephant in the Zoom, came out in mid-June. And I hope to be able to do more of these every few months. That one, which was about meltdowns within progressive institutions and nonprofits, had as its backdrop the fraught debate over cancel culture. This new piece is set against that same backdrop. Despite all the protestations of the right about restrictions on speech, the fastest way to get canceled in America remains to step out of the bipartisan consensus around our policy toward Israel. Witness the recent censoring and firing of Katie Halper by Hill TV. All of these groups, both crypto and pro-Israel, have since quit spending on behalf of Democrats in the general election because they don't really care if Democrats or Republicans are in the majority, if they can spend heavily in primaries

to make sure both parties embrace their agenda. That's not a real democracy or even a republic. Yeah, Emily, having covered Democratic primaries. What about you? What points do you want to make? What point do I want to make? I'm trying to make it happen like Gretchen Wieners. So new emails show a Pfizer board member complaining to Twitter about a journalist. Alex Berenson, the journalist in question, obtained internal Twitter emails as part of his federal lawsuit against the company for banning him. Now, the platform settled in July and restored his account, but Berenson released a particularly telling message in a Substack post last Thursday. Now, you probably know the Pfizer board member who sent that message. It was none

other than Scott Gottlieb, Trump's former FDA commissioner, who became a go-to source for media during the pandemic and a fixture of the broadcast coverage. Here's what Gottlieb sent to someone at Twitter. Quote, this is what's promoted on Twitter. This is why Tony needs a security detail, he wrote in August of 2021, forwarding a Berenson article posted earlier that day on the, quote, arrogance of Anthony Fauci. Now, Twitter banned Berenson just four days later over alleged COVID disinformation, four days after getting that email from a Pfizer board member. Gottlieb, by his own admission, informally advised the Biden administration during the pandemic. Andy Slavitt, at the time a senior advisor in the Biden administration,

pressured Twitter to do something about Berenson as well. Berenson went on Tucker Carlson's show last week to discuss the new evidence surrounding his ban, but to me, what's less interesting than the timing of Berenson's ban is just the existence of Gottlieb's email. Here we have Scott Gottlieb, who held high-level positions in George W. Bush's FDA before heading it up under Trump, taking it upon himself to email Twitter about Berenson, a former New York Times reporter who happened to be skeptical of the vaccines. private partnership on COVID is aging better with every passing day. When his book came out about a year ago, he was totally game to explore his own mistakes over the course of the pandemic on my podcast, which I respected immensely, and we don't even pay his salary. Now try getting that out of

Fauci in any meaningful way. But the arrogance Berenson wrote about makes perfect sense when you think about it. Gottlieb had the audacity to join Pfizer's board less than three months after leaving the FDA in 2019. Trump had the audacity to nominate him for the FDA post after Gottlieb sat on the product investment board of GlaxoSmithKline, worked at a venture capital firm that invested in pharmaceuticals, and made hundreds of thousands of dollars from drug companies for consulting and speaking fees just from 2013 to 2016. Now, whatever you make of the vaccines, Gottlieb made hundreds of thousands of dollars from Pfizer while promoting their product to the media during the pandemic. And that's whose interests he represented, even if unofficially,

when he contacted Twitter about Berenson. So there you have it, a revolving door bureaucrat trying to pressure a major corporation to cut off a journalist's access to its massive speech platform and doing it over email, seemingly unbothered by the possibility his conduct might someday be exposed. Indeed, people of this mindset are proud to police the discourse. We know this because the White House openly boasted about flagging disinformation on Facebook. The Biden campaign openly encouraged social media to censor the New York Post story on Hunter Biden. Gottlieb was asked, actually, about his email on CNBC. His response is tellingly nonsensical. Quote, respectful debate and dialogue

is one thing and should be encouraged and protected, Gottlieb tweeted after the hit on CNBC. He continued, but there's no place for targeted harassment and misleading dialogue, which can instigate a small but persuadable group of people to make targeted and dangerous threats. Of course, Berenson made no threats. Gottlieb is arguing that what he defines as, quote, misleading dialogue from Berenson could have instigated people. But banking one person's definition of, but having one person's definition of, quote, misleading dialogue become something that is used to squelch, quote, respectful debate because it cuts against powerful interests actually leaves no room for that respectful debate Gottlieb purports

