Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - Counter Points #7: Midterm Update, Nuclear Exercises, Hunter Biden, Local Media, Iran Protests, & More!

Episode Date: October 18, 2022

Ryan and Emily discuss midterm polls, NATO nuclear drills, Bannon charges, Hunter Biden dealings, Jan 6th failure, local media dies, & Iran protests!To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/Ryan Grim: https://badnews.substack.com/ Emily Jashinsky: https://thefederalist.com/author/emilyjashinsky/ Setareh Sadeqi: https://twitter.com/Leelako  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Good morning and welcome to CounterPoints Tuesday. Actually, we're just here filling in for the Breaking Points crew and excited to be here. We will also be back on Friday. Sagar and Crystal will be back this week as well. Ryan, we've got a big show today. Lots to talk about. Yeah, you know, it feels like these news cycles just never slow down anymore.

And it's always a sort of struggle to figure out how to pack everything into one show, especially with the news cycle moving as quickly as it is. Actually, Sager sent us this morning just more information that we should cover. Sager can't stay away. Sager can't stay away. Actually, out, sadly, of Eastern Europe. And we will get to that in just a moment. But there's big news on the midterm front because a lot of new polling is coming in, and I want to put up this tear sheet from the New York Times. This is A1. The headline in the New York Times here, we're exactly three weeks away from election day. Keep that in mind. Republicans gain edge as voters worry about economy, and that is from a new

New York Times Siena poll. Now, the results, if you break them down, are interesting. It shows that 49% of likely voters said they plan to vote for a Republican to represent them in Congress on November 8th. Again, that is exactly three weeks from today, compared with 45% who planned to vote for a Democrat. That is an improvement for Republicans since September. Now, also, the most important issues, according to the poll facing Americans, has leapt to 44 percent from 36 percent on economic concerns. And that's way higher than any other issue. Plus, Republicans were favored overwhelmingly, that's a quote from The New York Times, by more than a two-to-one margin on the economy. So, Ryan, that really does show what happens when money starts to come into these races and when sort of rubber meets the road after the summer. You get into the fall, things shift. Do you see this as sort of the natural progression of the election cycle? Or do you think there are things happening in the economy, for instance, gas prices have ticked back up, that's really driving these gains for

Republicans? Yes. And even though only about 50% of people, something like that, have money in the stock market, and that includes 401ks, the volatility in the stock market filters into our kind of cultural perception of the stability of the economy. And you've seen just these absolutely wild swings. People like predictability. In fact, that's why as gas prices kind of stabilized, Republicans were very frustrated because they're like, wait a minute, you guys, this is like a couple months ago, like, hey, voters, why aren't you freaking out about gas prices? They're like $1.50 higher than they used to be. And people are like, yeah, but they're not going up anymore. Yes, I don't like that I'm spending more on gas, but it's the movement and it's the unpredictability that creates economic anxiety, like immediate anxiety. And so I think the volatility,

the swinging back and forth, I think all of that is contributing toward the economy becoming more central in voters' minds. The Kansas election was, what, August 2nd? Yes. And there were people who were saying that the interest around it may have peaked just a little bit too early for Democrats. Some of the criticism of Democrats for making abortion rights a major issue, I think, is unfair because it is not exactly Democrats who kind of brought it in too. Like, Democrats didn't overturn Roe v. Wade in an election year, in a midterm election year. Now, for the consultants who say don't talk about the economy because it's too difficult to message on the economy, I think those people absolutely do deserve criticism. Because I think the salience of abortion is so high that you can kind of gesture to it and then you can talk about your economic agenda.

Because nobody's going to forget that they overturned Roe v. Wade. You don't need to remind them constantly that it happened. Yeah, I think the question of whether it's going to be a sort of deciding factor. And again, one thing a lot of people forget is that midterm elections are about turnout. They're about energizing the base. And they are often in a state like, for instance, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, going to be marginal. These are going to be really close races, and whoever can motivate their base with the most intensity, those little differences can make a huge difference in the outcome of the election, clearly. So it does,

to some extent, you have to balance not depressing turnout from, you know, independents or other voters with energizing the base and making sure the base is excited to actually get out and vote for you. And so this is A2. I want to put that up as a tweet from Tom Bevin of RealClearPolitics. I think it's actually a really helpful perspective. So he's quote tweeting the New York Times issue and saying, the economy remained a far more potent issue than abortion. And Tom adds, this has been clear in the data for months. And that is true. But there was a lot of conversation over the course of the summer about how Dobbs was going to tank Republicans in the midterms. And not only Democrats were buying into that. There were a lot

of Republicans, even establishment Republicans, especially after what happened in Kansas, who were freaking out and saying, this could be a route for us. Instead of it being a route for Democrats, we could just get absolutely just hammered at the polls this fall because all of these suburban women, independent voters are going to, our candidates are all going to be turned into Todd Akin, basically, if you remember the war on women. It was very, very much channeling the frustration of establishment Republicans at the conservative movement and the conservative base. Although to me, even the most optimistic Democrats, Tom Bonior, who was the CEO of Target Smart, which is a Democratic data firm, he wrote the kind of widely circulated op-ed in the New York Times about the surge in women's voter registration after Kansas. I interviewed him

for my podcast, and even he said, he's like, I'd say the House is in play. It's within reach. Which is a big difference. Even he wouldn't say that they're favored. Even he, at the height of his optimism, was saying that he thought that Republicans were still favored to win the House. Yesterday, he pointed out, he said, look, if you believe every single poll, every individual poll that comes out, then today you have to believe that there's no gender gap because the New York Times-Siena poll finds zero gender gap between men and women when it comes to who they want to control Congress. And nobody believes that that's true.

Well, you know, women are going to side with Democrats. Like, that's going to happen. And also, you will have to believe that Democrats are going to comfortably win the Oklahoma gubernatorial election. Because a poll came out showing Democrats up by, like, eight in that. And it's like, it's a nice poll for Democrats. Don't spend all your money on predicted guessing that the Democrats are going to win Oklahoma. But so on the question though of how Democrats could message the economy, Mike Lux, who's a Democratic operative with

American Family Voices, was out with a memo that was circulating around town this week. I want to read to you a couple of his suggestions and see if they would resonate with you and your people. All right. So he says, number one, he's like, this is how you message on the economies. One, you say wealthy corporations with monopoly power jacking up prices. He's saying this. And sucking profits. If you're a Democrat, this is what Democrats should say. Agreed. All right. Number two, drug prices, health insurance premiums are going up. Sorry, drug prices are going down because of the Inflation Reduction Act. You're paying less because you've got rebates and you've got subsidies. So you're paying less for health insurance and drugs. I don't know if they really want to touch the Inflation Reduction Act because

if you're trying to talk about inflation in general, you might not want to be messaging on a fairly unpopular president's signature legislation. That might be a problem. But I'm not a consultant. Number three, he says seniors will be getting the biggest increase in their Social Security payments in 40 years while Republicans are talking about ending Social Security. Yeah, that always does well. That always does well. Throw that one out there. We actually saw that used last night.

There was a Utah debate between Evan McMullin, who's an independent that Democrats have gotten behind in his challenge for Mike Lee. We have seen some close polling in that race. I think Mike Lee will be okay. But Evan McMullin, who was a former Republican, is attacking Mike Lee for going after Social Security and Medicaid. And it's just, I mean, it's like the perfect evolution. But that's how potent that particular bullet point is. Some fun endorsements in that race. Mike Lee endorsed himself in the third person. Did you see this? I mean, it's like the perfect evolution, but that's how potent that particular bullet point is. Some fun endorsements in that race. Mike Lee endorsed himself in the third person. Did you see this? Well, so did McMullen's campaign. It was kind of a weird— Oh, okay. Yeah.

