5/8/25: Trump Hypes UK Deal, Trump Plans Gaza Occupation, MAHA Civil War, Libya Deportations & MORE!

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, guys, Saga and Crystal here.

Speaker 2 (00:01):
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Speaker 1 (00:25):
We need your help to build the future of independent
news media and we hope to see you at Breakingpoints
dot com.

Speaker 2 (00:34):
Good morning, everybody, Welcome to Breaking Points. Emily, how are
you this morning?

Speaker 3 (00:37):
I'm good, but when the bottom bar comes up, everyone
is going to see why. I'm not amazing. Good, but
not amazing. Yeah, because we missed one critical thing.

Speaker 2 (00:45):
We fumbled the bar the ball here on the A block.
Otherwise it was a full M show in honor of M.

Speaker 4 (00:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (00:54):
I didn't do that on purpose, but I spent all
day yesterday trying to make sure we can have an
M title for every show because at a certain point
it just and I was like well we have to
do this now.

Speaker 5 (01:02):
Yeah, but Chris, I screwed it up because I did
the FED block.

Speaker 4 (01:05):
So sorry, I'm still blaming Jerome Powell.

Speaker 5 (01:07):
It's still his fault.

Speaker 3 (01:09):
He didn't have to speak yesterday. You could have called
it money. It's your fault too.

Speaker 5 (01:13):
And you know what else, you know what else?

Speaker 2 (01:15):
We added a story to the show and it's a
story about Maha.

Speaker 3 (01:18):
Oh my gosh. It's just the level of consistency across
the board. This was meant to be yesterday.

Speaker 5 (01:24):
The stars were aligned.

Speaker 4 (01:25):
Yes, so everyone enjoyed.

Speaker 2 (01:26):
And there's some stuff going on in Maha that we
are only beginning to scrite the surface of. Trump's original
surgeon general pick was pulled after Laura Lumer and others
I guess criticized her. And the new person who he
has picked is Casey Means whose brother CALLI means. The
two of them have become very like prominent on Tucker

(01:47):
and Joe Rogan whatever. I as an outsider, we're like, oh,
the Laura Lumer is probably gonna be happy like Nicole Shanhan.
All these people probably be happy, right right, Yes, No,
they're going after her. So there's Nicole Shanahan is out
being like RFK Junior may have lied to me directly
because he promised me that neither of these siblings would
be involved in the administration. So anyway, we're going to

(02:08):
dig into that one. That's a really interesting one.

Speaker 3 (02:10):
It's so messy and we have to try to get
closer to the truth on this one. There's all kinds
of rumors flying around. Yeah, so we'll bring you all
of that, of course after we do the black that
I'm just going to call money, but Crystal called Fed. Yeah,
Jay Powell spoke yesterday, So lots of updates to talk
about from the Fed and on the economy more generally.

Speaker 2 (02:27):
Yeah, we're supposed to get some sort of a UK
trade deal announcement this morning, so we'll see what that entails.
Whether it's an actual deal, more likely it's like the
outlines of a plan to effectuate a deal down line
something like that. Yeah, it's a plan, it's the what
a concepts of So yeah, that's right. We also have
some very significant news with the arts to the lease.

(02:48):
Trump making some pretty wild comments about the Houthis that
we had to get into the show. But more significantly,
they are the US and Israel are talking about now
a US led administration Gaza, US led administration of Gaza.
They're modeling it on the Iraq US led government.

Speaker 5 (03:07):
As if that's a model I still follow.

Speaker 4 (03:09):
Yeah, wild, nothing but success.

Speaker 5 (03:11):
Wild, So get into that.

Speaker 2 (03:13):
Also, Republicans are making more clear what sort of cuts
to medicaid. David Day and actually got the scoop on
what they're looking at. Specifically with regard to cuts to medicaid,
they are significant. Any one of the options would entail
millions of Americans getting kicked off of that program. So
obviously we're going to dig into the details there. We
have some updates with regard to migrants and where they're

(03:34):
being sent. Mark or Rubio had said, Hey, we're looking
beyond El Salvador. There are other countries that we're going
to try to deport people into, potentially prison systems and
other nations. New York Times had that report that we
talked about yesterday with regard to Hey, it looks like
they're moving forward with Libya.

Speaker 5 (03:49):
This became quite urgent.

Speaker 2 (03:50):
There was a flight that was scheduled, lawyers got involved,
they went to a judge. A judge has now blocked
any migrants from potentially being sent to Libya, but Libya's
toward is like divide it between two different governments. Both
of those governments said, hey, we have nothing to do
with this, We would not accept these migrants. So anyway,
there's a lot that is sort of mysterious and interesting
going on there as well. And then we wanted to

(04:11):
take a look at these several developments with regard to
Trump and his meme coin. First of all, it appears
that it is largely foreigners who are pumping big buck
bucks into Trump's meme coin, raising even graver concerns about
levels of corruption there. There are some legislation that is
moving as well. And then also on the topic of corruption,

(04:32):
apparently one of the things that countries are being pressured
to do in order to get on the US as
good side is to adopt starlink, so and that's being
used in part of the trade negotiations. Jeff Stein's did
a fantastic report over the Washington Post. Finally, however, Emily's
got a big scoop you want to break down, give
us the top line of what you're looking at.

Speaker 3 (04:51):
Yeah, So, Breaking Points obtained a document from inside punch
Bowl News and we have basically we're ready to reveal
their entire business plan because for partnerships in twenty twenty five.
That's the document that we got our hands on and
got some comments from the White House because you may remember,
just a couple of months ago there was a big

(05:12):
controversy over the government getting premium subscriptions to Politico. So
in light of what we have in this document that
Breaking Points got its hands on, we heard back from
the White House about Punchbowl subscriptions. So basically what we're
going to be looking at here is the Chrysliba called
soft corruption. It's just so it's just corruption, plain and simple,

(05:35):
but it's so banal and mundane here that nobody even blinks, yeah,
thinks twice about it.

Speaker 4 (05:41):
But it is so so gross.

Speaker 3 (05:44):
And we have some great excerpts pictures from this document
that we obtained that I think as well worth taking
a look up.

Speaker 2 (05:51):
Yeah, the documents are not indicative of punch Bowl being
particularly unique in terms of the DC ecosystem. They just
simply expose how banal and how commonplace these relationships are,
and you know how much money is at stake as well.

Speaker 4 (06:05):
It really is.

Speaker 2 (06:06):
It's a fascinating look inside the beltwet meeting, specifically the
world of these sort of niche newsletters which are just
printing money because they're not that expensive to put together.
But the whole business model is, hey, if you can
tell advertisers, you know, my my tip sheet is read
by Mike Johnson, my tip sheets read by John Thune,
my chip tip sheets read by Chuck Schumer, then advertisers

(06:28):
will pony up big bucks to get their messages just
in front of those basically handful of people.

Speaker 3 (06:34):
Yeah, in this case, Google gold min Sacks and just
our last teaser here, So you stick around for the block.

Speaker 4 (06:39):
We have the actual price.

Speaker 3 (06:41):
First of all, we have their email open rates, we
have their subscriber numbers, at least the ones that they
send the corporate partners or prospective corporate partners. But then
we also have the pricing levels that they offer newsletter
sponsorships for. And that's what you're really going to want
to stick around for because it will make your eyes
pop out of your skull. So make sure to stay
tuned that block.

Speaker 4 (07:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (07:01):
All right, with all that being said, let's turn to
the economic news. This broke yesterday evening and could put
this up on the screen. So Trump expected to announce
some sort of trade quote unquote agreement with the UK.
Most of the experts are sayings probably isn't going to
be a finalized agreement because it will be more like
a framework including issues that they intend to resolve, but

(07:21):
we don't know the specifics at this point. Trump said
that he is going to make this announcement in the
White House at ten am. He put out a tweet
truth social it was big news conference from orow morning
ten am Oval Office concerning a major trade deal with
representatives of a big and highly respected country, the first
of many, Trump wrote, and this is of course the

(07:41):
first of the many trade deals that they were allegedly negotiating,
ninety deals in ninety days so far. We're now maybe
the outlines of one is what we're looking at. There's
a lots that's interesting about this. Obviously, they've been under
a lot of pressure Emily to be able to show something,
and the world has been pretty resistant to what they
see as you know, US bullying. Even close allies like

(08:03):
Japan have really taken the side of we are not
going to be bullied into some sort of a deal.
You know, much of the world has made some overtures
to China, and the whole idea here was, oh, we're
going to try to isolate and encircled China. That has
not worked out either. The UK is interesting because here Starmer,
the leader there, is really unpopular. You know, he's just

(08:26):
elected Prime minister not that long ago. His approval is
dramatically underwater. People are not happy with him, they're not
happy with the economic situation there. And whereas a lot
of liberals and you know, liberals in Canada, liberals in
Australia have actually really bullyed their standing by opposing Trump,
Starmer has taken the opposite path. He has really made

(08:49):
a lot of overtures to Trump and has been you know,
aggressively courting him and trying to work out the steal,
thinking that if he can blunt some of the impact
of tariffs on the UK, that would benefit his country
and benefit his political standing. So that is the bet
that he has placed in that sort of the context
within which this framework agreement, whatever this is, is being negotiated.

Speaker 3 (09:10):
Yeah, and like you said, we don't know much yet,
but I think your Starmer is in the now Mark
Carney category as well, where they're recognizing that the economic
benefits they can get their own people, because the disadvantages
the costs of this are going to are likely going
to be if they don't handle it diplomatically and in
a way that pleases Donald Trump. Where where they're at
least able to make a deal with Donald Trump, then

(09:33):
the costs of their country are going to be way
greater than the benefits of sort of making a kind
of stand against Donald Trump. And that's not to say
Mark Karney actually managed rather cleverly to do both, to
be really you know, sort of diplomatic to Trump and
to butter them up while also putting his foot down
and saying can it will never be for sale? Starmer,
You've got to carve out for high end British cars

(09:54):
according to political at least so that you know you
had Aston Martin Bentley looking at really disastrous consequences of
the twenty five percent tariffs. So yeah, I think that's
the right bet if you're a cure Starmer, who again
is not particularly popular. But maybe this is a way
for him to turn a new leaf.

Speaker 4 (10:11):
In the UK. I sort of doubt it.

Speaker 3 (10:13):
I don't think he necessarily will be able to do that,
but it's probably better than him doing nothing. Or making
some type of like petulant virtue signal stand while people
end up not getting any benefits.

Speaker 4 (10:24):
To the economy.

Speaker 5 (10:26):
Yeah, we'll see how the politics play out.

Speaker 2 (10:28):
Because Donald Trump's not popular in you know, certainly among
cure Starmer's based in the UK, and as I was
saying before, you know, Mark Carney, the reason he was
able to win was by positioning himself as an oppositional
figure to Trump and someone who would be a steady hand.
When we talked to David Dole about how, you know,
how people saw that him. It wasn't that he was

(10:50):
elected with this you need to aggressively stand out to Trump,
but it was more we feel you're a steady hand
who's going to have our interest and not going to
cowtow to him Starmar. Potentially because of the way that
he has, uh, you know, tried to maintain diplomatic relations
with Trump and gone out of his way to do such,

(11:13):
the UK has avoided some of the criticism that has
been leveled at other European countries. You know, Vance Jade
Vance famously you know, went and was really aggressively chiding
them about their free speech et cetera. And so you know,
they've sort of avoided and certainly they hadn't been subject
to like the fifty first state smears that Canada was
very very upset about and continues to be very upset about.

(11:36):
So I think maybe some of the the fact that
Trump has not rhetorically gone after them is also probably
because of star War's efforts behind the scenes to kind
of butter him up. But on the other hand, they
still were hit with the same ten percent tariffs and
other you know, higher tarfs some things like steel that
the rest of the world was as well, so those
efforts were not really rewarded in real time. We'll see

(11:59):
what comes out, what the specifics are with regard to
this particular deal.

