Chapo Trap House - 888 - Bustin’ Out feat. Moe Tkacik (11/25/24)

Episode Date: November 26, 2024

Journalist Moe Tkacik joins us to look at a number of issues she’s reported on recently. Starting with the alarming prevalence of sexual assault allegations among Trump’s new cabinet picks, we follow the trail of backlash to accountability among the ultra-rich to College campuses and of course, Israel. We then turn to Moe’s reporting on the growing tumor of private equity in the American healthcare industry, and how these financial barons are gutting our already threadbare hospital system. Find Moe on Twitter: https://x.com/moetkacik And here writing at the American Prospect: https://prospect.org/topics/maureen-tkacik/

All right, we're rolling. You were talking Matt Gaetz. Because of course his father is like a hospice billionaire. That's such a Dickensian thing to be a billionaire from. So fucked. My family's money isn't old people dying. Especially when the money, like all of the money in hospice is in signing up people who are not actually terminally ill. So like, so that you can just keep building Medicare and. Like Jimmy Carter.

Oh, someone's making a fucking bucket off Jimmy Carter. I know and like they probably, I mean, he was like 90, he's a hundred now. When they signed him up, they did not think he was gonna be a whale. They were like, great job. You know? You have a big gold star.

My grandmother is fucking 104. That is amazing. And like, they tried to put her in a home like 30 years ago. No. She was like, no. And now, yeah, she's just old as shit. No one's trying to put her in a home. They might forcibly rendition her to a home at this point

because they're not making any money off her. Just one more quick thing. Felix, is your 104-year-old grandmother gonna see the new Nicole Kidman movie about kinky sex relationships? Oh my god, oh probably, yeah. No. Baby girl? That's the other thing about my grandmother

is that she loves like sexy movies. The first call I think she ever made with a cell phone was when she saw E2 Mama Tambien. You know, when she was only like, you know, fucking 87. And she just put up her phone and started like filming the like a, trying to pirate the movie. Oh my, if she'd had a camera, she would have done that. But she called us like from the lobby,

she called our house phone. And left a message and she was like, I just signed into Mama Tambien. It was very sensual. Like the entire family. But yeah, no, she's the evil hospice industry making zero dollars off her. Zero. No one's putting her in a home.

She's like fucking up, she's really helping out in the life expectancy department though. You know, like she's carrying her weight. He's throwing off the curve, yeah. It's insane. It's like, there are like people in my family who are like, I don't know, like better people than me. One of our cousins was like, I think like, we need to do activities with her so she like drinks less. And she's not like an alcoholic. She just like, she can, because she's 104, she can drink like a thimble full of vodka and be fucked up for a week. And like, why wouldn't you at 104? Like, yeah, I think at that age you should be allowed to continue any bad

habit thus far in life. But she was like, yeah, our customers like, yeah, maybe if I like fucking go and walk with her, she'll drink less. And it's like, oh yeah, let's take her to fucking AA meetings and maybe she can pick up some shifts. No, it's over. Like, what the fuck? Like I get the impulse. Take her to fucking AA meetings and maybe she can pick up some shifts Like I get the impulse she's a better person than me for suggesting that but you know I would never heroin if I was allowed to Like I can barely drink I can't really even drink anymore so like I'm so impressed It's somebody who's a hundred and four can drink

Yeah, can you imagine what a hangover must feel like at a hundred? like I'm so impressed that somebody who's 104 can drink. Yeah. Can you imagine what a hangover must feel like at 104 years old? Or maybe you just stop getting them after a while. Maybe it's like when you got drunk for the first time as a teenager and you woke up the next day, no problem. Maybe it comes sort of full circle and your body is just pickled enough that you don't experience the effects of, you know, dehydration and brain swelling. Yeah, it's like trying to, it's like trying to like install a virus on a computer that

is totally full storage. Like the body, the body is just going through so much. The body is like, we thought we were going to quit 30 years ago and now you're telling me I have to do a hangover? No, fuck that. No, there's no way. ["All I Got For Me Is Here For You"] Well, this is a good introduction because we will be talking about this country's healthcare system today.

But I should officially start the show. It's Monday, November 25th. Happy Thanksgiving week, everybody. And Felix and I are joined today by Moe Tasic, a writer and investigations editor at the American Prospect. And we're going to talk today about the phenomenon of private equity and what they're doing to make make our economy and society even healthier than it is now but I'd like to begin because you know just like sort of a bit of a hangover from last week we're still talking about the Trump cabinet

and Mo you just wrote a piece in the American prospect about Donald Trump's cabinet picks I'm going to affectionately call it the Doris Kearns Goodwin book, Team of Rapists. Because in addition to their dog-like loyalty to Donald Trump, it seems like even among the lesser known nominees, it seems like sexual assault charges or worse, seems to be a common denominator among all of them. But I want to begin with Matt Gates

Because he has withdrawn his nominee now after resigning from Congress to be Attorney General he's now withdrawn his nomination and Is going to be replaced by this woman Pam Bondi Moe I know I know you know about I'd like to talk about Pam Bondi But I I just like to talk about Gates for a second I think we got to begin with Gates and I will certainly say Under no circumstances. Do you have to hand it to him? However? He has ensured that that every Venmo transaction I make from now until I die the subject line will be being awesome Yeah, oh, yeah, it's funny to be like a soy groomer. I mean, oh my god, you're 17

Ah, the thing about Gates is that so obviously Gates has a lot of Why would you be like a soy groomer? Oh my god, you're 17? Ah! The thing about Gates is that, so obviously Gates has a lot of fans, people who are like, well he's really good on antitrust. But it does seem like among all of these dudes, like he's sort of the least rapey. Or yeah, the like,

I wouldn't, his sexual assault or is it alleged sexual assaults are maybe the most consensual? So there's that and also the intrigue surrounding the investigation is so insane that, yeah, I, you know, there's one of my sources is this like anti-trust. She's this anti-ticket master activist and she's also part of like, she was one of the most intense factions of the like free Britney movement, which also Matt Gaetz is a part of. And yeah, there's a lot of people who think that he was sort of just wound up by this

honey pot tax collector. Yeah, Joel Greenberg. It is a weird story. It's sort of like Russia gate where it's like, it wouldn't surprise me if they did Russia stuff, just like I wouldn't be surprised if Matt Gaetz did, grew a motherfucking 17-year-old. But at the same time, there's so much weird shit around it. The prevailing theory that I've seen on sort of the,

not MAGA, but sort of like center-right parapolitics people is that this was an attempt to like raise money to pay for an operation to like rescue an American spy in Iran. Yes, who had been left out of a hostage deal that accompanied the Iran nuclear deal. Like, and the Israelis were really mad about it for some reason, and they decided to like leak it to the Dilbert dude.

Like, it's, it is, it is so epic. I mean, I can't, I, it's kind of incomprehensible. But important to note that also Greenberg, who's currently in prison for sex trafficking and making fake driver's licenses and sending fake letters to a public school teacher who primaried him allegedly from kids that he molested, that he left his fingerprints all over. So that guy, that he left his fingerprints all over. So that guy, his family owns a massive chain of dental clinics that don't. So this is Florida.