And then in the debate, McMullen pointed out that Mike Lee had voted for him in 2016 for president. Right. That was kind of funny. All right, so number four, he said, point out that manufacturing jobs are coming back to the United States. Infrastructure is being rebuilt. This will fix supply chain problems and create millions more good jobs. I like it. And number five, I will fight for the child tax credit, which would give parents $600 a month to help with groceries, gas, and housing and pay for it by taxing corporations and millionaires. How's that? Great. But nothing about Drag Queen Story Hour. Nothing.

Nothing about Drag Queen Story Hour. You tax it if you don't like it, tax it. You tax it, yeah. No, I mean, and this is getting to- At least it's talking about it. The debate on the left has been really interesting to watch this week because there are pieces from David Sirota and Jacobin talking about how how Democrats are really struggling to even it seems like they don't have the will to be taking this economic message to voters it's like they would rather talk they would rather just sort of rely on calling Republicans the handmaid's tale villains and that's their sort of signature

message they have been running tons and tons of ads on abortion. And one question that I actually think is an interesting, I'm curious of what you would say, why you would say they have been running those ads despite having plenty of access to this polling. I don't think polling is perfect. I think as you just highlighted with the Oklahoma governor's race,

polling is a real problem for us, period, as an industry. It's a problem for the consultant industry. It's a problem for politics in general. That said, there is evidence abortion is not going to help Democrats over the finish line in some of these races. And yet they are running tons on it. And you aren't hearing a lot of the bullets that you just, the messaging of a lot of those bullets. It's not rising to the surface. Some of it they misread, like the Pat Ryan race, for instance, upstate New York, where he ran half of his paid media was on abortion rights.

Half of it was on how he took on corporate power as a county executive, took on the unpopular utility there. The Democrats focused on one half and not the other half. What Democratic consultants say all the time to candidates is that voters don't trust Democrats on the economy. Therefore, it is very difficult for us to message in 30 seconds on the economy because what we say lands flat. I think Republicans have a flip side problem on some other issues where they're like, look, we're just not trusted on this particular issue, so we're not going to message on it. But to write the cordon off the entire economy, what kind of political party is that? Well, and again, I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that if they're going to run on a fairly unpopular president's signature accomplishments, they would rather

talk about just about anything else. Although the corporate greed, it seems like just a very easy opening for Democrats, but a lot of them probably don't want to go out and bash corporations, even if it's not entirely sincere. Yeah. There you go. Well, we have, as we mentioned, we should move on here to some stuff that Sagar had been passing along. We were going to cover it and he passed along, Ryan, what was the tweet that he sent this morning? It was really interesting. Go ahead. Yeah, so, and you can pull it up. So, both NATO and the Russian Federation are preparing for their annual nuclear drills, which, you know, every year they come around, they do these drills. Preplanned before the invasion.

You know, do your drills. They go off without a hitch. The world survives. It's always been fine, and it's always fine until it's not fine. To have both of these entities doing nuclear drills with the nuclear tensions ratcheted up to what they are suggests, you know, it has people on edge. It has people praying that everybody is in communication, that each side is going to be able to tell a drill from live action. And it's coming amid increasingly hostile relations. Like war is obviously hostile. But the war, as we were talking about yesterday, has taken a turn where it's now battering civilian infrastructure in a way we haven't seen in this war.

And that's actually what Sager passed along. Zelensky is claiming that up to 30% of power utilities have been taken offline by Russian strikes, which is a war crime. And it's not that both sides are obviously guilty of war crimes in every war. This is a war crime on a truly tremendous scale heading into a Ukrainian winter. Right. And so we have a report from Wall Street Journal's reporter in Ukraine, Matthew Lexmore, who is saying Kyiv is telling Ukrainians to prepare for blackouts across the country after days on end of Russian strikes on energy infrastructure. Indeed, Zelensky said 30% of Ukraine's power stations have been destroyed. And then the consequence of that is blackouts heading into winter. And then in the

shadow of all of this, you have 14, I think it's like 14 NATO countries doing the exercises. This is 60 aircraft, and that includes fighter jets, it includes surveillance planes. This is a, this is, it feels like a very dystopian moment in the world. And this, I was thinking about the story of, so seeing that, let's say a third of the power utilities have been taken offline for now. I was thinking about it in the context of the story that Ukrainians are basically also running out of glass. Did you see that story? No, I didn't see that. And running out of windows, basically.

So, you know, when your city is getting shelled, even if you don't, even if your building does not take a direct hit, the chance that your window is going to blow out is pretty significant. And it wasn't something that I had really thought about before, because here you get a window broken, you head down to Ace, you get a new window. If it's too big of a window project, call the window people, and it sucks, but you get a new window put in. Or you do what my friends did in college and use Saran Wrap. Well, that's what they're doing in in. Or you do what my friends did in college and use saran wrap. Well, that's what they're doing in Ukraine. This is really the only thing to do.

Right. So it's saran wrap, cardboard, plywood Ukrainian winter is going to put tens of millions of people in who are just civilians not involved in this, you know, didn't sign up for this war in just excruciating conditions. Yeah. And in the preparation for blackouts. Yeah. Again, as Ryan was just saying, we're going into mid-October, into November, 30%. That's a pretty incredible number. So is there anything you think that people should be watching with these exercises? Is there anything to pay attention to particularly with them? No, I think you'll get a five-minute warning that you're about to die if it happens.

So I don't think you—just think about how you're about to die if it happens. So I don't think you... Just think about how you're going to spend that last five minutes, I guess, from the time you get the alert. I was wondering, who's the person that sends the alert? Because they're probably dying, too. Because they're probably a New Yorker, do you see? Do they actually send the alert? Are they like, you know what? Somebody else can do this.

I quit. I'm going out on the street and getting lit in the sky. Or I'm going to the basement. Did I bring my iodine pills? Yeah, I'm going to turn some fish on. There you go. Just go out like this for the last five minutes. So, no. I expect that

these two sides are going to coordinate this. And hopefully what we're seeing from Russia at this point is kind of a last gasp to get the best leverage that they can from the negotiations that they're forced into to get out of this war that has been disastrous for them and disastrous for Ukraine and a disaster for the world. The idea that we're talking about nuclear Armageddon over this when it can be resolved, when this can just be finished is absurd. Right. That's exactly it. And we continue to see the clip of the Finnish prime minister last week, for example, we continue to see resistance to negotiation. And yes, you don't want to

give in to nuclear blackmail. I think we're all on board with the idea of not giving in to nuclear blackmail. At the same time, you do not want to get into a nuclear tit for tat for Russia. And so the ongoing Western resistance to even entertaining the idea of seriously, meaningfully coming to the table and trying to end this. Unbelievable. Somebody responded to my post the other day and said, so if we came into your apartment and we occupied two of your bedrooms

and then you would just negotiate with us at that point, do you have nuclear weapons? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Actually, at that point, I probably do you have nuclear weapons? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Actually, you know, at that point, I probably am, like, ready for some talks. Right. You just crashed your way into my apartment? Yeah, okay, let's figure out a way out of this.

