Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - Counter Points #8: Midterm Polls, GOP Agenda, Gain of Function, Curriculum Battles, Iran Protests, & More!

Episode Date: October 21, 2022

Ryan and Emily give their commentary on midterm polls, inflation numbers, Kevin McCarthy's agenda, GOP divides, false voter fraud claims, gain of function research, parent school protests, & 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/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. mainstream by becoming a Breaking Points premium member today at BreakingPoints.com. Your hard-earned money is going to help us build for the midterms and the upcoming presidential election so we can provide unparalleled coverage of what is sure to be one of the most pivotal moments in American history. So what are you waiting for? Go to BreakingPoints.com to help us out. Well, welcome back to CounterPoints Friday, actually on a Friday this time, not CounterPoints Monday or Tuesday, but actually on Friday. We even did a Wednesday. We still haven't done a Thursday. That's right.

Okay. So we're coming for Thursday. Thursday's not safe for us. Stay away from Saturday and Sunday. That's right. Also, our first CounterPoints Friday with a live studio audience of one. That's right. My mom is sitting about 10 yards away from us, and she is going to be somewhat of an

ombudsman every time Ryan says something socialist about unions or the economy. The audience has been prepped not to boo too loudly. Yes, there won't be any booing. But it is sort of fun to have a little live studio audience. I'm not sure why she has a little bucket of tomatoes there, but I think we might find out. She brought eggs. Yes. All right. Well, our first topic today, we're going right in on the midterm. She has a little bucket of tomatoes there. But I think we might find out. She brought eggs.

All right. Well, our first topic today, we're going right in on the midterms. And I want to put this sot up because Peter Doocy from Fox News pressed President Biden at a news conference this week. And I think the question he asks and the way Joe Biden responds opens up a bigger discussion about what's happening in the midterm elections. So let's go ahead and roll a one. Top domestic issues, inflation or abortion. They're all important. Unlike you, there's no one thing. It crosses the board.

Domestic, ask about foreign policy, too. There's multiple, multiple, multiple issues. And they're all important. And we ought to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. You know that all expression. Thank you. All right, Ryan. Can they walk and chew gum at the same time? There's been a lot of chatter in the Beltway Press over the last couple of weeks about whether Democrats have sort of handicapped themselves by focusing so much on the abortion issue because they felt they had the wind at their backs after the Dobbs ruling that this was going to

help them eat away at what was going to be a really positive turnout for Republicans in the fall with a bad economy. But is that actually the case? Do you think that's actually what's going on? Or do you think the Democrats really are walking and chewing gum at the same time, meaning that they can talk about both of those issues and they can target ads about abortion where it'll matter and maybe not so much elsewhere? I think Biden is right in the sense that people contain multitudes. Right. Like the idea that you have to choose between all of the different things that you care about. Like, well, I care about inflation, therefore I don't care about abortion. Or, hey, I care about abortion rights, pro or con, therefore I don't care about inflation.

It's a question of salience and it's a question of what moves people to things, what moves people to vote or not to vote, and what moves people to switch sides. And pundits might, we'll find out on election night. I'm not terribly optimistic about Democrats' chances, but they have overperformed in basically every special election that we've had since the Dobbs ruling. Overperformed polls, overperformed in basically every special election that we've had since the Dobbs ruling. Overperformed polls, overperformed expectations. And if they do end up overperforming, it will be because people, when they were asked, what is the most important issue? They say, well, inflation. Like every single day I'm wondering for two reasons.

One, I hear about inflation on the car radio when I'm driving around, and I know that that's going to impact my 401k, which I've watched 20%. A lot of people have 401ks. A lot of people have watched their 401ks nosedive. That bothers them, even if they're not going to retire for 10, 20, 30 years. It's like watching that happen gives you anxiety. Secondly, seeing prices rise. Spending hundreds of more dollars a month that you don't have on things that you need. Gas prices are going back up. Gas prices are going up. So when you're asked, what's the issue that's most important to you? You're going to respond to that. Also, there's tons of polling research that what the media

is talking about then comes back to pollsters as the top issue. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Around the deficit, for instance. Nobody says the deficit. It used to be the number one issue was the deficit. Did we solve the deficit? Is the deficit gone? Deficit's not top 30 anymore. Isn't it amazing how that works? Because the media doesn't talk about the deficit. And so people sometimes view these polls as quizzes. What's the correct answer? Well, I hear all the time about inflation. So therefore, the correct answer to your question you're asking me, I'm smart, it's inflation. Well, it's also just the conditioning, right? If you sort of exist in the media ecosystem, as all of us do now, like you can't really tune it out. If you have social media,

whatever, you're being bombarded with it. And that sort of conditions, that is the conditioning. I don't think people need to be conditioned in this case to worry immensely about inflation. Same with abortion. And that's where the wildcard could come in. Because you could have a sizable number of people who are not a majority. It's not going to turn up to be the number one issue, but so many people are going to vote on that issue that that might throw off these polls. It's a point. Because even if it's only 10%, boom, that flips the apple cart of all the punditry. Well, so that actually also explains the way the parties are spending. Because we talked about those earlier in the week. Midterm elections are largely about turnout. So if you are a party consultant and you're engineering election strategies in Ohio, Pennsylvania, wherever it is, Nevada, perhaps, you're saying, how do I make sure every Democratic voter actually goes out and pulls the lever for a Democrat? your job to bring in independents to the polls. And this is from an Axios report. It's from the Wesleyan Media Project. A university-backed political ad research group finds that the

top issue mentioned in ads in Senate races across broadcast TV nationally from September 19th through October 2nd was abortion. And you can see where in the aggregate, if you're asking Joe Biden, can you walk and chew gum at the same time? The real question there is, are Democrats focusing on abortion to the detriment of inflation? And that is absolutely a real question. But if they're doing it smartly, and if Republicans are doing it smartly, and when Republicans run ads, this isn't just about Dem spending, this is also about Republican spending. If Republicans are doing it correctly, it's also as a motivating factor saying, Mark Kelly supports no restrictions on abortion. If that's the Republican line, that's what you want to be doing, not sort of blocking and tackling.

Yeah. Last night I watched the Jim Bognett-Matt Cartwright debate. It's in Northeast Pennsylvania. Fun night in the Grimm house. I mean, it's my favorite congressional race. Maybe we can talk about it more next week. Matt Cartwright is an old school populist Democrat. And watching him kind of parry the inflation blows from Bognett was what people on the left would love to see every Democrat do. He would just hit him back. He's like, look, and he even used the line that you hear on this show and elsewhere

when Bognet would talk about Drag Queen Story Hour. And he'd be like, look, here this guy goes with the culture war stuff again, just to try to distract you from the fact that his big donors are making record profits and profiteering and driving up prices. Which was kind of how that Katie Porter video went viral this week was kind of how that Katie Porter video went viral this week. Did you see the Katie Porter video talking about? Okay, so the, and again, that's true. We're going to talk a little bit about, in my monologue actually, about culture war and versus kind of economic issues and how, in my opinion, they're often overlapping more than people realize. But to your point, it's incredible how Democrats don't pick up

on the messaging of Cartwright. Like, why the National Party doesn't do that? Is it because they're new? He's actually their vice chair for messaging or something, but they're still not listening to him. Yeah. But they really aren't running like that. Is it because they're cozing your relationship with the Chamber of Commerce? I shouldn't say new. It's not entirely new. I mean, a lot of them don't want to offend their own donors, I guess. Right. Well, or they're running in suburban districts maybe where they don't want to be accused of being socialists or something like that. Something. So it's not working. So let's pull up A2 here, which is, you know, so 538 flagged on Twitter yesterday that Republicans, after trailing for a very, very long time in the generic congressional ballot, ticked up by one-tenth of a percent.

