The Texan Podcast - IVF and Pardons and Trump's Cabinet, Oh My: SMSS Ep. 10

Episode Date: December 10, 2024

On this episode of Send Me Some Stuff, Cameron and Rob bounce around topics like Trumps cabinet selections, the recent changes in South Korea, comments and reactions to President Biden pardoning his son Hunter Biden, IFV mixups and policy predictions, and more. Might as well be lions, and tigers, and bears, oh my! 

Well you've heard of course the joke about Trump and RFK Jr. What's that? Well it's you know, a man wakes up in a coma the day after the election. I've already told this one in the office. A man wakes up from a coma the day after the election and the first thing he says is, Who's the president? Who's the president? And somebody says, Donald Trump. And he goes, wow, Donald Trump? The man's been in a coma since like 2008.

And they go, yeah, Donald Trump. It's crazy. He just appointed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be Secretary of Health and Human Services. And he says, Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Wow. Who did the Republicans run? Yeah. Hello and welcome in to episode number 10 of Send Me Some Stuff. My name is Cameron Abrams. I'm a reporter here at The Texan. I'm joined once again by the assistant editor, Rob Lauches. Rob, what's up?

Thank you for having me, Cameron. I really appreciate getting to join you on this illustrious podcast. Cameron, how was your Thanksgiving? It was good. What'd you do? I went back to California, visited first with my dad in San Luis Obispo, which is in Central California, right on the coast, and met my brother out there as well.

He lives in Houston now, so we are both traveling from Texas. And we did some hikes, did some runs outside, did a little turkey trot on the beach. Very fun. And then drove a few hours up north to Sacramento, where I'm originally from, and spent a couple days with my mom. And, yeah, it was fun. Didn't have a typical Thanksgiving meal, though oh is that so that is so on what's your family do for the meal then well i was in

san luis obispo on thanksgiving day and me my brother and my dad went to a brunch at a hotel like they and they just like blew it out like tons of people huge buffet uh all your typical thanksgiving fixings but then they also had like a taco bar there was a pasta bar so pasta very classic thanksgiving food really New England you know it was fun though and then with my mom I was with her the days after and her Thanksgiving was making soup Oh classic winter food yeah at least Thanksgiving themed soup like turkey soon over sweet but no what else there was a what kind of soup was it like a thai curry type soup that sounds pretty good there was like an italian um like tortellini kind of that sounds pretty good so that was fun um the weather in california is nice 300 360 days out of the year you know there's maybe uh four or five days when it when

it's bad so it was beautiful out there and then i came back here and it was you know it's nice but it's it's cold it's getting cold yeah it's starting to get a little chilly i'm kind of bundling up here a little bit it's it's freezing it's almost like 60 degrees or something it's crazy well it it works because i always like this time of year the fall because you can bring out the jackets absolutely no i have tons of jackets um did you do anything fun yeah i went back home to houston which is where i'm originally from and uh saw family there saw my grandma I got to hang out with my family to watch the Texas versus Texas A&M game which was very exciting the revival of a rivalry that I believe hadn't played since 2011 okay so I mean I was like 11

years old when that last happened it's a very exciting game. Hook'em Horns. And the Aggies have not, the Aggie offense has not scored against Texas since 2011. Wow. The only touchdown came from an interception. Okay. I believe it was, unless it was a fumble. I can't remember off the top of my head, but. Did your, does your family have any unique Thanksgiving traditions? Unique traditions? No, I'd say normally, you know, eat the meal, have the food coma, live off leftovers for several days. That's pretty much our tradition for Thanksgiving.

That's awesome. That was a lot of fun. Yeah, good turkey. Yeah. All sorts of good things. Dark meat or white meat? Got to be dark meat. Okay. Got to be dark meat on turkey or chicken, you know.

That's what it has to be. That's where the flavor is. That's where all the flavor is, yeah. So chicken breast is healthy. Well, the crazy thing is there's tons of news that came out. You know, we record this podcast once a month. But just over this past week, crazy stuff was going on. We have, gosh gosh six different stories

we might touch on absolutely um we have a really interesting ivf mix-up story that i came across got the hunter biden part in we got more controversy surrounding petexeth and a sort of deep dive Megyn Kelly has done over the past couple weeks. We got South Korea. The coup that was and wasn't. Right. Very interesting. And there's an interesting story coming out of Europe right now where they've actually voted on a assisted dying bill in the united kingdom yeah yeah so i think we're going to talk a little bit about that and then if we have time uh a larger controversy has been brewing online regarding james lind, if people know who he is, he kind of bursted onto the scene with the hoax papers that him and Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose published probably close to 10 years ago now. And he's remained relevant and he's been really vocal about some of the fringe elements on the political right

and he sort of did a similar thing that he did with publishing a story now in a right-wing online mag that caused a stir so if we have time we'll get to that I definitely have a lot of thoughts but if you always have a lot of thoughts if we have time we'll get to that but I think more where we will start is with this IVF story I actually came across this in a tweet where it was a tweet from Trung Phong. I'm not super familiar with this account. They do have over 700,000 followers. I do see them come across my timeline every now and again.