Yes, it's the post-Cold War hubris is, like, stems from this idea that we really thought we won the, like, forever, the idea of nuclear tit-for-tat. Like, this is how it's going to go. And meanwhile, Russia was completely building up its stockpile, and that's where we are right now. But it's just so hubristic, I think, to expect that you can bluster your way out of that when people on a daily basis are put in harm's way or targeted by— and it's Putin's fault. There's no question about it. That's why you go to the negotiating table and, and, you know, try to find an end to the suffering.

And I do think it's fair for people to say like, look, okay, you should not be able to kind of wage a conventional war, invade another country, and then use, you know, nuclear saber rattling to get, to hold on to that territory. You should not be able to do that. No. to get to hold on to that territory. You should not be able to do that. And Putin is not doing it cost-free. Like there has been an enormous amount of cost that he's been. And I think that's what people need to remember. And there can be more. And there will be more. Like the, you know, Russian power will be a shell of what it was before he launched this. Even if, even if he left the war with every single inch that he current, that his troops currently hold, they would still be so dramatically weakened that it would be a cautionary tale to other countries who are thinking about doing something like this.

And he's not going to hold on to every inch that he has. He's losing ground by the day, even as he resorts to just bombing power centers. Right. Well, let's move on to developments in two investigations of Trump era, two ongoing Trump era, actually, trials. That would be the first one I want to talk about is Steve Bannon, the trial of Steve Bannon. The DOJ recommended six months in prison for Steve Bannon and a $200,000 fine over contempt. He did not respond to subpoenas from the January 6th Select Committee. And we're going to get to what happened in the Danchenko case yesterday as well. But Ryan, first, let's start with Bannon. What do you make of the six months in prison for contempt? There are other people in

the course of history, other administration people in the course of history, other administration officials in the course of history that have similarly demonstrated such contempt and not faced what the DOJ is recommending here. What do you make of it? Well, I think if you think of the kind of system as an immune system. Like, I think it sees, it sees somebody like Bannon as a virus that needs to be expelled. It sees Bannon as something that is out of the normal type of operative or politician that the system is used to dealing with.

What do you mean by the system? The legal system? The entire political system. Okay. Like, he's such a table flipping, uh, radical, different type of operative that, and I think, so, and so I think that that's why I think he's getting treated differently. That because he is a T the, the system sees him as a different type of figure. And so they're not going to give him the same treatment that you would give to a Mark Meadows.

Who was much more involved with January 6th. On the right, the name that was circulating yesterday was Eric Holder. Yeah, Eric Holder was held in contempt by... But the recommendation of six months in prison, we don't actually know what the sentencing will be, but I don't remember Eric Holder being recommended for six months in prison. Well, they never... I mean, he was never convicted of anything in a quota law. Right. He just got a vote. But why would the system... In the entire political system, there was not the same thirst to take Eric Holder literally to court and hold him in contempt of Congress.

Well, yeah, I mean, right. Bannon is, I think Bannon is different than almost everybody, but he's wildly different than somebody like Eric Holder. He was so much more powerful. Who goes from like a law firm to an attorney general, back to a law firm. Like that, the system's like, all right, we get that. This is what we're built to deal with. Yeah, Republicans are mad

at him over Fast and Furious, and so they can hold a floor vote that holds them in contempt for not doing whatever they wanted to do. But if they really felt like he belonged in prison, they have to go to court and get a judge to agree with them. But I think it's Bannon's persona that is creating this kind of distinct, kind of punitive approach toward him. Why do you think that he didn't just plead the fifth and do what so many others did? Just show up?

Right. Hey, I plead the fifth. Right. You can make me come here, but you can't make me talk. What about the show, the defiance, did he need to kind of broadcast to his people? Yeah, I think you're hitting on what it is. It's making a point.

I think Steve Bannon is clever enough to know that there's value in martyrdom from his media perspective. And that's probably the argument he would make. It's that we're making this point that people are really being sort of sucked into the system and the system is treating different people differently. And a lot of the conversation on the right now is about some legitimately, like, whatever you think of January 6th, we talk about it all the time. There are some highly questionable treatments of people who were involved in January 6th. There are some highly questionable treatments of people who were involved in January 6th. There are some highly questionable treatments of people who have been arrested by the FBI for squabbles in front of abortion clinics. And this is all coming together in a way that the right sees as targeting. And so

in that broader context, I think you can see that Steve Bannon probably understands there's value in pushing on this button or pulling at this thread um and and being the person in the center of that so I don't know the argument that he would make that would be my assumption as somebody kind of on the right figuring out where where he's coming from there and it's only six months yeah you know minimum security yeah and if you come out of it as like the leading martyr I guess there's some that's better than bending the knee and pleading the fifth and looking like a cuck

which is the worst thing isn't that the worst thing on the right? I mean maybe on the in the alt right I love learning all these I can't believe you just said cuck I love learning all these terms from the engagement with the right on this show. Yeah.

Do people teach you the word cuck on the Internet? Yeah. Okay. What part of the Internet are you on? Twitter. Yeah. With right-wingers. Sounds like maybe you've been on Kanye West's parlor.

Parlor had a little VIP screw- up yesterday, which was very funny. Anyway, anything else on Bannon? No, not on Bannon, but moving to Igor Denchenko. His case, we have deliberations ongoing today. He's on, the jury is deliberating about false statements charges. So charges brought on this question of false statements that were brought by Special Counsel John Durham, who was appointed by, was it Bill Barr? I think it was Bill Barr under Donald Trump to look into how the FBI mishandled, actually,

the crossfire hurricane Russia collusion investigation. Now, one thing I want to actually focus on here is Margo Cleveland in The Federalist has a piece up right now where she says this conclusion or an important conclusion to pay attention to is that the criminal case against Danchenko confirmed that crossfire hurricane was never properly predicated and that instead politics prompted the targeting of Donald Trump's presidential campaign. This is why we combined the story with the Bannon story, because there's some similarities. And Margo says that conclusion follows from two facts. First, after Danchenko allegedly told a colleague he knew people who would buy classified information, the FBI did

not launch a full investigation into the Russian until obtaining corroborating evidence. And then second, the FBI refused to open an investigation into the Clinton-connected Charles Dolan, as some members of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team believed appropriate. So this, you have all of the convoluted nature of the Russia collusion hoax baked into the Danchenko story. It's extremely layered. And I think that's why a lot of these stories actually don't get much play in legacy media. I mean, I think, of course, there's a huge amount of bias and activism at play as well. At the same time, they're really difficult to talk about because there are so many different layers, so many different people and all of that stuff going on.

But a hugely important thing, I think, to pay attention to in the Danchenko case, what did you make of the development yesterday with charges thrown out in what the media described as a blow to Durham? I think two of the charges were dismissed. Right, and I've tried to follow this stuff pretty closely. Like you said, most progressives and liberals, and also most mainstream media,

which a lot of people on the right would just call liberal, have barely covered this at all. But even I'm getting lost on this one. Like, it does seem like on a surface level, another blow to Durham that he, and is it, are we going, what has been the response from the right? Because the last time he face planted on one of these, it was like, wow, it's a jury. You can't, you know, you got a bunch of woke libs on your jury and they're going to side with, side against. D.C. jury. Well, I mean, he knows what. Virginia jury. He knows what city he's bringing these cases in. Has that been the response or what, like, at some, Durham has to have something to show for all of this.