So they're now up by one-tenth of a percent in the generic ballot. That is obviously not statistically significant, but the direction is significant. They have been trending upwards. Democrats have been trending upwards. Democrats have been trending downwards. As we get closer to the election, and actually ballots are already out, so we're in the midst of the election, typically the president's party starts to lose momentum heading into the, you know, the people that are still on the fence at this point oftentimes swing over towards Republicans. And the polling is so bad that it's really hard to know. If you are either party at this point, if you're Republicans, you want to be up a couple points because Democrats had overperformed in all of these recent races, although you have a gerrymandering and geographical structural advantage where if there's a flat 50-50 vote, Republicans win the House. If you're Democrats, though, you look at all the polling misses in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania,

Michigan, Ohio, all over the country, you're like, we need a much bigger margin than we have right here. Right. Well, and they're up like 3.4 in the aggregate, the RCP aggregate as well, 3.4 points. And that's it. It wasn't always that way. It's the trend is going higher as the last couple of weeks. The gap is getting higher as the last couple of weeks. And yeah, it's partially that. It's also partially where the money has gone.

You know, after Labor Day, people start spending big money in some of those races. And that what happens, I think, downstream of the money coming in is that people sort of realize what their messages actually are and have to be. And as that kind of congeals, you see the efficacy of it. And gas prices are not helping Democrats right now at all. Obviously, inflation is a broader issue, but I think specifically gas prices went down a little bit. And when the generic ballot was a little bit tighter, gas prices were a little bit lower. And so all of that sort of drives people in different directions. And to the point I was making earlier about inflation being a concern relative to the markets too, let's put up a three here, which is you're getting signals from the Federal Reserve that they're not happy that their raising of interest rates has seemingly had so little effect on inflation. And so they're

signaling that in their next several meetings, they're going to continue raising interest rates until they push it well over 4%. And then they're going to leave it there for most of the rest of the year. And this actually goes back to the conversation that we were having with Matt Stoller and Dave Dayen, but I guess two weeks ago now, where Dave Dayen making the argument that, okay, if it was true that raising rates was actually going to deal with the drivers of inflation, then okay, then let's have that conversation. If this tightening was going to do that in some way other than just massively ratcheting up unemployment, let's think about it. I think what we're seeing so far is evidence that Dan is correct at this point, that the drivers of inflation are not the things that you can manipulate with tightening or loosening Fed policy. If it's supply chain driven, if it's drought driven, if it's driven by the war, if it's driven by sanctions on Russia, if it's driven by OPEC cutting the amount of oil that it's producing, the Federal

Reserve monkeying around with its Fed funds rates isn't going to affect any of that stuff other than savagely depressing the economy and throwing so many people out of work that eventually, as a knock-on effect, those prices come down. And so what you're seeing here is that they're like, well, I guess we're just going to have to keep doing it. And maybe then it'll rain in California. Or maybe then the war in Russia will end. or maybe then we won't be seeing heat waves in India. They feel like they're so divorced from the reality of the economy that they don't recognize something that Brad DeLong in his recent book was pointing out, which is that if you think of inflation, people talk about it heating up or a fever.

If you think of the purpose of a fever, like a fever, and this is kind of the new medicine that the pediatricians have been telling us. If the fever's below like 101, 100 or so, let it run because the fever has a purpose. Rub some dirt in it, yeah. Yeah, rub some dirt in it. You let it run for as long, if it gets higher, then you need to seek like serious intervention. But if it's running at 100, 101, there's a reason the body's doing that. The body is heating itself up so that the heat then, you know, is an immunoresponse and pushes down whatever the problem was and beats it.

So as soon as you see a little tiny spike in a fever, you take Advil, then that allows the virus to just, oh, sweet, no immune response. I can just rock and roll here for a while. You'll feel better. And so inflation is a signal to the economy that something's off. In the early part of the pandemic, inflation was a signal that the supply chains were completely broken. So you can either then invest as a society and figure out a way to fix those supply chains and then bring that fever down, or you can just dump a bunch of Advil, which is saying, well, the problem is

too many people are buying things and people have money because they have jobs. So therefore we need to throw people out of work. So then when they don't have jobs, they won't be able to buy things. And then that will fix the supply chains, except you didn't fix the supply chains. You still have your same supply chains

so that the next time then you have economic growth again, you're going to have another supply chain crisis because you never fixed it. That's our entire economy. It's like Band-Aids over Band-Aids over Band-Aids that are often crony Band-Aids, but it's just like Band-Aids layered on top of other Band-Aids. And that's why when people say we have this wonderful free market system, and I'm talking about people on the right, no, we have a wonderful free market system, but for cronies. But the other thing I was going to say to that point is in this case,

it is somewhat complicated by the reality that to invest in those fixes, the spending can be inflationary too. And so it's just a kind of a lose-lose, being you're between a rock and a hard place, basically. And so if that 538 forecast of a 0.1% advantage for Republicans in the midterms comes to be, you're going to have a Speaker Kevin McCarthy. And if we can put up B1 here, Emily Chichinsky has a profile of Kevin McCarthy, just ran in the Federalist. So tell us, what was your impression of Kevin McCarthy? You know, I think there's a lot of interesting stuff going on with Kevin McCarthy. Remember, he is a young gun, right? Remember that hilarious photo shoot and book with Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan,

and Kevin McCarthy? That was incredible. From 2010 or 20, it looks like a men's warehouse ad. And so he sort of came up under Boehner, under Ryan, very much an establishment fixture, who is now on really good terms with Jim Jordan. He is now on really good terms with basically the entire Freedom Caucus. He's on decent terms with Donald Trump. And so here's this question of how did this establishment fixture navigate the Trump era in a way where he emerges as the last young gun standing. He's the one that managed to actually have really good relationships with people like Jim Jordan, Donald Trump, while also having good relationships with the establishment, continuing to have a good

relationship with the establishment. It's an interesting question. And it's not to say that Kevin McCarthy is brilliant or dumb, although Politico ran a piece earlier this year asking, is Kevin McCarthy a dummy, like a giant dummy? Is he a dummy? No, he's not. And I think that's really what's interesting here is that he's very savvy and he's such a people person that the Republican caucus feels very heard by him, which goes a long way when you need to sort of unite people and get all of their votes for speaker. So all that is to say, we are likely to see a Speaker Kevin McCarthy. In the story, I have a Freedom Caucus source basically saying, that is not done and dusted, is what he says.

Politico also had a piece saying, Kevin McCarthy, Freedom Caucus is totally behind him. I don't think that's the case. But I think he's going to have to make some concessions. In the story, Rachel Bovard talks about how Nancy Pelosi basically blew up a lot of precedents. And by her own admission, she said we had to blow up those precedents essentially to deal with the threat of Trumpism, to deal with the threat of the insurrection, et cetera, et cetera. So that means Republicans want Kevin McCarthy to fight fire with fire. He's going to boot Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell from the Intelligence Committee. He's going to boot Ilhan Omar from Foreign Affairs if he is Speaker,

if Republicans win. He's not ready to talk about impeachment yet. That's one thing that has a lot of people on the right kind of riled up. They wish he would come out guns a-blazing and go for Mayorkas, go for Merrick Garland. He says he'll do it if something occasions impeachment. But he's really walking a tightrope, and he could slip and fall at any moment, but he's been doing this for years, and I think it's worth paying attention to. What do they want to do Garland for? The letter about the parents in Virginia? Well, that's, yeah, to start with that, yeah. And then all of the other FBI corruption. Yeah, generally it would all come down to FBI corruption. Gotcha.

You had an interesting anecdote about Jim Jordan because it is, and I think that a lot of liberals have not picked up on the fact that Kevin McCarthy has really ingratiated himself with the right. And so they keep thinking, oh, he's not going to be able to handle the right. It's like, no, actually, if you follow the caucus or the conference, it's so annoying. It's a Democratic caucus and a Republican conference. The Republicans in the House call themselves a conference. Democrats are a caucus. And actually, they're— I call them a caucus, too, though.