That's, I'm just telling you, it all always comes back to some kind of Medicare fraud, or in that case, it's usually Medicaid fraud. They're usually using pediatric, they're usually doing pediatric dentistry, like doing root canals on like two year olds. What? Yeah, that's a thing.

That's a huge thing. Like there was another chain, this wasn't in Florida. I think this was actually like a national chain where their thing was like Medicaid dentistry and they would do all these horrible procedures to kids and because you're giving like a five-year-old a fucking root canal they had these like full-body sleeves that they would fucking put kids in so they would stop storming when they were like torturing them. They're called papoose, they're literally called papoose boards. They're called papoose, they're literally called papoose boards.

Yes, this was cool smiles and also small smiles. There were two chains that had a lot of the same founders, both private equity backed. That is such a sinister name. Well, I think Matt Gaetz should be putting a papoose board, keep his fingers away from the phone. But Mo, what do we know of the circumstances that led up to Matt Gaetz withdrawing his nomination

to be attorney general? Because everyone is speculating about the contents of this House ethics report that's out there about him. But I've seen other people speculate that Trump nominated Matt Gaetz as like an intentionally ridiculous and like, like, it was like a sort of a sacrificial lamb essentially to get over his more egregious Pam Bondi. Like, what do you make of the, is this 4D chess going on? Do you have any idea of what's in this ethics report? And like, what it like, you know, what exactly is alleged about Matt Gaetz here? Because

I've heard a lot of things. Okay, so what is alleged about Matt Gaetz is that he had sex at a party with a 17-year-old. And I think everyone kind of agrees that that happened, but he didn't know she was 17 because she had a fake ID procured for her by his friend, Joel Greenberg. And he, and kind of everyone says that she cut off, that he cut off relations with her. She was in high school until she turned 18, which is really classy. I'm sure you can agree. Um, and then when she turned 18, then he

started, you know, buying things for her, sending her Venmo payments. He, no, he didn't actually Venmo her, but Greenberg did. So that is something that like, I don't know if Matt Gaetz claims that he didn't or has like nothing to say about that, but that's, I think that's the thing is that like, I think that most of the, I think the girls who testified against him say that he didn't know that she was 17 when it happened. So, yeah, he's sent a lot of, he's sent thousands of dollars via Venmo to very young girls,

but all of the ones that we know about were 18 or 19 or maybe even 20. Now it's one thing that's interesting about this is like, well, I don't know, this is just really random, but when I waited tables, I waited on Matt Gaetz and he was with, I carded the woman that he was with and it said she was like 31. So, you know, maybe she was a beard. I'm not sure. Um, he was by far like the least, I didn't know who he was.

Somebody was like, you know, that's Matt Gaetz. And I'm like, oh, whatever. Like I, this was back in 2018. So, you know, I didn't, I wasn't up on, um, any Russia gate or anything like that. But yeah, I think that, you know, there is some intrigue. They were trying to rat-fuck Matt Gaetz, but it's also possible. I think that when Matt Gaetz discovered that he was sort of under investigation, he decided to become, he decided to like start supporting Lena Kahn and, you know, and, and, and Britney Spears, and sort of taking,

he started to take some, oh, and Julian Assange, he started to take up positions that might make him look like he was some sort of, you know, that he was being rat-fucked. So, you know, he's a pro, and I hope that he, you know, becomes governor of Florida. Pam Bondi is way worse. Like there's no doubt about that,

but I don't think that Trump cares. I think that the Gates nomination was, like it's hard to think that it wasn't a ploy to distract from all the other sex, sexual assaults. But again, I don't think the people are really distracted. I mean, the Pete Hegseth rape is, has captivated a lot of newspaper journalists. And I guess they haven't really focused

on any of the Vince McMahon stuff. Yeah, the- I had totally, like, somehow, like, this is the, you talk about, like, Hegseth and Gates, it has flown under the radar that Linda McMahon is the nominee to be Secretary of Education. I mean, if we still have an education department in another four years, that'll be one thing,

but, like, Linda McMahon, wife of Vince McMahon, and, like, the sex trafficking and rape allegations swirling around the World Wrestling Entertainment Association are fairly blood curdling as well. I they they are IDF caliber they are really really really disgusting and Yeah, I you know He this poor woman that worked for him and this is stuff

That's not this is not stuff that happened a really long time ago. It's like three years ago, like I worked for Vince McMahon and he made me have sex with him in his office and then he shit on my head and then he wouldn't let me wash it off. And he made me have sex while I was like drowning in shit with his like friend while he watched. Like it's just absolutely putrid stuff and it does make you think like obviously this was Vince and it wasn't Linda but she has been you know all of these years

very much you know enabling this behavior, covering it up. And she's still fucking married to him. They're separated. So yeah, and then there's RFK. I don't even think that anybody- The example that you use in your article is that I, again, I completely forgotten about this and the crush of other quote unquote allegations. I like filling out a cabinet with people who every one of their Wikipedia page has an

allegations subhead. The official the official theme song for this cabinet should be clips. Mr. Me too. But you said that like a former nanny of his alleged that he groped her. And when confronted with that

accusation, his defense was, quote, I had a very rambunctious childhood. And you mentioned that he was 46 at the time that he supposedly groped this woman. I mean, his defense is that he had a very, very rambunctious youth. But yeah, it was in the pantry. And he starts like feeling her up. And yeah, and he had five kids at the time. That was just, and I think that like, you know, the way that he said, I mean, it's an interesting ploy.

He said many times, there's so many skeletons in my closet, like, you know, whale skeletons. Tiger skeleton, you know, but skeletons. Tiger skeleton. You know, but... Got a museum of natural history over at his fucking house in Hyannisport or whatever. Seriously. I feel like because he said that, nobody's even bothered trying to like, trying to, you know, keep track of all of the accusations.

So there's this one woman who's come out and she was, you know, she was his nanny, but she was also like a legal assistant and, you know, just absolutely revolting behavior. But you know, his, he, he cheated on one of his wives so much that she killed herself, I think. And, and name checked him in the suicide note as well. Right and and then there's a what's-your-face Nuzzy Who apparently was the aggressor in that relationship, but um, you know, it's just a real It's like again, he's so scummy that like nobody's even bothered to like tabulate all of the cases. So it's really, Trump's really making, and one thing that I also think is weird, he didn't

try to stagger these picks. He could have gone with the gay Soros dude, he could have gone with Chavez de Riemmer, she runs some ketamine clinics, but apparently she co-sponsored the PRO Act. He's had since all the rapists were named, he's had some more well-rounded candidates. Yeah. Candidates who don't have the allegations

of head on with him. Yeah, the way he's doing it, my sister said that Trump's favorite thing to do is to take a bunch of hogs to market and watch them get slaughtered. And I feel like that's part of the strategy. That's the rationale behind the Gates pick, like 100%. Yeah.

