Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - CounterPoints #3: Midterm Update, Italy PM, Antitrust Battle, Neoliberalism vs Happiness, Media Censorship, & More!

Episode Date: September 30, 2022

Ryan and Emily discuss the midterm elections, Italy's new prime minister, Brazilian elections, antitrust debates, Jan 6th reporting, neoliberalism vs happiness, & media censorship on Israel!To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/Chicago Tickets: https://www.axs.com/events/449151/breaking-points-live-tickets Ryan Grim: https://theintercept.com/podcasts/deconstructed/ Emily Jashinsky: https://thefederalist.com/author/emilyjashinsky/ Katie Halper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3xLOxx1ggQ&t=3shttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUsMkDtVyel9USjCTaM42rw  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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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. Good Friday morning. Welcome to Counter us out. South Carolina, the best is Florida, recovering these apocalyptic scenes that we're seeing down there. Reports suggest death tolls are already in the hundreds. We have no idea where that number's going to land. Just absolutely brutal. We'll have more on that next week. This week, we have so much to get through in terms of both domestic and global politics. There's a presidential election in Brazil that we're going to talk about later. There's a presidential election in Brazil that

we're going to talk about later. That's coming up on Sunday. We had elections in Italy, and we have elections in the United States of America coming up. That's right. And so let's start with Pennsylvania, right? So the Fetterman odds, the polls that were coming out over the last several months that were showing Fetterman with these double-digit leads, I think they were fun to see. And I think we have an element there. They were fun to see from the left. It's always fun to see Dr. Oz getting owned. But I don't think anybody took them too seriously to the extent that Fetterman was actually going to win by double digits. It's still Pennsylvania. Now, Shapiro, the gubernatorial candidate, he may actually end up winning by 10 points against Mastriano. And I'm curious for your

take on this. This is a case where the hardcore MAGA wing really got the guy they wanted. And the Democrats got the guy they wanted, Mastriano. And it looks like he's getting utterly hammered. So I'm wondering, do you think he has any shot whatsoever? And how do you think that race kind of influences the Senate race? Does it lead to more ticket splitting or does it drag Oz down? I think it probably leads to higher turnout and enthusiasm. And that's what midterm elections are really all about. On both sides? Right, exactly. And who, well, oh, yes. So who benefits from that is the big question. And I can see that actually being a motivator on both sides in a way that Oz and Fetterman aren't. Maybe Oz is a big draw. I don't know. I highly doubt that.

A draw on Twitter. Yeah. But actually what's interesting about this is over the course of the summer, those polls were coming out with Fetterman up. And that was, I think, for people taking that seriously, which included the establishment wing of the Republican Party that was unhappy with the choices in the Pennsylvania primary and has been unhappy with certain races from Blake Masters to J.D. Vance. They took that very seriously. And it was another sort of piece of this increasing tension between the establishment and maybe the sort of MAGA wing of the Republican Party. And that was always, I think, foolish because until the money starts pouring into these races in the fall after Labor Day, when that starts happening, you see the messaging on both sides

start to congeal and you see the momentum start pushing in the direction that it will ultimately end up in. And so some of these summer analyses, whether they were in Ohio or Pennsylvania, I think we're or Georgia, for that matter. That's not to say, you know, I think everyone is a great candidate on the Republican slate. Far from it. But I do think that there was a lot of premature anxiety, both in Republican areas and a lot of premature enthusiasm in Democratic areas. And I'll add to that, there are a lot of serious pollsters that I would argue are center left who are still saying that we are not gauging actual voting patterns very well, especially in Rust Belt states that happen to be, once again, the critical key race states going forward. Right. The theory in 2016, which seems to be borne out somewhat over the past couple cycles, is this silent or Trump voter, this voter who

non-responding to polls is just refusing to participate in that process. And there have always been millions of people who don't want to participate in that process, but the difference has been that there were just as many Democrats, Independents, and Republicans who didn't want to participate in it. So it didn't mess up your numbers. Now it does seem weighted to Republicans. In 2020, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin in particular, the polls missed substantially. So it feels like Fetterman, to feel comfortable on election night, kind of needs a five or six point lead going in. His margin now is already down to four and two. And we had an element that showed it.

Nate Cohn showing some. Yeah, Nate Cohn showing these big decreases. And I actually don't really know how that plays out for Mastriano. But I do think it is a lot of the typical Beltway horse race over the summer, that analysis jumped the gun in big ways, knowing or probably should have known. It's an interesting example of how the media tries to or can influence the way money goes into these races and the way elections look. Because if all of the chatter is like Oz is a dud, everyone in Pennsylvania loves Fetterman, that totally changes the way that people in D.C. let it change the way that they look at these different people to see things out of whack with what they actually are. And I think the point about Wisconsin is a really good one. Even Mitch McConnell abandoned Ron Johnson in his last race. That is actually really a huge, huge sign of how badly or how bad DC is at reading tea leaves these days. And at the at the same time, Fetterman's stroke, I think, played a role in this

in a significant way. He hasn't been able to campaign like he was able to campaign up until the primary. And that didn't really sink in for a lot of people for several weeks past the primary. Now we are getting a real sense that his recovery is not complete yet. And he's starting to address that more head on, which I think is the right thing to do. And to emphasize, look, this

is a recovery process. I'm going to continue to improve. These are the things I need to do to improve. But it's campaigning with a hand tied behind your back. But let's go quickly around the country. Arizona, the conventional wisdom in D.C. seems to be that Kelly is in a, Mark Kelly, a Democrat, is in a very strong position there. Is that, how are Republicans feeling about Arizona at this point? Well, that race is one of the most contentious in terms of this inner Nicene battle in the Republican Party, because it was clear that Mitch McConnell wanted Peter Thiel to put more of his own money into it. McConnell pulled some ads in August, or it was around Labor Day, McConnell pulled some planned ads for Blake

Masters. Blake Masters is sort of championed by the new right wing of the party. We interviewed him once. I think he's a very interesting candidate, and I like a lot of what he says. But the Mitch McConnells of the world are now saying this is not winnable. McConnell's doing a couple of fundraisers for him, but still- Candidate quality. He was referring partly to Masters, probably, right? Candidate quality, right. And this is Mitch McConnell saying that in August, the Senate majority leader starting to turn his fire on the candidates going into the election cycle. And I think probably, Ryan, partially because of this incorrect reading of the tea leaves, I do think Masters is a better candidate than a lot of people in D.C. realize. And I do think the more that we see money going into that race on both sides of it. I'm not just talking

about money going into Masters. I'm talking about just in general, when you have the resources that are actually going to look like what they look like in the weeks before election day. So people are on the message that they want to be running on before election day. And as we get closer to election day and people are actually voting, I think Masters is going to close the gap. And I think it's going to be a close election. I'm not, I wouldn't be surprised if it's closer than what a lot of people in D.C. realize. Now, Masters may lose. I don't know. But at the end of the day, that is one of the most like, if you're looking for a race that shows all of the different dynamics in the Republican Party,

look at Arizona. And New Hampshire, I thought was going to be the state that was the sleeper that was going to be the most likely to flip Democrat to Republican. Yeah. But then Republicans nominated this interesting character, retired general, I forget the guy's name. Don Bolduc, yeah. Who, kind of a Twitter character, kind of followed his timeline. It's a lot of fun. I interviewed him once as well. He's very charismatic. Interesting dude. But it seems like everybody's taken New

Hampshire off the map now. That it looks like Maggie Hassan went from kind of either toss up to likely Republican to now like comfortable Democrat. Is it, is, is, is Bolduc that unappealing to kind of swing voting New Hampshire voters that it's, this race is over? Yeah. I don't know. Is that how you're feeling about this race? I don't know. New Hampshire is such an interesting state and you probably would know more about this than I do, but the New Hampshire voters are not your tip, especially on the Republican side, not your typical Republican voters at all.