There's actually supposed to be a meaningful distinction between the two. A caucus is supposed to vote together where a conference is like people who are— Conferring. Conferring but are still individuals. But they're not actually. They're a caucus now. So let's call them a caucus. So the Republican caucus is actually pretty, you know, united behind Kevin McCarthy. It seems at this point, as Rachel said in your piece, the Freedom Caucus doesn't really have the juice to take him out. You had a good,

you had this interesting anecdote about Jim Jordan and how he kind of jammed him onto the oversight committee against the wishes of the committee. How do you do that and what's been the fallout from that? Yeah, there hasn't been fallout, which is what's so interesting. It's like he tells the story about how after Jim Jordan ran against him for speaker, he said he called Jordan up. I think there were freshmen congressmen together. He called Jordan up. Jordan was working out at the gym. And Kevin McCarthy said, listen, you got to get down here. I need you to be oversight chair. You're the best person for the job. It's work hours. What are you

doing? I mean, I don't know. I don't know what was in the steering. I don't know what hours the steering committee keeps. So, but Jordan comes down and gives his presentation to the oversight committee or to the steering committee and they eru, is what Kevin McCarthy said. The steering committee erupted on Kevin McCarthy for bringing Jordan in. McCarthy says, you elected me to lead, let me lead. Sticks his neck out for Jordan. Jordan does what, just by all accounts, everybody on the right believes was a great job in oversight. And Kevin McCarthy sees that as a real success point. And Jim Jordan is really his bridge to the Freedom Caucus. But as we talked about with Ken Buck earlier this week, it's possible that bridge could break if the Freedom Caucus gets annoyed enough with Jordan over their disagreements on big tech stuff. Who knows if that happens,

but it's another thing to watch out for. But yeah, I mean, Kevin McCarthy has been very intentional. He is not Paul Ryan. He is surely not John Boehner. And that's an interesting point that you raised about how on the left, I don't think people recognize how sincere, it's another story from the piece, which very quickly he talks about, Jim Jordan talks about, and Kevin McCarthy talks about how that first impeachment of Donald Trump, they did not lose a Republican vote. And they've lost Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney on January 6th stuff. But that's pretty remarkable given where we know Republicans are sort of behind closed doors when it comes to Donald Trump, right? And also when it comes to sending weapons to Ukraine and national security behind closed doors, which was what that impeachment was about.

Exactly. And so for him to be able to do that was a feat. And Jim Jordan talks about how that really brought the conference together. McCarthy saw that as a moment that really brought the conference together. The way I described it, it's like when you're on a high school field trip, like maybe you're going somewhere big and fancy and something goes really wrong on the trip and everyone becomes best friends because it's like trauma bonding. That's basically how Republicans would describe their experience with the first impeachment and keeping everybody together. And that is strategically a testament to McCarthy's leadership. Now, to your point, Ryan, he had some interesting comments this week to Punchbowl where he said we're basically not going to be giving a blank check to Ukraine in January because people are seeing a recession. They're going through a recession.

They're dealing with high levels of inflation. What they're not going to want to see from us is a blank check to Ukraine. This gets blown up into a whole thing about how Republicans are now this isolationist Jacksonian party. But what did you make of McCarthy weighing in on Ukraine, especially with the news that you wanted to discuss briefly about Kherson? Oh, right. So there isn't a development yet on this incoming battle of Kherson, but the Ukrainian government has now kind of put a blackout around all of their operations around the Kherson region. And they're telegraphing that there's going to be a major assault on Kherson in the next several days. Could start today, as far as we know.

It's running along the same pattern as we saw with the assault on the eastern front, what was that, a month ago or so. Kherson is the only kind of regional capital that Russia was able to take. Putin has declared martial law there. He has illegally annexed the region. And if it falls so quickly after that, it'll be a huge blow to Putin. And the authorities who are currently controlling Kherson have urged all civilians to evacuate so that they can fortify the city, bracing for this coming assault. And so it does feel like this could be a battle that tells you where this is heading, that if they get repulsed and then they head into a winter with most of their power stations out and with Europe growing sick of their own kind of travails at the expense of this war. Yeah. And if you have McCarthy take power in January,

Putin may feel like, okay, I've got this. If I can just hold on, I've got this. If they take Kherson, then the rest of the war seems foretold in a way. Tell me more about that. That from there, I could just see everything just collapsing. Dominoes. Yeah. Because if they can't hold the most significant piece that they grabbed, then you keep saying, well, you see supporters of the Russian war effort saying, don't dismiss this war.

They seized 30% of territory, and they still hold 20% of territory. And then they're going to be like, well, they hold 18%, they hold 15%. They hold 10% of Ukrainian territory. And at that point, morale is so important that if you see which direction things are going, then you could imagine these different fortifications just saying, you know what, I'm not here for this. Well, and on this point, a really interesting, this is from Morning Consult, which says their tracking, quote, shows the share of Republicans who say the U.S. is doing too much to halt Russia's invasion of Ukraine has doubled from 13% to 27%. So 27% of people say the U.S. is doing too much. That was from March to May. So

those are somewhat outdated numbers, but you can see that doubling really quickly. And that's very, very interesting. And that's where you start to see this creeping into Republican rhetoric and perhaps into Republican policy. Now, Mitch McConnell is very hawkish and is all in on sending a lot of money to Ukraine. Obviously, if Ukraine is able to have a bulwark militarily, that's heavily coming from U.S. funding. And so it's heavily reliant on their ability to persuade, to have Mitch McConnell persuade a Republican Party or a Kevin McCarthy to be on board with that.

And to your point, Ryan, one thing I always see happening in Washington is you can always make the case for the next step, the next spending, the next increment, and the next bill, because this is about Curson. And if Curson goes, then you have a domino effect. And that's something the Republicans are going to have to deal with, I think. Or they might not, because I could see a scenario where in the lame duck, let's say Republicans have taken over both chambers or they took over just the House. I could see in the lame duck, Pelosi on her way out, sitting down with Schumer and McConnell and saying, here come the crazies, like, let's write a blank check. Or not necessarily a blank check, but how about another 50 billion? Like that should get another 100 billion. We're not going to spend it all, but here's 100 billion

that's available. I could absolutely see that happening. And all it has to do is get through the House. And then once it gets to the Senate, like you said, McConnell and enough Republicans, you've got people like Portman and Blunt and other retiring Republicans, that breezes through. And then McCarthy can say he's not going to send any more money. It won't matter, which actually probably would be his preference. Like if you could speak to him completely privately about it, he probably wants to send money there, but doesn't want his fingerprints on the money. Because if you notice, he said— Special interests want us to spend money in Ukraine.

And so do a lot of the hawkish donors in the Republican Party that are left. The base doesn't necessarily want it, but a lot of the donors do. That might be changing, but you're right. Right. Some do, some don't. But you notice his phrasing. He said, we're not going to send a blank check. That's different than saying we're not going to send money. We're not going to send a check. We'll send a check.

And it is shameful that there have not been strings attached, that there has not been oversight put on this money. We're going to see these weapons all over the world. And you're going to see enormous amounts of it skimmed. You're also obviously seeing enormous amounts of it fired at the Russian military and at their positions. So it's not as if nothing's being done with the weapons. But so McCarthy, I think, would still sign off on significant military aid, but there would be money for the IG. There's basically evidence that there are cracks in the foundation that really has not had cracks in it. Pat Buchanan, I don't think, really put cracks in it, but maybe tiny little hairline fractures that are now opening up into cracks in the sort of neoconservative foundation of the