Speaker 3 (12:03):
Trump needs us for the markets too, because everyone's waiting
for deals. It's not just about the one deal. It's
about the one deal showing that there are actual deals coming,
and that is obviously yet to be seen.

Speaker 4 (12:13):
So we will pay attention to that. But Crystal J.

Speaker 3 (12:16):
Powell, speaking of the markets, Jay Powell popped out yesterday
and made his announcement.

Speaker 2 (12:21):
Yeah, that's right, so holding interest rates steady and sounding
some very significant warnings about where he thinks the economy
is and where it is heading.

Speaker 5 (12:29):
Let's take a listen to that.

Speaker 6 (12:30):
If the large increases in tariffs that have been announced
or are sustained, they're likely to generate a rise in inflation,
a slow down in economic growth, and an increase in unemployment.
The effects on inflation could be short lived, reflecting a
one time shift in the price level. Is also possible
that the inflationary effects could instead be more persistent, avoiding

(12:52):
that outcome will depend on the size of the terariff effect.

Speaker 5 (12:55):
Tariff effects, on.

Speaker 6 (12:56):
How long it takes for them to pass through fully
into prices, and ultimately on keeping the longer term inflation
expectations well anchored.

Speaker 2 (13:03):
So you know, Fed chairs, theyre always try to be
very neutral and mild mannered in their comments, but he's
sounding a warning about the tariffs, and the tariff position
has really put the FED in a tough bind because
on the one hand, you see slowing economic growth that's
always saw with the GDP numbers and some other indicators
that would push you in the direction of let's lower

(13:24):
interest rates. However, you also see rising inflation that would
push you in the direction of let's lift interest rates
to try to keep inflation under control. And so That's
why stagflation is so difficult to deal with where you
have low, low or no growth and you have inflation,
because you have to use some tools outside of the

(13:45):
fed's toolkit in order to deal with both of those problems,
because the tools that the FED would use go, you know,
in opposite directions with regards to those two things.

Speaker 5 (13:54):
So he's in a bind.

Speaker 2 (13:55):
So he's basically saying, hey, we're holding where we are
until you know, we until we see what's going on.

Speaker 3 (14:00):
Yeah, I mean, this wasn't surprising at all. It's kind
of exactly what everyone was expecting to see from J.

Speaker 4 (14:04):
Powell, though you never totally know.

Speaker 3 (14:07):
But this muscle is connected to the black we're going
to do un Medicaid because a lot of the economy
right now is going to hinge on Donald Trup's ability
to pass this big tax cut bill, and his ability
to pass that big tax cut bill is going to
depend on his ability to actually make enough cuts without
going into the political weeds of cutting Medicaid in any

(14:28):
way whatsoever, which, as Steeve Bannon will tell him, a
lot of magas are on Medicaid. So uncertainty I think
coming from all of that, as well, because he wants
that tax cut bill to also have industrial policy for reshoring,
and if that doesn't get passed, that's a huge, huge
setback for I mean, they see this as was described
recently as there are two barrels to the gun, and
one of.

Speaker 4 (14:48):
The barrels is the trade war, the tariffs.

Speaker 3 (14:51):
The other barrel is the tax cuts, and if you
can't if you can't have that, that's a big problem.

Speaker 5 (14:56):
Interesting.

Speaker 2 (14:57):
Yeah, that's an important note there for sure, Scott Bessant.
Part of maybe potentially why they're anxious to announce this
UK trade deal is we talked yesterday about how they said, Okay,
we're going to meet with Chinese negotiators with regards to trade,
and we all just happen to be in what Switzerland,
We just happened to be there.

Speaker 5 (15:16):
So we're going to get together with them.

Speaker 2 (15:17):
The Chinese, by the way, are saying the US were
the ones that requested the meeting, which is an interesting
note as well. Scott Bessant thought yesterday really downplaying expectations
for what could come out of these talks.

Speaker 5 (15:27):
Markets really took notice of this as well. Let's take
a listen.

Speaker 7 (15:30):
On Saturday and Sunday, we will agree what we're going
to talk about. My sense is that this will be
about de escalation, not about the big trade deal. But
we've got to de escalate before we can move forward.

Speaker 8 (15:45):
Well, they said that they would not talk unless the
reciprocal trade tariff of one hundred and forty five percent
was removed. Would it be likely that you would be
able to go back to the President and say, to
show good faith, we could drop this down in the
interim to fifty percent.

Speaker 7 (16:04):
Could that be in the cards, Laura, I'm not going
to negotiate. You're on TV, You're one of the most
popular the anchors in the world, So I'm not going
to give away our strategy. And look, everything's on the table.
It's up to the president at the end of the day.
The President has said that he's happy just to give

(16:24):
all countries a number if the negotiations don't go well,
and that's what we're doing with the other seventeen important
training partners is look, you can negotiate good faith that
you can come with your a game or President Trump
is happy to ratchet the number back up to your
April second number.

Speaker 2 (16:45):
So you know, seems like those talks are very preliminary,
long way from any sort of a deal actually being
struck with China, of course, that is the really main
focus in China. Of course, subject to those one hundred
and forty five percent taros effectively.

Speaker 5 (17:00):
Cuts off trade with China.

Speaker 2 (17:01):
No, I'm sure there is going to be some because
the terraffs and other nations are much lower ten percent.
I'm sure there's going to be some of China shipping
to other places that ship here. They call it trans shipping,
they call that. Yeah, and that was already being done
and I'm sure that will only expand to try to
fill the gap of trade that is just being completely
blocked from China. But it's still going to have quite

(17:22):
a significant impact.

Speaker 3 (17:24):
Well, which is why if they're still doing trade deals
with every country that was hit by the reciprocals, that
means they're going to have to do deals with places
like Cambodia, Vietnam and some of those places where things
are being shipped.

Speaker 4 (17:33):
First from China and then into the United States.

Speaker 3 (17:36):
So the level of unpredictability here, I mean, I know
things feel like since what was Liberation Day, April second,
it's been more than a month now, we've sort of
slipped into some sense of normalcy, and it's we're almost
numb to what we're in right now because everything changed
so quickly. But the level of uncertainty in the economy
is hard to even capture with words.

Speaker 4 (17:58):
I mean, it's it's or not on the woods, that's
for sure.

Speaker 2 (18:01):
Yeah, and you know, there have been concerns about looming shortages,
retailers sounding the alarm about that. You know, we played
the director of the LA Port or executive director of
the LA Port, whatever his title is, saying basically, it's
already way down. You know, the shipments are receiving from China.
We expect it to be much worse. I saw indications
yesterday that, you know, there's vastly diminished activity at some

(18:24):
of the major ports in the country. But you know,
the White House is saying basically like yeah, they're just
crying wolf. Everything's fine. There's been no shortages yet. Let's
go ahead and take a listen to Hassett talking about that.

Speaker 9 (18:37):
Well, the scare mondering is happening now. But I can
tell you that I get real time data every day
on whether there are shortages, and I can report that
there are still plenty of things on the shelves. There
were a couple of weeks where shipping from China was lower,
but now shipping from a lot of other countries is
going way, way up. So people don't have to be
worried about what the scare mongderers are saying. These policies

(18:57):
are on shoring jobs, on shoring production. You could see
it in the job s data. You could see it
in the explosion of manufacturing jobs already even before the
tariffs came in. The way to think about it for me, Laura,
is that President Trump did something last time, looked and
saw that it really work, and now he's doing more
of it, a little bit bigger. But that's what you
should do. You should do something, see if it works
or not, and then change. And that's what he's doing.

(19:18):
He's ramping up the ante because he saw that it worked.

Speaker 3 (19:21):
In the past.

Speaker 2 (19:22):
So the question is whether this situation is able to persist.
It's also funny, I mean what he's saying there, Well,
trade with China's downshore, but trade with these other countries
is up. It's because of what we were exactly talking about.
The goods are being shipped from China to these other
countries and then here to get around the extreme tariffs
that are put in place with regard to China, and

(19:42):
we'll see because you know, it takes roughly a month
or more to ship goods from China to our ports.
LA I think is one of the places that goods
can move most quickly too, And we're right in that
timeframe of when we'll see what the impact is.

Speaker 5 (19:59):
Now.

Speaker 2 (19:59):
A lot of companies did stock up in anticipation. That
was part of what played into the GDP numbers in
the first quarter. A lot of companies knew that something
was going to happen, and so they aggressively imported what
they needed to import so that they could have a
sort of backlog and storage to be able to weather
the store. So that will help to buffer especially large
companies that were able to do that and to get ahead.

(20:22):
I think the first place we're going to really see
impact and fallout is among those small and medium businesses
that just do not have the size, scale or cushion
in order to maneuver around these terraffs or in order
to really prepare fully prepare and soften the blow from
the impact.

Speaker 4 (20:38):
Yeah, absolutely, Chris. So also this tear sheet, this Ford
tear sheet. If we put this on the screen. A three.

Speaker 3 (20:47):
This is import because we had that clip yesterday of
Mark Pocan going after Scott Bestn't asking who pays tariffs? Yeah,
and Scott Bestnant was really insistent about not answering that question.

Speaker 4 (20:59):
He was trying all kinds of clever ways to get
around that question.

Speaker 3 (21:02):
The CNN headline is Ford will raise the sticker price
on cars imported from Mexico. It just said it didn't
expect significant US price hikes. There you go, that's evidence
right there to the point Kevin Hassett was just making
let you see something, you try it, you see what happens,
and then maybe you pivot.

Speaker 4 (21:22):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (21:23):
Well, Ford says they're going to hike the sticker price
for three US models that they import from Mexico by
about two thousand dollars each. So I would say that's significant.
That was only days after executives were like, I think
it'll be fine, and they had, you know, I think,
in an attempt to curry favor with Trump, had said
they were going to hold the line with regard to
sticker prices on vehicles, and now here we are a

(21:45):
short time later of them being like, oh, actually we
can't hold the line at least on these three models,
we're going to up.

Speaker 5 (21:49):
The price by two thousand dollars.

Speaker 2 (21:52):
And that is another question too, is we saw this
during the post COVID inflationary period. Is there were genuine
inflation pressures, and they were also companies that were like, oh,
people think there's inflation, I can raise my prices.

Speaker 5 (22:03):
I'm going to raise my prices.

Speaker 2 (22:05):
And by the way, when the put costs for those
companies went down, did they bring the prices back down?

Speaker 5 (22:10):
Of course not, of course not.

Speaker 2 (22:12):
And I actually saw that there's industry jargon for these
types of practices.

Speaker 5 (22:17):
It's called taking price.

Speaker 2 (22:19):
So it's such a common practice that they actually have
like industry jargon for what it means. It makes sense,
of course, if you're a capitalist and you see you
can get away with raising your prices, You're going to
raise your price. So that's how you can also feed
an inflationary spiral, even above and beyond the direct impact
of the terraffs, which is also quite significant.

Speaker 3 (22:37):
Yeah, and you know, this is where it obviously should
factor into the Trump administration's decision making process.

Speaker 4 (22:44):
I think it's unfair to let some of these corporations
off the hook.

Speaker 3 (22:48):
Not that we do, but it's such a small part
of the media conversation here is like they take the
economic procarity that everybody is living in and just squeeze
every little drop out they can, and disproportionately end up
sending that money continually to executives away from workers. They
increase prices for customers, they pay themselves more and more,

(23:08):
they do buybacks, and that's why. Actually, an interesting industrial
policy in the tax bill would have been something like
the millionaire a tax that Trump was talking about to
pay for some of the cuts. That seems like it's
off the table now, but there are all kinds of
other things.

Speaker 4 (23:23):
That you could do.

Speaker 3 (23:24):
It's not really I guess I shouldn't call it industrial possible.
There are all kinds of things that you could do
to make this trade war actually help workers and customers
and pass those costs off in different ways, And there's
not a ton of conversation happening about what could be
done creatively in that big, beautiful reconciliation package Trump is
hotly anticipating. But it seems to me like that would

(23:45):
be a missed opportunity.