Like, yeah, that much is clear. But like, he'll do,, like the first day of announcements, it was like, okay, this is what Jeb Bush's cabinet would be. And then the next day, it's like, here is everyone who has ever been accused of like, grooming a 16 year old. And then the next day, it's like, Dr. Oz? Fucking Soros, like someone who would have been Hillary Clinton's

Treasury Secretary probably. Absolutely, Mr. Three Part Plan or whatever. Yeah, that guy was his name, I'm forgetting it now. But Soros was the seed investor to his hedge fund. And his seed investment was two billion dollars. And I don't know how much Soros is worth at this point, but that's like such a massive amount of money to like start a hedge fund with.

It's just this guy might as well be Soros. Soros is worth like $30 billion at this point. Oh really? Okay. Yeah. He's, I mean, it's hard to like get a read on any of this stuff because it's like, how do you even tabulate all that? But like, you know, he's like probably the single most successful currency trader of all time I always want you know all the people I've met so many people who were like, oh I like voted for Trump

I don't like some of this stuff But it's just like it's an opportunity to elect a businessman and we need like we need that Why don't those people support George Soros? Like he's like a way better visit. He made so much money, you know businessman and we need that. Why don't those people support George Soros? Like he's like a way better business. Like he made so much money. You know, yeah. Why not like just let Soros run the country? I think though he did, like, is he a naturalized citizen?

Yeah, no, no. He was born in Hungary, but like Hungary, there's no reason that Hungary has to be like part of Europe. There's like 200,000 people in Hungary Hungary has to be like part of Europe. There's like 200000 people in Hungary. Just like make it part of Chicago. Won't even change Chicago's ethnic makeup. Just the east side, the far east side. Yeah. But I want to go back to the the proposed replacement for Matt Gaetz as AG.

It's a woman named Pam Bondi. And you described her as the Eric Holder of the Liberty UCEDD. What do you mean by that? And can you talk a little about her career helping foreclosure mills forge documents? Yeah, I meant that like very literally. Because she came, she got elected in 2010. And the two big issues in her state were obviously foreclosures and opioids because it was the peak of the whole strip mall pain clinic business. And what state is she from again? Florida.

Okay, yes. Florida. Pandora's box of maladies of lifting the United States. She is, yeah, she's very blonde. I mean, she just has the most wannabe Sarah Palin face. And the, so Eric Holder's two claims to fame are that he represented Purdue Pharma in its negotiations with West Virginia back in like 2003 and he got the company off with like $500,000 or something like that for like, you know, addicting like-

Oh, what a steep penalty. One in three. For addicting an entire state of people to heroin. It was truly disgusting and all of the documents are still sealed, I think, and like, you know, bankruptcy courts. I mean, it's just the... So that's cesspool. He sort of embodies that.

And then of course, under Obama as attorney general, he wrote this famous memo about how they really can't actually prosecute any bank CEOs because it might scare the markets too much. And I forget what the doctrine, there was some really Orwellian name for this doctrine. So Pam Bondi comes in and she does her part. My understanding, I remember at the time I was writing about some state reps down in

Florida who were trying to do something about these pain clinics, these strip mall pain clinics because there were hundreds of them that had just sort of risen out of nowhere overnight and she was just rap fucking them like every step of the way. But the big thing that she did was that there was at the time an attorney general investigation into this massive document forgery scheme that undergirded the entire foreclosure crisis because all of those loans, all of them were actually properly documented in any way. They didn't transfer the deeds. They used this weird database called MERS, and they didn't actually transfer the paperwork

properly. So they had to go back and forge and backdate everything. And there were a bunch of foreclosure mills that were involved in this. And, you know, one of them like had, like famously had this Halloween party where they all dressed up like homeless people and like took pictures of themselves. And it was ultra classy. It's a classic hobo party. You know, we've all been there. Everyone brings a bindle. You stand around the trash can fire.

I think that was their defense. Literally, it was like, no, it was a hobo-themed party. So Pam Bondi comes in and these investigators, these staffers inside the AG's office were investigating these foreclosure mills and they were about to kind of bring a case against them and she hires them and she basically burns their documents. She won't let them share anything that they have with this. There's this like 50 state foreclosure investigation happening and Kamala Harris got her name, foreclosure investigation happening and Kamala Harris like got her name, you know, sort of became, you know, very high profile associated with that. Florida

would have actually sort of taken all the credit but they weren't even allowed to participate in the investigation. It was like, so that's, you know, those are, you know, Pam Bondi's like first two things that she did in public service. And you know, ever since then, I mean, she is, she's deeply in bed with Scientologists. Israel, after Trump donated some money to her campaign, she dropped a pending investigation into Trump University. It's just like everything like every every possible crooked corporate lobby that you could represent in Florida, she works for them. And she's really cheap. Like she'll she'll do it for like $50,000.

So this is the replacement that you you cannot say she has some good stances on antitrust or Britney Spears. Oh, fine. Yeah. This is just zero. Or Julie Assange. No, I mean, she really makes Matt Gaetz look dreamy, I got to say.

Like, it's sad, but that's the breaks. Like, that's the world we're living in. She's also dumb as a rock. Like, according to, sorry, according to people who have, I was reading this like bulwark message board and I don't know how I ended up on that, but you know, there were all these guys. She might post probably. I've done, I've done events with Pam Bondi and like, you know, she's not intelligent. She's just sort of like a very classic,

like she's not a prime time attack dog. You know, she's like a like, you know, two o'clock in the afternoon kind of, you know, person you would book. So she's just like, you know, it's hard to imagine her as, you know, cause you look back at somebody like a Bill Barr, who by the way, you know, Matt Gaetz sort of blames for his own demise. And he was, I mean, he was so like bountifully evil.

So it's really hard to imagine somebody like Pam Bundy like being quite like that, like that sinister. But she's really prolific. I think that she's like, she'll plug away. Yeah, Bill Barr is like first team, like all Deep State. He's like, he's like, you know, LaMelo Ball or someone. Like he's from like a multi-generational Deep State family.

And Pam Bondi, like the first time I saw her I was like who the fuck is is this like the lawyer for a car wash? Like what the fuck is this? The Attorney General of a state no I know she was um she was also she had a brief stint as a Registered for an agent for guitar So that might balance things out. Yeah. I would say like, Pam Bondi aside, like you touch on this in the in the piece you wrote for the American prospect, but like, when you see like the the the breadth of shall we say allegations swirling around the Trump cabinet, Do you regard this as basically just like

a incidental side effect of just the people who Trump would nominate to high positions in his government is just like these are this is the well he's drawing from? Or do you see this as sort of like a broader and conscious sort of strategy of cultural realignment of sort of putting me to back in the box and just saying kind of like letting it be known that they're like, this is the way things are done when you're a powerful man, because like you mentioned in the piece, like, there's a brief moment when we seem to like crack open the, the window to reveal that like every major American institution be at Hollywood, the music industry, USA gymnastics, but, but like the fashion industry, just down the list, is just a factory of exploitation and rape. And like, is this a conscious strategy to just close the door on that and be like, not just close the door and deny it, but close the door on it and be like, that's the way things are? Or is this just, like I said, like incidental to the the figures that swirl around Donald Trump and the Republican Party?