But they posted this really long tweet covering this story where these two couples who were attempted to conceive using IVF well the fertility clinic accidentally swapped the embryos yeah and what is really interesting here is both women, as part of these two couples, both gave birth to the child, raised them until about three months, I believe is what they're saying here. One of the couples noticed that the baby didn't really look like any of them. Yeah, because I believe it was two white parents, and then the other couple was Asian and Latino.

And so they realized, you know, the both of them thought, well, this baby doesn't really look like us. It doesn't look like the mother or the father, which, you know, just a crazy to to see and have to think about you know and yeah so i'll just read a little bit from the tweet here the couples agree to swap babies in other words get back their genetic baby but the moms having understandably grown attached to their newborns need time the couples start with family visits at each other's homes. Then they do daytime swaps with the babies. Then they prepare for the full swap. It's emotionally wrenching, made harder by

the fact each couple also has older siblings who don't fully understand why their new, quote, sisters are being changed. Now the kids are five years old. All things worked out. The two couples actually sued the clinic and the clinic settled. And this tweet goes into the larger discussion here over the question concerning the commercialization of IVF. A lot of issues regarding safeguards and how regulation is going to help prevent issues like this from occurring in the future. So obviously a big mishap on the side of the clinic. Absolutely. But it's nice to see that these parents were able to find each other because it turns out they live like 10 minutes away. Yeah. In the same part of the country and they were able to find each other and introduce the kids to each other because obviously these parents

still felt a very strong attachment to of course oh to these babies so the fact that they were able to find each other and sort of you know they didn't they sort of started raising the kids together they were like interacting with each other they were you know became like friends yeah they became friends it's it's a crazy thing to think about how, well, the really nicest thing, and this is what I think they talk about in the New York Times article that this tweet is based on. At the very end it says, you know, the parents say, well, it's not a happy ending, but it's the happiest ending we could have had

because there's still a lot of emotional turmoil involved in the whole situation. But it's interesting because IVF is in the public, it seems to be in the public eye a lot now. After the overturning of Roe v. Wade, there's now been an even broader discussion about reproductive technology as a whole, with some people on the conservative Christian right arguing that actually now IVF should be seen as perhaps something for the pro-life movement to go after. So tell me if I have the argument correct from that perspective. Pro-life arguments against IVF are based upon the fact that when a couple goes in to try and conceive through IVF,

they have to create a number of prospective or possible embryos that can be implanted. And obviously couples, they make dozens of them, right, these IVFf clinics and they're not all used during the ivf process so a number of these potential embryos are destroyed after the couple conceives using ivf and that can't that sort of falls into this gray area of pro-life, pro-choice. Exactly. So I have that correct, like the sort of arguments there for the pro-life side? Pretty much, yeah. So it's they have to create all these embryos and then they kind of have a process of determining, well, which ones are we going to implant? You know, are we going to do more than one? And then the rest of them are not preserved. So if you believe that life begins at conception, then obviously there's an argument to be made that this is, effectively speaking,

it's more or less equivalent to abortion in the sense of destroying a fertilized egg, right? If you believe that that's a human person. So it's a very complicated issue. But the interesting thing is that some Republican politicians have actually taken a stance against that perspective. For example, Ted Cruz, a politician few would describe as not conservative, who attempted to pass a bill, I believe it was just this year, to protect IVF across the country and prohibit any state from banning IVF practices because I believe it was the Georgia or Alabama Supreme Court, I think it was, that ruled IVF could not be practiced. Do you remember which one it was? Say the states again.

I believe it was Georgia or Alabama. Yeah, it was Alabama. Yeah, because we wrote a story about this. We? You must have written the story yeah i wrote this story a little while ago um if i can find it here yeah it was an alabama supreme court decision back in february where they ruled frozen embryos used during IVF are human lives under state law. And Governor Greg Abbott was actually questioned about this when he said there is, quote, no doubt the same issue will be addressed in Texas. And then a little while later, in July, we actually saw Senator Brian Hughes. He was questioned and asked if he thinks the Texas legislature would consider banning IVF, and he said, I don't.