Speaker 2 (23:46):
Actually, yeah, there's no doubt about it, And I mean
with regard to the corporations doing what corporations do. I mean,
I obviously we're going to call them out here, but
also you know, it would be like expecting to a
snake not.

Speaker 5 (23:58):
To buy you liked And so that's why you need.

Speaker 2 (24:02):
Government policybers to protect workers, to protect consumers, and to
understand the dynamics and incentives that you're creating and so
what you're likely to have. Also as a situation where
if you are a large player in particular, and your
competitor is suffering more from the terrorists and the import

(24:22):
taxes for whatever they import more from China, etc.

Speaker 5 (24:27):
You have two choices.

Speaker 2 (24:28):
You could hold your prices steady and then you undercut
them and then you steal their business.

Speaker 5 (24:32):
That's going to work out well for you.

Speaker 2 (24:33):
Or you could take price and also up your prices
to match them, knowing that you can get away with
it because they had to increase their prices. So there
are a lot of dynamics here, and we have actually
a lot of David Dan's reporting in the show, but
he's been pointing out the way that this policy also
really benefits the large players, and there's a lot of
reasons for that, and one of them is also just

(24:55):
the fact that if you are Apple, if you are Forward,
if you are Walmart, you are Costco, you can get
those meetings with the Trump administration, you can argue your case,
you can maybe get your car dound, you can get
what you need to be able to survive. And if
you are one of the smaller players, you are not
going to be able to have that opportunity.

Speaker 5 (25:13):
Whatsoever.

Speaker 2 (25:14):
There's one more piece of market news we wanted to
bring you that is kind of unrelated to the terrorists,
but also really significant to put this up on the
screen while I was keeping our eye on what the
impacts of AI are going to be. Wild story yesterday
about the rampant use of chat epute whatever cheating in
college we could have.

Speaker 5 (25:32):
We'll do that conversation another day.

Speaker 2 (25:33):
But in any case, Apple stock price significantly fell after
they are a top executive there said that it is
considering injecting Safari with AI, and the big news here
injecting I know, I'm going to.

Speaker 4 (25:46):
Vaccimate it with a vaccinate in the ai Jab.

Speaker 2 (25:50):
In any case, one of the big notable comments that
was made here is that for the first time ever,
Google searches are going down. These people are using, they're
asking CROC, chat GPT, They're not going to Google, And
I mean I can attest to that it is like
better at Google effectively that.

Speaker 4 (26:11):
When you're using AI, you and Sager obsessed with AI.
With the I feel like Kyle uses a lot too,
but like chat GPT.

Speaker 2 (26:18):
Kyle loves making images with Groc, loves who among us
sends hours over there, just like what if I did this? Yeah,
it's really up to some young thumbnail game.

Speaker 4 (26:30):
I have to say, I mean, what can't Groc do?
But seriously, this story is incredible.

Speaker 3 (26:35):
And Stoller was monitoring Google stock price yesterday and he
had a great post on big his substock, which is
a great subscribe about how basically the markets were saying
this is his headline, Wall Street tells Google to break
itself up because the markets were reacting to this information
as it was being And he had an interesting point too,

(26:57):
which is that as the day went on, you could
see people kind of grappling, investors grappling with what it
meant because it was a stiff plummet at first and
then went up a little bit, but it stayed really low. Huge,
huge problem obviously for Google, and they're about to be
broken up. And it looks like they're about to be
broken up in a couple of different directions. Yeah, so

(27:18):
huge news for like our tech stocks in general. And
it came out as this came out as part of
the testimony in the Google antitrust trial.

Speaker 4 (27:29):
Is that crazy? I mean just.

Speaker 3 (27:33):
This is like the wildest way for Google to have
their stock prices crater, as a stolar put it. And
last though, Crystal, Apple and Ford remind me of something
we covered this about a month ago when the Ford
CEO around Liberation Day did an interview talking about how
they suddenly realized none of their parts for any of

(27:53):
their cars were like made in the United States at all,
Like they had to get from so many different places.
They made assemble them in the United States, but they're
sourced from everywhere. And it would be hard to use
a similar problem with Apple, and these guys now find
themselves in these companies. It might not be his fault,
it might not be Tim Cook's fault, but this we

(28:14):
rely on iPhones and we rely on forward cars.

Speaker 4 (28:17):
At least I do.

Speaker 3 (28:19):
It's like, it's not just I'm not saying that Trump
administration solution has been executed well, because it hasn't been.
But they also hold the economy hostage to their shitty business.

Speaker 4 (28:31):
Models, and it's like the same thing.

Speaker 3 (28:33):
Actually, I think it's the same thing with Google here too,
and we're all held hostage to their complete monopoly that
you know, you see their stock tanking when something obvious
happens and it's like, are they prepared for that?

Speaker 4 (28:45):
What does that mean for Google? I don't know, but
Stolar makes a good point.

Speaker 3 (28:48):
He compares it to Standard Oil, compares Google potentially standard Oil,
which created when it was broken up, all of these
more efficient, broken up companies in its place, And so
this actually might a really positive piece of news, although
it would be quite a transition period for the US
economy and certainly for Google.

Speaker 2 (29:07):
Yeah, I mean with regard to AI, there's there's a
lot to say there. But I feel like if we
had a functioning society, we would have a really aggressive
national debate about how far we want to go with
this and how much we want to limit it. And
I was thinking about I'm old enough so that I
when I first started driving, you could print ount the
map quest oh directions, right, but I still had to

(29:28):
occasionally you screw up the map quest directions.

Speaker 4 (29:31):
It was bad to go to the map. Oh, it
was bad.

Speaker 2 (29:34):
You got to open up the map, You got to
figure out where the hell am I. You got to
stop at the gas station ask the guy like how
do I get to this place?

Speaker 5 (29:39):
At that place? And yeah, it was it was rough.

Speaker 2 (29:42):
I much prefer being able to navigate and to just
have the phone and be like, Okay, you screwed up,
here's another route whatever. But I will tell you I
was a lot better at knowing how to get places.

Speaker 4 (29:52):
Oh, this is a thing.

Speaker 2 (29:54):
Everybody who has had both excret knows. Is the thing
like I have to use GPS to get to places
that I've been, you know a lot of times, Whereas
at that time when you had to actually think and
use your brain and engage, you were able to navigate places.
And I feel like with AI you can kind of
extrapolate that to your entire brain.

Speaker 3 (30:13):
Yes, yes, there's research on this, and Nicholas car started
writing on this when was the Shallows was like twenty eleven.

Speaker 5 (30:19):
That's right.

Speaker 3 (30:19):
Yeah, And actually there's a decent bit of research about
how your brain atrophies in different ways when you start
outsourcing critical parts of it to computers. It's not to
say that we should never allow anyone to touch a calculator.

Speaker 4 (30:32):
Obviously I don't agree with that.

Speaker 3 (30:33):
But there's so much that we're going to lose so
quickly and not even have a baseline. You know, there
are people who don't remember map quests, don't know map
quests that are very much alive, like your kids.

Speaker 4 (30:43):
Probably you have no idea what it is, like, what
what the hell is not what you printed something out?

Speaker 5 (30:48):
Like what he's talking about.

Speaker 3 (30:48):
It just gives me so much PTSD about like coming
late to soccer games because the map quest was hard
to get to the But in all seriousness, like this
is a real problem. But thankfully we have a surgeon
general who will be on top of it.

Speaker 2 (31:02):
Oh yeah, yeah, we thinking all these things through very deeply.
With her lack of a medical license, all right, we'll get.

Speaker 5 (31:08):
To that later. That's a deep teas they're coming to.

Speaker 4 (31:11):
You know what on the road, Biden certain general was
excellent on that. It was really good on this.

Speaker 2 (31:16):
You know what, You're right about that, and you're right
about that. He was very thoughtful. You put out a warning.
He basically said that social media uses should be treated
like tobacco, alcohol, like that kind of seriousness, and we're like, okay, anyway.

Speaker 4 (31:29):
Thanks Ivbolt, kiddo, mail it in for a little while.

Speaker 5 (31:32):
I would be quiet, good luck, You'll be fine.

Speaker 2 (31:36):
All right, Let's go ahead and get to some very
serious topics. But starting with you know, we were talking
yesterday about how Trump has basically taken the Houthis up
on their deal to they to back up for a second. Okay,
Houthis have been doing their their operations in response to
the Israeli genocide in Gasa. During the ceasefire, the brief

(31:57):
Gaza ceasefire, they stopped all that. When the ceasefire ended,
they resumed activities, but just visa v Israel, they were
not bombing or bothering US ships. We started bombing them
aggressively and killing a lot of civilians and signal gate
and all of that sort of stuff they have long said,
And a drop side interview to Ryan and Jeremy's credit

(32:20):
actually interviewed who if you leadership who said, listen, we've
always said, if you don't.

Speaker 5 (32:25):
Bomb us, we won't bomb you.

Speaker 2 (32:26):
So apparently Trump decided to take them up on that
deal and decided to stop bombing them, and in response,
they are not supposed to bomb us either, even as
they continue their hostilities visa the Israel. So Trump gets
asked about this yesterday and has just about the most
Trumpian answer of old time.

Speaker 5 (32:44):
So let's go ahead and take a list of that.

Speaker 10 (32:46):
But so we do we take their word for it.
It was, you know, we hit them very hard. They
had a great capacity to withstand punishment. They took tremendous punishment,
and you know, you could say there's a lot of
bravery there that it was amazing what they took. But
we honor their commitment, and they were they gave us

(33:07):
their word that they wouldn't be shooting ships anymore, and
we honor that.

Speaker 4 (33:11):
We honored the brave, very brave.

Speaker 5 (33:14):
We honor their commitment.

Speaker 2 (33:15):
I mean, it's just like it reminds me of some
of the things that Trump would say in his first term,
Like when he was talking about Putin, He's like, what
you think we're so you think we don't have by killers?

Speaker 5 (33:25):
Yeah, they were so innocent here or yeah, or the
way he would you know, talk.

Speaker 2 (33:30):
About meeting with North Korea or meeting with the Taliban,
Like I feel like we got a little more of
this Trump the first administry. This was a bit of
a throwback, but it's also funny just in the context of,
you know, a bunch of lefties, Hassan in particular, have
gotten a lot of shit for talking about the Houthis
and being like, you know, it's brave what they're doing.
And here you have Trump and being like, they're very brave.

(33:52):
What can I say, I honor their commitment.

Speaker 4 (33:53):
Imagine Barack Obama calling the Houthies brave.

Speaker 3 (33:57):
Imagine how Republicans, thank God, honoring the bravery of the
Hoho thies.

Speaker 5 (34:03):
You can't, you just can't.

Speaker 2 (34:04):
Cannot only Trump, only Trump, We would still be talking
about the scandal of it to this day. I'm not
even kidding it is.

Speaker 4 (34:14):
It's kind of a crazy thing to say.

Speaker 3 (34:16):
But sorry, Hassan, but like, it is kind of crazy
from the president who's in charge of the United States
foreign policy.

Speaker 4 (34:23):
And yet and yet here we are.

Speaker 3 (34:26):
So but I guess a little bit of good news
on that front too, and cannot be divorced from the
broader context of the administration heading to Oman this weekend
for negotiations on the Iran nuclear deal.

Speaker 4 (34:38):
We have some updates on that front as well. Yeah,
we do.

Speaker 2 (34:41):
But before we get to that, I want to talk
about this report from Reuters, which is deeply troubling and
really significant. Let's put this up on the screen so
they were able to get this exclusive report that the
US and Israel are discussing a possible US led administration Gaza.
Let me repeat that, a US led indefinite administration occupation,

(35:07):
you could say, of Gaza. Let me read you a
little bit of this report, because just the utter insanity
of this I cannot possibly be overstated. The US and
History have discussed the possibility of Washington leading a temporary
postwar administration of Gaza. According five people familiar with the matter,
the high level consultations have centered around a transitional government

(35:30):
headed by a US official that would oversee Gaza until
it had been demilitarized and stabilized and a viable Palestinian
administration had emerged.