Republican Party. There was a quote that you were highlighting earlier. Who was that from about how you're never going to have a hawkish Republican Party again? That's exactly why you should stay tuned for the next segment because it is indeed in the article that we're about to talk about. Excellent. Stick around for that. Well, that's right. We can start with it right now. If we can put C1 up, this is a story that was in a very long and in-depth kind of profile of the Republican Party's struggles with those cracks in the foundation that we talked about in the last segment. When you start to have people like Kevin McCarthy saying, well, we're not going to send a blank check to Ukraine, which as Ryan points out

is different than a check. So the headline here is the neocons are losing. Why aren't we happy? Ryan, the quote that you're referencing, that you referenced in the last block, comes from Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation, who's saying that, and I'm paraphrasing this, we are unlikely to ever have a hawkish Republican president again because the movement has shifted. And he's quoted in the New Republic article as saying that, and let me just read one quote that I think encapsulates the argument of the New Republic piece. It says, the Jacksonian moment is coming. In preventing overreach and curbing the default hawkishness that still predominates in Washington, this is a welcome development. But with their hostility to alliances, diplomacy, and internationalism, the Jacksonians may make U.S. foreign policy unnecessarily ruthless and selfish while making

new enemies and destroying some of our greatest strengths. From somebody on the left, do you share those concerns about creeping isolationism? And I don't mean that in a pejorative sense on the right. I'm all for isolation. Let it creep, let it creep as much as it can creep. I thought you were going to say that. on the right. I'm all for isolation. Let it creep, let it creep as much as it can creep. I thought you were going to say that. Jackson, but why did they go to Jackson? Why did they go to Jackson? Jackson, like- It's always Jackson. Jackson became president, you know, because he, like, disobeyed orders and, like, invaded Spanish Florida. Like, that was the thing that, like, kind of put him on the map. His, like, absolute genocide of the Native American population was central to his entire political rise. And so, he didn't go to war with Britain or something? And so, that counts as

he didn't go to war with Mexico? He left that for other people? He's just always been that avatar. And so, they call him an isolationist? Right. When neoconservatives want to punch at the isolationist right, they go to Jackson. Oh, the neoconservatives go to Jackson. Yeah, when they want to create a sort of straw man, they go to Jackson. Why don't they go to La Follette? The actual Republican isolationist? You're asking the wrong person. Weird. Why don't they go to La Follette? The like actual Republican isolationist.

You're asking the wrong person. Weird. Well, he wasn't president. No, he wasn't president, but yeah, he was kind of the leading isolationist Republican in the early part of the 20th century who, and that movement was really kind of smashed to bits by World War II. Yes. Yes, it sure was. And it took until Pat Buchanan really to start kind of showing some green shoots. Well, and it did. And this is, I think, a bigger question about we lose perspective on how new nuclear technology is and the very immediate, urgent new threat that nuclear technology posed to the world, not just North America, not just the European continent in the mid-century, right after World War II, informed what became neoconservatism. And this isn't to endorse

neoconservatism. It's merely to say that it's pretty understandable at the time that if you have missiles in Cuba, there's sort of a real reason to deter that and to be doing preventative action and the sort of Reagan idea of peace through strength, of building up to the point where you are deterring the use of nuclear weapons. Because, I mean, we had children doing nuclear, like, things under their desks, like doing nuclear emergency drills under their desks. Now we traumatize our kids just with shooting drills. We traumatize them in so many ways now. But yes, that is among many ways we traumatize them.

And so the sort of broader question of neoconservatism I think is more understandable with that aperture. But at the same time, right now, what we see is the wreckage of decades of neoconservative policy around the world, not just in the United States, of course, not just in the United States, very much around the world. And with that in the rearview mirror, this new sort of nuclear threat emerges at an entirely different context. And it is interesting that you're seeing this kind of populist isolationism emerge in a similar cauldron as it did 100 years ago, you know, the wake of the Gilded Age. Oh, that is interesting. Everybody says we're in a second Gilded Age.

And so it would make sense that the characteristics of the first Gilded Age would be reproducing themselves here. And you could see why in the first Gilded Age, you'd say, look, any war that's being fought right now is being fought on behalf of the plutocrats, the J.P. Morgan, the Jace. The same plutocrats today would be the ones that people would see themselves as fighting on behalf of. Arguably much worse plutocrats today would be the ones that people would see themselves as fighting on behalf of. Arguably much worse plutocrats today, if it's possible. I don't know. I mean, those were some pretty bloodthirsty plutocrats back then. And also, it's what they're capable of getting away with.

Yeah, that's very true. So they're constrained a little bit by their era. So, yeah, I think that's a significant part of it. That again, the collapse of the social contract results in people then not trusting their leadership. And if one decent outcome from that is that they don't want to join those leaders in wars, okay, I guess let's take that. Yeah, that comparison is really interesting because what we pejoratively refer to as isolationism now, when it came to the First World War, was pretty much public opinion. And it took a long time. Right, Wilson ran on he kept us out of the war.

Right, and you remember when George W. Bush ran on keeping us out of foreign conflicts? What was the phrase that he used? Nation building. Right. We're not going to do nation building. Just destroy nations. So he kept that promise. He did not build any nations. We will not be building. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, I don't know. That is a really interesting comparison. And there was this huge influx, obviously, of European immigration around the time of the Gilded Age, which informed why people didn't necessarily want to be entangled in foreign conflicts as well. There was like a lot going on at that time. But this kind of hubris of the post-World War II order was informed by a really strong economy and a very strong post-war economy that was built on

a war in so many different ways. And there's nothing like that right now at all. If anything, it's, we've been spending so much money in the defense sector abroad that we have, you know, empty sort of, we have a tattered social safety net here. One piece of fun trivia to finish off this block. To your point about immigrants in war, the way that World War I was sold was through anti-German hostility. And so there was tons of propaganda against beer because beer was considered to be German. And prohibition came about significantly as a result of all of the propaganda against Germans to get us into World War I. They're like, well, then let's just go ahead and ban it all. This isn't trivia to somebody from Milwaukee, right?

The whole history of the German beer movement, it is pretty interesting. Wisconsin always went first with Social Security, with unemployment, with socialism. Did they ban? They didn't ban beer first, though. Too many Germans. I'd highly doubt that. We were actually the last state, I think, to give in to the 21, the federal 21 drinking age. And they did that with, they.

The highway money. The highway money, yeah. Federal funding for highways. You really had to poke at us to get us to go along with that fascism. Yeah, we'd rather have potholes than not allow our 18-year-olds to drink. Hell yeah. All right, on that note, moving on to a much more serious topic. Actually, we have some disturbing footage out of Florida that Ryan and I know you want to talk about.

So the Tampa Bay Times obtained body cam footage of the arrests, and they posted three different arrests. We're going to play a couple of them here of people who are being charged with voter fraud. And as you watch these videos, you're going to see that what you're looking at, to me, feels like state entrapment. These are people who, you know, there was a referendum that allowed, that restored felon voter rights in Florida. The DeSantis administration attached a bunch of different conditions that made it so that you weren't automatically allowed to come back in. It also held exceptions for murder and for sex crimes. And so, but the entire thing is so confusing because of all the different red tape that was thrown up around it. You'll see one of these people, the DMV, just said, hey,

you can register to vote now. These people all got voter registration cards from the state. They were on the rolls. They went to vote. And then the state goes and rounds them up. And so I would encourage people to watch these clips before they jump and comment and say something asinine, like, well, if you don't want to get arrested for voter fraud, don't do voter fraud. Watch it first. If you still want to say something asinine,

watch it first and then say it. So let's roll some of this. I have to go to first appearance, nothing like that. A bump? I didn't do it before. Hello, ma'am. We have a warrant for your arrest. For what?

For voter fraud. Good. How are you, sir? Great. Oh, my God. Hold on. Wait, wait. Let me tell my husband. We're telling him. He's right here. Let's call him right here.

So, if you could put your hands on your back, please. Oh, my God. Do not move. Ultimately, ma'am, you have a warrant. Okay. The warrant. Hold on. Listen. I know you're...

You caught off guard. I understand. Right? So, you have a warrant. it's for voter fraud, okay? Hear me out. It's an ROR. You know what an ROR is? Oh my God. You go in, you get booked, and then they're going to release you from booking.

You can go right out. You're going to be right back out. Right back out. Right back out. But you have a warrant. Okay. I'm like, voter fraud, I'm a voter, but I ain't committing no fraud. Well, so that's the thing.

I don't know exactly what happened with it, but you do have a warrant. That's what it's for. Oh my God. Yeah, so I don't know what happened with that, but... I got out, the guy told me that I was really scared to go vote because I was dumb. I'm tired. Yep.

I was sick. The warrant was just made yesterday. So, I... The guy stopped me two weeks ago. Yeah, I know. I don't know, ma'am. I honestly couldn't tell you, okay? So, I got to do some paperwork.