He said how in previous years pro-life legislation was passed, it, quote, carved out provisions for ivf and he went on to say quote there are always going to be developments on how it's done and how it's done ethically those are always going to come up a ban on in vitro fertilization will not be going anywhere so i think that really highlights the sort of pivoting on the right regarding the new arguments that are being presented post-Roe is it has sort of modulated from being either pro-life or pro-choice with most conservatives majority being pro-life but still there's a gradation of what pro-life means. And I feel like most conservatives are aligning themselves more with the idea of being pro-natalist. Interesting. Being that no matter if it's through a natural conception or through IVF or through other medical interventions. Whatever is going to bring more children safer into the world is going to be the best position to take moving forward. I believe that's what Cruz said, was

saying we want to give parents the opportunity to have more children, especially if it's difficult for them to conceive without it. Yeah. And so I think that's, especially with how Donald Trump positioned the pro-life, pro-choice argument during the presidential campaign, saying it's going to be left up to the states. I think we're going to see a variety of different laws be enacted regarding IVF across the country, maybe somewhere like Alabama, that's saying an embryo is a human life. Maybe other states are going to find a position that's radically different than that, as we've seen with the just returning to the abortion argument. But what you want to talk about, I mean, leaving it up to the states, is the incoming Vice President J.D. Vance said in his podcast interview with Joe Rogan that he is a

pro-life politician, but that he was bound to respect the decision made in his own state of Ohio to add a pro-choice amendment, I believe it was, to the state's constitution, which the fact that you have the president-elect and vice president-elect, you know, maintaining this sort of states' rights argument on abortion. I think it's an interesting change in the sort of strategy of the pro-life movement. Well, and that's an argument I've made, at least internally here in the office over the past few months, when this issue continues to be in the public discourse is I think abortion being a state's rights issue could actually be seen as a positive for the pro-life movement being that it's incredibly difficult to pass federal legislation regard you know how many how many decades has it been since

Roe was instituted and there was still never a congressional law to Congress never passed a bill to codify Roe in law. It was still left up to the Supreme Court's interpretation of the law. Exactly. And so I think lobbying state legislatures to be more pro-life, I think, is a much easier path forward for pro-lifers. But, you know, that's me. That's just my opinion, right? Well, even in Texas now, to 50 states and I think even a county to prohibit any abortion within city limits, to prohibit abortion trafficking, which is when you transport somebody through an area

for the purposes of taking them somewhere to get an abortion. There's definitely a variety of, sort of with the federal, almost with the federal government removed as a sort of area of play for this for this debate for this issue now you have more state and local options for this this issue to play out so it's interesting stuff but yeah with the IVF it's it's just interesting what happens you know the more the more

advanced our medical technology becomes the more opportunities because obviously there have been swapped babies throughout history that's not a new thing but to have a swapped embryo that it's actually not your genetic child but that a woman would still actually conceive and carry that embryo to term i mean that's that's a very difficult sort of circle to square there so yeah yeah Yeah. And we could get into a whole podcast. And even, yeah, even longer discussion about looking further into the future and potential other medical developments that could further complicate this question. But I think. Go ahead. I was going to say, speaking of parents' feelings towards their children, I think that gives us a good segue into our next topic here,

being the President Joe Biden's pardon of Hunter Biden. Yeah. Which is huge. Well, it was huge because he was saying for the entire tenure of his presidency he was questioned about this and he would always say oh i'm not going to pardon him it's out of the question there's a line there i won't cross and then you know snap of the finger uh issues this essentially napkin pardon you know know, it's like... Everything was like everything over an 11-year period, right?

Yeah. All federal crimes from 2014 to 2024 or 2013 to 2024, I think. Yeah. And so... I don't think we've had such a wide, a pardon over such a wide period of time in a very long time. Yeah. long time yeah so i think that so it's those two things have been brought up a lot when people are questioning the act itself the fact that biden president joe biden has said he wouldn't do it then he goes and does it and then the fact that it's such a blanket pardon over um an 11-year period. Lots of questions being raised about that, but we do have some

reactions. Nancy Pelosi told The Hill when asked for her thoughts about the Hunter Biden pardon, saying, quote, I support the president. Senator Gary Peters, Democrat from Michigan, posted that the pardon was, quote, wrong. Senator Michael Bennett, Democrat out of Colorado, said it, quote, puts personal interests ahead of the duty and further erodes America's faith that the justice system is fair and equal for all. We've, you know, but we've also had opposite reactions. A number of people I've seen online, large accounts, whether it be on the left or on the right, have had said things like, if I was a father, I would have done the same thing. unjustly persecute his son and he already you know with the way that the election went not going I think how many Democrats were expected to go maybe Biden says you know what I'm I'm done here I'm gonna pardon my son and we're gonna leave and it's y'all's problem now so yeah perhaps well I it's even even Trump had made jokes about pardoning Hunter Biden I believe before this pardon came in yeah that said something to the effect of, oh, maybe in the interest of unity, I'll pardon Hunter.