Speaker 5 (35:38):
I'm sure that'll be easy, no problems there.

Speaker 2 (35:40):
According to the discussions, which remain preliminary, there'd be no
fixed timeline for how long such a US led administration
would last, so we're talking about literally good last forever,
which would depend on the situation. On the grounds of
hive sources said. Those sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity,
compared the proposal to the Coalition Provisional Authority in that

(36:01):
Washington established in two thousand and three, shortly after the
US led.

Speaker 5 (36:05):
Invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein Emily. How did that go?
Can we check back in on that? How? How did
that work out for us? A great idea? Did we
execute it well? Did it? You know, foment tons of
terrorism and horror for years to come.

Speaker 4 (36:19):
I think we were able to successfully win the love
and affection of the people and establish.

Speaker 5 (36:25):
A demonstians accomplished is what I heard.

Speaker 3 (36:27):
What we did was spread democracy, and democracy is contagious,
as you know.

Speaker 4 (36:31):
Oh yeah, oh yeah, especially in the Middle East.

Speaker 2 (36:33):
I just.

Speaker 5 (36:35):
These words, they.

Speaker 2 (36:36):
Truly, I mean, a few things are shocking to me
with Trump at this point, but he ran in opposition
to the Iraq War.

Speaker 5 (36:43):
This was one of his.

Speaker 2 (36:44):
Campaign innovations, calling Jeff I mean, we all loved watching
him call out Jeb Bush to his face on stage
or his brother going into Iraq, And that was one
of the ways he really did separate himself from the
pack and really did seem to represent some sort of
a break from the traditional Republican establishment, and now here
you are talking about perhaps the most disputed land on

(37:08):
the entire planet, and we are going to administer it indefinitely.
And the model is the coalition provisional authority in a rock.
I mean, the human horror of it, the stupidity of it,
the insanity of it.

Speaker 5 (37:24):
I just I literally cannot get over it.

Speaker 3 (37:26):
And of course we fund one side of the dispute
in that conflicted territory to the tune of billions of
dollars a year. So trying to pitch that to the
Palestinian people, you're already.

Speaker 4 (37:38):
Going to be I mean, like, well, what are you
talking about?

Speaker 3 (37:41):
This is just basically the same thing as giving Israel
the land percent And I can't tell if this Reuter
story is a leak from people who think it's a
really good idea or people who think it's a really
bad idea.

Speaker 4 (37:52):
I couldn't tell genuinely in the.

Speaker 3 (37:53):
Story if this is a trial balloon to try to
acclimate people to this idea, or it is to try
to blow the whistle and say someone needs to stop this.
My instinct is that this is people saying this is
a really great idea, let's slowly try to acclimate the
media and the public to This is a quote from
the article. The quote, high level consultations have centered around

(38:14):
a transitional government. As you read, how did buy a
US official that would oversee Gaza until it had been
demilitarized and stabilized and a viable Palestinian administration had emerged.
So just zeroing in on that, we have no idea
what a timeline would look like in that case, until
a viable Palestinian administration had emerged.

Speaker 4 (38:29):
The word viable is incredibly vague. That could mean a
million different things, and it could mean a million years
for as long as for as far as we're concerned,
because viable is going to be in the eyes of
the US beholder and Israeli beholder in this case. And
it's very hard to believe that Benjamin Netanyah, who's coalition
won't always be in power, but believes you know, he

(38:51):
was totally at odds with Joe Biden about the question
of a two state solution, doesn't believe in a two
state solution. So what does viable mean?

Speaker 2 (38:58):
That's right, How did our viable government in Afghanistan workout?
How did that one go as well. I mean, I
just I had the same question about who was leaking
this and why? And then the other question I have
is Trump te's this big Middle East announcement?

Speaker 5 (39:13):
Is this it?

Speaker 4 (39:15):
I think?

Speaker 2 (39:15):
So?

Speaker 4 (39:16):
I think that's I think that's exactly what it is.

Speaker 2 (39:18):
You do, Yeah, I mean, I don't even know what
to say. I don't even know what to say. But
it's consistent with what he's been saying all along about
we're going to we are going to own Gaza.

Speaker 4 (39:30):
So this is this is the roadmap to the Gaza Rouvierra. Basically, Yeah,
that's right.

Speaker 2 (39:35):
And you know, again, I think you have to take
him seriously. I think he got this idea in his
head and his eyes lit up at the idea of
like the beachfront property or whatever. And now here we
are planning some indefinite, endless occupation of Gaza.

Speaker 5 (39:52):
It's just it's just an absolute horror.

Speaker 2 (39:54):
And at the same time, the israelis now the mask
is totally off.

Speaker 11 (39:58):
You know.

Speaker 2 (39:58):
In the beginning days, Emily, I'm sure remember we had
all these conversations about like, well, what's the day after
the war.

Speaker 5 (40:03):
And what's the plan.

Speaker 2 (40:04):
And of course Phoebe would never say you know, he
would always oh, well, it's just we're just focused on
the hostages.

Speaker 5 (40:09):
Also, by the way, update on that in a moment.

Speaker 2 (40:12):
Stay tuned for how much they care about the hostages
and what a priority that is for them in this
new expanded Gaza operation that they just authorize. In any case,
they have now made it plain the goal is we
want to we want to permanently occupy Gaza, we want
to flatten Gaza. You and Ryan covered this earlier this week,
and some Democrats are starting to be a little bit

(40:34):
more vocal. Senator Chris van Holland, who have to say,
has been compared to other Democrats. He actually had traveled
to the region previously under the Biden administration and was
blowing the whistle right, was blowing the whistle on the
you know, all of the ways that they were blocking
aid and how insufficient the aid was at least some
aid was getting in at that point, but how insufficient
it was, and that it was the Israeli's fault that

(40:57):
more aid wasn't getting into the strip.

Speaker 5 (40:59):
So he has been a vocal critic here for a while.

Speaker 2 (41:02):
He's now going one step further and saying that the
Israeli plan is brazen ethnic cleansing.

Speaker 5 (41:08):
Let's go ahead and take a listen to that.

Speaker 11 (41:09):
I want to talk about the humanitarian disaster in Gaza.
It's now been well over sixty days since the net
Yahoo government imposed a total blockade of humanitarian assistance to
the people of Gaza, not allowing any food or any
other humanitarian assistance to reach the over two million civilians there.

(41:33):
With holding food and humanitarian assistance as a weapon of
war is flat out illegal under international law. It is
collective punishment, pure and simple. And now we're told that
the net Yahoo government plans to seize and reoccupy huge

(41:58):
parts of Gaza. And recently Ben Gavier, one of the
most ultra extreme members of the extremist net Yahoo government,
was in Washington calling for the implementation of the Donald
Trump plan to essentially force two million Palestinian civilians to

(42:20):
leave Gosa. That is simply ethnic cleansing by another name.

Speaker 2 (42:25):
And Ben Gavier, of course, very influential in this administration,
and you know, very much in line with what many
members of the net Yahoo government and frankly much of
the Israeli public also won at this point. And you know,
we are more than two months since any food, water,
medicine has been allowed to enter the strip more than
two months, and you've got roughly two million people there.

(42:48):
We really don't know how many people there are are
still alive at this point. President Trump had suggested the
number was lower at this point. But in any case,
you have millions of people there, and they will all
die if food does not come in. We already have
dozens who have died of starvation. You know, children in
particular suffering gravely from malnutrition. And that's that's where we

(43:09):
are at this state.

Speaker 3 (43:10):
Let's put the next element up on screen. This is
a tweet from drop site, which looked at times of
Israel report from yesterday May seventh, and crystal this just
makes your stomach sink. The headline here is leaked Israeli
document rescuing captives ranked last in Gaza war goals. A
leaked military is really military document shows that rescuing captives

(43:33):
in Gaza is listed last amongst six official objectives for
a planned ground offensive in Gaza.

Speaker 4 (43:38):
And let's just go through these six.

Speaker 3 (43:40):
Because if you're reading these as steps, and I think
that's a correct way to read them, by the time
you get to six, it just again it makes your
stomach sink. One defeating Hamas, two achieving operational control over Gaza,
three demilitarizing the territory, four striking Hamas government targets. Five
concentrating and relowating the population. Six rescuing the captives. And

(44:04):
Netna who is already facing regular protests from the hostage
families because many of them want him to make a
deal to rescue any living hostages, obviously, and to return
the bodies of any deceased hostages. But this has always
been the fundamental early criticism I mean, going back to
middle late October of the net Nyahu administration from hostage families,

(44:29):
not all of them, but some of them who felt
that actually rescuing the hostages was taking secondary, taking a backseat,
basically to this broader goal of taking over goss of obliterate.
I mean to put it in the words oft Yahu,
obliterating hamas, eliminating hamas. But in the process of eliminating hamas,

(44:50):
do you eliminate the lives of hostages? In some cases
we know that is likely what happened.

Speaker 4 (44:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (44:56):
And secondly, I mean, because this tweet says, despite repeated
public claims by Israeli leaders that freeing them is the
war's top priority.

Speaker 4 (45:04):
But you know what, there's been mixed messages on that.

Speaker 3 (45:06):
They've kind of tried to have it both ways, saying
that the hostages are their priority, but also that the
top aim of the wars to eliminate Hamas, and those
goals are not necessarily categorically compatible.

Speaker 2 (45:18):
That's exactly right, and that is what many hostage families
and many Israelis recognize, and that really has been the
focal point from what I can tell of a lot
of the protests. You know, if you ask Israeli Is
according to the polls, it has the war been too
brutal on Palestinians. The number that say that is like
four percent. I mean, it's shockingly low. But there's been

(45:38):
a lot of descent around the issue of what the
impact is on the hostages of this all out assault,
genocidal assault on Gaza. And it has long been clear
that BB and Co. Did not care about the hostages.
They were happy to use them for propaganda value, and
they aggressively. I mean, you remember in the early stages

(45:59):
that the pictures of the hostages were everywhere, and if
you weren't fully behind the Israeli war effort. Well, you
don't care about the hostages and you just want them
to die. And for a long time from the beginning,
what hostage families and others have been saying is, yeah,
but you don't know where our family members are. So

(46:20):
if you are bombing starving this population, our family members
are there too. So if you actually want to prioritize
the hostages, what you would prioritize is remember there was
that brief deal early in the war that there was
a brief cease fire and there was an exchange of
hostages from both the Israeli and the Palestinian side. That's
when most of the hostages who were released were released during.

Speaker 5 (46:42):
That time period.

Speaker 2 (46:44):
That is how you actually get the hostages back is
through diplomatic negotiations and a ceasefire. Hamasas said from the beginning,
we'll do an all for all exchange. You release all
of the Palestinian hostages prisoners that you're holding, we will
release all of the israel High hostages that we are
holding as well. So it has always been clear, and

(47:04):
the military effort to rescue any of the hostages have
been I think there was one that was successful and
it also included mass civilian death and a lot of
chaos and cartage as a result of that operation to
rescue hostages. So it's always been very clear if you
actually want to secure hostages, then you need to negotiate.
The diplomatic resolution is the way that you're going to

(47:27):
save hostage lives. And we were told that, you know,
the no, no, no, the hostages are the number one priority.
And now again, as I said before, the mask is
coming off of Israel, they no longer feel the need
to lie and pretend like hostage lives are the number
one priority. And you know, this leak document just confirms
actually it's the last on the list of war aims,

(47:50):
the least important war aim is to secure the release
of the hostages at this point, well, and it.

Speaker 3 (47:56):
Was always for the sake of this goal that again
was unattainable without complete and utter civilian destruction, because we knew,
I mean, we could tell in the early stages of
the war that Hamas was not going to be defeated
without that that they were already reconstituting within what would
like six months was about six months, they were already

(48:17):
reconstituting control and like government authority in particular areas of Gaza,
like in Rafa. So it was all I think if
I were, you know, a hostage family, that is what
would weigh most heavily on me, is that they're not like,
what is the end here? I don't think anybody ever
really knew, because well, I mean, the end for many people,

(48:39):
let's say, was just this goal of quote unquote eliminitating Hamas.
But what that would actually look like, when that would end,
if it was attainable.