Sort of more libertarian leaning, which makes it an interesting test case in the kind of MAGA moment. How are New Hampshire Republicans reacting to more MAGA Republicans, I think, is actually kind of a fascinating case study. So I don't know. I have absolutely no idea what's happening in New Hampshire. But I do think the context of the economy right now, where in the summer Democrats started to feel really good, August had passed their Inflation Reduction Act, gas prices had come down a little bit. They were still really high. All of that context, I think, had Democrats feeling way better than they should have been about the fall in August. And now that we're almost in October, I mean, we're doing this block and

next time we're here, we'll be October, we'll be about a month away from the elections. The economy is looking worse and the Inflation Reduction Act and the correlation between the Inflation Reduction Act and the stock market is pretty bad for Democrats because you can see it just dipping as soon as it's passed, whether or not you can sort of parse that. Jerome Powell's like, yes. Yes, yes, yes. not you can sort of parse that. Jerome Powell, but yes. Yes, yes, yes. Of course, you can parse that in different ways. The effect on average Americans under a Biden administration, though, is not good for Democrats. It's a drag on these tickets. And speaking of which, we'll be here Wednesday, next week.

That's right. Well, we'll be pre-taping Wednesday. I think we're going to air it on Wednesday. Oh, wow. Okay. Because we'll both be gone for the weekend, Columbus Day weekend. That's right. We're going to air it on Wednesday. Okay, we'll look forward be gone for the weekend, Columbus Day weekend. That's right. We're going to air it on Wednesday. Okay, we'll look forward to that. There'll be old news by Friday.

There'll be old news, that's true. So I now think the sleeper is Nevada. Tell me more. So Cortez Mastow is running for re-election. She's a Democrat in Nevada. And I think that Nevada got hit, Las Vegas in particular, got hit harder than almost anywhere in the country by the pandemic, and particularly by policies that are associated with Democrats shutting down the economy. The Las Vegas economy just was completely annihilated. And as a result, you have this widespread economic misery. And to the extent

that Las Vegas was the place that, you know, powered Democrats so that they could overcome the rest of the state, if they lose just a small margin in Vegas, then that's enough for them. And with a lot of the kind of Mexican-American population down there, the abortion issue might not have the same kind of resonance that it would have in other parts of the country, the voters that Democrats really rely on in Vegas. So, and I believe the Nevada got, Nevada Republicans got the like kind of non-scary Republican that they wanted to, right, in the primary. And so, you don't have the kind of MAGA effect that's going to drag a couple points off of the Republican. Although the counter, the counterpoint to that is in midterm elections, which are about energy and turnout, the MAGA Republican candidates. And if you're looking at somebody like, for instance, J.D. Vance, these are people where, or Herschel Walker might be an example, where you actually do energize voters who actually want to go out and not vote for the milquetoast Mitt Romney Republican, but are energized to go out and be a part of what they see as change. And that's on both sides.

That's not just about Republicans. But that is what a lot of D.C. Republicans cannot wrap their heads around about the MAGA base, is that the average Republican voter is actually very, very excited about, and actually these people do appeal to the average Republican voter, even if it makes Mitch McConnell uncomfortable. It can actually have an effect on the outcome. I love that you're all in on the turnout idea, because on the left, I a thousand percent believe that if you put like a Sanders wing candidate out there, you're going to inspire people to come out to the polls, give them something to actually vote for. When I look over at the other side, I'm like, nobody's going to

want to come out for them. Yeah, like, I got to go vote for Joe Crowley. So it's funny. Yeah, it is. I don't know why I can't get my head around the idea that there could be an advantage to running some of these mega candidates. I mean, you're from Pennsylvania. Right. And Pennsylvania is a lot of suburbs. It's true that it's true that like the Carville thing, you got Philadelphia one side, Pittsburgh on the other, and Alabama in the middle. There's still a lot of truth to that. But there's also a massive suburban vote in Pennsylvania that is turned off by a lot of that stuff. True. And would be turned off by some of the like, if AOC was like on the ticket.

Yeah. Oh, absolutely. And both parties know that. And that's why they start targeting these suburban, especially educated suburban women. That's become this like just treasure trove demographic for both parties. But at the same time, I think the other thing that factors into this, I mean, abortion clearly will, I think, have some effect. But you also then have education, which totally, if you look at what happened in Virginia with Glenn Youngkin just a year ago, favors Republicans if they run on the issue in an appealing andright candidates, Italian voters went to the polls on, what, Tuesday? And elected Giorgia Melani as the incoming prime minister of Italy. A lot of debate over whether to call her fascist or not. No, don't call her fascist.

So the party, like, the history of the party, it evolved from a party that evolved from a party that evolved from Mussolini's party. You know, she used to, in the old days, say nice things about Mussolini. Recently, she's broken with Mussolini. She's not a fan of Mussolini. She's pro-EU. She's kind of... Pro-NATO. Pro-NATO, pro-Ukraine war. Yeah. Or pro-eu uh she's kind of pro-nato pro-nato pro-the-ukraine war yeah um or pro-the-ukraine side of the war um and there were some uh jokes on twitter i don't know if there were jokes on twitter when when zelensky's like congratulations a bunch of people on the left

like see we told you he was a nazi because he looked like they're butting up with this other nazi down here in italy those weren't. And so there was another, there was kind of a left-wing working class kind of coalition that was running as well, kind of the five-star movement, which used to be, you know, which started as kind of a post-partisan kind of populist-ish type of thing that was mostly left-coded, but some right populism. When they got into power, they implemented a universal basic income, particularly down in the South, and did a bunch of other things that really tried to appeal to the material interests of the working class. Maloney really very much appealing to the cultural interests, anti-immigrant, what you would generously call pro-family. And it seems like by at least a three-to-one margin, the working class voters were more moved by the cultural elements that she was offering than what the five-star folks were bringing. And one of her first acts was to

just nix the universal basic income. Like, done. Done with that. So what do we draw from this about where our confusing kind of working class material versus cultural politics are headed? It's so interesting that from an American perspective, I think we try to sometimes graft the American left-right dichotomy onto elections where there are way more than the two-party system. So like if your choice is Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, the handicap there is we're suddenly acting as though the entire country loves Donald Trump or hates Hillary Clinton. And that's just not the case. It's always more nuanced than that. And this example is so instructive because of exactly the dynamic you just said, that cultural issues prove to be more salient for how much of the vote did she win? 28%.