And the quicker I can get the paperwork done, the quicker I can get you there, okay? Hey, unfortunately, you got a warrant out, okay? Warrant? Yes, sir. Put your hands behind your back for me. Well, no, but no one ever really explained all that much to me. I told the guys when I came out here that I was at the driver's license place getting my new driver's license. The guy there asked me, he says, hey, can you call?

He says, hey, are you registered can you vote? He says, hey, I'm pretty sure I can. He goes, well, are you still on probation? I said, no. I got off probation like a month ago. He goes, well, then you can probably vote. Hey, just fill out the form and if you can vote

and they'll let you give your card, if you can't vote, then you won't. I'm like, alright. And there's your card. If you can't vote, then you won't. And I'm like, all right. Then there's your defense. You know what I'm saying? That sounds like a good call to make. It's not a vote, but we can vote. Can we get this back? Yes, sir.

We'll do it. It's because of the sex offender thing that you can't vote. So, I mean, the warrant is for the voting deal, I guess, but... I guess it's kind of all tied together. Yeah, I guess they're doing, like, some kind of roundup thing or something for all the ones that were within the county. Yeah, I had to do one of these this morning already. Oh, really? Do you know the statutes for them?

It doesn't say it on the... Let's walk over to my car, okay? Why is y'all doing this now and this happened years ago? I don't know. I have no idea, man. This shit's crazy, man. Y'all put me in jail for something I didn't know nothing about. Why would y'all let me vote if I wasn't able to vote? So those are officers with the police force that Ron DeSantis created called the Florida Office of Election Crimes and Security. It was part of, I believe, 18 arrests. DeSantis followed

it with a press conference. This was clearly a coordinated sweep. And I think my posting of the video and us doing it here is what Ron DeSantis wants. I think he wants to chill, get out the vote. He wants people to be afraid of voting, that if they go out and vote, there's a chance that they don't really understand the rules. And yes, there was a felon voter restoration law, but it's complicated. And so maybe you actually can't vote. And so is it really worth it? You really want to go out there and vote because you might wind up getting handcuffed? This to me was just, as I said on the post, just struck me as just deeply evil. You want to play your culture war games in a press conference or whatever, do your culture war games,

but to then bring it to people's front steps, put them in handcuffs when they thought they were able to vote, and also to do it in a way that is completely unbalanced. There were a couple Republicans that were in, I think, South Florida who were caught voting twice on purpose. They knew they voted twice. I remember that, yeah. Right. And what did they get? Like a little community service or something. Or they had to go to a class to teach them not to vote twice?

They are not getting charged with felonies. I don't know. What was your take on this? I mean, the law, I believe, is very clear that you have to have intent. And the intent is what comes through. The lack of intent is what comes through on all of those videos. And so I think it was something like 20 people were arrested in this. You heard one of the officers say it's some kind of roundup is what he said.

And that question of intent is clearly an important one. If you were listening in the podcast format, this was a video from the Tampa Bay Times. And they put a text over it at one point that said everyone who was arrested was given a voter registration card. And the one man in particular, he was saying he was at the DMV getting a new driver's license. And somebody said, hey, you probably can vote. And he even raised, well, I'm not, I'm a felon. Well, as long as you're not on probation anymore. Now, that was the guy who had a felon. I'm a felon. Well, as long as you're not on probation anymore. Now, that was the guy who had a sex crime. And look, those are not sympathetic people.

You went to prison for a sex crime. That doesn't make you a sympathetic figure. Well, these figures are all people who went to prison for murder and sex crimes. Right. Everyone that you just saw there. Right. The woman. Right. Which is a tried and true tactic of government forces is to try to find, if you're going to try to violate a sacred principle, like the right to vote, you're going to find the least sympathetic character so that people will then not stand up for that person. It's one reason that when governments around the world, and particularly the United States government, wants to crack down on press freedom,

they go after Julian Assange. Because the rest of the news media is like, well, we don't even think of him as a journalist. We don't like him. And he's a jerk. Like, personally, we don't like him. And so then people will say, well, I'm for press freedom, but that guy's a jerk.

So I'm not going to stand up and defend that person because I screw them. And then boom, you're just allowing your rights to be chipped away at. Governments don't target the most popular person when they're trying to roll back your rights. That's why it's so important if you're standing up for a principle that you have to defend it even when it's unpopular. Exactly. Judge me by how I treat the least among us. And that's a key principle, obviously. But the other thing I would add to this is it's very frustrating. And I don't think it's even tactically smart, the Republican focus on voter fraud. So this idea that you have illegal people that are like intentionally voting illegally as opposed to, I actually think there are serious questions

about ballot harvesting. I think there are serious questions about the way that billionaires, democratic billionaires poured money into, especially the 2020 election, with this operation that made it easier for all of this to happen, laid the groundwork, as Mark Elias did in states like Wisconsin, to have the money sort of smooth the path for Democratic candidates. I think that stuff is actually very worth talking about. I think it's very worth talking about just the basic sanctity and the security of a person going in and casting a secret ballot. All of those things. Very legitimate room for inquiry there.

And the security of our voting tabulation. Yeah. From foreign hacking. 100%. Yeah. Especially as we gravitate towards new technologies. I think these are very legitimate areas of inquiry. When it goes into stuff like this, listen, I don't know that this is,

I don't think this is going to hurt Ron DeSantis one bit. I don't think there's a real political liability for all of the reasons you just listed. But I also don't think it's tactically a good use of, either a good use of your political resources or even just your resources as a state. Of course, I don't think that, but I don't think it's a good use of like your political capital either. And so it's just very frustrating to see people get caught in the mix.

Yeah. And this is the second time that one of his stunts has involved kind of fundamentally transforming the lives of just normal people. There's still an ongoing investigation about the way, how did he get these Venezuelans in Texas onto a charter plane? Although that I think is increasingly vindicated. I'm following that investigation very closely. And I think it's increasingly vindicating for DeSantis. Maybe we can do a segment on this in the next week or so.

But, I mean, it was pretty clearly all voluntary. And going to Martha's Vineyard, pretty clearly that was communicated. The more we learn about it, as far as we know. What I'm still curious about is whether there was false information given to people about guarantees of housing and work. And also, the money that he got from the Florida legislature to do this was for people who were in Florida illegally. Yes.

Yes. Texas is not Florida. So he had to, what, fly them into Florida? He did do that. So he flew them from Texas to Florida. It's a stunt.

Yeah. Now they're in Florida. Now I can spend the money on it. So it's like... 100% a stunt. And yeah, and I don't know where the bulk of his resources in this election security force have been spent.

But that's exactly the thing that you risk sort of going over the line when you do these stunts to the point where like engage in stunts, period, no matter who they are. And just sort of gauging this or grading this from the pure, cold political strategy perspective, that is absolutely where you risk really pissing people off. I'm saying a stunt is one thing. Don't destroy regular civilians' lives who aren't involved in this. Absolutely. So a firestorm around a Boston University research paper has exposed dangerous gaps in public oversight of the type of research that has the potential to spark new pandemics. So the controversy began when the UK's Daily Mail reported on a public preprint describing BU research that took the spike protein from the highly contagious

Omicron variant of COVID-19 and attached it to the more virulent earlier iteration of the virus known as the Washington State variant or the wild type. Now, we covered this controversy earlier this week, but since then, BU has really dug in and it's worth examining their response because it's a window into how unresponsive some in the scientific community have been to the public's very real concerns about the safety and wisdom of some of this research. So the researchers infected 10 mice with the newly created virus. Eight of them died. After the news broke, the public controversy took an unusual turn with unexpectedly sharp public comments made by officials from Anthony Fauci's NIH division, NIAID, directed toward the researchers. The agency told Stat News they

would have reviewed the research had they been alerted to it and that a probe was now underway. BU responded with a public statement that rejected the notion that the researchers had any obligation to alert the agency and said that while NIAID was thanked for support of research that built the groundwork for this project, this particular research wasn't directly funded by NIH. Therefore, there was no disclosure requirement. Now, the extent of the misleading information included in Boston University's defense of its research and its lack of transparency serves as evidence that the public health community either does not recognize the severe blow its credibility has taken the past two years or feels that it is

immune from that loss of credibility. A closer look at the statement reveals the distance still left to go to regain trust and guarantee a safer research environment. So let's take it piece by piece. So the statement's first claim is this. They say, first, this research is not gain-of-function research, meaning it did not amplify the Washington state SARS-CoV-2 virus strain or make it more dangerous. In fact, this research made the virus replicate less dangerous. Now that, according to Dr. Mark Lipsitch, who is director of Harvard's Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, is preposterous. BU's claim that the new virus is, quote, less dangerous is a reference to the fact that the

original virus killed 10 of 10 mice, while the lab-created virus killed just 8 of 10 infected mice. But the key there is that the mice were deliberately infected. So while the pathogen was slightly less lethal in mice, the expected result of attaching the more effective Omicron spike protein to the Washington state virus would be to make the original virus more infectious. If many more people or mice get infected, that result overwhelms the tiny decline in case fatality rate. So here's Lipsitch. These are unquestionably gain-of-function experiments. The wild-type backbone virus gains immune escape from the insertion of the Omicron spike in ways that the paper describes in detail.