Right. And actually, I'll read another line from Margo's piece to that point. She says, no matter the eventual verdict, however, like Durham's prosecution of former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussman, which Ryan was just alluding to, the criminal case against Danchenko revealed extensive evidence of malfeasance by the Crossfire Hurricane team. And so, yeah, I think, and that was always, I assume, part of the impetus for the Durham probe to begin with, which is that through discovery, through the criminal courts, through the sort of legal process, what's going to emerge might not always be criminal to the point where you have a D.C. or Virginia jury ready to actually say that. But what you are going to do is find exactly, you sort of put the pieces together of what the FBI did to the Trump campaign in the lead up to the 2016 election. And with all of that additional information, we get a clearer, fuller picture of the corruption that was at hand. And I think that's absolutely the case.

I think per Margot's point, there was that, as revealed last week, she writes, the FBI refused to open that investigation into Charles Dolan. So that's something that came out over the course of the Denchenko trial and is valuable to kind of understanding exactly what the FBI did and didn't do as it pertained to the legitimacy of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. Well, speaking of another layered and partisan coded and complicated investigation, Hunter Biden, back in the news, Chuck Grassley, one of the leading kind of oversight Senate Republicans or Republicans from either party, was saying that a whistleblower has turned over copious amounts of evidence of criminal wrongdoing on the part of Hunter Biden. Hunter Biden has been under criminal investigation for, it feels like years now at this point. A lot of people wondering what on earth is going on with that? Are we going to get some type of resolution? Why are we not getting the kind of drip, drip, drip leaks that you get sometimes with these political, you know, with these investigations of people who are in politics? And I don't know.

Like, when are we going to, when are we getting an answer here? Yeah, this is one thing. And it says Hunter, if you're watching, you see it says Hunter at the bottom of the screen. But if you read Grassley's, he put out a press release yesterday in which he did say, as the tweet we had up from Jerry Dunleavy of the Washington Examiner, that whistleblowers have revealed the FBI possesses, quote, significant, impactful, and voluminous evidence with respect to potential criminal conduct by Hunter Biden related to China. And that includes info provided by Tony Bobulinski and to Ukraine, which tied to Burisma. But if you read Grassley's press release, what he's really talking about is the fact that the FBI may be sitting on tons of evidence that implicates the president himself. And the Hunter Biden story is

extremely relevant and concerning in a million different ways. Whether you're talking about CEFC, whether you're talking about Burisma, it's pretty much obvious the level of corruption. He's trading on his name. He's making tons of money off of these off of trading on his name and operating, let's say, with something like CEFC. That's the Chinese energy conglomerate that he made a lot of money off of. And at a time when you wouldn't necessarily have wanted the son of the vice president or the son of the former vice president to be involved with a Chinese company, let alone a Chinese energy conglomerate on the level that CEFC was. But the idea that the FBI, according to a senior Republican senator, has voluminous evidence that might actually tie Hunter Biden to his father, that his father was profiting. That is the critical thing here.

And you have people saying, whistleblowers saying, that the FBI has evidence they provided to this extent. We're getting into pretty remarkable territory. And a good question for you is, do you have historical precedent? Is there historical precedent? Has this happened before, basically? You mean for? The FBI is sitting on evidence that might implicate, major evidence that might implicate the president in sort of like criminal corruption?

Oh, yes. I think, and actually there's a new Hoover biography that just came out, or it's coming out soon. I have a copy of it that I've started, which is a reminder that Hoover sat on evidence around high-level misdeeds for pretty much every president. I was going to say. I was going to say. Yeah. It would not be unprecedented, certainly, for that to happen. But it is getting to this era that we consider culturally to be a very dark one. And that's why I assumed that there was some sort of Hoover precedent for this. And we look back on Hoover's tenure over the FBI, even though the

building is named after him, our culture sort of understands, has in the last couple of decades, at least, come to understand the tenure of J. Edgar Hoover as a very dark one, as a very sort of un-American approach to, I mean, the FBI, you could argue in general is sort of predicated on problematic grounds, but that tenure is a very dark one. And this seems to be happening under everybody's noses. One question might be, what would the criminal activity be? Because if you ever do corner Democrats on this particular question, they'll say, well, Joe Biden was out of office at that point, but he was no longer vice president. Now he was vice president when Hunter was cutting some of these deals. But during the time that, let's say, since Bobulinski is the one that is being

referenced here by Grassley, the Bobulinski claims, if you believe them, and I think he has presented a significant amount of evidence to suggest you should believe him. Right. That that is definitely, you know, kind of pre him running for president and post vice president. But if you miss this, but basically Bob Alinsky has texts and emails with Hunter Biden talking about meeting meeting your father. Right. And then there are text messages that say, hey, I'm at the bar. I'm over here. And it's like, hey, it was awesome to meet your dad. So there are contemporaneous text messages

that would have had to have been concocted seamlessly. Like if you were trying to retcon this event that didn't happen. So the FBI should be able to then figure out, well, where was Joe Biden at this time? Now, if he did meet with Bobulinski, it would be understandable that Hunter would want that to happen. Because Hunter's whole pitch is my last name is Biden. It's only useful if your last name is Biden if you can also then deliver on those connections. And so to be able to have your father come and meet this guy at the hotel bar or wherever they said they met. There's another one where we'll stick with Bobulinski.

Now, they wouldn't talk about anything because that's not how that goes. Like you would, you know, Biden would show up. And this is what Bobulinski says. There are plenty of pictures of Joe Biden with Hunter Biden's clients. Right. And this one, there was no picture, but according to Bobulinski, it was just like, hey, take good care of my son. My son says that he trusts you, therefore I trust you. Like they don't talk business. The other problem for Biden, the big guy, as he likes to go by, is that he has said on the record that I've never discussed Hunter's business affairs with him ever. Hunter has said on the record to The New Yorker that they did at least once,

where Biden said to him, with Burisma, I hope you know what you're doing. You better know what you're doing, which you can see somebody saying that. Absolutely. If your son is Hunter, like, geez, Hunter, you better know what you're doing here. And that doesn't necessarily implicate Biden in the business deal, but it means they did talk about the business deal, which means his claim that they never talked about it is at least discredited by that moment. And then it puts the Bobulinski meeting in a different perspective. So I'm very curious what information the FBI has gathered to kind of, because, you know, if Bobulinski is able to, you know, if he provided all of the same information that he's made public, then, you know, the FBI has tools to try to verify. Was he where he said he was?

Was Hunter where he said he was? Be nice if we would learn some of this. Well, and again, this is. It'd be nice for Democrats if they'd learn it before the presidential election? Because, yes, if the House flips to Republicans, their focus on oversight is absolutely going to drag a lot of this into the public domain. I mean, there's just, it's going to be a huge tug of war on information pertaining to Joe and Hunter Biden. So there's no question about that. And the question of criminality is a good one. The question of propriety is a good one. I think the bottom line, from my perspective, is that I would love to know how the president of the United States funded his lifestyle from the years that he was after leaving the Obama administration until being elected, because it seems very likely to me that a chunk of that was funded on Hunter sort of

trading on the Biden name and paying for different things and what that means for Joe Biden's actual governance. You know, maybe that's the last question I'll toss to you. I'm curious what you think. Is there any reason to believe that Joe Biden's, say, foreign policy is compromised when it comes to China, compromised when it comes to Ukraine. I think it's an open question. I don't know that there's significant evidence he's treating the China question from this very broad 30,000-foot position differently because of those relationships and because of the way that his son made money. But it does show, I think, at the very least, corruption. Well, we know a significant amount of his revenue did come from what I'd call legal corruption. The typical legal corruption that we have in our system, which is just massive book deals

that come from these corporate conglomerates that own these book companies. So there was that. Which he routed through an S-Corp, right? Routed through an S-Corp. Then there was an $800,000 or $900,000 gig at the University of Pennsylvania where mostly it seems like a no-show gig, which he then followed by naming the University of Pennsylvania chancellor or president or whatever it was as like the ambassador to Germany. And so a reporter had flagged it as one of the few, like, because ambassadorships are just, under every president, just rotten to the core. Like, they just go to big donors.