I think he said he wouldn't rule it out was what he said. Well, that would have been a real power move for Trump to pardon Hunter. Of course, this one he called a miscarriage of justice. I think it was the words he used for it. Yeah. So I just think it's interesting, the pardon power that the president has, it is quite sweeping. We've seen Supreme Court cases in the past essentially say the pardon power is unlimited. And, you know, most famously, Richard Nixon being pardoned.

Probably the most controversial pardon in American history. online ex-fears is because of not just the fact Joe Biden said he wasn't going to do it, but also the mounting amounts of evidence regarding previous crimes allegedly committed by Hunter Biden, whether it's the foreign business dealings or, you know, we can go down all sorts of rabbit holes regarding Burisma and Ukraine and all sorts of stuff. But especially the Hunter Biden laptop and the hundreds of crimes that are documented on that thing. So, yeah, it's just, it's just an interesting question. Like,

and it's hard to opine on what you would do in the situation if you were. Oh, it's easy for all of us to sit here and say, well, I would never do that. But, you know, when, when you have that kind of power available to you with no consequences to save someone you care about from something that they may or may not be they may or may not be legitimately facing you know it's hard to it's hard to i think resist that kind of the temptation to use the power for that but i think as you mentioned something else with biden is see what this reminds me of also is the way that he had sort of insinuated at the beginning of his presidency that he really

wasn't going to run again, right? He's going to be kind of this one-term president, this stopgap measure to get Donald Trump out of office. And then he went on to say he actually does intend to run for reelection. And you were predicting months ago that he was going to drop out. And I was like, there's no way. I was like, no. See, Cameron's been right about everything, basically. He keeps telling me Biden's going to drop out. I think Trump's going to win the popular vote. And I kept saying, no, I don't think that's going to happen. And so I've been surprised every time. But yeah, it's an interesting example of a sort of maybe that phenomenon repeating itself. Maybe Biden's going, actually, you know what, maybe I will do this.

Decides he's going to do what he thinks is right, even if he said something to the contrary beforehand. And of course, it's not the first time. I mean, what is it? Donald Trump pardoned the, what was it, the father of Jared Kushner, if I recall correctly. Yes. Okay. You would know more about that one than I do.

Yeah, he did. And the father of Jared, man, that was incredibly lots of issues regarding the reason for the pardon there. Because I don't want to get into it right now because i i don't know all the information off the top of my head people can look it up if they're interested but yeah it's a a incredibly complicated issue there but i think we should move on and talk a little bit about some something that is really continuing to rear its head in the in the media right now is Pete Hegseth Pete Hegseth as everyone

knows he has been nominated to be the upcoming secretary of defense in the next donald trump administration and he's a fox news host he has served as executive director for a couple of different veteran organizations and he's former, I forget which branch he was in, actually. He was a former Army National Guard officer. Army National Guard here. So he has an interesting resume, of course, and he's written a number of books, and I've listened to him. After his name was announced, I went and tried to read up a little bit

and listened to some stuff he said before, and I went and listened to his interview on the Sean Ryan show. People should go check that out if they're interested in hearing a little bit more about what Pete Hegseth, his sort of approach to the Pentagon would be. Since the announcement of his nomination, there's been a number of allegations that have kind of cast a large shadow over him, where there's been allegations of sexual assault, allegations of alcoholism, allegations of financial issues regarding how he ran some of his nonprofit organizations. So many of these allegations are being offered by anonymous sources in mainstream news outlets, whether it be The New Yorker, New York Times, those sort of outlets. So take all the allegations with a heavy dose of salt, right? Well, it's just, you know, it's an allegation is what's sort of like where people, it reminds me of the Kavanaugh hearings, right? That's exactly

how people have been comparing it. Well, you saw the you know, the right was saying, well, he has not been found guilty of anything. So this doesn't this is evidence. Right. An accusation is not proof of guilt. Whereas the liberal side was saying, well, an allegation, you know, it's not a it's not a trial. It's a job interview. You know, an allegation does matter if it reflects poorly on the person's character. So it's one of those difficult issues where, you on the person's character. So it's one of those difficult issues where, you know, it's right, it's not a trial. It is kind of a job interview, but at the same time, you can't treat someone as being guilty of something when it hasn't been proven, right? Because an accusation is not proof of guilt.