26, 28. Yeah. That chunk of the voter base, but that's not a resounding majority. I mean, far from it. Enough to win the election, but not exactly a majority. suppose it's side by side with the working class party. Yeah. So what's interesting about that is it shows particularly, I think, what the American right misses, which is that, and what the left really misses, which is that the culture war can be kind of the big tent. That's something we say at The Federalist a lot. The culture is the big tent because people's

interests, their sort of material financial interests, those two things go together. So if you can't speak your mind at work without fear of losing your job and you need the job, or you feel like you can't talk about your faith, whether or not you can actually do it is different than whether you feel like you can do it. So take something like Maloney talks about people's faith or their patriotism. People feel like they can't talk about that without suffering financial consequences. Those two things are actually completely intertwined and the left does a really poor job, I think, of recognizing that and addressing it by also tackling this sort of really discomforting, alienating culture. And coding immigration as purely cultural is probably part of that too,

because in Europe you have a lot of left-wing parties now. The Sweden Democrats. That have gone pretty anti-immigrant. Yeah, yeah. I mean, this happened. I don't think people, I mean, I don't know. Again, it's difficult to like graft the left-right dichotomy from America into, but this is on the heels of what happened in Sweden. It also reminded me a lot of what we covered previously in France with the juxtaposition of National Front, Marine Le Pen. And also, you have a sort of far left, you can't really call Bernie candidate, but kind of in that vein,

doing okay at the same time. And that's really the real competition. Macron benefits from it because you have the split between those two. But yeah, immigration, that's exactly the real competition. Macron benefits from it because you have these two, the split between those two. But yeah, immigration, that's exactly, I think, the point. It illustrates the point so well because there are people's both cultural and material concerns on the table. And to dismiss that as bigotry, necessarily as bigotry, and not as possibly anything else, reasonable, good faith disagreement. And you can disagree about the politicians, whether they're coming to it in good faith, but voters, that's a different question. And I just think the left is struggling so much right now. And Europe is a great example. They have yet to muster a really good response.

Yeah. And in some ways, the parliamentary system allows you to draw out a little bit more of the texture and the distinctions in ways that are obscured here. AOC famously said a couple of years ago, if we were in Europe, I wouldn't be in the same party as Joe Manchin, which was taken as like a shot, but also just a fact. Like that's just an objective fact. They would be in different parties. And so there was a center-left kind of technocratic party in Europe, I think led by a guy named Latta, who refused to kind of link up with the more working class left parties because there was, you know, Italian politics is incredibly factional, but for our purposes, like the materialism behind it was related to blaming them for kind of tossing them out of power, like blaming some of these other factions for tossing them out of power years past, like just score settling and grudges. So they didn't

team up, but it's not clear that they could have necessarily even teamed up because they represent the kind of wing of the Democratic Party, what you would call the kind of upper middle class, professional class element of it, which in the U.S. is married together in this one giant party. And so it's harder for us to see the strains in the strains that are trying to keep that together. Whereas in Italy, you can just see it much more clearly that there's a kind of both cultural and class distinction between these elements of the broad left that make it very difficult for them to team up. They just don't like each other in a lot of ways. And these center-left and center-right technocratic

parties in Europe are blamed for taking Europe from its boom period of the 60s, 70s to what it is now. Well, yeah. And I think also, yeah, that's where you're going to see, I mean, we showed the subsidy cut right away. That's where you're going to see this interesting return of maybe austerity with a super pro-EU, pro-NATO, kind of pro-European order, basically. You know what I mean? Attached to this agenda of cultural populism, center-right cultural populism, I would say. And if we could put B5 up on the screen, that would be great. Because I think this Larry Summers tweet really is the perfect tweet. He's talking about America, but he says, There's some social phenomenon which I suspect explains non-work, non-marriage,

doves of despair, general alienation, and I suspect the Rise of Reactionary Populism. It should be a major task of social science to understand it. Yes, thank you, Larry Summers, 10 years behind the curve on that one. But I think it's just fascinating to see, to come up or muster a legitimate, genuine, decent response in terms of policy, in terms of messaging to the rise of what Larry Summers is calling reactionary populism. Precisely because, I mean, this week, the Maloney speech suddenly just gets scraped from YouTube. The same thing actually happened to Matt Taibbi. He had a video demonetized yesterday that was then restored. And then the Maloney video ultimately was restored and said it was an error. She was called the steady drumbeat of fascist, fascist, fascist. I think the New York Times had a story that used the word fascist like 28 times in the story about this woman who loves the EU and NATO. So it just like, if that's the response is to reflexively dismiss everybody as a fascist and bigot, the populism is not going to go anywhere. It will only grow because that's

exactly what drives it and what animates it. And we all laughed at the Larry Summers quote, but I'm curious if we actually have the same answer because I think we all think it's obvious, but to me it's neoliberalism. Is that what you were, like, when you look at it, like, hey, yeah, it's you, Larry. Absolutely, 100%. Yeah, we're all looking for the guy who did this. Well, and I know people get frustrated because the word neoliberalism becomes used as a catch-all and sort of an easy slur for populists. But neoliberalism, I think, properly does encapsulate the cultural and the economic policies and the marriage of those that people like Larry Summers sort of just dismissed or didn't see the serious, serious concerns of what was happening when you're hollowing out the

Rust Belt, when you're de-industrializing, when you're opening up trade and borders with reckless abandon and not implementing policies that would at least be perhaps a safeguard or would do that more responsibly, getting super rich and creating this huge growth of inequality. I mean, it's neoliberalism. It's no problem saying that. It was a rough day for the left in italy this week but on sunday the left has a chance to gain a little bit of that ground back as brazilian voters are going to go to the polls for the first round in uh in presidential voting uh pitting uh jared bolsonaro the incumbent right-wing president down in brazil against lula da silva former president who was in prison at this time in 2018 during the last presidential election. Here in the United States, we have a decent number of people

who either joke or say Bernie would have won, talking about 2016. Down in Brazil, the line is Lula would have won, but everybody takes that quite seriously, left to right. Lula would have won in 2018 were he not in prison. He is no longer in prison. And I want to pause and recognize my colleagues at the Intercept Brazil for their work there. Glenn Greenwald, former colleague, got a massive cache of documents and messages that proved that the prosecution of Lula was entirely politically driven and manipulated and timed so that he would be in prison during the election. And all the messages proved the case, which goes to actually a question we talk about a lot, hacked materials, because it turned out that these were hacked by citizens who had a sense that this was the case. Hacked and then leaked to the press. And so whenever anybody has a question of, is it okay to publish hacked documents? I would say, well, Lula is free and potentially on his way to becoming president of Brazil again.

Polls have him at 51, 52% at this point with still some 10 to 20% undecided on top of that. And if he wins 50% on Sunday, there's no second round. That's a knockout first round win. So the polls say that he will, because if he's polling at 51 and let's say he gets a quarter of the undecideds, that's pushing him to 55, 60% of the vote. Bolsonaro is already saying polls are fake. I got secret Bolsonaro voters all over the place. I'm not recognizing this tally if it comes through, which has put the United States in a fascinating position because the U.S. has signaled, no, we are going to recognize the results of this election, which means that maybe for the first time ever, the U.S. is working against a right-wing coup in South America.

Wow, things have changed. Weird. But I actually think it's part of our partisan polarization because I think Democrats in the U.S. associate Bolsonaro with Trumpism. Yes, absolutely. And Trump. And associate the social democratic left and Lula with kind of Democrats. And so their partisanship overwhelms their kind of structural impulse toward supporting right-wing coups in South America. It's like, wait, the U.S. – wait. There have to be strong forces pushing back to have this U.S. State Department saying that they're going to be hands-off on a right-wing coup. Like, that's – and so that's, I think, how strong partisanship is now in is now and it's going global. To be fair, we have not checked in with the CIA.