And it's the one place where that's a little less awful because you want an ambassador to be some like, or if you're an empire, you want an ambassador to be like a representative of that empire and having a, some type of super rich person who's a social being. It's like, they'll do the empire's work. And then they're like, this is one of the few, this, we got somebody that runs a university. So thank you Biden for doing something that wasn't like on

his face corrupt when it came to ambassadorships. And it like oh actually uh a person she paid him nine hundred thousand dollars personally directly to him so it's like all right never mind that one that one was not not corrupt either so there's so we already know that that and there wasn't a lot of time 2017 18 then by by like 18 he's back in the race yeah yes he is you know the reason that I think these stories between Bannon and Dzenchenko and Hunter Biden, I think it's very true that the media, obviously, with all of the bias and activism at play, also refrains from going super deep on them because they're just difficult to dive into. It's difficult to give appropriate treatment to them in shorter segments. Oh, but to answer your question, I don't think that his Ukraine policy has influenced at all.

Because I think this is structural. Like, this is what any non-Mega president would be doing, Democrat or Republican. I do think there's a question as to whether when he was vice president and Hunter Biden was on the Burisma board, that he had people chirping in his ear from his son's sort of orbit and had that sort of disproportionately loud volume up on them as opposed to other. Yeah, that's why this stuff shouldn't happen. Exactly, because you can't quantify it. You can't know it. You can't disentangle it. But the reason I think these stories are important to cover is because it does, from my perspective, really show the way in which powerful interests are being weaponized, not just by Republicans, not just by Democrats,

but by the political establishment sort of in general. I mean, if you look at the House January 6th committee that subpoenaed Steve Bannon, you have Adam Kinzinger and you have Liz Cheney leading the charge, shattering congressional precedent in terms of what we seek on select committees like that. And the result is probably, sadly, going to be something like more unrest along the lines of what happened on January 6th, along the lines of what's happened around the country in different ways over the course of the last few years, because this stuff is really happening. I mean, it is really happening under our noses. The media's lack of curiosity, whether it is Bannon, Denchenko, Hunter Biden, is truly, I think, sorry, state of affairs. Now, on that point, Ryan, speaking of sorry, state of affairs, speaking of January 6th, bring it on.

What's your point today? I got a point to make on that. So going back to the book I talked about actually a couple of weeks ago. So in the lead up to the impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump, Congressman Jamie Raskin pushed the White House to allow impeachment managers to call witnesses. In particular, he wanted to call Secret Service agents to testify about Trump's actions on January 6th and the lead up, as well as call Pentagon officials to testify about Trump's actions on January 6th and the lead up, as well as call Pentagon officials to testify about the long delay in getting the Capitol cleared. That's

according to the new book, Unchecked, the untold story behind Congress's botched impeachments of Donald Trump. Now, I got an early copy of the book, which comes out today, and I talked about another scoop in it a few weeks ago about how Nancy Pelosi rejected attempts by rank and file Democrats to impeach Trump on the night of the insurrection. This new bit of news is particularly interesting, given that the clinching argument made by the January 6th committee related directly to Trump's attempt to practically carjack the beast. Here was their blockbuster testimony from a former White House aide. I'm the effing president. Take me up to the Capitol now. To which Bobby responded,

sir, we have to go back to the West Wing. The president reached up towards the front of the vehicle to grab at the steering wheel. Mr. Engel grabbed his arm, said, sir, you need to take your hand off the steering wheel. We're going back to the West Wing. We're not going to the Capitol. After the testimony, Trump denied it happened. Here was his little stand-up bit making his case. You know what else I don't want to talk about? How about that phony story? I'm sitting in the back of the beast. I wasn't sure if I should be honored because I felt very strong. And I had these two big, strong Secret Service guys.

If one guy could lift 350 pounds, no problem. And I said, take me to the Capitol. Oh, sir, can't do it. So I grabbed the steering wheel. The commandant. And he rebuffed me, she said. He rebuffed. Interesting. Well, he rebuffed me. Yeah, like this. He rebuffed me. So my hands fell around another powerful guy, strong as hell. I know these people.

These are very strong people. It's just not my deal. And I started to choke him. I felt, you know, so when the story came out, some people said, I never knew you were that strong physically. And then they said I started throwing food all over the White House. No, I have too much respect for the White House. But that somebody could sort of believe, you know, that you could.

But to think that I'm going to be jumping into the seat, grabbing a wheel, being rebuffed, grabbing this big, powerful guy. His neck is like this and grabbing. I'm going to take him. Oh, boy, oh, boy, oh, boy, what we have to put. And guess what? The Secret Service put out an announcement, which they never do, put out an announcement that it never happened, which everyone knew anyway. So now Tony Ornato, the Secret Service official that Hutchinson cited as her source for the story, later denied it. But he has denied other things that multiple witnesses say happened. Here's a tweet from Alyssa Farrar, our old colleague back at Rising.

This is just one of many examples of things that he's been caught in. And Carol Lenning, actually, who won a Pulitzer for her reporting on the Secret Service and is as well sourced there as anybody. Put hers here next. Said that the agents denied that Trump physically attacked them, as Trump did, but confirmed that he was furious and demanded to be taken to the Capitol. So the point is, this is the perfect kind of thing that could have been sorted out by some witness testimony, but the incoming Biden administration refused it. The book also reports that Biden blocked investigators from calling Justice Department officials to look into rumors of an FBI memo that had warned of a looming threat to the Capitol. Rachel Bade and Karen DeMargin write,

quote, the document would have helped Raskin's team make the case that the president knew of the threat of violence before he urged his supporters to march on the Capitol. But justice officials told him that disclosing it would complicate upcoming prosecutions of rioters. They ran into a similar predicament with the Pentagon, unquote. So in short, in order to strengthen their case against the regular people who mobbed the Capitol, they purposely weakened their case against Trump. There couldn't be a more perfect encapsulation of the Democratic response than that. Now, Emily Raskin in the book seems to think that... All right, what about you? What point you want to make? Well, it didn't get a lot of attention, but Northwestern University dropped its state of local news report earlier this month,

and that reported that America lost over 360 newspapers from late 2019 until last May. That's an average of about two every week. Since 2005, we've lost 2,500 papers overall. This is a market failure. People want affordable information on their communities, but rapid technological changes made that almost impossible for businesses to supply at sustainable levels. Now, as Northwestern notes, digital media isn't replacing those papers, and while some philanthropies have sought to fill the gaps, those efforts are leaving behind the same subset of communities. In the words of the report, economically struggling, traditionally underserved communities that need local journalism the most are the very places where it is most difficult to sustain either print or digital

news organizations. The result is a glaring disparity that haunts our politics and our culture more than people realize. In less affluent communities, powerful interests face much less scrutiny, allowing them to more easily exploit people without fear of oversight from the free press. The sanctimony about democracy dying in darkness is fun to laugh at from self-serious celebrity journalists, but the problem is very real outside of our big cities. These blind spots are dangerous and they fuel our political discord. Take recent explosions in national coverage of local school districts' curricula.