And so I've been trying to pay attention to this as best as i can um megan kelly uh former fox news host nbc news host uh she has her own podcast her own show the megan kelly show she's been doing deep dives breakdowns of all the allegations um being levied against Pete Hegseth. People should, you know, she has an archive of a lot of her shows. If people are interested, she goes through the entire police report regarding the sexual assault allegation and a lot of the issues that have been neglected to be mentioned regarding that police report by these mainstream outlets. And she actually sat down with P. Hegseth this week.

She sat down with him on December 4th, where she asked him the tough questions regarding these allegations and uh Hegseth came with the receipts and um talked about the financial um allegations regarding how uh he ran these veteran organizations he talked about the sexual assault allegations um talked about everything so I'd encourage people to go check that out if they're interested um but what what sort of your broader thoughts on this because we we've been seeing not just Pete Headseth be attacked but a number of the other cabinet nominations whether it be RFK Jr. or Kash Patel what you know what why do you think people are in the media going after these cabinet appointments? Is this a new normal post-Kavanaugh? Or is it specific to these individuals because they're part of the Trump administration?

Well, I think it's that Trump seems to me that this time around, excuse me, I think that Trump this time around, you know, he had so many problems in his first administration with this very high turnover for his chiefs of staff and people who got frustrated with him and ended up leaving the administration. And it seems to me that, you know, I don't know Donald Trump personally. I haven't had the chance to have an interview with him like Brad has, actually. Brad's interview with Trump is very good and worth reading. But he seems to have the attitude that as the president, you know, I think he kind of comes into it thinking that he's kind of going to run the country like a CEO, right? Where what he says goes, right? At least within the executive branch, that's what he believes ought to happen. And so you have these, you know, members of the executive branch, cabinet secretaries,

whatnot, who kind of push back against him because the president is expected to also delegate some authority to these people. And they end up running into, they end up butting heads, especially when Trump wants to break with some precedent because he just thinks there's no point to it. You know, he says, oh, why are we doing it this way? Let's do it some other way. And so I think they get frustrated with that. That's why we had such high turnover back in the day.

That's why a lot of Trump's own, you know, chiefs of staff and secretary, secretaries of everything. That's why a lot of them come out and been very critical of him, actually, this time around. And we have been critical of him, honestly. Maybe he maybe he's not the nicest boss to work for. I don't know. I've never worked for him. But I will say that I think this time around, he wants to make sure he has people who are loyal to him. And, you know, the big criticism that these people are facing is that they're unqualified.

They haven't served in federal government for long enough. They haven't worked in the specific, you know, they just, they don't have the specific knowledge needed for these appointments. But if Trump's main desire is simply for people who will, you know, take the marching orders and do what he says, then that's maybe all he needs. So the only thing I'll push back on is I don't think I do agree. These are people who are going to be more loyal to the Trump administration broadly as compared to the first administration's appointments. But I also don't think these are people that are just going to essentially fall in line with anything Trump says. I think these are people that have a lot of their own ideas about things. I think in the podcast era that we exist, you can go and listen to Kash Patel talk for hours upon hours about what he would do if put into a position like this.

So you can go listen to hours and hours of pete hex talking about what you do or vivek ramaswamy or robert f kennedy jr rfk jr and another interesting thing that i think is worth mentioning is the really ideological diversity of the cabinet appointments you know there's people that might see them some of these these appointments as being really embedded in the MAGA movement, really concerned with Trumpism as a political ideology. But then you're going to see there's some people that are part of the political establishment, people that are part of the corporate establishment,

former lobbyists. That's true. You have RFK Jr., a man who was... I was going to say former Democrats, Tulsi Gabbard, RFK. Well, you've heard, of course, the joke about Trump and RFK Jr. What's that? Well, it's, you know, a man wakes up in a coma the day after the election. I've already told this one in the office. A man wakes up from a coma the day after the election. I've already told this one in the office. A man wakes up from a coma the day after the election. And the first thing he says is, who's the president? Who's the president? And somebody says, Donald Trump. And he goes, wow, Donald Trump. The man's been in a coma since like 2008. And they go, yeah, Donald Trump. It's crazy. He just appointed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be Secretary of Health and Human Services. And he says, Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Wow. Who did the Republicans run? Yeah. And it's just to show us just how much has

changed in the last, you know, 16 years. This whole realignment that's happened around Trump, where you have more populist types on the left and the right who are more interested in what Trump has to offer. Because Trump isn't a very ideological person. You know, he's not coming at it from this systematic conservative worldview that I think some of his detractors think he's coming from. I think he's coming more so from a perspective of saying, I like that. Let's do that. I don't like that. Let's do that. Or let's not do that. Well, he's more willing to bring in people from Marco Rubio to Robert F Kennedy jr. who weren't very different people right and