Well, we'll see. Yeah, we'll see. No, good point. So the tweet that was just up on the screen for everybody listening showed that Senator Bernie Sanders and Tim Kaine had a resolution that was passed over in the Senate to support the free and fair elections in Brazil. I have seen media speculation that there could be political violence this weekend. There will be political violence, yeah. Tell us more about that. The intensity of our politics here in the U.S., just crank it up by several magnitudes. There already has been violence in this election.

Back in July, someone was shot. Well, in 2018, someone was shot. all sorts of signals saying to his supporters after the election, quote, you know what to do. Like that's the code. And it's not, that's not very impressive code. Like, you know what to do is they do know what to do. And he has stacked his administration with a ton of military figures. And he has openly praised the military dictatorship over his entire career. He has openly praised the military dictatorship over his entire career. He has said that Brazil would be better off if it went back to a military dictatorship. But just like Trump, there are a lot of elements within the military that are alienated by him, that are not necessarily supportive of him. And also, if you're in the Brazilian military, you take more orders from the United States than you do necessarily from the civilian government in Brazil. And so if they're signaling no coup, then it's going to be much more difficult for him. He has, and when he has tried to bring massive crowds out, they've often fallen short of what the

expectations were. And so because the left, unlike here in the U.S. necessarily, because they can marshal huge numbers in the streets too, and kept Morales out of power for a year. But because of massive street protests, were forced to hold a new election. And then the Brazilian left won that election by so much that it couldn't be stolen. So we might end up in that situation. Well, yeah. And the last question I'll throw to you is in the context of the so-called pink wave that swept Central and South America in recent years. And there is a real case for that. I mean, you go from Chile to AMLO. Colombia even. Colombia. Right. Exactly. I'm curious what you think about that. And to your point, which is such an interesting one about coups and kind of coups from the West, is that it speaks to how the sort of left-right wing dich against the kind of UN, Davos groups that try to push what they see as a globalist agenda. And so then your right-wing candidates are not good coup candidates, right? Because

they don't support the order that people like Joe Biden and the Davos class support. So it creates friction on that level, too. And I wonder if that dynamic, how that continues to play out in populism in Central and South America. That's a really good point. Central and South America take too seriously the kind of anti-Davos, anti-globalist politics, then they're going to forget who put them in power in the first place, which was the globalists and the Davos, the Dulles brothers. You can't run against the Dulles brothers as a right-wing tinpot dictator if it's the Dulles brothers that are installing you in power. And so I think that's an interesting point. If Bolsonaro was playing nicer with the United States

in the way that Maloney is playing nice with the the U.S. would be sending signals like, look, we're going to let things shape out. And he recognizes this. After the election in November 2020, he was doing the whole stop the steal. You know, Trump actually won. Biden stole this election. Like he was with Trump the whole time. After January 6th, he's like, oh, okay, there's a new president's going to be in town. And he has been sending all sorts of warm signals toward the Biden administration. But it's kind of too little too late at this point. And then I guess I'm curious going forward how global meddling, when you have the, I guess, the very real Davos class, if their cultural priorities overcome their economic

priorities, or they can find a way to have them work in tandem if they start intervening on behalf of left populists. Yeah, we'll see. You got to be more clever. But they're absolutely not going to do that unless they're completely fake left populists, because left populists fundamentally challenge the entire basis of the economic inequality and the structure that the Davos crowd. They should. Right. So they're not – Lula is very good at co-opting elements of that kind of coalition, like getting enough of it to when he started out as a kind of a radical leftist, the union leader, was not able to get to national power until he started compromising. So there's this whole Lula's a sellout wing down in Brazil. Although for my podcast this week at The Intercept, I interviewed Sabrina Fernandez, a kind of Marxxist leftist who's part of this marxist leftist uh coalition that is saying lula lula yeah might have been a sellout but like he's our guy that's

gonna it's like a like a popular front that's gonna get rid of bolsonaro marx identified how the cultural priorities of the uh you know the wealthy elite um whether it's sex, age, religion, nationality, were to the benefit, the economic benefit of the wealthy and the elites. And so a true left populist, I think, would be out of whack with the Davos class on the cultural issues instead of being exploited. That's right. You've got one of those in Peru, and they're already impeaching them a bunch of times. Right. But I think there's increasing, I think, awareness of how those divisions turn people basically into cogs in this ridiculous capitalist machine. And I say that as a conservative, but this is not real. This is not real capitalism, not free markets, in the same way that you would say that probably about real socialism.

We vowed to do that one short. We didn't. Actually, this is a great, great transition into the next topic about the package of antitrust legislation that just passed the House because Matt Stoller made just a fantastic point about this. That's D2. So this package of legislation passed the House of Representatives. This is from The Hill. It's the, so this is from The Hill. It says, this package of bills would update filing fees for mergers to increase them for larger deals, allow state attorneys general to select their venue when enforcing antitrust laws, and use the merger notification process to require parties to disclose subsidies they've received from countries that pose a risk to the

U.S. And Matt wrote about that over on his sub stack, which you should definitely take a look at. But he made this really interesting point on Twitter as well about how Zoe Lofgren and Jim Jordan were both opposed to this package. And Jim Jordan is someone who has tweeted, you know, break up Facebook, break up. Someone who's completely anti big tech. Zoe Lofgren was saying that actually this gives she invoked January 6th in urging her colleagues to vote against this package, saying basically that it gives more power to Republicans who want to challenge the content moderation, which gets to the underlying issue of how Republicans and Democrats really can't agree on tech stuff anymore because Democrats want more power to regulate and Republicans want to take it away. So beneath the

surface of the antitrust consensus is something very different. Now, Mike Lee, Tom Cotton, the Heritage Foundation, everyone supported the slate of bills. Jim Jordan did not, and some Republicans voted against it, but it really was an interesting eruption. Yeah, and it's an amazing example of the way that politicians on both sides use the culture war to distract from what's actually going on. And so let's play the clip because you have Zoloft tapping her culture war buttons and then you have Jim Jordan tapping his culture war buttons saying opposite things, but both for the same purpose, which is don't vote for this bill that big tech doesn't want you to vote for. Side with big tech, but for these cultural reasons. So let's play those speeches. Of speech. Now, content moderation is important. We have seen in the

January 6th committee a lot of material that has spread lies, that has incited violence, and that content should be moderated. It should not be subject to a bogus effort by state AGs to prevent content moderation through the antitrust provision. This bill would actually give $140 million to the DOJ so they can work with, continue to do what they're already doing, work with big tech to censor certain information from getting to we the people. And why do I say that? Because we know what happened. Just a month ago, Mark Zuckerberg said the FBI come and told him not to allow the story about Hunter Biden's laptop to be on their platform. They gave him the old wink, wink. Oh, we think this is Russian disinformation, which we know it wasn't.