That is gain-of-function. Now, because the research was being done on viruses already in circulation around the world, the risk of creating a dangerous novel virus was actually kind of low. But the false claims from BU are important because they reflect on the inability of researchers to self-regulate, Lipsitch noted, which means the government needs to step in with more rigorous oversight. He said, quote, the statement from BU is disturbing in several ways. First, it denies that this is gain of function. It is gain of function. If meant sincerely, this is disturbing from the institution that did the research because it provides prima facie evidence that institutions are not equipped to self-regulate, unquote. So next,

BU makes the following claim. Secondly, the research was reviewed and approved by the Institutional Biosafety Committee, which consists of scientists as well as local community members. The Boston Public Health Commission also approved the research. Okay, but in fact, according to a BPHC spokesperson, the researchers submitted their proposal and it was approved by the Public Health Commission in March 2020. Now, of course, there was no Omicron in March 2020. Therefore, quite simply, the research that was actually performed was not, in fact, approved ahead of time. Various experts have made this point publicly, though there's no need for me to quote them here.

We all understand, at least on a very elementary level, the nature of time. Now, Boston University's statement then explains why it was not required to inform NIH of what it was up to. We fulfilled all required regulatory obligations and protocols following NAIID's guidelines and protocols. We did not have an obligation to disclose this research for two reasons. The experiments reported in this manuscript were carried out with funds from Boston University. NIAID funding was acknowledged because it was used to help develop the tools and platforms that were used in this research. They did not fund this

research directly. NIH funding was also acknowledged for a shared instrumentation grant that helps support the pathology studies. We believe that funding streams for tools do not require an obligation to report, unquote. Okay, but according to the BU researchers' preprint, they said, quote, this work was supported by Boston University startup funds, National Institutes of Health, NIAID grants, and then they list the grant numbers. And then the paper also acknowledged the support

from the Boston University Clinical and Translational Science Institute, and they list the grant number for that as two sets, five grants. Now, microbiologist Richard Ebright noted that of the five grants acknowledged, only two were for equipment and three were for research. One grant provided $750,000. Another one gave CTSI $4.6 million for clinical research, clinical trials, and supportive activities. And the third gave $437,000 for research titled Regulation of Host Innate Immunity Against Viral Infection, unquote. So even setting aside the dubious argument that public funding of the tools used to do research doesn't entitle the same public to knowledge of what research is being done, and setting aside the false claim that no gain of function was involved, even on its own terms, the BU claim that only tools were funded is called into question by those three grants. After I sent those grants to BU, Rachel Cavallerio,

a BU spokesman, told me, quote, the link you shared is a different paper research and is the tools and platforms referenced. But as Lipcich explained, if the research grants don't describe the precise research in question, that fact should not get BU off the hook, but instead that fact is actually evidence of the way the system is broken and in need of reform. The second reason they cite as excusing them from reporting obligations is a repeat of the claim that no gain

of function was involved. We already dealt with that claim. During Kamala Harris's clumsy presidential run, she used to talk about her 3 a.m. agenda, which she described as a plan, quote, focused on the issues that keep people up at night. Whatever consultant came up with that was actually onto something, even if their idea was wasted on a doomed candidate. Millions of families are waking up in the middle of the night or sitting at the kitchen table after putting the kids to bed, trying to figure out how to make it all work.

That's a quote from Kamala Harris in a 2019 op-ed that argued her plan included, quote, solutions that will have a direct and immediate effect on people's lives, paychecks, and healthcare. Again, the consultant's on to something. It's important that our politics are indeed focused on solving the immediate problems of everyday Americans, not on trumped-up, media-friendly conflicts used to emotionally manipulate voters. Of course, there's really no getting rid of that emotional manipulation,

but responsible actors in politics and media should seek to cut through all that noise. So what are 3 a.m. issues? Surely now it's the full slate of economic pains, gas prices, food prices, health care, student loan debt. For the average voter, abortion is likely not front of mind as polls open around the country. And yet, take a look at this video from Dearborn, Michigan. We want to leave the politics out of this. If you're on Facebook, all you see is fear-mongering political rhetoric that this is book banning, censorship, homophobic. All it is is protecting our children. We as concerned parents, we as concerned parents in Dearborn

are not tied to the left, to the right when it comes to this issue. And we're not going to be used as pawns for any organization for their own agenda. We're here to protect our children. Do not fall for the political rhetoric on Facebook, on Instagram. Do not fall for the trap, because that's what they want. They're trying to smear us. They're trying to control the narrative. They're trying to say this is homophobic. Listen, there's a book. There's a

book that was banned. It was called This Book is Gay. And I tell you, if the book was called This Book is Straight, we're still going to go after it because it's teaching kids. It's teaching kids how to go online and have sexual intercourse with others on the internet. This is wrong. The title referenced in that speech is called This Book is Gay by Juno Dawson. I'm going to read a positive community review from the Progressive Daily Coast, which compared the book to other LGBT books aimed at teens. Quote, Juno goes a bit further, though,

offering specific and practical advice on how to find and meet like-minded people for socializing and sex, the reviewer notes. Some of her advice is tailored specifically for teenagers in high school. She frankly describes the different ways gay men and women bring their partners to orgasm. She includes illustrations not of sex acts, but of bodies less graphic than those in fun home and genderqueer graphic novels that feature in other book banning attempts. Okay, so like those books, This Book is Gay has been the subject of parent protests. Here's the section of the book the dad referenced in the viral speech which reads how sex apps work. You can see on the screen it's basically an instruction on how to get on a sex app and meet someone. Here's

another section that provides instructions on how to perform handies and blowies and much much more. So is this a dumb culture war blow up or a 3am issue? In another part of his viral speech, the father turned protest leader in Dearborn said people have been warning him that if he speaks out, they're going to protest your businesses. You're going to get fired from your job. I've got three children. My purpose in this world is to protect my kids and that's all all I will do, and nobody will stop me. That's what the dad said. Now, hundreds of members of the Muslim community in Dearborn have come out to school board meetings since September,

organizing to keep their kids from accessing books like Dawson's. This is where more culture war issues become 3 a.m. issues. If you're worried about finances for speaking out against a book that provides your 14-year- old with what reasonable people would agree is unhealthy sexual instruction, then this culture war issue becomes an economic one as well. None of that is to say cultural issues can't keep people up at night without also being economic ones, it's merely to point out that we often too often think of culture and economics as mutually exclusive areas. This is not an isolated local issue in Dearborn either. This is happening

in communities all over the country and with more than just this one book. These questions played a role in Glenn Youngkin's upset last year in Virginia. Parents care about this. For understandable reasons, they take issue with the content of the book and the ease of access for their children, who are already very difficult to protect from violent internet porn. The idea that a public school could be undermining their best efforts at parenting is obviously infuriating. Now, check out this headline from the Washington Post. School board meeting cut short as protests over LGBTQ books grow unruly. All right, so much of the news coverage has included basically no information