I think what we're seeing the realignment is not left versus right it's establishment versus anti establishment where we like you Like you mentioned, Trump really threw a wrench into the establishment candidates that had been previously offered by both Democrats and Republicans. Which is why we saw a number of former Bernie supporters coming over and supporting Trump in 2016 and most recently in 2024. It's the populist left and populist right finding common ground against the supporters, who argue the establishment left and establishment right has neglected the average person, the working person, a very progressive organization, very progressive site that has now come out and been more critical of the Democratic Party establishment for saying, you know, you've you've left working people behind. And, you know, he said, I'm not a fan of Donald Trump, but I am opposed to the establishment politicians that he is also opposed to, which is politics makes for very interesting bedfellows.

That's the only thing that doesn't change in politics is how strange it can be, you know, to end up on who is with you, you know, on each side of the battle lines. Well, I wouldn't say Cenk is with. No, not with. I think he understands the populist sentiment that has grown around trump over the past eight years so yeah i think that's uh you know going back to how we started this uh conversation with regarding pete hegseth is he is representative of a anti-establishment wing approach to the military. And he's made comments about rooting out the wokeness in the military.

He's made comments about women in combat roles wanting to roll back how prevalent that's become. Yeah, but he's certainly made some controversial statements that break a lot with our sort of foreign policy establishment. Right. He's moved away from being much more pro-interventionist to being much more anti-interventionist after his experience with being overseas, working with veterans. And I think the anti-interventionist, more anti-war sentiment has grown among the populace, whether it be left, right, center. I think people are much more wary about America's involvement overseas. And we've seen that with a selection like Pete Hegsa.

Well, and you've also saw this, of course, on the other side with former Vice President Dick Cheney coming out in favor of Kamala Harris and, of course, Liz Cheney, his daughter, former Congresswoman Liz Cheney. But I think, yeah, if you could go back in time 20 years ago and say, you know, Dick Cheney, the Republican vice president, he's going to be endorsing the Democrat in 20 years. I think people would have said you were crazy. And that's the situation we're in now. I mean, that's the crazy thing about a realignment like this is it really does change the battle lines, you know. Yeah. And I'll just mention one more thing, talking about this. The Kamala campaign, the people who are running that campaign went and did 90 minutes or two hours i believe on the pod save america if are you familiar with them at all pod save america it's like i've

heard of them yeah they're like the biggest uh left wing uh sort of podcast out there talking about politics and they went they talked about some of the issues that occurred with the Kamala campaign and things they were touching on where you know it was a truncated campaign they didn't have enough time I mean sure it was only about three months time I mean yeah and so there there's some legitimacy to those arguments but um There might have also been some bad decisions made on the campaign trail. True. I also think the Democrats need to reckon with two things.

One, they put up a uniquely unpopular candidate to run for president. One who didn't even make it i believe to iowa in 2020 and then also their entire bench of potential future candidates are going to have to reckon with the fact that cultural um liberalism cultural progressivism on many issues is unpopular broadly unpopular with the voting age population in the United States but surely there's been previous comments that are going to be tough to walk back by these individuals Harris certainly faced that problem with issues like the excuse me the idea that of

course the United States should provide gender reassignment surgery, for example, to illegal aliens in custody who identify as transgender and that the U.S. should be willing to provide those medical services. And that ended up coming back, unfortunately, to bite their campaign. And so whether people on the Democratic side of the political spectrum here are thinking, oh, we have people that can run during the next cycle. Well, right now, cultural progressivism is incredibly unpopular. Many of these candidates, potential candidates, have made comments that are going to be tough to walk back. I predict in 2028, any of the people you see right now in the betting markets is not going to be the person.

Gavin Newsom is probably not the country's not going to elect to California. Even like AOC, like those sorts. I think there's going to be... A lot of, of course, young progressives who are very online are big fans of these people, but there's also some divergence between any kind of online activist and the average voter, I think.

There's a big... There's a wide gap there. So I think what will be interesting to see is if there's just someone that comes out of nowhere to lead the Democrats in four years. Also, this is a very dark horse sort of prediction, is RFK Jr. Wow. Okay. RFK Jr.