he wants to have. So this isn't just culture war fear-mongering either. This new mentality dominates big business, big media, and big government, meaning it directly affects the decisions that we make as consumers and voters and parents and children every single day of our lives because it affects the information we rely on to make those decisions. Whether it's about getting boosted or how to make financial decisions or what, for instance, abortion laws are in your state, powerful interests are using the boogeyman of disinformation, as Gottlieb did, as a tool to discourage disagreement, pushing it outside the mainstream altogether, and even silencing it.

Funnily enough, when I interned at a conservative think tank in college, Scott Gottlieb's office was right across from my desk. He was always really nice and really friendly, and that's true of a lot of people with bad ideas, of course, and it's why corporate networks gravitate towards relatable personalities like him. But it's also kind of a good window into the mindset of a technocrat, someone who sees themselves as one of our benevolent betters, who can fly from building to building like an intellectual superman rescuing people from the ravages of skepticism. The concentrated power of Silicon Valley is a new tool in the technocrats' arsenal. With emails or calls to just two or three companies,

they can easily exert pressure or control over massive information pipelines to tens of millions of people. If they weren't also so cozy with the press, there would be a disincentive to meddle in those companies' business inappropriately for fear of being exposed. But the media cheerleads that collusion now under the same technocratic mentality that the public needs protection from ideas that challenge elite dogma. Legitimate disinformation is an opportunity to show your work. Sometimes that's easier than others, but when people don't want to show their work at all, we should be very suspicious. This isn't just some abstract debate for pundits to wax on about. This mentality is hurting us on a daily basis. An easy way out is simply for the media to start stigmatizing this kind of conduct from people in big government and big business,

discouraging them from doing it again. But our current media cheerleads it, so we're probably a long way from any improvement. It should be really embarrassing for Scott Gottlieb as a Pfizer board member to... UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has proposed sending troops to Haiti, an international occupation essentially of the Haitian island. And we put this up here, the U.S. authorities are apparently leaning towards backing this occupation or this troop presence being sent on to Haiti. At the same time, the island, and this is what this is in response to, the island has been facing weeks of protests against economic conditions and political gridlock and corruption in the country.

So we're going to be joined to talk about the latest on this by Ambassador Dan Foote, who was the envoy to Haiti up until fairly recently when he publicly resigned in protest over the Biden administration's policy toward Haiti. So first of all, Ambassador Foote, thank you so much for joining us here. Good morning. It's great to be with you, Ryan. Thanks. And so Haiti doesn't get a whole lot of coverage in the American press. And in fact, it was occurring to me recently that when we had a day or two of a few hundred or maybe more than a thousand people take to the streets of Havana, it led to kind of a week of coverage here in the United States. Will the regime over there fall?

And then they petered out and kind of they were quickly memory hold. But you have had weeks of just absolutely massive protests in Haiti without a peep here in the United States. What do you think accounts for the different approach that American media and public takes towards these two islands? I think part of it is Haiti has been through this a number of times, and the U.S. public has become a little bit inured against the disaster in Haiti. Also, I believe over time that there's a little bit of a racism thing where an island of 12 million, half an island of 12 million black people seems to get less coverage in the United States than other places

with dissimilar demographics. Yeah, and again, as Ryan mentioned, you resigned ambassador. And one thing that I think didn't get a lot of play in the news cycle, I mean, a shockingly little amount of play in the news cycle, is a report from Todd Bensman recently based on things that you have said in the New York Post about how the relationship between Ariel Henry and the United States is based on his willingness to actually accept these migrants that are being deported from the United States back to Haiti, which is a huge deterrent. I've talked to the Haitian migrants at the border who don't want to cross illegally because they haven't lived in Haiti for years. They've lived in Argentina, Venezuela, and Brazil. So could you tell us a little bit more, Ambassador, about that decision you made to resign from the administration? What motivated that? What factors were behind that decision? The deportations were the straw that broke the camel's back because, A, it's completely