Sometimes the way these stories are first reported is actually in national media outlets that have little connection to the place in question. They don't have a reporter at all of the school board meetings who knows the superintendents or the union leaders or the parents. They don't have a direct stake in the school either. When schools went virtual during the pandemic, parents seemed to be learning for the first time things local outlets might have actually caught had they been equipped with the resources to more closely report on what was happening. Social media platforms also vault local stories to viral

reach, ripping them from their contacts and thrusting unwitting people into international controversies. So that's a problem too, but it's one for another show. Now, Northwestern's report notes, quote, the number of journalists declined in lockstep with revenue decreases by almost 60% from 75,000 in 2005 to 31,400 in 2021. They report, quote, 4 million people live in the more than 200 counties that have no local newspaper. More than half the counties, 1,630, have only one newspaper, usually a weekly one with a small reporting staff. Only 70 of these counties have a local digital alternative, and two-thirds of the nation's counties, 2,000, have no daily paper. Fewer than 100 of these counties have a digital substitute.

Fewer than 100. By necessity, the report says, the main source of local breaking news for residents in many counties without a daily paper becomes social media or television stations, often located in cities miles away or even in another state. Northwestern points out that single newspaper counties in the West can encompass several thousand square miles. So, while they may have fewer people and thus fewer consumers, they have an immense amount of literal ground to cover, which also makes it more difficult for consolidated regional outlets to be sufficiently thorough.

Worse yet, the national and regional chains that snap up dying local papers, quote, often replace publishers and editors at local papers with regional publishers and editors and then merge the small weeklies with other weeklies in the area or with a larger daily that is often in another county altogether. That's according to Northwestern. This means people concentrated in big cities are covering communities with vastly different cultural and political characteristics. Because those differences are often rooted in class differences, again, we see how economically disenfranchised communities get screwed in this arrangement. They either get no coverage or worse coverage, and both of those categories are great for the power brokers who can more easily take

advantage of people, their governments, and their land. It's not great for people in more affluent areas either because they struggle to understand and empathize with their fellow Americans because they have less accurate information about what happens outside of big cities. Now, when a coastal hedge fund disappears a rural paper mill, do you think they'd rather do it with or without coverage from a strong local news outlet? When a teacher tries to implement debunked curricula into their lesson plans, debunked or controversial, do you think they'd rather defend it knowing a local reporter will be at the meeting filing a story that parents around the district will read?

A lot of people, especially conservatives like me, probably haven't been too sorry to see their local papers fold. Journalists tend to be liberal, and even in smaller communities, that bias is often clear and often skews further left than the community they cover. But biased news is still news, and we should prefer communities to at least know what's happening around them than allowing their government and business and faith leaders to operate in relative darkness. Plus, local journalists actually live and work in the same communities, meaning they're familiar with their subjects and actually accountable to the people around them,

like other parents or their neighbors or even friends at the gym. You can't execute hit and runs as a local reporter quite like a national one, doing shoddy work and just moving right along. Local TV affiliates do what they can, and Instagram and Twitter profiles try to disseminate information, but that doesn't really instill fear in the hearts of powerful people quite like traditional reporting. Those same people also need safe places to air their grievances and whistleblow on things that their constituents care about and places to share in communal successes too. But they absolutely need to be afraid because without fear of oversight, they will abuse their power. Once again, the people who bear the brunt of that abuse will be those people who already lack resources. We're going to be joined now by Sadara Siddiqui. She is a PhD in American Studies

from University of Tehran. She joins us from Esfahan, which is one of the largest cities in Iran. She's a teacher and also a podcaster. Her podcast and YouTube channel are host. She's the host of Twice Told Tales. That's on YouTube and it's also a podcast. Sitara, thank you so much for joining us. You're welcome. It's my pleasure.

And so, Sitara, can you first set the background here? What is your own take on the policy that is being protested against right now across Iran and what has your involvement been in kind of pushing back against the law that is currently at the center of these protests? Well, as a woman who is

concerned about women's rights in my country. I have been a part of the campaign, online campaign, which was launched well before the tragic death of Mahsa Amini in police custody. And I used hashtags to join other women and men to protest the way the mandatory hijab is enforced and to protest the quote-unquote morality police which in Persian we say we call it the guidance patrol by the way but as as a woman who's been active in the society, I have always been concerned about how this struggle of women's rights inside Iran

is also represented outside because we don't want anyone to make our struggles within the society, within Iran, more difficult. So when the protests started, people wanted to make a statement to the state and say that the morality police has to be abandoned. But soon the protests were going a totally different direction. And in my city, for example, they were not as huge as the other protests that I have seen over the years. side of Iran and maybe Western media, what is it, do you think, or are there things that the American media is getting, Western media maybe in general, is getting wrong about what's happening right now? Are there narratives or themes or storylines you see coming out of Western media that are most egregious? Well, I mean, a lot. It's not the first time that the Western media has tried to control the in Iran 24-7 as if something really huge has been happening. But when you come inside Iran, I have been talking to tourists just a few days ago when I was on a picnic with my family.

And they did not even notice anything in Tehran or in Isfahan and in other cities that they have been visiting. Tourists are even still coming to the country, even though we're seeing a decline in the number of people from outside who want to visit Iran because of, obviously, what they hear. So this coordinated manipulation campaign cannot be denied. And, you know, as an Iranian, as one of the members of the Iranian nation, I have seen that Western countries, especially the U.S., has launched different propaganda campaigns against my nation. They have tried to demonize against my nation.

They have tried to demonize the Iranian nation. To portray Iranian women as submissive and needing help from outside, while Iranian women are very powerful, they don't need help from outside. 57% of Iranian university students are women. Above 44% of the university students are women. Above 44% of the university graduates are women. Women are active in different sectors and they run NGOs, they're entrepreneurs, they're doctors, university teachers, etc. And they know how to control everything. we are seeing from the western media is troll farms basically trying to portray what is happening inside iran as almost a revolution which is

it's really funny for us who are living in iran because if you don't open our twitter or our instagram or other social media, we don't see anything happening around us. But once we get on social media, we feel that something very important is happening. I walk downtown, I go to work, I visit family and friends, and I don't see anything happening. I hear from friends that there have been protests here and there.

Many of them have already died out. And people are still trying to make a statement to the state and try to change the things that they don't agree with. But overall, we do not want a regime change, to be frank. We're happy with a lot of things that are happening here. At the same time, we're protesting and we're demanding more equal rights and more civil rights. And this has nothing to do with anyone from outside, as Malcolm X said in his famous The Bulletin Ballot speech, our brothers and sisters, I know they have good intentions, but those from outside Iran better not even speak about it because they just make our struggle more difficult. We don't need help from outside. We know how to deal with the government and pursue our goals.