It definitely felt to me when I read it, I kept thinking of that annoying line, the cruelty is the point, you know? But the thing is that with Me Too is that, you know, you can whatever, comedians can complain about getting canceled or whatever, but even the right absolutely understands that these networks of organized sex abuse sort of run the world and they're very interested in how those networks work and exposing them. And so that's I think another reason that all of these picks and exposing them. And so that's, I think another reason that all of these picks and announcing them

like all in one fell swoop just seems like such a gut punch in a certain way. Like it had these real, you know, 2004, 2005 vibes and I just felt especially the Hegseth pick and so that's kind of what I was trying to comment on is like you know what like and yet I feel like the resistance is sort of you know powerless to even make that point because you know they're the party of genocide and that's what they've been doing all year. And the rapiest people the universe has ever known, I don't know if that's actually true.

But in my lifetime, the Democratic Party has been enabling that and funding it. And that's kind of why it seems so, there's been so many things over the past year, through the billionaire boycotts and the anti-Semitism hysteria and the group chats and all of the oligarchs have been sort of conspiring in plain sight for the past year to perpetrate atrocities. And this just seems like part of that, you know, like we're back, you know?

The feeling I immediately got after election day was that, you know, this was like, it was like a continuation of 2004 or like a version of 2012 when Romney won. Like it wasn't like 2016 or something like that. It was just like, it felt like more of a return to form of like sort of a mishmash between like Bush Republicanism, tea-cott and tea party shit, and then like a dash of Trump. I think like looking back on the previous administration, all the like craziest stuff

they did and then also all of the like desperate stuff they did was a result of like the neuroses of losing the popular vote. But now that like there isn't that insecurity anymore, I think, I don't know, in part it like causes him to make weirder choices, but in other parts sort of just revert to being a regular Republican. I think that, I don't know how much people paid attention to like the Depp-HD trial, but when it was happening, like the sort of the weird vibe I got from things was almost like it was a

bunch of people like accepting this as like permission to like stop caring about me too. Yeah, that's definitely. And it preceded like an institutional shift. Like I feel like a lot of, on the Republican institutional side, I think they do resent that like, for at least like five years, that like if Eric Boling sexually harassed someone, they would have to fire him.

That they essentially have to play by the same rules as what they saw as liberal institutions. And that there's like just a huge backlash to that. I definitely think, and I think that you're right about that trial, I mean, obviously there were all kinds of right wingers who were amplifying, because I remember I didn't pay any attention to that,

but my husband was giving me updates about it, like every few minutes, because they were pushing it out to him because he's in like, you know, all these like Eagles message boards and forums and in like, you know, all these like, Eagles message boards and forums and about like, you know, the like NBA basketball and stuff like that. And so they were just pushing it out and he it was it was really funny. But I think there was another thing that I felt like last year around this time when when the billionaire boycotts started at the Ivy League

and one of the first people to come out and say, I'm not giving any more money to Harvard, was Les fucking Wexner. And like, she and, literally, literally, like, they're just like, Virginia Jafray or one of them, one of Epstein's victims had just come out and said, yeah, like I had to fuck Les Wexler all the time. It was really gross. And that to me was just like, oh God, you know, this is, this is it. Like that's, you know, we're, we're coming back now.

And the guy who started it, like at, at UPenn where I went to school. So I'm very, I was hyper aware of these boycotts because they actually started prior to October 7th when Penn hosted a Palestinian Literature Festival back in September and the Lauder family wanted them to cancel it. But yeah, the first guy to come out and say, hey, you hold these Palestinian literature festivals

and sooner or later you get October 7th, was Mark Rowan, the CEO of Apollo, which had just, obviously he'd gotten his job because Leon Black, the founder of Apollo, had sent $188 million to Jeffrey Epstein and was accused of raping multiple women in Epstein's house. So yeah, it did seem like those guys wanted... And there was this long story in Puck, and I don't subscribe to Puck.

I kind of wanted to read it, but I was like not going to, you know, pay up like $40 or whatever for this. But like there's this whole story around that same time about Leon Black planning his comeback, you know? And he was putting it out there that like he was just like the victim of like, you know, weaponized wokeness. And yeah. Yeah, it almost like it kind of went hand in hand, like the elite backlash to the idea that they could be like fired, like they were comedians or like people on Netflix.

It went hand in hand with sort of like the the counter offensive against anti Zionism, because I've said on the show a billion times that like all politics now is like a reaction and counter reaction to 2020. Just like people either who are still mad about whatever goofy shit people said back then, or people who are embarrassed that they were a part of it. I feel like with- I think that's absolutely true.

You know, Ackman, this is a similar thing though. I feel like with Ackman and Leon Black and all these guys who weren't, even if they didn't do the things that like Leon Black did personally, they resent that like, you know, that they can, they'll have to like leave their hedge fund because they like committed sexual assault.

And the like rolling Zionism into it. It's sort of, it reminds you of the 2020 stuff because, you know, no one in America is opposed to identity politics. They just want their own version of it. And for these people, they're all against like wokeness and DEI, but the subtext of course of it is like the only people that actually deserve to have identity politics are Jewish people. Right. And like all this other stuff is goofy and we have to like boycott it and get rid of

it. But that it yeah, it's like like they're taking the form of what they perceive as the E.I. and applying it to themselves. Yeah, it's just the war on Christmas, but for Jews, you know? Yes. Yes. And like, that's totally, and you know, the thing is that in 2020, I feel like we all knew this was gonna happen.

Like people were saying crazy shit, you know? And like, I mean, there were, and there were so many times at protests where one person would just, you know, say something ridiculous or, you know, and people were trying to out-abolish one another, and it's just like, okay, we know it's coming after this. And it was just sort of delayed and very, very...

It happened more slowly than I thought it would be, that it would. I guess they were waiting for another election, but they completely, you know, have sort of adopted now this idea that like, you know, colleges aren't safe spaces for Jewish students and that, you know, they need that they are oppressed and that they're ostracized and that they're, you know, sort of a, you know, a minority that that needs protection. that needs protection. When they said that it's not safe to be Jewish at NYU, I was like, well, if that's true, then that's on us. That's like, if we're not safe at fucking NYU, then give up, Judaism's over. I'm pretty sure that white gentiles were a minority group when I was at Penn.