Tries to run as a Democrat again. That would be very interesting. I'm not going to lie. That would as a democrat again that would be very interesting i'm not gonna lie that would be very interesting it'd be very interesting if it if but these party politic uh their machines that are incredibly powerful and if they didn't let them in in 2024 are they going to be more receptive to someone like rfk if they're actually trying to win an election possibly i don't see see it but i've seen small hints of a discussion among people online yeah that that could be a possibility well i think also it's worth pointing out you know we're all trying to prognosticate and predict what's going to happen in 2028 before Trump has even been sworn in. Well, that's true. It is fun. But, you know, even though it seems like the more

cultural progressivism, you know, what people on the right to write is wokeness might seem to be receding right now. It also gained a lot of ground, it seems, during the first Trump administration. So it is possible that a second Trump administration could lead to that movement gaining more ground. For all we know, we don't know what's going to happen in four years time. But we could talk about this issue especially forever. But I think we should also, speaking of presidents who have been accused of being threats to democracy, I think we can talk about what happened in South Korea or what didn't happen in South Korea. Yeah, well, why don't you lay out the sort of little bit of timeline that happened here.

All righty. Well, the president of South Korea, I believe it was on, which night was it? It was, I believe it was on, I'm trying to remember here. I think it was Wednesday. It was Wednesday? Or was it Tuesday? It was two days ago? Tuesday. Okay. Whichever one it was, it was on that, I believe it was evening over there, it was in the middle of the day over here.

When this president of South Korea declared martial law, which is a power that the president has, claiming that communist North Koreans were subverting the government in South Korea. Now, I believe here that this president has some decent unpopularity over there right now. But, I mean, you know, it took Twitter by storm. If you were on social media when this happened, you know, you remember seeing people saying, what's happening in South Korea? And the special forces advanced on the South Korean parliament.

I mean, it was just this whole crazy thing. The South Korean opposition leader was filmed, I believe in his car as he's being driven over there and, you know, saying, we're going to vote, we're going to lift this martial law declaration because the parliament can't lift it. And they did. I believe they voted 190 to zero to lift the martial law declaration. I think it was like six hours after it was originally declared. And then, of course, the special forces just went home.

They left. Yeah, it's hard to run a coup when you don't have the military on your side. And they said to the South Korean president, you know, you should resign for this. And he's like, well, I don't know if I should resign. It's a tough thing because South Korea, you know, came out of a dictatorship in the 1980s. And since then, a lot of South Korean presidents have actually been if I believe they've a lot of them have been impeached have been found guilty of crimes after leaving office you know so there's there's been a history of sort of issues with the South Korean executive I think ever

since they emerged from that dictatorship in the 80s so this has been just it was something wild to watch if you were there just watching on, if you were watching it as it was happening. Yeah, well. I mean, you've seen the videos coming out of people, just random South Korean citizens going up and pushing the soldiers aside.

Because you bet that most of those soldiers weren't exactly happy to be thinking that they're about to march on their parliament. Yeah. I don't think anybody died, which is a very good thing to have seen. I don't believe so, but it's just a very interesting happening. And now I think they're planning on impeaching him, but you know, I would think even in the U S if a president had tried to declare Marshall and now the president doesn't have the authority in the constitution

to do that, but you'd think that that would be something worth resigning over. You'd think. But he's like, oh, maybe not. Yeah. His name is, let me see here. The president's name is Yoon Suk-yool. So President Yoon may or may not be, it might have been done to boost his sort of flagging approval numbers or it might have been done for, I mean, you know, maybe there are these communist North Korean subversives that are planning on turning South Korea over to North Korea, but probably not. North Korea seems to have a lot of problems of its own. Of course, they have a lot of people over there in Ukraine right now fighting on behalf of Russia, which is a crazy thing to have seen. And all of the sort of news coming out over there about, I believe a lot of South Koreans like the North Koreans are enjoying like snacks and going on an uncensored internet for the first time and stuff like that. So it's an interesting thing to see. But yeah, no, it's interesting to have this country where martial law is something that has happened in their history and is not like outside the realm of possibility. Whereas obviously

over here, if a president tried to declare martial law across the entire United States, that would be fairly unprecedented. I mean, maybe the closest thing we had was, well, not even maybe, after the Civil War, when the Union occupied the South and split it up into military districts. That was martial law. So I was wrong there originally. But then, of course, you also have turning the entire West Coast of the U.S. into a military district during World War II, which is what allowed for the internment of Japanese Americans during that time because it was officially all one big military district. So, you know, but even those are kind of exceptions.