How does the unrest that you're seeing and the protests that you're seeing now compare to 2019? And what were the different kind of goals and agendas of those two different protests? Or even 2009. Well, yes. I mean, in 2019, the protests started over the fuel prices going high. So it was mainly by the working class, but also a middle class that was also hit by the economic problems that we have. And by the way, it's important to know that, I mean, alongside the mismanagement that we might have in Iran, it's also U.S. sanctions, the U.S. unilateral coercive measures against Iran that are hitting ordinary Iranian citizens. And that's why we find everything that comes from the U.S. claiming to be advocating for

the rights of Iranian citizens as very, very hypocritical. We have not forgotten that the U.S. backed Saddam Hussein in its war. I was born during the war, by the way. And we have not forgotten that the U.S. backed Saddam Hussein's invasion of Iran. And some European countries armed Saddam with chemical weapons, and we still have people who are suffering from them. We haven't forgotten that the U.S. downed our passenger plane on the Persian Gulf. We haven't forgotten that the Bush administration, for example, armed and trained the MEK terrorist cult in Nevada to assassinate our nuclear scientists. And the sanctions are still hurting ordinary citizens. So with having seen all of that,

we find anything that comes from the U.S. very hypocritical. I think that makes a difference. I mean, if anyone had doubts that the U.S. is pursuing its agenda, now it has become more clear. Because in 2019, when the working class was protesting, and the protests were a lot larger than this year, we did not see as much coverage of the events as we're seeing now. And, you know, CNN did this article on how the narrative is being taken over online and how so many of the accounts that have been using the hashtags regarding Mahsa Amin's death

have been actually fake accounts or accounts that have been created only 10 days after, up to 10 days after Mahsa Amin's death. And I mean, it's surprising that the Twitter account, Twitter is not even taking down those fake accounts. And you see celebrities with millions of followers sharing fake videos. And even when they are told that this is a fake video, this is, for example, from a drama scene, they keep that on.

And so it's very different in the sense that people, Iranian people, and I think the world is gradually also understanding that they have been lied to about whatever is happening in Iran. And they have not,

and how many voices from inside Iran have people been hearing? I mean, I'm glad that you gave me this platform so that I can, as one voice inside Iran, speak to the people of the world. But there are really not many platforms out there for Iranians to be able to speak and say that, yes, we're not a monolithic society. We have grievances with our governments. We're not looking for regime change. And we're living a normal life. Speaking of that non-monolithic approach, can you talk a little bit about what's going on in the Baluki region or the Kurdish region? There were reports that more than 60 people were killed, I think, in the Baluki region. There's reports of some clashes with protesters in Kurdish regions.

How did this begin as a protest around the morality police and involved into these types of clashes? And what are the latest on those? I imagine you're not there, but I assume you're getting reports from out there. Yes, because when I lived in Tehran, I had roommates from across the country, and I have had Kurdish friends. The Kurdish ethnicity comes second to our Iranian nationality we don't really feel that someone is from a different ethnicity it's very different here we ethnicity is something that comes second to our nationality and like we have family members who marry into other ethnicities, and that's very normal in different cities.

So, yeah, I have been talking to them too. The thing is, there are a few terrorist groups and separatist groups that have been exploiting ethnicity to pursue their agendas, and they are usually, as has been proved several times, not only in Iran but also in Turkey, in Iraq and Syria, they are funded and backed by the U.S. and the U.K. and the Israeli regime because they are seeking to destabilize the Middle East and especially destabilize Iran because, you know, we have been a very, a country with, which has been like as well established. We don't have issues of security or destabilization that much, but they are trying to create chaos inside the country. So when there is unrest, when there are protests and riots, it's a great

opportunity for those terrorist groups to pursue their own agenda. When Mahsa Amini died, his father made it clear to the public that this has nothing to do with her Kurdish identity. It is an issue of women's right for all Iranians, regardless of their ethnicity, and they don't want the ethnicity to be highlighted because it doesn't really matter. And that's the same for all Iranians from other ethnicities. In Balochistan, we also had terrorist groups which are funded and backed by Saudi and Salafi ideology, And they have always been very active. Unfortunately, they have killed a lot of police officers, not just this year, in previous years too, because they are at the border with Pakistan

and they seek to create chaos there. So what happened in Balochistan and what happened in Sanuchistan and what happened in uh in sanandaj for example was that we saw activities from like um random people shooting uh and then the police had to get involved and when something like that happens unfortunately and sadly we also see innocent people getting killed but there are videos of what happens in for example sistan where uh like people dressed as ordinary people uh come and start shooting at protesters like from among the protesters and they start shooting at protesters so and and because of the all the lies and fake uh stories that have been viral online, it becomes very difficult for people

to understand who's exactly causing this chaos in the country. And they want to step back and just not to be involved in the protests anymore. And that's, I think, one reason that the protests have already died out. It's interesting because I remember back in 2000, I think it was 2009, the Obama era, the idea was that Twitter was fueling revolution and that it was going to topple authoritarian dictators. Well, and Satara could talk about this, in 2019, they shut the internet down for at least a week, like a full week. So like it's, there is power. No, of course there's power, but there's so much power for fake information to go viral too. And that's what that, that is so, I think that is such a stark contrast with the way Twitter was being pitched back in the, the aughts. Um, and I wanted to ask, you know, obviously the, the hostility between the United States and Iran is, is long

and complicated and two-sided, but if we separate the sort of ordinary citizens from the government, you know, there are a lot of regular Americans who want to know, you know, what can the, what is the plight of women in Iran? You know, what, you cut out all of the Western disinformation and narrative. What are activists in Iran, like yourself, what can your government, what should your government be doing better for women? Well, I think we have improved a lot over the years, and that's because women have been taking the lead in demanding reforms with, for example, laws regarding women. And it's been improving. So what we ask the government is just to speed up this process and allow for more and more women to get involved and to support them. Women in Iran have been able to change a lot of laws regarding women and have improved the situation for women.

And that's why, as I said, we are seeing more women studying at universities than men even. In some majors, it's even more than 70% of the students are women. So this is what we have been doing and we have to educate our nation as well i mean it's it's not everything comes from the government we have to also educate the grassroots but what we want the government to do is to resist any foreign intervention and do not allow our our struggle for civil rights and for more equal rights to be hijacked by forces outside. This is basically the main thing. And we want the government to focus on us.

And I know that when there is so much hostility targeted towards Iran, it becomes very difficult for the government also to, I mean, they will have to get busy at the borders, they will get busy at a lot of other things, but still we want them to focus on the issues inside and try to make it easier for women to pursue their goals. Somewhat off-topic question, but not totally. Iran has a pretty strict abortion ban, and I'm curious, since I live in a country that's headed in that direction, what has been the effect of that? Is there a significant black market for abortions? Is there an abortion rights, is there kind of an underground abortion rights movement there? Where is Iranian society and law on that

question right now? Well, the abortion in Iran is not totally banned. If abortion is necessary for the mother's health, or if you get permission from doctors, you can do it in the regular hospitals, and that's not very difficult. So, and that's also one thing that women's rights have been working on. Because the majority of Iranians are Muslim and they want the Islamic laws to be enforced, they have maybe some sort of different ideas about how abortion has to be banned or not banned here. But based on Islamic law and based on the Iranian law, the mother's health and well-being comes first. And that's what plays a pivotal role in whether a woman is allowed to abort or not.

Like Christians, I mean, I'm sure the Christian community also believes that, at least as Christians, they should be able to practice what they believe in, or the Jewish community. And here, too, Muslims want to be allowed to practice what they believe in. And I think it's very important to understand it's not about only abortion, it's with a lot of other rules. For example, the head cover or the covering. It's very important to understand that not everyone in the world

wants to enforce the liberal Western notion of freedom or bodily autonomy. There are people who believe in their own ideas and that's about the majority of Iranians here. It's interesting to know that there have been campaigns inside Iran because, you know, it has become very easy for women to just get a permission from their doctors to abort. And there have been campaigns inside Iran asking doctors to make it more difficult because the patients have to be, you know, well informed about the consequences and about everything that would happen to them. And they are asking for more education for women so that if they make a decision, it's not only coming from the doctors.