Speaker 4 (48:47):
Those were the questions.

Speaker 3 (48:48):
I think that we were haunting a lot of the
families of the hostages.

Speaker 2 (48:52):
All right, let's go and get to this update with
regard to run negotiations. Jd Vance. This was in Munich yesterday.
Correct that he was speaking, getting asked about it, returned,
he returned to un By the way, the tone the
time much so.

Speaker 4 (49:07):
Different, much softer. Yeah, it's interesting.

Speaker 5 (49:10):
Little chastened was kind of yeah, what did you make
of that?

Speaker 3 (49:12):
Well, yeah, it was interesting because he started off by acknowledging,
you know, the elephant in the room and breaking the ice,
cutting through any tension, and so I wasn't sure if
I was going to be invited back, and his tone
overall it was a conversation or not a speech, So
I think that helped it. The tone be more a
little bit more that's the right word, maybe chastened or

(49:33):
just like buttoned down.

Speaker 2 (49:35):
It was a bit more relaydance that was on stage
with Tim Walls. Yes, it was very much like a
very nice, moderate dude, like, you know, we're trying to
get along here, whereas the first speech was very aggressive.

Speaker 4 (49:47):
Yes, it was very prickly and abrasive.

Speaker 3 (49:50):
And this was him I think, realizing that you can
catch more flies with honey.

Speaker 2 (49:56):
And I think also the trade war has changed the dynamics.
We're also they feel like they need Europe to side
with the US against China, and so there's there have
been some shifts there.

Speaker 4 (50:06):
In any case, he.

Speaker 3 (50:07):
Did have a really good quote where he said, basically
like the point is not US versus Europe, and I
don't want things to seem that way though you can
understand why the Europeans, by the way, interpreted that earlier
Munich speech as in US versus Europe. But he's saying
that's not the point. The point is that we actually
need each other. It was a much it was actually
I think a much more mature version of the argument,

(50:27):
and obviously he's had a couple of months to get
feedback and hear from people about how that first argument landed.

Speaker 2 (50:34):
Don't forget too that the signal Gate chats that leak
down where Jade Vance is trying to make the case
against the strikes in Yemen by being like, oh, we're
just bailing out those chromy Europeans again, and Hegseath I
think was the one that chimed in, right, Yeah, who
was like, yeah, we you know, we can't stand them.
I mean there was a lot of euro bashing going

(50:56):
on in that chat. Yeah, and they read those as well,
so I'm sure they were were also not super happy
about the contents that messages.

Speaker 3 (51:03):
Super quickly I pulled up the quotes because I think
it gives a good flavor of his tone. Yesterday he said, quote,
I wasn't sure if after February I'd get the invitation back.
Everything that I said there applied as much to the
previous American administration as it did in any government as
it did any government in Europe. So he was saying
sort of humbling himself and saying, well, not himself, but
humbling his country and saying the Biden administration was just

(51:26):
as bad as I.

Speaker 4 (51:26):
Think you guys are. It's like Biden's a Armer's same thing.

Speaker 2 (51:29):
Biden administration wasn't kidnapping students off the street for writing
up its.

Speaker 5 (51:32):
But then that part always goes on set.

Speaker 2 (51:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (51:35):
Then he then he goes on to say it's not
Europe bad, America good.

Speaker 3 (51:39):
Both Europe and the US. We got a little off track.
So that's a night and day Tonal difference. But he
was in conversation this.

Speaker 4 (51:47):
Time, so I guess it's not like a scripted speech attack.
He was talking to some guy up on stage.

Speaker 5 (51:54):
Gotcha, Okay.

Speaker 2 (51:55):
So in part of that talking to some guy up
on stage, he gets asked about the status of the
Iran nuclear negotiations.

Speaker 5 (52:01):
Interesting comments here. Let's take a lism.

Speaker 12 (52:03):
So there are a couple issues with the earlier agreement,
the jcpoas as it's called here in the United States
and I assume in Europe. But here here are the
two big issues with that agreement are. Number one, the
enforcement or the inspections regime was incredibly weak, and I
don't think that it actually served the function of preventing

(52:24):
the Iranians from getting on the pathway to a nuclear weapon.
That's one thing that must be different. And then second, yes,
we believe that there were some elements of their nuclear
program that were preserved under JCPOA that yes, they weren't
nuclear weapons. Iran doesn't have a nuclear weapon, but allowed
Iran to sort of stay on this glide path towards
a nuclear weapon if they flipped the switch and press go.

(52:46):
And we have to think about this not just in
terms of Iran, which again the President has said this.
We think that there is a deal here that would
reintegrate Iran into the global economy, that would be really
good for the Iranian people, but would result in the
complete cessation of any chance that they can get a
nuclear weapon.

Speaker 5 (53:03):
And that's what we're negotiating towards. So what did you
think of his comments there? Emi language? What was now worthy?

Speaker 3 (53:09):
Yeah, I mean really interesting because they need the buy
in of Senate Republicans who have been hearing these leaks
the broad contours of a potential Trump are on negotiation
and saying that sounds exactly like the JCPOA.

Speaker 4 (53:21):
The Foundation for Defensive Democracy is very hawkish on this.

Speaker 3 (53:25):
Some of their folks have been making that criticism and
I think the Trump administration knows that they need the
buy in of a significant part of the Republican coalition,
and they're not going to get that for the JCPOA,
even if it's Donald Trump. You know, you saw we
didn't talk about this yesterday, but Tom tellis under Tom
tellis coming out against Trump's DC attorney pick Ed Martin

(53:47):
and tariffs had Rand Paul, for example, bringing together this
byport partisan coalition to try and get a vote to
take back at least symbolically Congress's power over trade. So
I think think they realized that on the highest priority issues,
and I cannot think of a higher priority issue for
the Hawks in the Republican Party, the like remaining neo

(54:11):
conservatives a Tom Cotton, a Lindsay Graham, whenever it is.
You cannot just copy and paste JCPOA, even if you're
Donald Trump, which is one of the reasons actually people
ended up getting on the Trump bandwagon back in twenty
fifteen and twenty sixteen because he was such an opponent
of JCPOA. So I think what Jade Vance was doing
yesterday was making a substantive and fair criticism of jcpoa's oversight.

(54:36):
The oversight let's say regime that was in JCPOA like
you have to be able to verify what Iran is
actually doing. Otherwise the whole thing kind of falls apart
and it's kind of useless. So I think it's it's
a reasonable criticism.

Speaker 4 (54:49):
I also think it was a way to distance the Trump.

Speaker 5 (54:53):
Plan, say this is this is totally like, this is
way better than that, So it's not as well.

Speaker 3 (55:01):
It's not impossible that they land on especially if we're
grading on the curve of like conservative Republican Party lawmakers,
it's not impossible that they land on a solution here
that is much better than your typical Republican or maybe
even your typical Democrat would have negotiated.

Speaker 4 (55:16):
But that's obviously it mays to be seen. They're negotiating
in Oman.

Speaker 3 (55:19):
It's the weird thing of the Trump eras that because
of the oddities and the coalition, and because of Trump's
very eccentric, to say the least, approach to these negotiations,
they sometimes end up in good places.

Speaker 2 (55:32):
We'll see, yeah, we'll say fingers crossed that they just
you know, get back into something approximating Jacboa, but are
able to put some rhetorical flourish on that keeps most
Republicans on board, because I do think that that is
a genuine risk, given the fact, you know what we're
about to transition to block on the Medicaid cuts, the

(55:52):
block on what's going on with MAHA. There are cracks
that are starting to emerge. And as this administration gets
more popular across a broader range of issues, as the
economic numbers get more uncertain, it just gives you a
lot less room to navigate. And also as the mitrop's
getting closer, and many of these, you know, the members

(56:13):
who are up are looking at their reelection bids and
getting very nervous. And then of course there are such
hawkish organized forces in Washington that the vast majority of
the Republican caucus has been you know, has been aligned with,
so it will be difficult for them to persuade their

(56:34):
own caucus that this is a deal worth negotiating.

Speaker 5 (56:37):
We shouldn't just go to war with Iron, which of
course would be an utter disaster.

Speaker 4 (56:41):
They have been flipping out over it.

Speaker 3 (56:43):
As soon as it became likely or possible that Trump
was going to pursue a broad plan or a plan
that broadly resembled JCPOA in some way or another meaning
allowing for some enrichment for at least civilian purposes in
the agreement.

Speaker 4 (57:00):
Yeah, quote unquote civilian purposes.

Speaker 3 (57:02):
And that's it's not that they don't have a point,
that that's something that people should absolutely be concerned about.

Speaker 4 (57:08):
But is it realistic.

Speaker 3 (57:11):
No, in all likelihood, it's not realistic to start, let's say,
thawing these tensions or cooling these tensions without coming to
some sort of agreement that has in an agreement, you
have to like give and take a little bit, and
you end up with no agreement whatsoever.

Speaker 2 (57:30):
And the administration has been all over the map with
regard to enrichment. Jd Vance there seemed to say no Enrichmond.
Others have said no enrichment. Tonal Trump got asked about
it and he said he's not sure, so which is good.

Speaker 4 (57:41):
I'm glad.

Speaker 5 (57:41):
I'm glad he said that.

Speaker 4 (57:42):
I think whit CoP's gone back and forth as well.

Speaker 2 (57:44):
Yeah, I think I think that's right too, And I'm
not I don't remember if it was in clip we
played there or not that jd Vance made a comment
during their saying like that no country has ever had
civilian enrichment and not ended up with a nuclear weapon,
and that.

Speaker 5 (57:56):
Is just not true at all.

Speaker 2 (57:58):
Japan, Brazil, Germany, Lens are among countries that enrich uranium
and haven't pursued nuclear weapons. So not that part was
not particularly encouraging. But we'll see where it all goes.

Speaker 4 (58:07):
Hey, that's a rare glimmer of optimism. I suppose the best.

Speaker 5 (58:12):
You're going to get for me, Crystal. All right, let's
go ahead and move.

Speaker 2 (58:19):
Speaking of not having glimmers of optimism, let's move to
the quite drastic Medicaid cuts that appear to be part
of the big, beautiful bill that Republicans are in the
process of negotiating.

Speaker 5 (58:31):
David dan Over at the American.

Speaker 2 (58:33):
Prospect getting the scoop here on the specifics of the
Medicaid cuts that the Republican Caucus is planning on making.

Speaker 5 (58:39):
Let's put this up on.

Speaker 2 (58:40):
The screen, and guys, I'm just saying, I'm going to
take my time.

Speaker 5 (58:43):
To go through a little bit of this because this
is so important.

Speaker 2 (58:45):
So he says, I've obtained a list of the Medicaid
cuts in the Republican reconciliation package. The big one is
that they're going to raise premiums and copays on beneficiaries
at or above the federal poverty line. That is what
helps pay for the tax cuts, and that's what he
has here in this text. He says the most potentially

(59:06):
explosive item on the menu is cost sharing above one
hundred percent of FPL. That's a federal poverty line. That
appears to mean that Medicaid recipients making ad or above
the federal poverty line, which is fifteen thousand and six
fifty for a single individual and twenty one thousand and
one to fifty very low amounts here for a two
person household would have to pay some money for coverage,
either in premiums, copays, or hospital visits and other treatment

(59:29):
or other fees. Currently, Medicaid gives states the option to
impose out a pocket spending on recipients, so some populations
and services like children under eighteen or pregnancy care are exempted.
Some premiums and enrollment fees are limited to beneficiaries above
one hundred and fifty percent of the poverty line. This
policy would take that number lower. Making poor people pay
more for healthcare is exactly the kind of cut effective

(59:51):
cut to Medicaid that moderate Republicans have sworn they would
not abide while reducing the federal share of o Bombcare's
Medicaid expansion, which provides federal funding to extend Medicaid to
adults under age sixty five up to one hundred thirty
eight percent of the poverty level in forty states.