I'm trying to think, but that was in Trump's, what was his, his anti-Semitism commercial with the women sitting at the diner. Oh yeah, those like, those like very Anglo looking women who were like, oh, vey, I'm so worried about Israel. I usually don't like Trump because I'm woke, but this time it would be Michigan and not to vote for him. I got that one confused with the time out for hate campaign that Shaq did, which I, the Robert, Robert Kraft was behind that one, but you see it a lot, like when you watch

NFL games. What I like about that is it implies that like you're taking a time out for hate, but it will resume when you know the clock starts again Well, I want to go back to that guy Mark Rowan who you mentioned who was like the big the big pen donor who Started all of this boycott before October 7th because pen hosted a Palestinian literary event You have a quote from him in the article about him that thought was astonishing He wrote in a forward to a book from 2020-2012, he wrote, traditionally we are taught to judge the success of a society by how it deals with the least able most vulnerable members of that society. But shouldn't we judge society by how they treat the most

successful? Do we vilify tax expropriate and condemn those who have succeeded? Or do we celebrate economic success as the engine that propels our society toward greater collective well-being? Yeah Yeah, I mean that is basically this is also kind of what like what you know the the danger in this ever Expanding definition of anti-semitism is that these guys just want it to be like You know just think of it, anti-Semitism as being distrust of rich people, you know? It's like, and so that's kind of like, yeah,

where he's, where Rowan is coming from. Rowan is like also, I mean, because Leon Black is so ghoulish and like, and terrible. And I actually heard from a source that knew that Leon Black, when his son turned 11, he decided that his son needed to not be a virgin anymore and hired a Russian prostitute to do the job. Jesus fucking Christ. To do the job. Um, but yeah, so like Leon Block is this like, you know, comically villainous, uh, creature and, um, and, and Rowan is like the nice guy who wears sweaters.

And, but he's, he's, you know, like a pretty repugnant Pepfellow. And after I started writing about, um, Penn, because he was leading, he, he's the one who started the billionaire boycott of the Ivy League. And he did this in his capacity at, I think he might be the board chairman of the Wharton School at Penn. And he was writing them emails, like the whole board of Penn, the trustees. And he has a, he has a lobbyist who's like best friends with Josh Shapiro. So like, Josh Shapiro, and this has just recently come out this week, the way that Josh Shapiro was sort of micromanaging Penn's, like, management of its crackdown

on its encampments. And like Penn is not a political school. The encampments were like two and a half tens, you know? Like it was, I don't think, you know, they had a Palestinian Literature Festival there, but you know, I think that probably, you know, five students actually knew about it. It's a very, very like small sliver of that school that is showing their solidarity with Palestine. But yeah, I mean, they're on their high horse.

And I was told by a former member of the board of trustees who resigned in this whole fiasco that the donors seemed to start getting mad after affirmative action was overturned because they realized that legacy admissions or they worried that legacy admissions would be next and that like all of the millions that they donated over the years might all be for naught. And I was just thinking like, how can these people, like they think that legacy,

no one's gonna end legacy admissions at Ivy League schools. Like that would never happen. This is not the French Revolution. But yeah, he's a pretty noxious character. And I think that he was supposed to be a shoo-in for the treasury secretary job. But I think that he basically concluded that he could have all the influence that he wanted without having to actually do that job. I mean when I think about this like in India like this is this this week or last week rather

the ICC issued arrest warrants for Yoav Galant and Bibi Netanyahu for war crimes that they've done over the last year or so. And we saw like of course over the last week Biden so. And we saw, like, of course, over the last week, Biden spending the waning days of his lame duck presidency doing everything possible to protect them from international criminal justice and whipping senators and, you know, in his own government to continue to vote for arms transfers to Israel. And I guess, like when I think about this and like all the people involved in it, I think it really shows like the futility of people who think that like the elections over

like Gaza, like voters didn't really care about it, or like we should just, the idea, the fantasy that we can just focus on a domestic agenda when like every single person who's stopping anything good from happening domestically are also huge supporters of Israel who will not brook even the slightest disagreement or criticism or accountability for the state of Israel and in the many crimes it's done over the last year or so. And I guess I can think about this like over the last like a couple weeks since the election, Felix and I have talked on the show about this kind of strange strategy of displacement that angry liberals are going through now, where they're reveling in the thought of deporting Latino or Muslim voters who didn't come through

for them or betrayed them in some way. And it's like they can displace their own fantasies of what they want to do to punish minorities onto Trump who will do it for them. And that way it's not me doing it, it's Donald Trump who's a bad person, but I'm just enjoying it. Do you think that there's like a similar strategy of displacement going on on the right, at least as regards to like their obsession with grooming and sex crimes and like look, it's been very politically useful for them because the targets of like, you know, are institutions that are normally associated with the left, like the movie industry or the music industry.

But what do you make about their obsession with protecting women and protecting children given who they just tried to nominate to be Attorney General of the United States? I mean, it's so astonishing. And first on the liberals being happy about people being deported, I mean, I was looking back in the story about the liberals having, you know, being happy about people being deported. I mean, I was looking back in the story about the rape gang, I was looking back at, you know, the biggest moment, you know, what Ivanka Trump has said is the lowest moment in Trump's presidency. And I think that the sort of crowning moment for the resistance was all of the coverage

of the children in cages and the child separations and the really detailed and heartbreaking stories of women being thrown locked away and having their babies and children confiscated some of them while they were literally breastfeeding them. Again, images that, you know, conjure what, you know, the West Bank, not Gaza, you know, not to that point. And you know, the public outrage about that was enough to actually get Trump to, you know, overturn the policy and issue an executive order ending the policy.

Now, of course, the architect of that policy is his border SAR, so we'll probably see a return. But, you know, it's hard to, like, it's hard not to just be astonished at the extent to which the libs have really just abandoned any moral high ground that used to be their calling card and all year. And I've been wondering throughout this genocide, how are you okay with this? Like how everyone knows that this is destructive, even if all you care about is Israel, right? Even if you just care about the medium term for Israel as a state, this is not going to make it easy to be an Israeli, you know, not that they care. But yeah, it's just gotten so out of control

and with the Nancy Mace, her outlandish, like what did she do? Did she create a rule to ban what's her face from the woman's restroom. Just that, like, that episode, which I hadn't, you know, even, like, paid attention to until recently. It's just like, this is just sadistic and mean and nobody, you know, like, I don't think that this is popular. I don't think that Nancy Mace is, like like making any friends by singling out the one trans woman in this body of 435 for ostracism in this extremely humiliating

and gratuitous way. That's gross. But could the Democrats really even say anything about it? No, because they don't have any moral compass and they're like, oh, you know, could the Democrats really even say anything about it? No, because they don't have any moral compass and they're like, oh, that they, them add, like, cost us the election. And it's like, man, you know, do they, them add, you know, the luggage thief thing, being reminded of that, that was not a high point for the Biden administration. But I think the genocide was a little more important. You know, like, if you look, and I've talked before in the past about like this this weird act of projection like when

people see people protesting against this war or protesting in favor of Solidarity with Palestinians or for the for their freedom and it can be discerned that anyone protesting is like gay or trans They immediately jumped like why don't you go to Gaza where they fucking kill you for being gay or trans, they immediately jump to like, why don't you go to Gaza where they'd fucking kill you for being gay or trans, unlike me, who would ever consider doing something like that. And like, I just think like, with Israel, I think it's the same, like, literal, like an imperial project of where Israel gets to be the vessel that's our imperial proxy in which like they can exercise old-fashioned colonialism and all the attendant violence, both sexual and otherwise, that goes along with it.