So the Democrat says you should oppose this bill because of censorship. Censorship as she views it. The Republican says you should oppose this bill because of censorship. Censorship of how he views it. Now, that's how you know they're both lying, because it's completely contradictory. But what are they both telling you to do? They're telling you to oppose this bill. Who wants you to oppose this bill? Big tech wants you to oppose this bill. Just utterly incredible. And this is such small potatoes, too. It's a significant win, because it gives new resources to the FTC, and it gives new resources to the antitrust division of the Department of Justice. And it blocks big tech from being able to take a lawsuit from, if you file it in Texas or Oklahoma or Colorado, big tech likes to yank it to their favorite judge,

say in New York or somewhere. It blocks you from being able to do that. So it's, you know, this is real stuff, but it's also not the big kind of Klobuchar bill that's in the Senate, the competition act that would like actually, you know, come at big tech in a serious way. And they still threw everything they had at it. And we get arguments like this, that, oh, don't do this to big tech, because if you do, they're not going to be able to censor like we want them to, or they're going to do lots of censoring like we don't want them to. So culture war, culture war, culture war, but just in the end, side with big tech. Right. The culture war becomes this disguise for anti-populist, you could say, or just like pro-tech governance. It's just

wearing the culture war as a costume to distract from the economic reality. And again, Lena Kahn, for instance, is not conservative. There's no question about it. Lena Kahn is like the new Brandeisian in that field. She is on the left, no question about it. But again, she is advancing the economic interests of a lot of average Republican voters and a lot of average Americans who are absolutely being railroaded by an industry that, because of consolidation, also has cultural consolidation. And Stoller is really good on this, but it's absolutely true that because Facebook also owns Instagram and because Google also owns YouTube, that means the worldviews of the tiny C-suite class at all of

these companies then dictate what constitutes acceptable speech, what constitutes, and to Jordan's point, actually, whether the Hunter Biden story should be allowed to see the light of day on their platform. Well, if they're all going to vote for Joe Biden, they're probably all going to lean in a certain direction on something like that. And they're probably going to listen when the FBI, which the left has the strange new respect for, or I should say the center left has a strange new respect for, or I should say the center-left has a strange new respect for, is going to tell them, you know, be on the lookout. And that's why it makes really no sense to me to use, especially from a right perspective, a culture war argument to vote against this. It is such a, the American conservative had a good piece referring to it

as a, quote, modest proposal. Even that might be an overstatement. I mean, when it comes to the serious emergency that is big tech, this is a drop in the bucket. And if you can't get on board with it, it's, I don't know. I don't know where we go from here. Yeah. And Zoe Lofgren's argument was such a crazy bank shot. She's saying we need big tech to be able to do its content moderation free of these anti-woke Republican state attorneys general. But even if you pretend that she's serious about that for a second, the bill is trying to stop lawsuits from being taken out of, say, Texas and taken to New York the way that a serious antitrust piece of litigation was. That's not what happened with the one that she's talking

about. The one she's talking about was the Fifth Circuit, which is down in the circuit court down in Texas. So it doesn't even apply to the thing that she claims that it's applying to. She represents roughly Silicon Valley. So if you step back, you're like, oh, okay, we see what's going on here. So there are still elements of this that have to pass the Senate. It's not completely over. But there is support for this in the Senate. It very likely, you know, it has a shot as long as people keep pressure on. Yeah, I think it absolutely has a shot. But big tech is going to pull out all the stops, even for a, quote, modest proposal. They're going to...

They have plenty of money to throw around to block even modest proposals. On that note, Ryan, I see you're getting your glasses out. Which means you're ready to read the script. No, I'm kidding. Speaking of January 6th, actually, you have a really interesting monologue today. On this book that's coming out in a couple weeks. It's huge.

It's like 600 pages. It's actually very good. If you like kind of congressional drama, which I do, I recommend it. It's called Unchecked, The Untold Story Behind Congress's Botched Impeachments of Donald Trump. And I got an early copy recommend it. It's called Unchecked, the untold story behind Congress's botched impeachments of Donald Trump. And I got an early copy of it. So I have a piece of it that I can do here. Before you do that, does it feel almost like Bravo when you're, do you like congressional drama for the same reason that you like the House of Representatives? It's the same stuff. If it's done right, it definitely taps the same buttons.

Tell us what's in the book. I said it's January 6th. And so history often unfolds through the collision of structural forces that operate independently of any specific decision or decision maker. But once in a while, a real moment of contingency arises in which a single person choosing between several genuinely viable options within their reach can set history on a different course. Now, according to the new book Unchecked, the untold story behind Congress's botched impeachments of Donald Trump, leading Democrats pushed hard to impeach then-President Donald Trump the very day of the insurrection, but were beaten back by a reluctant House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, who instead decided to gavel the chamber

out of session once it had finished its business at hand. Republican tempers were running so hot against Trump, as documented in the new book by Rachel Bade and Karen Demersian, that forcing them to choose sides in the Senate that week could easily have resulted in his impeachment, removal, and disqualification from any future run for the White House. High-ranking Democrats wanted to give Republicans that chance. And to give a sense of how thirsty for MAGA blood Republican senators were, the book includes a scene in a Senate conference room. With protesters in the Capitol, Lindsey Graham looked over and saw the Senate sergeant-at-arms in the safe room with them. Graham yelled at them, what the hell are you doing here? Go take

back the Senate. You've got guns. Use them. Graham then called White House attorney Pat Cipollone. Is it Cipollone or Cipollone? I don't know. I'm going to go with Cipollone. Just guess. And he warned that Republicans would remove Trump from office using the 25th Amendment if he didn't call off the mob. Now, the first member of Congress we know of to begin drafting an article of impeachment, David Cicilline, a Rhode Island Democrat, scribbled it on scratch paper while locked down in the Rayburn House office building, according to the book. Representative Ted Lieu, because of his office's proximity to pipe bombs that had been discovered, by the way, whatever happened to those, he had to evacuate and he came to join Cicilline, where the two worked on the impeachment article together in

the office. The two started lobbying other members of the Judiciary Committee with Lew texting other members they, quote, should start drafting articles of impeachment now, regardless of what leadership says, unquote. Cicilline reached out to Representatives Jamie Raskin and Joe Neguse, and Raskin recommended going for the 25th Amendment, but if that didn't work, yes, impeachment. They worked on a 25th Amendment letter to Vice President Mike Pence, but they kept pushing on impeachment throughout the day. They reached out to Judiciary Committee Counsel Aaron Hiller for help fine-tuning the impeachment draft. Hiller called his boss, Jerry Nadler Chief of Staff Amy Rutkin, and told her, quote,

I'm about to do something that's completely unauthorized by leadership. Should I tell you or not? He told her, and she said, do it, after hearing about it. Hiller then told Cicilline, go find 200 co-sponsors right now to get it done. Don't wait for a blessing from leadership. Now, Ilhan Omar had also been working on an impeachment article. Now, because she gets so many death threats, she's one of the few members not in leadership with her own security.