Speaker 5 (01:00:04):
In DC, is not part of the menu.

Speaker 4 (01:00:06):
This is a.

Speaker 2 (01:00:07):
Backdoor way of achieving something like that reduction on the
backs of individuals who get Medicaid.

Speaker 5 (01:00:14):
There are other provisions in here as well. There are
some changes to.

Speaker 2 (01:00:18):
The Affordable Care Act that would also increase premiums and
raise out of pocket costs for people who enroll through
the ACA market places, so that is significant. There's some
changes here in terms of work requirements. That also you
know what has been found previously with the Medicaid work requirements,
in particular recording the Kaiser Family Foundation. This is also

(01:00:40):
in Dane's reporting, is that sixty one percent of US
adults on Medicaid already work. Large fraction of those who
don't are either disabled or elderly. The requirement would primarily
add red tape to the enrollment system. Push people out
of Medicaid using bureaucracies is very common tactic, and states
like Arkansas have already experimented with this and found that

(01:01:00):
exact situation. It was expensive to implement and ultimately did
not improve efficiency or anything.

Speaker 5 (01:01:07):
The goals you might imagine with that.

Speaker 2 (01:01:08):
Instead, it just pushed people out of the program because
they couldn't go through all of the bureaucratic red tape
in order to get in. So bottom line here is
that they are planning on making Medicaid more expensive, raising premiums,
making people who are somewhat above the federal poverty line
pay in, and doing some other tweaks around the edges,

(01:01:29):
including these work requirements, in order to reduce the cost
of Medicaid. So quite significant, and we could put this
next piece up on the screen just to get a
broader sense of some of the different options that they
had floated. This isn't specifically looking at the day of
the day and report of what they've sort of landed on,
but it lists all of these different options that had

(01:01:49):
been suggested had been proposed. One of them is reducing
the expansion of the population matching rate. Another one is
limiting state taxes on healthcare providers, capping spending per enrollies,
repealing eligiblibility, and enrollment final rate.

Speaker 5 (01:02:05):
Any one of these options.

Speaker 2 (01:02:07):
They find would yes reduce the federal deficits somewhat, and
also would reduce Medicaid coverage by millions of people. Anywhere
from eight point six million people to two point three
million people would be cut off from Medicaid and you
would have a significant increase in all instances in uninsured people.

Speaker 5 (01:02:28):
So that is where we are and what we're looking at.

Speaker 3 (01:02:31):
This is a trip war for Republicans who want to
need to, by their own strategic intentions, pass a tax
cut bill in order to we could disagree with their
argument here, but in order to supplement the terif regime
and the trade war.

Speaker 4 (01:02:48):
They don't believe.

Speaker 3 (01:02:48):
I mean, they've said this over and over again that
they need a tax bill to have their intended effects
in the trade war. And you know, you could go
and look at that and say, well, then maybe you
should have done the tax bill first, and if you
got it passed, then done all of these tariffs at
the at the sort of wild levels, unexpected levels that
a lot of you know, even the administration sort of

(01:03:09):
admits were very radical because they ended up walking them back.
And Trump said the bond market it was getting a
little yippy. So it's it's by their own admission that
some of this was a little wild. So maybe wait
till after you get the tax cut bill passed, because
now Republicans need to offset the tax cuts with significant
spending cuts. They believed that Doge was going to find

(01:03:30):
Elon Musk first said two trillion dollars in savings. He
then said one trillion dollars in savings. Now we don't
even know if it'll be two hundred billion dollars.

Speaker 2 (01:03:38):
They did spend saving, probably spent more money than they say,
I'm not kidding, not genuinely.

Speaker 4 (01:03:43):
Not out of the question. Yeah, it's they've they have
not come anywhere near what Republicans expected Doche to do.

Speaker 2 (01:03:48):
Like they actually thought they were going to cut with
trillion dollars or some absolutely they really thought that.

Speaker 3 (01:03:54):
I don't think anyone thought two trillion was possible, but
I think, I mean, the federal budget is a while thing,
and I think even like some Democrats will yeah, you
could probably do that, but the way they went about
doing it, it's kind of exactly what you would expect
when you let oligarch run wild in the federal government
with a bunch of like no fighting twenty year olds, right,
because it's the same argument that people made against drowing

(01:04:16):
Pete Haigsteth at the Pentagon and we talked about this
with Mark Lucas, like maybe you need somebody.

Speaker 4 (01:04:22):
You have to find the rare person who knows the
bureaucracy in order to take on the bureaucracy.

Speaker 3 (01:04:26):
Otherwise you end up not being efficient at all because
you don't even know where to look, you don't even
know what to do. And that's sort of been an interesting,
like ez Recline argument against DOGE is that it's not
efficient to just come in and make cuts. Some of
these cuts end up being inefficient, and then you end
up maybe spending more money than you even cut. But
the bottom line is congressional Republicans now have to come

(01:04:49):
up with a budget that allows them to do these
tax cuts because they're also full of deficit hawks. They
now have populists because some of these Republicans represent working class,
heavily working class districts with a lot of people on Medicaid.
And Trump has said we could roll the tape back
from I think it was February nineteenth. He's sitting next
to Elon Musk in an interview with Sean Hannity and

(01:05:10):
says Medicare, Medicaid, none of that stuff will be touched.

Speaker 4 (01:05:13):
Then he goes on to say maybe for non citizens,
that sort of thing.

Speaker 3 (01:05:17):
And so he was assuring the US citizen American tax pair,
your Medicaid, your Medicare is going to be safe. The
only things we might make are tweaking around the edges
to affect non citizens or fraud. So they might be
able to make the argument that work requirements are going

(01:05:37):
against fraud whatever.

Speaker 4 (01:05:39):
I mean.

Speaker 3 (01:05:40):
Medicaid spending is about nine percent of the federal budget
as of at least twenty twenty two.

Speaker 4 (01:05:44):
I mean, is a huge amount of money.

Speaker 3 (01:05:46):
So it's irresistible for devis at hawk Republicans to want
to cut Medicaid. But if you cut Medicaid, you infuriate
a lot of people who put their rightfully or wrongfully,
their trust in the Trump Republican Party and Trump in particular.
How do they get to the tax cut bill with
enough votes even to pass the House. The slim margins

(01:06:06):
that they have genuinely a mystery at this point.

Speaker 2 (01:06:11):
Well, and most of the tax cut bill is just
to give away to the rich. I mean it's you
are literally cutting health insurance for poor people to pay
for a tax cut for the rich. That's what you're doing.
And there was even some acknowledgment. Remember there's some leaked
Republicans to Axios. I think saying like that's going to
be a tough one for us to be fige on yep,
because that's it's so politically toxic that it is hard

(01:06:34):
to imagine doing something more unpopular.

Speaker 4 (01:06:36):
We have the C three. This is Don Bacon.

Speaker 2 (01:06:38):
Yeah, and put Don Bacon up on the screen. Don
Bacon is in this. He's Nebraska right in this swing district.
Has not actually announced whether he's running for reelection. Again,
I don't think there's any way wins. I just you know,
I don't think it runs the way that this year
is shaping up. This is one of the districts actually
Bernie Sanders went to as well, recognizing and very smartly
recognizing that him and others in similar positions would be

(01:07:01):
a vulnerability on trying to cut medicaid. In any case,
Don Bacon, one of the most vulnerable House members, is
warning some Republican leaders have privately tried to get him
and others on board with this reconciliation built by claiming
any steep Medicaid cuts passed by the House, they're going
to be blocked by the Senate anyway. Here's the tactic
they've been using. He says, don't worry about the Senate.

(01:07:22):
They'll fix it. And now we're getting ready to take
our third vote on this. Bacon sat in a recent interview,
we feel like we're being pushed up to the edge
of the cliff here. So here he is in the
swing district. He knows that this is political poison, and
yet they are the tax cut thing Trump. This is

(01:07:43):
the one thing that he consistently promised to the financier class,
I mean really explicitly, like vote for me and you're
getting your tax cut. And they are not particularly happy
about the whole terriff situation. So I think that adds
pressure that you on that piece you have to deliver.
And you know, Republicans have long been lined up behind
giving tax cuts to wealthy people. That was the primary

(01:08:04):
accomplishment of Trump's first administration. So I think he also
has like, you know, a sort of ego commitment to
it as well, outside of the way it benefits himself.

Speaker 5 (01:08:13):
Personally as well.

Speaker 2 (01:08:15):
So that piece has to be in, and then to
make up for it, they're increasing the Pentagon budget, so
it's not coming out of the defense side of the ledger.

Speaker 5 (01:08:26):
That would be the other place you could.

Speaker 2 (01:08:27):
Look if you don't want to take healthcare away from
poor people, Well that's off the table.

Speaker 5 (01:08:31):
They're upping the budget over there.

Speaker 2 (01:08:33):
So that leaves you with forced to make really quite
significant cuts to Medicaid that are going to that Trump
promised he wouldn't and that are wildly politically unpopular and
more importantly, are going to be really devastating to millions
of Americans who depend on Medicaid. And you know, in

(01:08:54):
a way, this is a very real success of Obamacare,
the way that Medicaid expansion has made this program much
more politically popular and much more difficult politically to cut
because you have so many more millions of Americans who
benefit from Medicaid at this point than prior to the
Obamacare expansion.

Speaker 5 (01:09:13):
So that's part of the background here as well.

Speaker 3 (01:09:15):
Yeah, I mean the politics of those were Republicans even
you know, I went back, so I wrote about this yesterday.
I was going back and looking at some of you
might remember this because you ran in the Tea Party years,
Republicans were very careful the way they talked about Medicaid,
Like actual Republican politicians were very careful the way they
actually talked about They would talk about, you know, needing

(01:09:35):
to reform Social Security or whatever, but when it came
to Medicare and Medicaid, it was only like the hardest
of the hardcore who would talk about like actually just
cutting it and getting people off entitlement programs.

Speaker 4 (01:09:46):
There was a sensitivity around it.

Speaker 3 (01:09:49):
If you go back and look what they said, you'd
be like, wow, that's really interesting because even at the time,
I think they realized how just disastrous, how important it
is to the seniors and the working class people who
hate the government, and maybe saw some like hope in
the Tea Party movement because they were like, yeah, term
limits and like screw the big banks after the recession,
how important these programs are to people. So it's just

(01:10:11):
like it's the chickens are coming home to rouse for
Republicans on this.

Speaker 2 (01:10:16):
Yeah, And I guess, Emily, can you speak to I mean,
because the other side of it, you got the Don
Bacon's on one side who were like, I'm about to
get tossed down and may not even run for reelection.

Speaker 5 (01:10:25):
Because it's looking so bad.

Speaker 2 (01:10:28):
Then you have people who are genuine fiscal hawks who
have signed on to some letter saying like no, we
need steep Medicaid cuts. So they're trying to balance all
of these pieces, which is I guess why leadership is
going to Don Bacon and saying like, just trust does
It's going to be fine. They'll work it out in
the Senate. It's not going to be that bad.

Speaker 4 (01:10:47):
Yeah, well the Senate, I mean they're not. That might
be their best option.

Speaker 3 (01:10:51):
And I think that's sort of what Mike Johnson is
getting at because he's ruled certain quote unquote cuts out
and that leaves them with like waste froggen abuse work requirements,
and to quote Rick Perry, here, there's a third thing.
I'm just forgetting it, but I have it right in
front of me because Dan posted it. But yeah, they're
going to get on whatever, like they're going to find

(01:11:14):
some outline, but that outline is then going to be taken.
And Dan put it a great way, and it's similar
to what you just said. He said in his story.
He was like, yeah, you're making poor people pay more
for health care. That's the direct quote from Dane. No
matter what Republicans do to Medicaid, yeah, Democrats are gonna
be able to say that, Yeah, it doesn't matter.