It's also something that they really want to do. Just curious, if you could get a, or maybe you have some polling that you trust, what is the general attitude toward the particular law around required hijab in public? Where do you think the Iranian public would come down on that? And if it were repealed, what's your guess on what the effect of that would be? How many women would voluntarily continue wearing it in public? That's a good question because it's another one of those things the Western media latches onto as a sort of straight and narrow question within the framing of Western freedom.

Exactly. And the way they portray women inside Iran wearing hijab is that they have been asked by men to do it and women are submissive or anything, but women here are very powerful and they know how to, as I said, achieve their goals. But I mean, I don't have, there are a few statistics, but because that's a topic that has not, you know, it has not been the main concern for Iranian women. Iranian women do not have the mandatory hijab, whether for it to be enforced or not, has not been the first priority for Iranian women. Iranian women want changes with other things that happen to us. For example, more equal rights in job opportunities, in marriage rights, etc. So I understand that the West might have difficulty understanding that a lot of people here do not really have an issue with covering their heads. And they understand the culture here because I have friends who do not like to wear, they had a scarf, but they have

been practicing it because they know that it's not only the government. I mean, the government has been enforcing it because a majority wanted it to be enforced. But now this is changing. I mean, with the demographics changing and with ranges from one person, I mean, from different percentages. So it's not like very exact. But I could tell you that there is still a majority that would practice hijab, even if it was not mandatory. And that's coming from even the Generation Z, as you call it here. I've talked to students at universities. I've talked to high school students.

Even those who, for example, practice it, wearing it quite relaxed and different from what the government demands. Even them, they say that if it was voluntary and I could make a choice, I would still wear it, even if it's like just covering half of my hair and not fully. But I would still wear it because the majority of Iranians are still religious. We have strong families here and family bonds here. Families are still functioning to a large extent and that's very different

from the West. And families cherish and celebrate Islamic values. Yes, I think there is a larger number now compared to, for example, 10 years ago or 20 years ago that do not

want to practice it anymore. And I think people should be allowed to choose as it functions in all democracies. That seems like such a reasonable position. If you want to wear it, wear it. If you don't want to wear it, don't wear it. Do you, why won't the, is there something symbolic about this particular law that is,

that the government is clinging to? Why won't the government move to that more reasonable position, which says, hey, you want to wear it? That's wonderful. If you don't want to wear it, that's also fine. Well, how does the U.S. government decide on whether to legalize abortion or not? We have nine unelected kind of religious leaders. Appointed by our elected leaders. We have a Supreme Council of Religious Leaders

that we call the Supreme Court. And they have final say over our laws. I understand that you have a similar system over there. Okay, yes. But we also have the parliament. And the parliament is the way through, the channel through which we can change a law, I mean, demand from the government the mandatory hijab law. So if you want to satisfy and if you want to convince public opinion, it has to be that people should be allowed. It is a long process.

You have to start educating people and, you know, working on that, because I'm sure that if Iran stopped enforcing the hijab law, there would also be a large proportion who would take to the streets and say that this is disrespectful to their Islamic values. So the country has to take all these groups of people into account. But apart from that, it's also that hijab is also a symbol of fighting and resisting imperialist power not now but you know even during the Shah the Pahlavi era or the Hajar era when hijab was not mandatory most people were practicing it and it was not at some point even because during the first Pahlavi Shah it was banned it became even more of a symbol of resistance

because people were feeling that there is an attack on their values and they wanted to resist that. So I think the reason, I mean, I hope that the government will show more flexibility towards changing it and so that more people, I i mean we have a more inclusive um um you know um concessions on on what to do here but i think that's also something that the people should decide the government alone cannot make a decision on it we have to convince the public opinion yeah i was i was being a little bit glib earlier because there there still a link to, there's some link to public opinion.

So, for instance, when our Supreme Court finally legalized marriage equality, it did so not out of thin air, but after a serious kind of cultural movement pushing to allow for same-sex marriage. And so it wasn't as if they just kind of came up with it on their own. And there was a significant movement to ban, you know, to curtail abortion rights as well that culminated in Roe v. Wade being overturned. So it's not like it's completely disconnected from public opinion. It's just not as easy as public preferences becoming law kind of overnight. Yeah. And so it can be a long process. Exactly. Yeah.

Well, thank you so much for joining us and sharing your perspective. We really appreciate it. No problem. My pleasure. All right. Well, that wraps up today's show. We were really packed. We kind of took a

tour of the whole world, basically, and American politics as well. Really interesting interview and just an interesting guest. Yeah. And I certainly, yeah, it's nice to hear a different perspective, whether or not you agree with it or not. Like we need to hear a we need to hear all, all bunch of different perspectives from both inside and outside. That's the thing, right. And this conversation about the concept of freedom in the West, right? Because Western media is so dominant, especially in sort of big business mass media that I think our concept of freedom is the most just definition of it. It is the correct, proper. And sitarists seem to agree with it also. And though— To a point.

The perspective, though, of what other people see as freedom is, I think, one, that the Western media doesn't like to platform and doesn't like to have these uncomfortable conversations because they're difficult and complicated. And they don't sort of fit neatly into the package that you want to sort of send out to people's living rooms and wherever for early morning television. But they're really important. And at least to have that kind of cross-pollination, have that conversation. It's such a loss. Our media can have conversations like that every day if they wanted to. And there's also a running theme from yesterday where we had Ambassador Dan Foote talking about the unrest in Haiti. And we were talking about how if there are protests in Cuba, Western media, in particular U.S. media, is going to spend its focus 24-7 looking at the protests in Cuba. Haiti blows up. Nobody cares

about Haiti. In Iran in 2019, they're protesting over, you know, fuel prices, which are, you know, exacerbated by American sanctions. They shut the internet down for an entire week. They killed hundreds of people in those 2019 protests. Barely a peep. Barely registered in U.S. media. But then a protest, this protest is getting, you know, just relentless coverage where, and if you take Sartaro's word for it in Esfahan, you walk out in Esfahan and you can't even tell that anything's going on. That doesn't mean that there isn't a passionate upswell of- Exactly. And a surge in opposition to this headscarf law. But we also need to take it in proper context because you don't want viewers then to be like totally shocked that the regime doesn't fall.

Yeah. And that a week later, you're like, wait a minute, what happened to those protests that we were talking about all the time? Well, yeah. And then you further lose trust in your media sources because they're telling you that this regime is on the brink of collapse when in fact it isn't. Well, and the money that the American public works really hard to make be on the brunt of losing our money or our spending, period, in any different way. So it's frustrating. I mean, our major media could be having these conversations every day. They won't. And she's also right that there is foreign influence in those particular regions that she talked about, but it absolutely doesn't justify security forces cracking down and killing dozens of people. So all of those different things can be true. Yeah, absolutely. Well, we appreciate you joining us here on the show. Crystal and

Sagar will be back this week. We'll be back on Friday. And it's been a pleasure. And in general, we just appreciate the viewers so much for allowing us, for making it possible for us to have conversations like this one. So we hope everybody has a great Tuesday, and we'll see you soon. See you then. This is an iHeart Podcast.