And so she was huddled with both parties' leaderships in Fort McNair during the riot. The aide she brought with her drafted an impeachment article that afternoon, and Omar publicly called for the House to vote on it. The aide she brought with her drafted an impeachment article that afternoon and Omar publicly called for the House to vote on it. That evening, once the Capitol had been cleared and the House returned to finish its business, Cicilline found Steny Hoyer on the floor. Hoyer, as majority leader, controls the House floor schedule. Cicilline handed Hoyer the impeachment resolution and implored him to allow a vote right then and there. He hemmed and he hawed, but he passed the request on to Pelosi. Pelosi's staff first tried to tell Cicilline there were technical reasons it couldn't be done, but then just told him to move on. Pelosi decided to gavel the chamber closed and everybody went home. Now there's a saying, if you come for the king,

you best not miss. Because if you miss, the king is going to make sure you never come for him again and that nobody thinks it's okay to come for the king. Trump came for the king that day and missed, and Pelosi and Hoyer just let him walk. The message was clear. It's okay to come for the king, or in our case, to come for democracy. If you hit it, you stay in power. If you miss, you live to fight another day. And we'll live with the decision Pelosi made that night not to hold Trump accountable instantly for the rest of our lives. And what I'm curious about from your perspective, because you would know this even better. Looking forward to what you got. One of my college jobs was working

for the dissident feminist author Christina Hoff Summers as she wrote a re-release of her eerily prescient 2000 book, The War Against Boys. Men, Christina warned, were falling behind and the results would not be good for women or for society overall. for some obviously necessary correctives to American culture, especially in education, the system came to be designed in ways that benefited girls, but at the expense of men. After not letting us vote or open credit cards on our own, women didn't find the plight of boys a terribly sympathetic cause at the time. Plus, many of the problems were happening in real time to kids at very young ages, making it super difficult to assess the consequences beyond projections. But now the results of this experiment are in, and they aren't good. Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution released his new book, Assessing Those Results This Week in Of Boys and Men. Crystal Insager interviewed him here on Breaking Points,

and I did about an hour with Richard last week over on my podcast at The Federalist. David Brooks wrote about the book at the New York Times, conceding, I learned a lot I didn't know. Brooks boiled down this new information to two points. One, that boys are much more hindered by challenging environments than girls. And two, that policies and programs designed to promote social mobility often work for women, but not men. Those are Brooks's words. Now, those two, of course, go hand in hand. Boys struggle more with, for instance, poverty and single parenthood than benefit less from the programs designed to help people overcome challenging circumstances. Christina showed how this was manifesting in seemingly harmless ways inside K-12 schooling, from curtailing recess and rough and tumble play to using emotion-based teaching

methodology and math and science that helps girls but makes school a little bit harder for boys. Boys end up hating school, underachieving, and turning to drugs or crime or other bad habits in higher numbers. They leave high school in a hole that's then hard to dig out of and then leave college with debt and go right into a hookup culture that disincentivizes monogamy into a world where fulfilling work is as hard to come by as purpose and meaning. What a lot of people don't talk about in this context is sex and dating, but of course these variables are very salient. A recent survey that made the rounds this week after being covered in Psychology Today found 53% of single men said fear of being creepy reduces their likelihood of interacting with women. Now, some stigmas, like creepiness, are obviously healthy, but this shows a widespread irrational fear that is seriously throwing a wrench into American communities. Brooks's column ran alongside another column in the Times this week, one that

asserted in the headline, quote, dating is broken, going retro could fix it. This is just one in a long, long line of recent versions of the same argument from progressive women that retro norms may have been healthier for women. Christine Emba of the Washington Post wrote Rethinking Sex. Louise Perry of the New Statesman wrote The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. BuzzFeed last year published a fascinating article about why Gen Z is, quote, rethinking sex positivity. The Times column published this week cited a 2010 study from the Journal of Family Psychology that found, quote, couples who waited until marriage reported not just less consideration of divorce, but also higher relationship satisfaction, better communication, and superior sex when compared with couples who began having sex

within a month of their first date or before they started dating. The story quoted one of the authors of that study suggesting, quote, rapid sexual initiation often creates poor partner selection because intense feelings of pleasure and attachment can be confused for true intimacy and lasting love. With a few caveats, economist Marina Adshade said back in 2019, when you crunch the numbers, quote, married people appear to be healthier and live longer than those who are single, separated, divorced, or widowed. They have better mental health, fewer health conditions, and recover faster from illness. In the past, said Adshade, studies found that marriage provided more health benefits to men than women,

but that effect is disappearing, and more recent studies find pretty similar outcomes for men and women. All right, so all of that said, if men are too afraid of being creepy to set that process in motion, women are in big trouble too. The left is wrong about the way some traditional norms, ones built on healthy expressions of human nature, brought about more fulfilling lives. The right, though, is wrong about how gravely the economic hollowing out of the American economy exacerbated the destabilization of sex, marriage, and community. Just this week, the Times also ran an insane article on the death of the starter home, which developers pin on red tape that removed financial incentives for them to be built, for those homes to be built, and left home ownership much further out of reach for millennials. Men's wages have remained stagnant while women's have grown in recent decades.

TVs and phones have gotten cheaper while homes and health care have gotten more expensive. Student loan debt is skyrocketing. Men are suffering disproportionate deaths of despair at higher rates. We're more comfortable in a material sense, but less happy, and we're treating the biological reality of sex differences as something that's less important when having a healthy recognition of those differences and even those similarities is actually what would serve everyone better instead of policies and norms that try to plug a square peg into a round hole and a round peg into a square hole. Ryan, we're about to talk about an article you wrote, and I believe we have Katie Halper

joining us. This is a very, very interesting story. If you want to tee it up a bit, because you wrote about it over at The Intercept, that would be great. Close to home for us, too. So Katie Halper, as probably most people here know, friend of this show, former friend of Rising,

on Monday was... Friend of the American people. Friend of the American people. The world's people. On Monday, she was co-hosting Rising, as folks know. You do a radar from the left, a radar from the right, and then you do the rest of your segments.

And then they post it and move on. If anybody watched Rising Monday, they noticed that there was only a radar from the right, not one from the left. It turned out that she had done hers on a segment very similar to, it was on the same topic that we had done one, you know, very recently, which was the controversy around Rashida Tlaib saying that you can't be progressive and support Israel's apartheid government. Katie took actually an even deeper look at the question of whether Israel qualifies as an apartheid government than I did last week. In my, we don't call them radars anymore.

We call them monologues. Sure. Counterpoints. We talk at you. I call them Ryan rants. My rants. And they, over at Rising, paused, refused to run the radar. And just recently she was told that not only are they not going to write it,

that she's not welcome back. And so we're going to be joined by Katie Halper to tell the story on this in just a moment. And we are, in fact, joined by a friend of the show, Katie Halper now. Katie, welcome to the show. Thanks. Thanks for having me. And so, Katie, also send James, producer James, a couple of links. Send them the video. Tell people where they can go and watch your full video that you've produced. And we'll make sure that we put that in the links at the bottom as well.

Great, yeah. And we're not going to do a screening party right now? Well, we don't quite have the tech capacity to do the screening party yet, but people can place that in full. It's right now. It's at at breakthrough news uh their youtube channel it'll be up at my channel shortly uh as well uh youtube.com slash the katie helper show but definitely check out breakthrough news i want to make sure that they get you know a lot of eyes and and credit um and then i did something at at youtube.com slash the kat Helper show as well, where I just kind of did a little explanation, not too detailed about what happened. Right. And so tell us, so Monday you showed up, you co-hosted the show in the studio,

you submitted your radar. What happened next? So I mean, I had submitted submitted it i guess the night before although as you guys probably know it's not i mean it's not even a submission i mean i you just do it and ostensibly unless you're reading probably like nazi propaganda that you just get the right to to to do it but i you know people saw that it was called apartheid exists. Yes, Israel does have apartheid, something like that. Yes, apartheid exists in Israel. This was not a piece that you couldn't tell was about Israeli apartheid. It was a piece that clearly made the argument that there was an apartheid system in Israel.