And that if it can be shown that it's okay, we can carve out this exception where it's all international law just does not apply. It is okay when they do it. And I'm referring to news reports from last week that one of the leading surgeons left in Gaza was raped to death after being kidnapped and thrown into an Israeli prison. That like if we can carve out an exception then like then it's sort of like we're carving out an exception for us as well. Yeah, that that is what I tell people who, you know, say like, well, you know, I'm not

a Zionist, I don't care about any of this shit. Even if I like to find that kind of morally repugnant, even just from a cynical angle, you should care about this if only for the reason that Israel is their petri dish for determining what is the absolute worst things they could get away with. It's kind of been that way for the last 30 years. It's a preview of, you know, what we'll do to like climate refugees. It is a preview of what things will look like here if things get worse.

Going back to sort of the liberal glee and the like current right wing, the Nancy Nace thing. I think another thing we've talked about at the show a few times, and it's something that Josh Eddington-Germanton brought up a few times. It is sort of the story of the last two presidencies,

and will probably be the story of this presidency, the idea that by virtue of us winning, that is a vindication of us doing whatever we want all the time. If we win, that means that everything that people said was stupid or counterproductive, that means it actually worked. No one ever wins despite anything,

or there were like, um, you know, parts of their campaign that were stupid or didn't work or policies that are unpopular. No, it's all popular because we won. That was sort of, that was like a weight around the neck of the first Trump administration. Um, and it was also kind of the case with Biden. Like after 2022, after that midterm, they just decided like, well, no, yeah, there you go. No one thinks Biden's stupid.

And they didn't even win in 2022. Exactly. The Republicans still like got the stupid majority. Like, I don't know, maybe they like it better that way, but. They absolutely do. But then this sort of new feature beyond like any you know Anything we want to do is right all the time because we won the new thing is Anything that happens to you is right because we lost and any reason we lost is because of you and never because of us

Right and has anyone have either of you seen this baby leaks movie that is about to come out or, I don't know, it was leaked on Telegram. I haven't finished, I've just watched about like- Are these the recordings that like would seem to imply that they absolutely knew October 7th was going to happen and let it occur? So I haven't gotten that far yet. Damn, that's spoiler alert. These are recordings wherein Sheldon and Miriam Adelson just talk shit to these interrogators about Bibi, and especially Sarah. I mean, it's just a dump on Sarah.

She is not going to recover. She is going to like drink herself to death when she, but she's already drinking herself to death according to these people. But yeah, so it's basically billionaires talking shit about Bibi and Sarah and how high maintenance they are and how basically they have to have like full staffs just for like, you know, like lavishing them with like the right gifts at the right times and how sick they are of their relationship.

And, you know, they trace it back to, I guess he won in 2015, he won like a bigger than expected margin in the Knesset and, you know, they just got high on themselves. And after that, Sarah went from needing one bottle of $3,000 champagne every day to four bottles. And it's just one of those things where there's just something so astonishing

about watching Miriam Adelson talk about how, like just awful and like just how wretched she finds, you know, these people who, you know, like you sort of think of as her, you know, ideological soulmate. The people who she's dedicated her life to supporting. To supporting, yeah. And it's just like, oh my God.

And this is a thing that you, you know, that this is something that strikes me about Israel all the time. It's just like, God, these people hate each other so much more than Americans even do. Like it's unbelievable. And that's what's so terrifying about, you know, the genocide is just like, this is the thing that, you know, is bringing all of you together, but it's actually making you more miserable. Like how if like,

surely you hate each other way more than you hate Palestinians. Like if you really think about it. I don't know if you saw this post from like a liberal Zionist, one of these, like, I don't like if you saw this post from a liberal Zionist, one of these, like, you know, I don't like Netanyahu, but actually any opposition to Israel at all is severely anti-Semitic. One of those people.

And she said, I don't like Netanyahu, but it really says a lot about Palestinian society that the Israeli government offered $5 million in safe passage to anyone who gives information about where the hostages are. And it's like, A, I don't know how after a fucking over a year of this, anyone could possibly believe any Israeli promise of safe fucking passage. That's just insulting. But secondly, the contrast between how people in Gaza treat each other in the most dire conditions humanity has to offer versus just the way that Israeli society is, everyone is at each other's throats.

People were ready to gun down their neighbors and kill cops over the right to rape detainees. And they just cannot envision of any society where people are just not just stepping all over each other all the time. To rape detainees with like burning metal rods. Yeah. Like it's, I mean, it's just like, and you know, cause them, you know,

damage to their internal organs. I mean, it is like a level of barbarousness that like is, is that we haven't, I mean, I just feel like the media, people are not contending with, they haven't, it's in it's, and it's all like, they're topping themselves every day. Yeah, I don't know, you know, again,

and I was glad when it seems really apparent that this is like a major block in the Democratic Party, like ability to sort of respond or contend with this. It's almost like the same block that Israel has had through all its demonstrations and its constitutional crises, the inability to reckon with the Palestinian question. It always seems so weird to me until we started arming a genocide for a year and, you know, it's like nobody like is ready to talk about it. I mean, obviously, like people like us are. But if, you know, it's a, I can't talk about it with like my fucking Gentile family, you know. It's, it's like too weird. I should say my, my, my dad, who's a Zionist for some reason.

We're like not even like Christian, you know, we're Catholics, but like, you know, there's no like Catholic Zionism. I guess there is now, with Judy Banz. Catholic Zionist? That's so fucking weird. The Vatican is so dumb. The Catholic Israel.

That's so, I don't get it. How did he get into Zionism? I mean, he like, he used to work at the Heritage Foundation, so I imagine that had something to do with it. I know we're running up against time, but I did want to talk about a lot of the reporting you've been doing about private equity and its effects on the American health care system.

But we've been talking in this conversation, a portrait of a society and a government for which human life has Approximately zero value. Well, the corollary to that is that human death and suffering is actually quite profitable And I'm just like there you're reporting that you've done on this like steward the the steward health care providers I just like could you talk briefly about like? What like just how private equity has used the concept of a bust out and it has infiltrated every aspect of American society, but with truly calamitous results

in terms of healthcare providers. Could you mention the story of Steward and how private equity is just draining money, just stealing money out of hospitals and closing them. Sure. So, after the ACA passed, mostly this happened after the ACA passed, but also during that period, private equity firms started buying up hospital chains. And nobody was quite sure how they were going to make money off hospitals.