Speaker 4 (01:11:32):
That's what they're gonna be able to say. Yeah, it
doesn't matter.

Speaker 3 (01:11:34):
If you get it down to unless it's just on
like non citizens or something. But it doesn't matter if
you add work requirements. That's still making poor people pay
more for health care. And there's ways you can message
it very effectively in some populous red districts, but it's
an uphill battle, a real uphill battle, and it gives
Democrats a huge gift with a very polarizing political environment

(01:11:56):
and a polarizing president.

Speaker 2 (01:11:57):
And I just want to say with regard to work requirements,
I said before Arkansas tried this, so this has been
studied and it really should be seen as a similar
tactic to what does is doing with Social Security, where
they're just making it so you can't you can't get
someone on the phone, you go to the field office,
the field office has been closed or the field office
has a three hour long line, so you're making impossible

(01:12:20):
for people to access those benefits. And this is a
common tactic and issue in neoliberalism where they put up
so much red tape and layer it with so much bureaucracy.
This is the kind of thing we need, like a
real doge to tap. They lay it with so much
bureaucracy that it means that people just cannot jump through
all the hoops, or don't have time to jump through

(01:12:40):
all the hoops, or can't figure out how to jump
through all the hoops in order to access the benefits
that they are entitled to. And that is I think
what you should really that's the real underlying goal of
work requirements is the idea that if we make it
more difficult for people to be able to obtain these benefits,
and you have to justify here's where I'm working years

(01:13:01):
the hours, and I talked to my boss and may
have cloudy on the phone and all of these sorts
of things, then you are going to make it so
fewer people enroll in Medicaid. And that's the way that
you're going to cut the numbers that are on this program.
So it is a backdoor way to make it so
that fewer people are on Medicaid. It's a cut, that's it,
bottom line. And yeah, so democrats will be able to

(01:13:23):
point to the numbers whenever we get the final bill
of exactly what is coming with you know what these
cuts entail, and say this, many millions of Americans are
getting kicked off Medicaid. For this many millions of Americans,
you are increasing the cost, and you know it's Republicans
will try to say, oh, work requirements, able bodied and
know it's not really a cut all day long. But

(01:13:44):
I think it's very difficult to explain your way out
of your cutting healthcare for poor people to pay for
rich people's tax cuts.

Speaker 3 (01:13:50):
Yeah, it is to put it in a corporate a
bill with a corporate tax cut, which by the way,
I mean taking the corporate tax rate from twenty one
to fifteen percent.

Speaker 4 (01:13:59):
Don't need and it's a can of room to open it.

Speaker 5 (01:14:00):
Now.

Speaker 3 (01:14:01):
I'm just like a total you need a like a
flat tax basically a type of person. And we probably
disagree on that, but I just believe that's the only
way to close loopholes, and closing loopholes is the only
way to get corporations to pay their fair share and
to pay like to put revenue into the treasury. But
to do this, to add this into a bill that's

(01:14:21):
cutting the corporate tax rate for twenty one to fifteen percent. Yeah,
that might get companies to in some small way bring
back their corporate headquarters which have you know, like moved
to Ireland. Johnson Controls, for example, moves to Ireland, but
that's the corporate headquarters.

Speaker 4 (01:14:34):
It doesn't necessarily affect that many workers either way.

Speaker 3 (01:14:37):
They can make this argument that's about onshoring bringing jobs back,
et cetera.

Speaker 4 (01:14:41):
But at the end of the day, Democrats can now say,
in a corporate tax cut bill, you cut medicaid like
it's just a disaster politically, there's no question about it,
and they have.

Speaker 3 (01:14:53):
This happened again in twenty seventeen. Paul Ryan was out there,
this is just going to be my little rant for
just a brief second. Paul Ryan was out there talking
about how he was going to get taxes down to
a postcard and that is like, actually a very I
think that would be if you're talking about like doing
it via a flat tax.

Speaker 4 (01:15:09):
That is a very just.

Speaker 3 (01:15:10):
System of taxation, wouldn't require corporations to actually pay their
fair share if it had the right policy incentives in it.

Speaker 4 (01:15:16):
And not that I trusted Paul Ryan to do that,
but genuinely.

Speaker 3 (01:15:19):
If you say, we have this mandate and we're going
to revamp the tax system, and you end up with
the TCJA, which is a tax hit bill in twenty seven.

Speaker 4 (01:15:28):
Yeah, and then you end up with whatever this bill
is going to be.

Speaker 3 (01:15:31):
Right, you have all of if you claimed this mandate
from political heaven right now, and you have the generational
opportunity to do something like doge, and you're not going
to take it to do any we know it's just
because lobbyists would swamp them. You can never have a
fair system of taxation because lobbyists will swamp you, and
then you lose and you have no courage or backboner spine,
and that's how we end up with these awful third ways.

Speaker 5 (01:15:52):
Yes, some of that I agree with.

Speaker 2 (01:15:54):
I think if you actually got rid of all of
the corporate like deductions of the poles and whatever and
had a lower like top line rate, but they actually
had to pay it, like, there is a version of
that that I would support, because many of these corporations
pay nothing, yep, because they availed themselves of so many
of these loopholes that exist in our tax gat All right, Well,

(01:16:14):
you know who understands some of these things. No our hero,
our heroin Laura Lumer. Laura Lumer who was also.

Speaker 4 (01:16:21):
He was an invite out for tomorrow's show.

Speaker 5 (01:16:23):
This is like, uh yeah she does. That's right, Laura.
We would love to talk to you tomorrow. Genuinely.

Speaker 2 (01:16:27):
Laura Lumer and David Dan are heavily featured. Yesterday was
the show and Duffy show tomorrow today and David Dan
And this was.

Speaker 3 (01:16:36):
The difference between when I planned shows and when you.

Speaker 2 (01:16:38):
Plan I guess so I only loves her some show Duffy,
I don't know. All right, put this up on the
screen from Laura Lumer. So this is so funny to
me always how she praises this, but anyway, she is hammering,
uh this Trump ally Paragon Health CEO Brian Blaze for
as a as a Rhino saboteur because he's pushed for

(01:17:00):
aggressive Medicaid cuts. I'm going to read you her post
here on Twitter. She says, in a shocking betrayal of
President Trump's unwavering commitment to America's working class families and
his promise to protect Medicaid, which he did promise, Paragon
Health CEO Brian Blaze a covert never Trump we masquerading
as a MAGA loyalist, spearheading a dangerous campaign to undermine

(01:17:22):
the Republican Party's mid term prospects. Twenty sixteen tweets from
Brian Blaze reveal he once said this is why we
can't have Trump, meaning like, oh, he's a Trump critic.
Along with bashing Trump on ex Blaze has also complimented
Barack Hussein Obama.

Speaker 5 (01:17:38):
God Forbid Sea screenshots below.

Speaker 2 (01:17:40):
Brian Blaze doesn't want you to know this, but he
is propped up by millions of dollars from the COC
network's anti Trump war chest. It's currently pressuring congressional Republicans
to defy the president's ironclad pledge to protect Medicaid, a
program critical to the Hartley and voter supropelled Trump to
his election victories. Blaze's insidious push to eliminate provider taxes
would gut Medicaid funding, hitting Americans the hardest in rural

(01:18:02):
red states like Texas, Florida, and Louisiana. By the way,
this is one of the pieces that Dan reported is
planned to be in the bill. Where Trump's base depends
on the Medicaid program for survival. This is why Democrats
are falsely accusing President Trump of trying to cut medicaid
because they know it's an effective way to suppress GOP
turnout for the twenty twenty six midterms. She goes on

(01:18:23):
to talk about Steve Bannon. It's a long post. I
won't read you all of it, but you know, basically
it's Look, it's clever how.

Speaker 5 (01:18:29):
She frames it.

Speaker 2 (01:18:30):
She frames this as like it's a betrayal of Trump's promises, when,
of course, like obviously Tonald Trump, if he didn't want
Medicaid to cut be cut, could just go to Mike
Johnson and John Thune and be like, we're not cutting Medicaid.

Speaker 5 (01:18:41):
That's not happening.

Speaker 2 (01:18:42):
But definitely yeah, but obviously she's got a frame it
in terms of like he's betraying Trump and Trump's promises
and endangering and intentionally endangering Republicans for the midterms.

Speaker 5 (01:18:52):
So that's that's her play here.

Speaker 4 (01:18:54):
Clever framing. Though.

Speaker 3 (01:18:55):
Let's throw this next hairsheet up on the screen, because
Republicans are going to be sort of flailing around. Basically
that Republicans are are looking to offset the tax cuts
again by selling some public land. This is actually a
fairly popular proposal in some corners of Republican world. I
haven't looked too deeply into it, and I will now, Crystal,
but they're going to have to come up with some

(01:19:17):
really creative mechanisms because Dose didn't do what they wanted
Dose to do, and they are cutting taxes a whole
lot on top of the tariffs, so they badly need
this to be like a real shot in the arm
to the markets and to the overall economy. And they
also have to get the damn bill passed. So that's
the I mean, they have to make all of these cuts,

(01:19:37):
like massive cuts, and get the bill passed with what
like a two to three volte margin, and that all.

Speaker 5 (01:19:42):
Increase the Pentagon budget.

Speaker 2 (01:19:43):
So you have to make up all of that as well,
and increase the ICE budget and the detention the you know,
the budget that goes to like these private prison contractors
that stand up detention centers. That's being increased massively. So
it's not just the tax cuts, although that is the
most sizable piece of it. But you're all so upping
you know, the police and the military and so ICE yep.

(01:20:07):
And so now you're like, maybe we can sell off
some public lands, some public assets to fund tax.

Speaker 5 (01:20:14):
I'm sure that's going to go over well.

Speaker 3 (01:20:15):
Yeah, this should be an easy sell back come at
their districts over the course of the summer.

Speaker 4 (01:20:19):
But again, like the pressure here is so high, the
stakes are so high.

Speaker 3 (01:20:23):
They can only lose like three votes or something, and
you have the Don Bacons of the world, who may
not be running for reelection. He's actually criticized. Was it
Haigseeth the other day that he came out and criticized.
He's been critical of the administration in some surprising ways,
which to me signals he doesn't think he's running for
reelection or he's at right now. I mean, it's like
you said, could he even win reelection?

Speaker 5 (01:20:43):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:20:44):
I think they've given him a lot of bandwidth to
criticize the administration because they recognize the situation that he's
in and they want him to run again because I
think I think he's probably dead man walking in terms
of getting re elected anyway. But if anyone could win
the seat, he's like the only one that has a
pre so I think they're willing to give him a
fair amount of bandwidth, is my read.

Speaker 3 (01:21:05):
We'll see what they do for Republicans in that situation
as they approach votes, which probably I'm guess gonna be
around fourth of July.

Speaker 4 (01:21:11):
So we'll follow it all.

Speaker 2 (01:21:15):
Shall we get to this very interesting story with regard
to the surgeon general. Okay, I'll start from where we are,
and then we'll back up and do some of the
backstory here. So put Trump's announcement here up on the screen.
He pulled his previous surgeon general nominee and has now

(01:21:35):
announced doctor Casey Means to be nominated our next Surgeon
General of the USA. Casey has impeccable MAHA credentials and
will work closely. This is what Trump said with our
wonderful Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Junior,
to ensure a successful implementation of our agenda in order
to reverse the chronic disease epidemic and ensure great health
in the future for all Americans. Her academic achievements, together

(01:21:59):
with her life's work, are absolutely outstanding. Doctor Casey Means
has the potential to be one of the finest surgeon
generals in US history. Congratulations to Casey. Secretary Kennedy looks
forward to working with doctor Jeannette. I don't know how
to say her last name, do you in another capacity
at HHS, thank you for your attention to this matter.
Doctor Jeanette. I'll just call her, sorry that I don't

(01:22:19):
have the pronunciation correct. Haven't been married to Mike Waltz.

Speaker 11 (01:22:23):
So good.

Speaker 5 (01:22:23):
There's another. Just gotta gotta love that one.