I delivered it. I think it went well. I like to think it went well. I delivered it. I think it went well. I like to think it went well. I delivered it. I did some more hosting. There was this interesting moment, which apparently isn't that unprecedented, where one of the co-hosts then read a pickup where he kind of reiterated something that Jonathan Greenblatt had said, Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League of the ADL. And then when I left, I had to run off to do another show because I had to do a useful idiots taping. And I got a call and it was very apologetic. And I said this in my video, and I want to make sure people know that the producers I was working with were really,

were like nothing but supportive. They wanted wanted I hope I don't get them fired by saying that they wanted their higher-ups to do the right thing maybe that makes you fireball in corporate media I think that's a really important point though okay because I was gonna ask you and that was our experience like when we submitted radars I never had one that was pushed back I don't think you ever had one that was just goes right into the teleprompter. Yeah, Katie, like you said, it's not really a submission. Yeah, exactly.

And the producers know that this is part of what makes the show great, that you have this perspective that, by the way, is like fairly mainstream left perspective. I mean, you have Amnesty International's, it's basically Amnesty International's perspective. I mean, you have Amnesty International's, it's basically Amnesty International's perspective. And then Katie, what was your sense when you have everybody working on the show? Again, this was our experience. They're great. They understand this makes what the, this is what makes the show great. It got, it got moved up the chain of command. Um, and that's where the

problem started to become very, very clear. What was your experience as that moved up the chain of command? Right. So I was talking to producers like basically Monday through Wednesday about trying to figure out a way to make sure it would get on air. Again, they were really supportive. And then I got an email from Bob, sorry, I got a phone call from Bob Cusack, who in no uncertain terms told me not going to run it, not going to run the piece, which kind of shocked me just because I wasn't expecting the phone call. And I just, I don't know, I felt very chastised and I kind of put in my place, which is fine. I guess they have the right to do that. It kind of undermines their shtick of being independent minded and not having talking points or not having. I mean, their shtick is that you don't have to stay within this certain lane. Right.

You're allowed to say things both on the left and on the right that you're not allowed to say in most corporate media. So anyway, I got the call from him and then I not to get too into like the nitty gritty of how this show works, but I was then, because I was told that you can't do Israel opinion pieces, but you could do segments and I go on the show every week to do a segment. So I was like, okay, so can I do this for my segment tomorrow?

And I asked the producers that and then I was directed to an email that I got from an executive there who told me in no uncertain terms I wasn't needed. My services were no longer needed. And that's an executive at News Nation or as not News Nation at Nexstar, not The Hill. Right. Because The Hill is owned by this big media company, Nexstar, which recently, by the way, hired Chris Cuomo to host a show on News Nation. But Katie was a bridge too far for Nextar.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, if only I had covered up my... I'm an only child, so sadly I didn't have the chance to cover up the crimes of my brother and, you know, commit a total... engage in a total conflict of interest and also, you know, probably grab a woman's ass at a party and engage in sexual harassment. But no, if only I'd done that, I would have gotten my own show,

I guess. But yeah, so then I got that email, you know, which and that really shocked me. I have to admit, I just didn't think I could like... I can read that. I can read it and have it here. She writes, we wanted to let you know that we will not be needing you to appear on Rising tomorrow a.m. Please feel free to submit any unpaid invoices for your work on Rising. We wish you all the best. And also, Gary Waitman, who's the chief communications officer for Nexstar, he declined to comment for the story for The Intercept and also presumably he's declining to comment for this segment as well.

So, yeah, so you got that email where you're saying, okay, well, let's do this as a segment. And then a top executive writes, actually, there's not going to be a segment. Send us all your invoices and we wish you all the best. Right. And I've been doing these segments for three years. I mean,

I did it when Crystal and Sagar were at the Hill and I did it during this reiteration, which you both were part of, obviously. And I really did. Like the thing I appreciate about the Hill was that you could say things that were taboo and other places and other corporate news. And,

you know, I knew that there were a lot of things that were said on that show that I disagreed with. But again, that was the shtick. It was like someone from the left, someone from the right. And seeing that the kind of censorship and cowardice, I would say, around issues that exist in so much corporate media, seeing that existed at the Hill, which kind of prides itself for being outside of that censorship, was really depressing. And it felt, you know, I'd love to be on your show and be like, but I'm gonna, you know,

get back at these people, or I'm gonna persevere and do my own thing. And I am gonna, obviously, you can find my stuff at youtube.com slash the Katie Halper Show, at Useful Idiots. You can join my Patreon, patreon.com slash the Katie Halper Show. But right now, I'm just, to be honest, I mean, it's just disappointing and it's saddening and it's infuriating and it's frustrating and you just feel very powerless.

Now, the good thing, again, is like the silver lining is that I filmed this video with Breakthrough News, which is an actually independent, actually independent media. And so, because I was really determined to get this out there. Like, I did not, like, they could silence me at the Hill and they could fire me. But I wanted to make sure that this argument got out there, which was, you know, basically I defend Rashida Tlaib from the typical attacks that she gets. I called out ADL for, I think, just for saying that Israel is not an apartheid state. I mean, it's just, okay, you can say that, but unfortunately, not only does Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch say that it's apartheid,

not only do obviously Palestinians say it's apartheid, not only obviously do Palestinian human rights organizations say that, but you have the Israeli Jews at Beth Jews, the Israeli Jews at Beth Salem say it's apartheid. And I say that, and I mean, this is another issue of kind of like the way you're given some protection when you're Jewish. Like I'll be called a self-loathing Jew as opposed to an anti-Semite and self-loathing Jew. You mean that, look, you can get fired obviously over saying this, but there is some relative privilege you get within this conversation if you're Jewish I think like I feel more comfortable talking about this stuff than probably other people do and of course this is a brings up a larger issue of how

people are not allowed to report on this I mean obviously Shireen Abu Akleh is someone who literally was killed because she was reporting on this issue. And I'm not comparing myself at all. Like I'm like doing op-ed pieces from the comfort of my own home. She was there on the ground. And ironically, I was able to talk about Shireen Abu Akleh at the Hill. That was one of the things I appreciated that I could talk about that. And I could, I even said that Israel lied, which I guess was controversial, but it's not because we know they lied because they said that they, they had foot, they released footage of, of a Palestinian shooting, pretending that that was Shemina Abu Akleh. And then it was

revealed that wasn't, it was physically impossible from that alley from, uh, for that bullet, you know? So again, that was so refreshing. Like, I really appreciate that I could sit there wearing like corporate media makeup and corporate media outfits and have all the like high production value that goes into corporate media. And I think it's really powerful to hear someone say Israel lied, they killed Shirin Abu Akleh.