Because it's just not that, you know, it's sort of a tricky business. There had been this, you know, there's this classic business model that's been used in the nursing home industry since probably like the freaking 1930s. But where you, you know, you sort of, you take over a home, you buy some nursing homes, you separate the real estate from the operating company, and then you sell off the real estate and you lease it back. And you sell off the real estate for like an obscene sum, and then you take all that money

and you force the nursing home operator to lease it back. A bunch of private equity firms decided to sort of use this business model on hospitals, you know, starting in 2010. And one of them was called Steward and that was Cerberus, the Cerberus private equity firm that is... By the way, it's always a good sign when your firm is named after a literal dog that guards the gates of hell. Yes, a three-headed dog. Yes, it's also like Molly Jongfast's dog's name too. Which makes fucking love. So confusing. Yeah, so like Cer had zero experience in healthcare. They had run all these, like they'd run a lot of retailers into the ground. Chrysler, they owned the

Bushmaster, like they owned this roll up of every like big gun company in America that like after Sandy Hook had to like file for bankruptcy to avoid like massive legal bills. So they knew what the important part is, which is how to control the bankruptcy process so that you can kind of buy yourself 100% immunity and not actually have to pay anyone back. But yeah, so they started this kind of hospital chain with this surgeon named Ralph de la Torre in Boston.

And it was like this little Catholic, this little chain of Catholic hospitals, they had hired Ralph in a hurry because their last CEO had like, you know, had like kissed all these like nurses without, non-consensually. Well, he had a very remunctious childhood as well. Yes, well, no, he blamed his Lebanese upbringing which is like we call that doing the Cuomo totally I have not heard that like the Lebanese take on it though but you know it's the Mediterranean world this very hot blooded and passionate so Ralph who like I don't know if Ralph was a into

sexual harassment he definitely is into much younger women. But at that point, he was still married to his wife, who he left when she had a stroke. That's the kind of guy this guy is. So he's a surgeon and he tells them that he is going to make them lots of money by using this Obamacare institution called an Accountable Care Organization. And basically, they involved in this idea. The idea is that like if you get the doctors and the pharmacies and the hospitals

all on the same page and the insurance companies all on the same page, then they can be incentivized to reduce unnecessary hospital stays. But basically what he saw was that they decided that in order to properly incentivize doctors and hospitals to do all those great things and save all that money for America, they had decided to give fraud and abuse waivers to people who ran certain kinds of ACOs. So he saw those fraud and abuse waivers and he said, hey, I'm going to do lots of fraud and abuse. And basically he was kind of forcing, he bought these hospitals and then forced every patient

that went to a doctor that was affiliated with hospitals to do all of their surgeries in those hospitals even if they didn't have the tools or weren't qualified or didn't have the space. Even though it was like the surgical facilities were like a field just outside Gettysburg. Right, yeah. It's like, no, I mean, or they didn't actually have them. Like they, like, there was one lawsuit and they, like, incorporated this, like, fake prostate center of excellence in this, like, fake urology center of excellence. And then they were like-

They were just fake dicks and assholes everywhere. Literally, literally botching circumcisions. And this poor urologist, you know, filed a whistleblower lawsuit about it. Yeah, it's so sad. It's so sad. But that was their first business model and that just wasn't making money fast enough. So Cerberus is like, listen- Have your infant bite down on this plug of leather before we go to work on the bris.

So Cerberus is like, listen, what we're going to do to cash out on this, because it's been like four years now and we got to start fucking, you know, taking some profits. We're going to sell all the real estate that the hospitals own and you're going to lease it back, but we're going to sell it for like three times the assessed value. I mean, just an obscene amount. So the hospitals could not actually. So they sold it to this like Alabama Real Estate Investment Trust. And for $1.2 billion, these hospitals that like weren't making any money and they can't make their

first rent payment. But that's okay because the Alabama Real Estate Investment Trust like, you know, lends them money to make that first rent payment. And then they just start doing this, like, series of, like, round-trip deals or complicated, you know. They started basically expanding this stupid hospital chain that is really bad to begin with, so that they own more and more and more hospitals

and owe more and more to this Alabama company. Meanwhile, Ralph, the surgeon, is just like paying himself hundreds of millions of dollars through like every avenue that you can imagine and buying like, and he leaves his wife and he like takes up with this like 26 year old equestrian and he buys her like a 500 acre ranch and he buys like, you know, like villas in Madrid and Costa Rica and he buys the

biggest. This is this is taking place in like while the hospitals in this hospital chain literally have that infestation. So they are not like they are not paying any of their bills like in order and every people leave because of us all these contractors, like they basically, you know, like they won't pay the exterminator. They don't pay the intensivist. They don't play the dialysis company.

They're not paying like the doctors. They do pay the nurses and that's it. Like they pay the nurses and everybody else gets screwed and they're not like, but they don't pay the like nurse staffing agency. So that there's all of these vendors that are owed like, you know, they get cut off by like the local pizza place. They have their boar's head deli meat repossessed one day.

I mean, it's really, really dark. And like. Holy shit. The fucking, the pizza delivery places cut you off and your ham is getting repossessed by fucking creditors. Deli meat! Like can you imagine repossessing deli meat? My husband is a chef and I told him that and he's just like, oh my god. Hey, just freeze it, freeze it. It'll be fine, it'll be fine. No, they like repossessed all of the kitchen knives, like I mean literally the stuff that they can by the way.

They're usingossessing. Yes, because I wish that were, no, they didn't use kitchen knives for surgery, but they did repossess all of this important surgical equipment and a woman ends up bleeding to death after giving birth as a result of that. So there's all of these people like literally dying because they don't have, you know, they don't have IV bags, they don't have any wound dressing equipment, they just don't have any freaking supplies. And this guy, Ralph De La Torre, who's in charge, he's just taking obscene amounts of money out of the company.

And there's people who are onto him. There's short sellers because this Alabama Real Estate Investment Trust is publicly traded. And there's this one short seller in London named Fraser Perring and he's kind of gotten really into watching Medical Properties Trust and Steward because it's just like clearly there's so much fraud there. And also during this time, one of the places they expanded was Malta. They took this contract to run four hospitals in Malta, and they didn't do anything. They were supposed to renovate the hospitals into these destinations for Libyan medical

tourism, and they didn't do anything. There was this journalist in Malta who was paying attention to these deals and saying, what is going on? There's this guy involved and he's got a bad track record. Well, she ends up dead in a car bombing. There was like orchestrated by this like crony of the guy who's kind of racing the wheels. And it turns out they spent $7 million on bribes to like the prime minister and various like other associates of him.

So there's you know, there's all this like obvious crime going on. No, has anyone been charged? Felix, that was literally the plot of Steven Seagal's General Commander, by the way. It is. Remember, the Oregon trafficking ring was run out of Malta in that movie. Oh my god. There's, there's so much and they tried and there's there's actually a guy that I listened to on you know one of the many private intelligence firms that they hired.

A guy you know like left the firm and basically went to you know like went to authorities and I have like him on a recording and he's talking about all of the things that Ralph wanted them to do and he's like yeah all of the things that Ralph wanted them to do. And he's like, yeah, Ralph was just asking like, how much is it gonna cost for me to cut Frazier Paring's breaks? That's the short seller. So he's like, like literally planning, you know, he's like maybe involved in this one assassination

and definitely trying to assassinate like another guy. This guy has not been indicted at all. In Malta, they just blow up your car to kill you, which is let's just try it in true assassination method, but like in America they're like, oh what if we cut the brakes on his car? Like what was the last time that worked to try to kill someone? I mean I maybe I'm being very nice. Michael Haffings. Maybe he was just trying to like put the like fear of God into him. I'm not sure.