Right. Well, there is one story I want to move on. So if we have enough time to talk a little bit about the assisted dying bill that has been it was proposed i believe it's passed now um i believe it did yeah yes and um um so i'll bring up my notes here. It's, let's see, this is a dying bill. Passes after vote, paving the way for historic change. Under the terms of the bill, a terminally ill adult with a life expectancy of six months or less could seek assistance to end their life,

provided that two doctors and a high court judge approve their decision. And prior to this bill passing, we saw a number of big figures in UK government speak out against it on either side of the political aisle. We saw Nigel Farage saying he voted against the assisted dying bill, not out of lack of compassion, but because I fear that the law will widen in scope. Then Jeremy Corbyn, he made a comment saying, I've always been in favor of assisted dying if the circumstances are explicitly justified but i simply don't trust this government so two because the labor party does govern the united kingdom right now but it's not jeremy corbyn's labor party that's correct and so um i think what else is interesting is this isn't the first bill of a kind like this to be instituted. One of the larger countries to institute something similar is in Canada.

Their medical assistance in dying maid law has been implemented since 2016. And in 2021, there were over 10,000 made provisions in Canada accounting for 3.3% of all deaths in the country, representing a 32.4% growth compared to 2020. Wow. So 3.3% of all deaths in the country in which year were due to this program program 2021 wow that's that's surprising i would not have expected to be that high that's that's yeah that's very surprising and so i don't know what do you have thoughts on a assisted dying bill whether it be in europe or canada or even here in the united states what do you think um about something like this? It's difficult. Obviously, you have people who believe that, well, it kind of reminds me of the IVF issue, you know, in the sense that there's this, you know, if you're coming from the more conservative side, from a sort of

conservative perspective on bioethics and medicine medicine saying that you must always maximize life, either by refusing to, for example, destroy a fertilized egg, you know, an embryo, or by refusing to euthanize a person, even if that person is clearly on the pathway to death. You know, they're saying it's simply wrong to put that person to death before they sort of die of the disease they have or an infection or whatever it is.

So and then you have the people who argue, well, these people are simply suffering. You know, they say that they are they are not going to recover and that it's simply more humane to put people out of their misery. And, you know, that's obviously a very difficult personal kind of decision to have to make. You know, I mean, I wouldn't envy anybody who was in this position of if you were given the option, you know, to just, you know, pull the plug, not even on somebody in the sense of pull the plug who's on life support, but somebody who is you just you know, is going to pass away imminently. And, you know, you're being given the option to sort of

accelerate that process you know that's a very difficult question to answer i think the more controversial aspect even beyond that issue though is the fear that um in places where with more socialized medicine that the government will will encourage euthanasia for sick people in order to reduce the strain on the health care system. I know this is a criticism that's been made of the Canadian program, that the government will actually, this is the big criticism, you know, big fear about it, that the government is going to, you going to save health care costs essentially by offering euthanasia as opposed to treatment that could actually help

people. This is the big fear. In fact, states all the way back to, I believe, 2008, the election between Obama and McCain where Sarah Palin accused the Obama, she said that the kind of healthcare reform that Obama wanted to implement would result in death panels, where if medicine was socialized, then it would result in doctors just deciding who to let go because they didn't want to treat them.

So this is a fear that's been around for a while. Well, and I understand both sides of the argument that you just presented, and I think both of them have valid points to make. I lean more on the side of Nigel Farage and his argument about the scope. If we have, as we've seen where medical issues being expanded to mental health issues and the definition of mental health issues being expanded to just encompass mild emotional disorders, Someone who could find some reprieve through non, let's say, find reprieve in counseling or therapy. But it could be a potentially debilitating mental issue that they have. But it's something that they could find some conclusion and live a normal life but with a option to end their life they might be in such a severe depression exactly for for example they find two

doctors that support them going through with this that's one of the criticisms that I've seen of this it would allow people with you know for example depression to essentially commit suicide when they could have received treatment. And that's certainly a scary possibility. Yeah, the scope argument for me, especially as we've seen issues surrounding definitions of words, expanding definitions of different categories regarding mental health. So I do see many problems here. I probably would not be supportive of something like this coming to America or the state of Texas.

But that's for us to address if it comes up. Absolutely. But, yeah, I think if we – do you have any final comments before we wrap up here? No, I mean, I just want to say to to everybody who listened, thank you for listening to our discussion. You know, it's it's great to get to take a real deep dive into these topics and discuss their broader implications. And if you, the readers, the sorry, the listeners, the send me some stuff fans have anything that you think would be interesting for us to cover. Send us some stuff. Our emails are available at thetexan.news.

You can also send it to editor at thetexan.news. And maybe we can hit it one day on a future episode of Send Me Some Stuff. Yeah. Thank you for listening, everyone. And we'll catch you next time