counterproductive to our goal of re-stabilizing Haiti and rejuvenating democracy and security and things of that nature. But the major reason I resigned is because I saw U.S. policy moving in exactly this direction, toward intervention, which is, as Einstein said, and I'll paraphrase, trying the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is insanity. And in Haiti, each time the international community has intervened without Haitian popular support, the situation is stabilized temporarily and then it becomes much worse over time. So since 94, we've intervened three times, arguably, I guess, and each time Haiti has gotten much worse to the point now where I can't even believe that Haiti's in this hemisphere.

It is similar to Somalia or Afghanistan. The quality of life and the tragedy that these people see, the hunger, the poverty, the violence, is similar to the most conflict-based places on the planet right now. And so in the July of 2021, Joven of Moise. As somebody who was watching this closely, what's your view on how that all unfolded? Well, first of all, when President Moise was assassinated, the acting prime minister at the time, a gentleman named Claude Joseph, stepped forward. The Haitian constitution sort of broke because of COVID and the fact that they don't have a parliament,

which expired. Ten days later, the United States, the UN and the international community, via press release, told the world that it would now work with Ariel Henry as the prime minister of Haiti, completely catching all Haitians off guard. They all found him to be completely illegitimate. Now when you go to the assassination, there are a number of ties between de facto Prime Minister Ariel Henry and actors in the assassination, including a gentleman, Joseph Badiou, who is believed to be the intellectual author of the assassination, including 12 phone calls right around the time of the assassination.

Ariel Henry has never answered me, you, the U.S. government, the Haitian people. He's just ignored that. And he's certainly guilty of obstructing justice. If you look at the number of judges that he's fired and the obstacles he's put up in the Haitian justice system to look towards the assassination. So he hasn't worked for justice towards the assassination. He hasn't answered the questions and the implications. And I'm flabbergasted that the United States continues to back the guy without being certain that he had nothing to do with the assassination of a Haiti status state. And it's better. unrest that people are seeing now in headlines, although not probably as many headlines as they should, is stemming from the humanitarian crisis related to food, fuel prices related to poverty, cost of living. Can you tell us a little bit more about the policy from Henri towards fuel,

the policy that he's taken and how it may have sparked protests that started about fuel and then became so much bigger to the point where the New York Times is calling this, quote, a low-intensity civil war. What is Henri doing and what could he be doing that would perhaps quell some of this? So since he was installed in July of last year, 2021, Ariel Henry has done very little to appease the population, to improve conditions, security or otherwise. And he has ties to the gangs down there. And he has had some frustrating relationships with the gangs, but he's still related to them.

As he lifted subsidies on fuel in Haiti recently, the price of gas rose to about $20 a gallon on the streets of Port-au-Prince. So people can't afford to go to the store, to go to the doctor, to go anywhere. Hospitals don't have fuel. And as a result, the people have come out in force to protest, which is in Haiti the only way for them to let their voices be heard. And the international community typically is taking a page from our historical playbook and blaming the riots, not on popular dissentent with an illegitimate, ineffective, and possibly assassin-acting prime minister,

but they blame the oligarchs and economic factions for paying the people to protest. These people are desperate. They're angry. They're not being paid to protest. They want a better life and they want it without Ariel Henry. And if the United States and the internationals go in with military force to take on the gangs, they will be supporting Ariel Henry, who's becoming more dictatorial by the day. So at the top of this segment, I was kind of struggling to find the right terms to use to describe kind of an armed intervention in Haiti by the international community. So can you

talk about what is being proposed by the UN and apparently backed by the United States here and what the history of such armed interventions has been over the last couple decades there? Without being privy to the details of what's going on in New York right now, Ryan, let's go back to the peacekeeping operation that grew out of the 2004 intervention, which was called MINUSTA in Haiti. I won't go into the French acronym because my French is horrible. But MINUSTA was on the streets of multinational force for over 20 years in Haiti.