But this guy, yeah this was in London I mean, they also hired Christopher Steele to like, to get the, some British MP to like talk about how Frasier Pering was like a tool of Putin. And you know, they're just basically running all these sort of like false flag, they call them false flag operations, but they're spending like obscene amounts on these private spies spying on their enemies. They also try to catfish like one of their ex CFOs.

I mean, they're just completely out of control. So like like anyone who notices the just like wholesale corruption and theft going on, they will, you know, intimidate blackmail or assassinate. And look, I know I know we've gone long today, but where I want to get to with this is this. I'm reading your reporting on how private equity works. If you are a fan of capitalism as an economic system or you're taught about it in American schools or you hear politicians talk about it, it's a certain story that goes like this. The market is the best force that we have

for matching human desire to productive capacity or human need and want to productive capacity. And that firms make profit because they provide a needed good and service and they employ people and the profit that they make is a reflection of the good or necessity that they fill in the market. Knowing what you like covering private equity like how does that doesn't doesn't the existence

of private equity sort of like put the lie to that entire idea of how capitalism works. Because as far as I can tell, they don't produce anything. They just have money that they use to buy things and then destroy them and make more money in the process of doing it. I mean, it's you don't have to take it from me. You can take it from fucking Steve Bannon, who just said this when you know Mark Rowan was under consideration because by the way Mark Rowan is running in an identical hospital scheme with the identical kind of you know characters and less Malta okay and fewer assassinations but like you know. Well, you said he was a nice guy.

It's a Leon Braxton. Steve Bannon, yeah, Steve Bannon just came out and said, you know, I don't know why they would ever pick Mark Rowan given how much, you know, destruction, private equity has wreaked upon the nation. I mean, there's like a lot of, and you know, to that point too, Bernie Sanders actually got the Senator from Louisiana, whose name is Cassidy, he's actually like a, he voted for the

impeachment or something, so he's kind of a little out there, but he and Bernie have been holding hearings about Stewart for months now and they tried to subpoena Ralph de la Torre, this guy who is, you know, absconding with all this money while patients die. And, you know, this scheme left everyone without malpractice insurance and all of the people who got, you know, had, were waiting on wrongful debt settlements, they've all been screwed by this very corrupt bankruptcy court that is like private equity's favorite bankruptcy court in Houston. It's another story.

But yeah, I mean, during these hearings, Mitt Romney is like, oh my God. I can't even believe it. This is just what he did at Bain Capital. Mitt Romney, yeah. No. I mean, and Bain Capital. You're fucking wrong me. Yeah. No. I mean, and Bain, like literally, you know, Bain got everyone into the hospital. I mean, it's one thing if you do it to Jeffrey the Giraffe, but doing it to like hospitals

is another level of evil. And yeah, and one of the nurses at one of the hearings was talking about how, you know, the elevators were down. And this is one thing, everyone's like, the elevators are always down. Like people are dying while we're waiting for an elevator to the ICU. And she said that they gave them sleds to push patients downstairs. Oh, the Papoose boards. We're back to it.

And so, you know, Bernie and got like almost everyone on this committee, Republican, Democrat, to vote to subpoena this guy Ralph De La Torre. And then when he didn't show up to hold him in contempt as Steve Bannon had been held in contempt and refer him for criminal prosecution for contempt of Congress. Now that was, I don't know, that was like two, three months ago. The GOJ has yet to do anything about that not only that but this guy has counter sued them for violation of his constitutional Yes for subpoenaing him in the first place Yeah

and and you know he's hired this like guy who was like the lawyer to Like everyone who was caught up in the also representing Eric Adams. Yes Yes Everyone who was caught up in this also representing Eric Adams. Yes So, um, so I don't know maybe that lawyers like so smooth that the I was not very impressed by their but by their lawsuit But it's like it's like if this activity because like there's so many terrible evil sadistic things that private equity does And it's kind of I guess it's kind of hard to figure them out. You kind of have to know a little bit about, you know, finance to figure out what they're doing. But this is so blatant. I mean, we're talking about assassinations. We're talking about bribery. Like, this stuff has all been very well documented.

There was this group in the OCCRP got like,,000 emails from Medical Properties Trust laying out the entire scheme. It's a publicly traded company, so there is accounting fraud. And literally nothing has happened. And it's like that's this country now. So it's pretty depressing. Well, we'll wrap it up there on that cheery note of just, yeah, like a country now just totally naked,

totally naked in the face of just outright, you know, just vandalism, just vandalism and theft everywhere, all the way down. Well, don't get secure. I, like,, just vandalism, just vandalism and theft everywhere all the way down. Or don't get secure. I like, when I worked in restaurants, all the El Salvadorians, like they never wanted to go back to El Salvador unless they needed surgery. And then it's like, yeah, you know,

investments in dual citizenship. Boy, yeah. Jesus. What I was reading about is like specifically like the real estate scheme that you detailed in your articles. Like it's amazing because like even removed from this, American healthcare is just like,

it's the most unbridled profiteering every step of the way business in this country. Like every, every single thing that is done, every procedure, everything that's bought, every, every facet of it is just maximal profiteering. Just looking at it before this, it would be like, how do you even up the ante? And this is how, by doing the fucking bust out from Goodfellas. And then finally, there's nothing left. Fucking shame.

And you can't borrow another buck from the bank or buy another case of booze. You bust the joint out. You light a match. Yeah, it's truly. I mean, and there's so many facets to it. Again, this bankruptcy court in Houston, like if you want to do a bust out, like head to the Southern District of Texas because they're all about it there. They're also like today, there's this hearing going on right now about Alex Jones is you know the

the judge who who is very concerned that Alex Jones's media company is gonna be sold to the Onion. You know he's like I'm not sure there might be a miscarriage of justice there. Well he's the same judge who has been watching the Stewart case and he's just... The Onion, I mean this is this is this is this is an antitrust issue. The onion has gotten too big. I don't think that's his jurisdiction. But no, that's fair enough. It is it's it's it's it's got incredible reach. It's

it's like the deep state. Well, we should leave it we should leave it there for the day. I want to thank Moe Tasek so much for joining us. Moe, if our listeners had like to follow your work or check out some of your reporting about these private equity bust outs, where should they go? What should they do? You can find me at prospect.org or I'm on Twitter Moe Tasek. I have an E in my Moe, even though that's supposedly like the girl version of Moe is supposed to be just MO. But mine has an E in my Mo, even though that's supposedly like the girl version of Mo is supposed to be just MO. But mine has an E. I like to be like ambiguous that way.

Links will be in the episode description. That does it for us today. Thanks again to Mo Tasik. And until next time, everybody, signing off. Bye. into Motastic and until next time everybody signing off.