about the content parents are objecting to, describing it repeatedly as LGBT rather than sexually explicit, which this book is gay clearly is. Now, I won't deny a chunk of the religious protesters are likely opposed more generally to LGBT books, regardless of whether they're highly sexualized. The Detroit Free Press reported at one meeting, quote, some of the placards held up read, keep your porno books to yourself, homosexuality, big sin, and if democracy matters, we're the majority. Here's more from the Washington Post. Quote, like other parts of the country,

conservative Christians were the first to raise fears about books with LGBTQ content in Michigan school district, which serves the city of Dearborn and part of the Dearborn Heights in the Detroit metro area, the Detroit Free Press reported. They then rallied the significant Muslim population in both cities to join them. All right, so that actually gives credence to what the dad said in his viral speech. This isn't about left or right. It's about parents who don't think these books are appropriate for teenagers and parents who are now reasonably panicked about the mindset that informs our education system, which is fighting to keep this book as gay and other titles in libraries. Interestingly, CARES Michigan organization has been supportive of the parent protesters,

while the American Federation of Teachers has been supportive of the books. Reading through weeks of the coverage, I was reminded of a post from Colin Wright's substack, Reality's Last Stand, this week. It was a pretty nuanced rebuttal by Lisa Selin Davis of John Oliver's recent Last Week Tonight show on trans issues. So while mocking his detractors for getting facts wrong, John Oliver did very much the same. While pointing that out, Davis landed on a deeper point. She listed off what she sees as excesses in Republican anti-trans policies, but then she added, the Democrats, on the other hand, have passed laws that allow children to medically transition without parental consent, sent CPS after parents who don't socially or medically affirm their trans-identified kids, and attempted to criminalize

parents who refuse pediatric gender medical interventions. I think it's safe to call these actions on both sides effing insane, which is a term Oliver uses several times, but never for the Democrats. So this is repeated in the media constantly as well. Parents have legitimate reasons to be furious about those books in libraries or about consent laws on transitioning, for instance. Who put those books in libraries? Who passed those laws? It was Democrats, as Democrats on the left more broadly. As Davis wrote, a lot of people on the left are worried about the compelled speech of pronoun announcements and that the left's handling of this issue may cost us the election and with it our democracy. Why not take that seriously? She was talking to John Oliver there. Well, back to the dad's point, because taking it seriously from the left either requires meaningfully challenging their priors or risking personal and

professional blowback. By the way, it's easy to understand why. Genuine bigotry exists and decent people want to protect others from it. But people are very upset about the culture right now and they have legitimate reasons to be upset about it. You may disagree with them, but treating all these parents as bigots or opponents generally of LGBT books pushes us deeper into a hole. And the deeper we go into that hole, the more time we have to spend talking about bizarre teen books than fixing our healthcare system. People aren't wrong to care about both. We're joined now by Iranian-American journalist Nagar Murtazavi to talk about the latest with the protests in Iran. Nagar, thank you so much for joining us.

We had said we would also be joined by Podar Ketebi. She's running late. We're still going to talk with her later. We'll post that video later. But in order to get this segment up as part of today's show, we wanted to make sure that we had time for it. So thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks for having me.

And I want to start a little bit by talking about the unusual circumstances under which you're joining us. This week, you were in the news for a bomb threat that was targeted around a conference in Chicago, where you were speaking. And you've continued to receive significant threats. Can you, and you know, the title, I don't know if you'd call yourself an Iranian dissident, but in general, over the last several months, Iranian dissident has not been a very safe occupation around the world, both in Europe and here in the United States. So what has the last week been like for you? I'm an exiled journalist, so I've been living in exile since 2009 from Iran, haven't been able to go back because of the pressure on me from the regime for my work. So, yeah, unfortunately, journalists, particularly female journalists, analysts,

some academics, activists have been receiving. It's been an ongoing trend of online harassment over the past years. It's been documented by multiple human rights organizations, particularly my colleagues who work in the Persian media sphere, BBC Persian, other Persian channels are also receiving a lot of this. And the level has been increasing so much. There's been an uptick in the past four years with the protests. Also, the irony is that we receive it from both ends so we get smeared and attacked by the regime as being

accused of mouthpieces of foreign governments if we're u.s based my colleagues at the bbc or friends at the bbc uh being mouthpieces of the uk government accused of being mouthpieces of the UK government, accused of being mouthpieces of the Europeans, and then by interest groups and some opposition or exiles being accused of being a mouthpiece of the regime. So both and simultaneously attack us. And I've been trying to do professional and nuanced reporting, journalism analysis. At times I've taken break from journalism, have worked with advocacy organizations, back into analysis now for a few years and have been focusing on Iran-US-Iran relations for a few years.

So I get invited on university panels and shows like yours frequently. And I was invited to speak at the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago. The event, because of the threat and the harassment I was getting and the Institute was getting, the event was moved online. And then on the day of the event, which was supposed to be held online, with the student newspaper, I wasn't there in Chicago,

but with the student newspaper, the university newspaper, the Chicago Maroon has reported was that the building or the institute received a threat and they closed the building. And the report says that they sent some student staff home. I also heard from the institute that there were canine dogs present and the event went on we went ahead online nevertheless but under just a lot of threat and pressure i'm grateful to the institute for um still going on with the event for supporting me for for um continuing this event to the university of chicago the whole entire community was very supportive but there was also they received a lot of backlash and emails. And there was a document circulating from an anonymous account online

with a sample letter that they were urging just anyone to send this letter to the university. And emails of the staff were circulated online and they were getting bombarded with these emails and some calls. But I wasn't there, so I don't have any firsthand reporting of this, but the good work has been done by some student reporters of the university on the ground. And also I saw ABC Local and another local outlet in Chicago reporting on the threat that the institute received.

It's always hard, I think, for Americans to, especially Americans that are reasonably skeptical of the media, to parse through and figure out, cut through the noise, figure out what actually is happening, what they need to know. So, Nagar, what do you think Americans, you know, the average American voter needs to know about what is happening in Iran right now? What are the big takeaways that people should be aware of from your perspective? Well, there is, and this is, I want to again connect it to this story later. This is a byproduct of the brutality that's happening in Iran. A massive amount of violence, brutal violence being committed by the state, by security forces, various different

segments of the security forces. Human rights organizations are documenting dozens, tens, I think, over passing 100 protesters being killed by security forces, shooting with shotguns, with live rounds, sometimes even shooting at people unarmed who are running away. So from behind, largely peaceful peaceful settings very crowded settings this is i think what i saw in the human rights watch report recently and just unlawful use of lethal force it's something that the regime has done in the past but to crack down and suppress protests and dissent. In 2009, mass protests, state-used violence took to crackdown. In 2019, essentially an iron fist. They brought it down in a matter of days, if not weeks.

There was a total internet blackout. Hundreds of protesters were killed. Thousands were arrested, many of them given very harsh sentences. And this time around, it's the same. We're seeing protesters being confronted by security forces, either picked up or killed. Some activists and journalists have been arrested. At least 40, I believe, journalists have been documented by the Committee to Protect Journalists who have been arrested, journalists, photojournalists who have been arrested. I've talked to some sources on the ground who are saying they're receiving threatening calls if they're political activists, if they're journalists,

to tone it down, to not protest, to not engage in the online conversation, and they're threatening them, security forces, with arrests. So it's a violent, violent and brutal crackdown, and the chants on the street are also against the entirety of the regime, the supreme leader, the Islamic Republic, the corrupt leadership with underlying political, life, freedom, and these iconic images of women and young girls leading many of these protests. And so earlier this week, we had a guest on, Sitara Siddiqui, who you were saying that you're familiar with,

who's more part of the conservative wing and more of a regime supporter, though she was willing to be critical of the morality police. And the case that she was kind of making is that this is being overblown by the Western press, that in a lot of parts of the country, you're not even seeing significant protests as you walk around the city. And I'm curious from— And basically that most women are satisfied with the sort of moral order. That some, that enough are. That it's not a cut and dry black and white issue. And so I'm curious from your perspective, from the sources that you're talking to on the ground in Iran, what is the energy level of the protests? How big are they relative to 2019? Are they bigger today than they were weeks ago? What's their trajectory? How would you describe it?