I first experienced it in the wake of the earthquake, and then in the two years after the earthquake. And at the time, gangs were a problem in Haiti, particularly Cité Soleil. And MINUSTA went in there and took on the gangs. But I actually talked to a general in Minusta who told me about back in 2004 when he was a major, them going into the slums of Haiti and not being able to tell the good guys from the bad guys

and just sort of like taking care of business and let God sort them out. So a minoos to post-earthquake brought cholera back to Haiti after 100 years without being in that part of the island. So Haitians are not pleased about that. There were huge problems with sexual exploitation by the peacekeepers, and at the end of the day, extrajudicial killings and other allegations. And Haiti didn't get that much better. So an international force will go in. I think that the goal will be a quick strike against some of these gangs.

But we have really limited intelligence on the gangs. And the problem in Haiti historically with foreign interventions is that we have great difficulty differentiating the gangs, the bad people in Haiti, from the innocent civilians who are protesting for a better life. And I fear you send troops in to support a dictator, Ariel Henry, and it could turn into a bloodbath. Yeah, and I want to ask you, Ambassador, about what, more specifically, a bloodbath could look like in Haiti, because we know already there are problems with hunger.

There are obviously immense problems with violence. So going forward, say there is military intervention from the UN, from the US, or say there isn't, because either way, the consequences for Haiti are immediately dire. Either way, there's immense suffering on the horizon. So what is the future, the immediate future for Haiti in either circumstance? Well, the future or the current situation is certainly dire. And it has been for a year. It continues to get worse, but we've ignored it for a year, despite the fact that the U.S. administration was told pretty clearly in my resignation letter what would happen in Haiti if we continued with our policies, and it will continue to get worse. The underlying issue is the Haitians believe

that they have a solution, and the U.S. and internationals have never let the Haitians come up with their own socio-political solutions. So we are always supporting unpopular ideas when we go in with a military intervention. If the United States stops ignoring Haiti's civil society and opposition political folks who came up with a consensus agreement to have a provisional transitional government to restore security and help create the conditions where acceptable elections, credible elections can be held, then I believe Haiti has a chance to move forward in the right direction. If we go in to back Ariel Henry, the de facto prime minister, with the difficulty we have differentiating between adversaries and innocents in Haiti,

I believe that the Haitian people are going to not take kindly to that, and we may wind up fighting the Haitian people who believe that we're supporting a dictator who's not in their interest. And is the U.S. not supporting a Haitian driven solution because they rely on having Ariel Henry in there so that the Biden administration can continue its deportation policy? That's my best guess, Ryan. It's almost unfathomable that all Haitians are calling for a different solution, yet the U.S. and the U.N. and internationals are blindly stumbling through with Ariel Henry. It's got to be because he has promised to be compliant.

But we're going to have a civil uprising in Haiti similar to 1915 when we sent the Marines in for the first time and administered Haiti for almost 20 years. In 1950, 15 Haiti was in a similar position and they went up to the French embassy at the time or the legation and they dragged the president, President Sam out and they tore him limb from limb on the streets. And I fear that you're going to see something similar with Ariel Henry or with a foreign force that's sent in there to propagate his government and kind of keep him in power. And if he's responsive to those negotiating letters on levers on migrants, perhaps he's responsive to negotiating levers on other questions in a way that Antony Blinken and the Biden administration would appreciate. And I guess that's my question.

Right. That's my question, Ambassador, is, you know, having worked very closely with this administration and sort of seen its policy up close, do you have confidence going forward? We've talked about the options that seem to be on the table and we've talked about the consequences that they could have. How optimistic are you about U.S. policy, about the Biden administration's policy towards Haiti in the coming months, weeks and months? If they support U.N. intervention and we move forward with that, I'm heartbroken, frankly, because it's not going to work. It can restore stability temporarily, but it will not be sustainable. There's no state in Haiti on which the people can hang their hat. And if the current illegitimate government holds elections, they might as well not even hold them because the people won't accept them and we will continue to be in a place where they are governed by

foreigners, basically. It goes back to our policy, unspoken U.S. policy that's been going on for 200 plus years, and I've heard this in hushed tones in the back quarters of the State Department, what drives our Haiti policy is this unspoken belief that these dumb black people can't govern themselves. And you've been unusually outspoken since your resignation. What's the response been from your former colleagues? From my actual friends, they're supportive. And from my former friends and the policymakers right now who are more concerned with their careers than they are with U.S. foreign policy,