It's very powerful to hear that and see that in that context, as opposed to just, you know, me from my own home saying it. And I really do think that there was a value in reaching people in that way. And I think that that's what the Hill provides is a kind of air of professionalism that often, because the left doesn't have huge funders the way the right does. I mean, we don't see this as much on the left. Yeah. It's really interesting that when you push,

you find or you discover the corporate third rails and you have to push to do it. But this is like just such a good example of that. And, you know, Katie, like, again, I disagree with the argument, but it's a reasonable argument and it's within the bounds of regional debate. And when you weaponize identity politics to stifle it which i'm assuming is what the hill or i shouldn't even say the hill it sounds like it was next star um was was doing going in that direction then you're again this this is going to fester it's not going to heal anything it makes everything fester it makes everything worse um and it's it's

a good example of like this is just profoundly profoundly, profoundly sad. And it's ridiculous. I just want to say also some of the people who I and I encourage people to watch the video, which is, again, a breakthrough news and will then also be at the Katie Helper show. But I quote Israeli politicians who say it's apartheid. I mean, an interesting thing we can do a whole show about this is that Israelis tend to be much more honest about this than Americans who are defending Israel. Sometimes they're honest about it in a very kind of crude way, like they don't care, like sure, like you have Benny Morris, who is this historian who, not to get too into the weeds of Israeli historiography, but he's someone, he's part of this movement called the New Historians of Israel, and they really, they challenge the Zionist narrative of history and of the founding of Israel. And they really, they challenged the Zionist narrative

of history and of the founding of Israel. And he wrote this essential book, this really seminal work called 1948. And it documents meticulously the ethnic cleansing that was the basis of the foundation of Israel. And he, over the years, and he was of course persona non grata because of that book.

And over the years, he's gotten much more conservative and very right-wing and hawkers, and people are like, Benny Morris, you documented that there was ethnic cleansing, and now you want Israel to bomb Iran. How do you reconcile those two things? And he was like, yeah, there was ethnic cleansing, and if there had been more ethnic cleansing, we wouldn't have

a problem today. Which is just like, I appreciate that, honestly. I find it a disturbing idea to wish that there had been more ethnic cleansing, but at least he admits the facts on the ground. Right. And high profile figures too, the previous two prime ministers, Naftali Bennett and Benjamin Netanyahu, both publicly said they're not for a two-state solution anymore. That's their public posture. But if you said that in the United States, you're like, that's outrageous.

How could you possibly say that? But they're not, like, now, Yair Lapid, he still pretends he's supportive of a two-state solution and supports a Palestinian state, but because he kind of represents a more centrist, center-right, you know, flank of it. But back in the United States, if you said, I don't support a Palestinian state,

I don't support a two-state solution, they'd be like, that's insane, you're crazy. Right, right. So the divorce between the two discourses is fascinating. Yeah, it is fascinating. I think it's because we see people in the United States struggle to try to fit in justifying Israel the way it exists and their government with a more kind of human right. See, it's just a bad look in the United States in a way that it's not at all in Israel because

it's being run by an apartheid government. I mean, I think that speaks to how apartheid-ish it is that they don't even have to cover. And what's interesting is that people I quote in the video, I quote like literally a dozen, I think, combined former Israeli officials and former Israeli prime ministers who either say we have apartheid or say we're going to have apartheid if the two-state solution collapses. There's clearly no viable two-state solution right now. And so that, you know, definitionally they're existing in an apartheid state. But that's the thing. And Emily, you brought up identity politics. What's so interesting is like,

I'm Jewish. Yeah. And you invoke that invoke that right away you invoke that in the monologue when I was reading the transcript I was like she starts by saying that you were disappointed as a Jewish person yeah you know I think I may have cut that out from the top so uh I had that originally and then I think while I was reading it, I decided to put it later in. So I should, you guys can update that or whatever. But I put it in later and I point out, I say, I'm Jewish. I was born in New York City.

My family is from the, well, we're fourth generation New Yorkers, not to brag. But my family before that was from Eastern Europe. And I could today, I could today right now decide to move to Israel. I could get a job. I could build a home. I could walk around freely.

And so could Jonathan Greenblatt from the ADL. So could Jake Tapper, who does the segment about Rashida Tlaib that I react to. All of us would be fine. And someone like Rashida Tlaib can't even go back to her family home in what is now Israel. Right. They've barred her from visiting. Yeah. So, again, I really.

Member of Congress. I'm just really. It's, you know, again, I'd like to be more, feel like more, yeah, I'm free. Now I can say whatever I want. And that's true. But, you know, it is depressing that you can't do that at certain places, especially places that kind of like to go against cancel culture, like to go against censorship. Like, you know, how much is that? How sincere are you in your opposition to censorship and cancel culture if you're perpetuating it yourself?

Right. Yeah. If there's one next door property that they should know not to mess with in this sense, it would be rising. So it's just really really sad and i remember we had some of those issues and it was like well should we give this airtime we're always air on the side of absolutely air it let the debate happen exactly that's the thing jonathan greenblatt can come on the hill and make his argument i'd be happy to be him or they could do it they can come on here come on yeah yeah yeah open invitation yeah viewers aren't stupid like we don't need to treat viewers like children like they're they're as smart as any executive at next star yeah they can listen to a debate and come up with an opinion that's that's reasonable what also scares me and depresses me is that they

were comfortable enough firing me for trying to get this story on air. Like they don't, they're not afraid that this would come out. That's what's so disturbing to me. Like, don't you just for the optics of it, not want to make it look like you fired someone for making a video, which made the arguments that are made by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Israeli Human Rights Organization, B'Tselem and countless Israeli officials, including former prime ministers. That might be the most demoralizing part,

but they just don't seem to care. It is. And they're not going to face any consequences. Like, I'm sure their donors are happy. I'm sure that whoever... And then another thing is, as a Jew, can I just be honest? As a Jew, I really don't like when things perpetuate the stereotype that, like, you can't talk about this because people are going to get mad and certain people control the media. And I'm not saying that's true at all. And the great thing is you've got a bunch of Christian Zionists out there. So that's a great thing because then you can criticize. You can undermine the trope with the Christian Zionists.

Yeah, right, exactly. But this is not a good look for anyone. I mean, and I, again, as a Jew, I'm really offended. What about my free speech as a Jewish person? I'm just not allowed to talk about this in a way that goes against certain narratives? No, you're a bigot, Katie, in fact. I'm a self, I've internalized, I've internalized anti-Semitism is what it is. I'm a self-loathing Jew.

And I also want to say that, like, I just want to give such a shout out to people like Ali Abu Nima at Electronic Intifada and the people at Mundo Weiss and the people on the ground in Palestine, in Israel, who are reporting on this stuff, who face so many challenges and they do great work. And everyone should check that out. Yeah. Well, Katie, you know, what you've done this week is not without some personal sacrifice, even if it's not on the scale of some of the people who are on the ground in Palestine. But I don't think we need to compare it. I think it was courageous for you to come forward. And we really appreciate you coming on here to tell us the story. Thank you.

And happy Yom Kippur Rosh Hashanah. Thank you. Thank you so much. I know you guys celebrate yeah there you go as always uh one of one of my favorite people to talk to indeed we so appreciate katie helper and katie's willingness not to give in that's right and that's the good news that there's shows like this, and that's the importance of what Crystal and Sagar has done and what all the viewers have helped Crystal and Sagar do. Yeah.

That Katie can have this issue with Nextar and come here and tell the true story and go to all the breakthrough news, can go to all of these other channels and tell the story and get it out to as many people as possible. That is made possible by what the amazing viewers and listeners here have helped Crystal and Sagar build. It's just incredibly important. That's part of what drew us here too. Yeah, for sure. And so it'll draw us here on Wednesday next week. So there will be no Friday counterpoints.

We'll do a Friday counterpoints on Wednesday. Yeah. It'll still be Friday counterpoints. TBD. Still have a Friday vibe. TBD. Yeah, there certainly will be a Friday vibe because we're both heading out on trips. Right. And then after that, we'll be back to the regularly scheduled Fridays. Your regularly scheduled programming. That's right.

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