Well, this is seen by Iran watchers. Many of us obviously are doing it from a distance, but as a serious crisis for the regime in a decade, the most serious rounds of mass protests. It spread to every single province in Iran, dozens of cities, religious cities like Qom and Mashhad. The protests were really huge in Kurdistan, in Balochistan, the ethnic areas where there's also lots of discrimination and suppression by the state against those communities over the years. And also we're seeing a lot of women and girls essentially showing that they're fed up, that this is a watershed moment. Yes, there's also violent repression. There's a lot of brutality.

I hear from sources there's a lot of security forces, plainclothes forces on the streets in major cities. So it's difficult to sustain and grow. But we also continue to see images of protests coming more in pockets, but still across the country. So I think what these protests are showing, again, considering the level of brutality and the violence, which prevents a lot of people from essentially braving the bullets

and risking their lives, because those who are staying on the street are essentially risking their lives. But what this is showing us is a crisis of legitimacy. We're seeing this chant of no to the Islamic Republic and no to the leaders and no to the system on social media also, among a lot of Iranians who may not be present on the street at the moment, but they support the larger movement.

We're also seeing acts of civil disobedience by women. Women were taking off the hijab, being in the public or ordinary citizens in a cafe. We have photos published and videos coming out of a grandma crossing the street, a girl having breakfast at a cafe, all without the hijab, which essentially is an act of civil disobedience.

And also more high profile people. There was an actress who appeared in a live interview inside Iran, who appeared in a live interview without the hijab, which was unprecedented. There was an athlete in Lazarek Khabib, a rock climber, who appeared in an international competition, officially on behalf of Iran, in an international competition without the hijab. So we're seeing a continuation of these pockets of protest, the legitimacy crisis and the saying no to the system,

to the repression, to the Islamic Republic by a larger population who is expressing it in other ways online through the media, and also these acts of individual civil disobedience by ordinary citizens and also prominent figures, celebrities, actors, athletes, and also these prominent figures who are joining the protest or showing solidarity and support to the protesters, say on their Instagram account, football stars, film stars, filmmakers who are posting messages about solidarity.

That's also part of the bigger movement. They may not be able to go on the street and join the protest, but when they post it to an Instagram with millions of followers, it gets shared and it goes the future to satisfy some of the demands of people who are taking risks, clearly risks, to their personal, professional lives to protest the regime? Well, the core slogan of this feminist revolution is women, life, freedom. And I think it encompasses the demands in three simple words women have been dealing with years of discrimination of devil standards of discriminatory laws and of state sanctioned violence of violent enforcement of these laws it starts with the dress code but it's all over in family law child custody, inheritance, in personal and professional lives, women have to deal with this discrimination.

It's also men, women and allies, women, young girls and allies, who are coming out essentially finding no other avenue for political change. The Islamic Republic has essentially shown a very rigid response and no other avenue for change for many of these people, millions of Iranians who think that the street is the only avenue where they can pursue in the form of these protests, risking their lives to demand change. In the previous election, the presidential election, the last election last year, all moderate and reformist candidates within the system,

so what's considered moderate and reformist within the system were disqualified, and the president is essentially seen by a big part of the population as a shoo-in candidate by the conservative who had the path cleared for him to become president. The parliamentary election the year before that, similar moderate reformist candidates were disqualified. And essentially the core the as they call it the hard core of the regime and the more militaristic and conservative and hardline core of the regime is is consolidating power is taking over all all aspects of power uh isolating their own their own systems reformers and martyrs and closing all avenues for change so

that's why you're hearing this chant of an end to the islamic republic and end to the regime by people on the street it's unclear how exactly that may materialize i don't want to speculate one way or the other is it going to happen is it not going to happen but you're just hearing this um fed up tone from a lot of iranians that it's not just a mandatory hijab it's's not just the morality. Sometimes even Iranians, my own friends watch my interviews and they think that I'm only talking about these issues as opposed to them wanting a change to the entire system. That's necessarily not the discourse here. It's difficult to speculate. I don't want to speculate as far as a crystal ball of what will happen, but we're seeing this as a watershed moment for many Iranians demanding an end to the entirety of this thing. They see it as a corrupt government, repressive state,

and also they see no other avenues for political change. And if the repression has brought the protests into just pockets in various areas, there's an epidemiology, as you know, to protests, and they feed off of each other. The bigger they get, the more people then can join them because there ends up being some kind of anonymity and protection in a large crowd. If you're talking about smaller pockets of protests, then each individual person who goes out is much more vulnerable. You know, it takes more courage to join, you know, some 20 people sometimes than it does to join 200,000 people. And so what's been

the effect on people who were kind of, who feel this way about the regime and have felt this way and were happy to join, you know, when there are large crowds? What's the effect on people like that now that the crowds are getting smaller? Well, it certainly has that fear effect, as you said. When people see someone next to them killed or shot or arrested, it does have that impact. Also, we're seeing, again, a lot of courage and bravery. So I want to applaud that. I'm in awe of the courage of these young girls, school girls.

I saw a video the other day of elementary school girls, three elementary school girls were running down the street chanting women, life, freedom, and waving their scarf up in the air. So they took it off. High schoolers, the bravery has been incredible, but also the brutality has that impact. I also spoke to some sources on the ground who told me they've heard of ordinary protesters who were identified in protests either by security forces or through images, the filming of their, of their themselves, and then they had their homes raided overnight and arrested. So it's not only activists, it's not only prominent people, it's also ordinary protesters, anybody that shows any form of leadership, even in a small setting. So I heard about this one protester who was an ordinary

person, but it seemed like she was leading the chant in one setting of like a dozen people around. And this gets picked up in the images and then the home is raided at night and the person is arrested. So they're essentially trying to send the message also to the rest, to the rest of the population, even to the rest of the protesters, to stop this, that we're coming after you, that we have the capacity to identify you, and, you know, the sources and the forces. And what we saw in 2019 was an immediate crushing of these protests.

This time around, it hasn't been as immediate. And my reading and some other Iran analysts and reporting that was also reporting in the New York Times is that the entire force has not been deployed yet. So this could get even worse than this, more brutal, more violent. And it has the effect of essentially either you pick people up, you arrest them,

or you threaten them and send them back home. So it does have that arrest. It did get, the protests did get crushed in 2019, even though there were mass protests across the country. But the problem is when the grievance is not addressed, when the demands are not addressed, be it economic, political, social, cultural, just the hijab, morality police, or the entirety of the system, even if you send people back home, the next time around,

they're going to come back with those grievances and an added layer. So in 2019, the spark was an increase in fuel prices. This time was the death in custody of this young woman. The time before that was an election. There have been teachers joining, lawyers, oil workers, laborers, university students, each with their own pockets of grievances,

but also this intersectional community coming together with a lot of overlap. And Nigar, where can people follow your journalism and follow your work? I have a website where I post. I'm an independent journalist, so I do a lot of interviews like this. I post it on my website on Negar Murtazavi. I also have a podcast. I host and edit the Iran podcast where we do weekly conversations about Iran, Iranian affairs that go beyond just the headlines and the mainstream media and have deeper conversations with experts.

I'm also very active on Twitter, not on other social media. I have some presence, but Twitter is my main place where I post my work, my interviews, and also my podcast. Sounds great. And Nagar has written for The Intercept, too. There you go. Yes, I have. Yes. Well, Nagar, thank you so much for your time and for your insights this morning.

Thank you for having me. Absolutely. We appreciate it. All right. Well, that have. Yes. Well, Nigar, thank you so much for your time and for your insights this morning. Thank you for having me. Absolutely. We appreciate it. All right. Well, that'll do it for this Counterpoints Friday. That's right. Thank you, everybody, for sticking around. Yep.

We hope you have a great weekend. Enjoy the wonderful fall weather. Hopefully, it's nice where you are. And we'll see you back here next Friday, Counterpoints Friday. See you then. This is an iHeart Podcast. here next Friday, Counterpoints Friday. See you then.