I don't have any relationship with most of them whatsoever. And I believe that they're undermining U.S. national security because as long as Haiti is unstable and the gangs are running it, you are seeing a ton of illicit drugs, arms, people, and worse going through Haiti and coming to the United States. Right. I've heard that a lot of the arms are coming through, particularly through Jamaica and what they call the guns for Ganja kind of pipeline. What are the other... Fuel from Dominican Republic. Yeah. And what are the other national security implications? What is becoming of Haiti as a failed state as it relates to the U.S.? Well, as a failed state, we're looking at the immigration consequences daily, right?

Haitians want to leave Haiti. If we were there, we'd do the same thing. It is unlivable there. So you're going to see continued increased immigration demand, including in unsafe boats and crossing very dangerous places like the Darien and Panama, etc. You're also running the risk and vulnerability of this kind of free-for-all with drugs and arms and human citizens and Russians and North Koreans running around Haiti, you're creating the opportunity for our real-world adversaries

to set up shop and to destabilize the United States from an hour and 40 minutes from Miami. Right. Destabilize Cuba? See what happens. Destabilize Haiti? See what happens. Andabilize Haiti, see what happens. And it's so absurd.

We're creating a failed state so that we can deport people to it, which then means there will be more migrants that we will then have to deport in ever greater numbers. It's self-referencing. Right. It's also an interesting... Oh, go ahead, Ambassador. Well, my argument is, let give the haitians a chance to mess their own country up for once i have seen us do it a number of times i was actually part of the 2010 post-earthquake reconstruction planning so i know how not to fix haiti we've done it

numerous times give them a chance to fix them fix. What's the worst they can do? They can't do any worse than the United States and the international community has done. And I guarantee you totally forgotten, I think generally totally forgotten consequences of the invasion of Ukraine, because this is stemming also from high food prices and inflation, and it all sort of was a ripple effect. And Haiti is not alone. There are other countries that are dealing with this too, because price hikes and corrupt governments are a terrible combination. Well, Ambassador Foote, thank you so much for joining us. It's been a pleasure. Thanks for your attention. I much appreciate it. You got it. And that'll do it for us for today. That's right. But fear not, we will be back tomorrow.

We'll be back tomorrow. We're going to talk about the protests in Iran. That's right. We're going to have a guest who's going to join us from Iran, Sattar Siddiqui. What else we got tomorrow? We have Congressman Ken Buck is scheduled to be on the program. You know, congressional schedules can always be a little tricky. So hopefully that works out. Otherwise, we'll make sure to get him.

And we will, of course, be covering the antitrust. We just saw that one of the FTC, a Republican FTC commissioner ended up at Amazon, I think right after leaving. So that's a story we'll cover tomorrow for sure. So surprising. Yeah. It's something to that. It's a great opportunity. And we'll talk to Buck about this great opportunity for Republicans to put an actual populist on the FTC. Yeah. That's a really good point.

It's going to be a huge fight. Yeah. He started it. Does Hawley win that fight and get a populace on there? That's a really good question. And that's something we'll talk about tomorrow. He's working for Google and Amazon as a lawyer. He's an ex-FTC commissioner. His last day was last week.

And he's immediately started, according to Matt Soler, at Google and Amazon as a lawyer. So we'll be all over that. We'll hopefully have Congressman Buck on to talk about it. And we will be breaking down all of the big news from around the world this week, tomorrow, and then Friday as well. So we appreciate everyone sticking with us on this Monday and Tuesday as Crystal and Sagar. I know they had a great time in Chicago. Love that city and loved seeing all of you guys. So we'll be back tomorrow. We'll be back Friday. But you'll be getting Crystal and Sagar too. See you soon.

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