Speaker 4 (01:22:26):
So a way Shakespeare. This is Shakespeare.

Speaker 5 (01:22:28):
It truly is.

Speaker 2 (01:22:29):
So she and the drama is as of yet unresolved.
There are many acts I guess to go in this
in this drama, but doctor Jeanette gets pulled after criticism
from Laura Lumer and others.

Speaker 3 (01:22:43):
I think who by the way now says she's been
hired by Donald Trump himself about four times, but his
staff has always thwarted lumour the hiring process.

Speaker 2 (01:22:50):
Really I just saw this, Okay, interesting, So anyway, the
original one gets pulled because of you know, backlash from
Lumer and others, you know, feeling like she had been
she was too pro vaccine, that sort of thing, right,
She was like too sort of normal in terms of
the medical establishment. So they didn't like her, so they

(01:23:12):
pulled her. There was also some question about her LinkedIn
page said she graduated from a different medical school than
she actually graduated from something like that as well. Okay,
so she gets pulled and doctor Casey Means gets put in.
I'm going to leave it to you to explain a
little bit about Casey Means and her brother, Callie Means,
who kind of came out of nowhere to be huge.

(01:23:34):
I mean, I think it's fair to call them health influencers.

Speaker 4 (01:23:37):
You know, they make the.

Speaker 2 (01:23:37):
Podcast Circuit Rogan Tucker very tied in with the MAHA
movement and so and you know, have voiced all of
the right skepticisms of vaccines.

Speaker 5 (01:23:49):
Will show you Joe Rogan clip where.

Speaker 2 (01:23:51):
Casey Means is saying, like, you know, vaccines may cause autism,
the same nonsense that RFK Junior pedals and is aggressively pushing.

Speaker 5 (01:23:58):
With his you know, his study that he's conducting.

Speaker 2 (01:24:00):
That seems he's already come up with the answer of
what he wants that study on autism ultimately to say.
So that's kind of the world that she comes out of, Emily.

Speaker 3 (01:24:08):
So I think maybe a good place to begin is
with this clip of Calli and Casey Means on Joe
Rogan's show.

Speaker 4 (01:24:16):
Yeah, and actually Robert F.

Speaker 3 (01:24:17):
Kennedy Junior told people to watch their parents on Joe
Rogan Show kind of held it up as a good
example or a good explainer primer on what MAHA is
all about. So if we roll this stop from Rogan
it's C seven, you'll get a good flavor of sort
of what they're all about. And we can go a
little bit deeper given that she's now nominated for surgeon General.

Speaker 4 (01:24:38):
So let's go ahead and roll C seven.

Speaker 13 (01:24:40):
Yeah, I bet that one vaccine probably isn't causing autism,
but what about the twenty that they're getting before eighteen months? Like,
we don't look at it in synergistic you know, And
so that's a big problem. And this is where the
cult of the science, and I say the science specifically,
because science is beautiful. Using the scientific med and using

(01:25:00):
that way of inquiry into the natural world is a
beautiful art, but weaponizing papers that are often bought for
or corrupted, and you know, they the leaders of some
of our key medical journals have actually even said that
fifty percent of scientific research that published ends up being wrong.

(01:25:20):
So it's bought for, corrupted, or wrong. We rely on this,
and if one interesting trend that we're seeing in our
world is that if we do choose to put dots together.
Use our intuition, are God given intuition. Anything other than
this particular way of examining things, you are dangerous. You

(01:25:44):
are dangerous. And I think that that's something we need
to really question, you know, I think especially as a woman,
like and I'm thinking about having kids soon, I'm like
thinking about like, wow, like I I have the ability
in my body to like build a human three D
print a human, pulling a soul to that human. I

(01:26:04):
don't need a peer reviewed study or a textbook to
tell me how to do that. Our body and our
intuition and our minds and the subtle things happening inside
is are important. They are incredible. We have now been
told that, like you can't trust it, and you are
dangerous if you do that. And I think that's one
of the reasons why I think parents are very frustrated
right now is because parenting. I'm not a parent yet,

(01:26:25):
but you know CALLI is. But like, you know, when
we're being told now that parents are the enemy for
using their own judgment about their families and kids, like,
I think that's probably it's deeply frustrating to people. And
that's basically what we're being asked to do.

Speaker 3 (01:26:39):
So I think that clip actually encapsulates a lot of
caliing Casey means in just the two minutes.

Speaker 12 (01:26:44):
That you heard.

Speaker 3 (01:26:45):
So to Crystal's point, they did kind of come out
of nowhere.

Speaker 4 (01:26:49):
CALLI means and I always confuse their names, by the way, Yeah,
CALLI means the man. They're brother and sister, So CALLI
means the brother.

Speaker 3 (01:26:56):
Sort of has this whistleblowing story of how he used
to be a pharma not pharmer, I'm sorry, a food lobbyist,
so working for some of these like awful corrupt big food.

Speaker 4 (01:27:07):
Companies like Coca Cola.

Speaker 3 (01:27:09):
Coca Cola, right, and so he started doing like kind
of whistleblower threads on X and that started to get
a lot of attention.

Speaker 4 (01:27:16):
Now, his sister nominee for Surgeon General.

Speaker 3 (01:27:19):
Her personal story and she explains it on that Rogan
episode basically is that she went to med school and
I think it was Stanford prestigious, and I think they
come from a pretty well off background.

Speaker 2 (01:27:32):
I think their dad is also a doctor something like that. Right,
And you wrote some book that Laura Lumer did not
like about gay people.

Speaker 4 (01:27:38):
Yes, it was about a flamming kid.

Speaker 5 (01:27:42):
I don't know what that's about anyway.

Speaker 3 (01:27:44):
Laura Lumber said that it was about trans people, but
apparently it's just about gay people.

Speaker 4 (01:27:48):
We don't even need to get into it.

Speaker 3 (01:27:49):
But she went to med school, did five years of
a residency and then dropped out because she says she
had this sort of awakening as to how and this
is very popular Maha will.

Speaker 4 (01:28:02):
It's very popular argument.

Speaker 3 (01:28:03):
Our medical system is obsessively treating symptoms for the sake
of profits that go to pharma ag big food and
end up corrupting the medical system, rather than treating causes
in ways that don't benefit pharma.

Speaker 4 (01:28:19):
So ozembic is a good example. They talk a lot
about it.

Speaker 3 (01:28:22):
Instead of asking people to spend more time cutting out
sugars or carbs, or you know, doing a lot of
physical activity, we.

Speaker 4 (01:28:32):
Just give people ozempic.

Speaker 3 (01:28:33):
And whether or not that's true, that's the argument that
they have. I think there's actually a lot of truth
to their criticisms and actually to RFK Junior's criticisms of
the corruption in the system. But do they then pedal
appropriate solutions. That's where the question becomes much more significant.

Speaker 2 (01:28:50):
It's very well and diplomatically put because well, and here's
here's the thing.

Speaker 5 (01:28:54):
You know why, Yes, yes, how I feel about these people?

Speaker 2 (01:28:57):
Yes, because she Cali means an Arcade Junior and the
Maha crew, like, they'll talk a lot about the profit
motive and the corruption in the system, et cetera. But
then your solution has nothing to do with getting the
profit motive out of the healthcare system.

Speaker 5 (01:29:13):
And in fact, both Cali and Casey Means have.

Speaker 2 (01:29:16):
Their own for profit healthcare companies that their solutions, whether
it's to COVID or anything else, just happened to bolster
their own it's convenient profit making direction. It's like, well,
how what if we applied the same analysis you're applying
over here?

Speaker 5 (01:29:32):
What if we apply that to you?

Speaker 4 (01:29:34):
What is that?

Speaker 11 (01:29:34):
You know?

Speaker 5 (01:29:35):
What does that come out looking like?

Speaker 2 (01:29:36):
So in any case, these two individuals apparently a lot
more controversial in some of the MAGA and Maha world.

Speaker 5 (01:29:46):
Yes than I really expected.

Speaker 3 (01:29:47):
This was like overturning a rock and seeing beneath the
surface that there's all kinds of like bugs fighting each other. Yeah,
and I don't mean that that wasn't to imply people
or bugs. It's just to imply that, like beneath the
surface of Maha, there's this raging battle for the soul
of Maha because the close close stakeholders have like this

(01:30:08):
is a very tight knit circle.

Speaker 4 (01:30:09):
I think it's a fair way to say, not just
online but offline.

Speaker 3 (01:30:12):
A lot of these people know each other, work with
each other now and RFK Junior is the figurehead of
the movement. A lot of people have personal relationships with
RFK Junior. And we didn't have time to put this
in the rundown because it just kind of this was
all happening last night. But doctor Jack Cruz, who was
really big in Maha circles, and you know he's been
on podcasts with like Andrew Cuberman, I think before is

(01:30:34):
Maha guy. He says, quote, I have it on firm
authority that Kelly Victory, another MAHA figurehead, was Bobby's pick
last weekend for surge in general. Kennedy called people Monday
and said Jeannette was out and Kelly was the front runner.
In a phone call to Kelly from RFK, all caps
this means Bobby has no juice, no power.

Speaker 4 (01:30:54):
DJT.

Speaker 3 (01:30:55):
Donald Trump allowed Susie Wilds to put in the World
Economic Forum and fabians inside the gates.

Speaker 4 (01:31:02):
So this is not a random nobody.

Speaker 3 (01:31:06):
This is somebody in Maha world who's like pretty significant
and is already staunchly against this nomination for surgeon General.

Speaker 4 (01:31:16):
The meanses have been very close the means. The meanses
have been very close to Bobby Kennedy. Like that's obvious.
Everyone kind of knows that.

Speaker 3 (01:31:22):
Yeah, But they come across to a lot of people
in Maha world as suspicious and her nomination when they
thought that their other ally Calli victory had it just
graded on these people who were already very suspicious of
Calli and Casey Means. They do think the story is
a bit convenient that both of them sort of dropped
out of these prestigious gigs medical school residency lobbying work

(01:31:49):
suddenly started infiltrating Bobby Kennedy world, which is quite interesting.
You can imagine those circles are filled with people from
all walks of life, including you know, like Intel world,
including like quirky science world. It just got to be
the strangest place to go to Thanksgiving dinner, right, can

(01:32:10):
you imagine zoea nuzzy No, actually, people from Glossy magazine,
like it's just crazy stuff.

Speaker 4 (01:32:18):
So they're very suspicious of the means.

Speaker 3 (01:32:21):
They see them as people who may be compromised by
the political establishment, and this just set that into hyperdrive.

Speaker 2 (01:32:31):
So this is the one that was really shocking to be.
Nicole Shanahan, who was K Junior's vice presidential pick and
has been She has said some things that she was
nervous about, but she's as far as I know, really
held back on any significant criticism of him or AJJS
or the Trump administration. She tweeted this, Yes, it's very

(01:32:51):
strange with regards to Casey means being put in very
strange doesn't make any sense.

Speaker 5 (01:32:56):
I was promised that if I support.

Speaker 2 (01:33:00):
RFK Junior in his Senate confirmation, that neither of these
siblings would be working under AHHS or in an appointment,
and that people much more qualified would be I don't
know if RFK very clearly lied to me or.

Speaker 5 (01:33:16):
What is going on.

Speaker 2 (01:33:17):
It has been clear in recent conversations that he is
reporting to someone regularly who is controlling his decisions, and
it isn't President Trump. With regards to siblings, there is
something very artificial and aggressive about them, almost like they
were bred and raised Manchurian assets. There is a lot
going on in that one tweet. I mean, first of all,

(01:33:38):
she has to be persuaded to support RFK Junior in
a Senate confirmation hearing.

Speaker 5 (01:33:42):
That's news in and of itself.

Speaker 2 (01:33:44):
And one of the pledges that was made is that
Casey and Cally Means would be nowhere in this administration
the way right, because to your point, RFK Junior talked
about them a lot on their campaign trail, you know,
in big speeches. He would make a point of shouting out,
you know, Calle Means in particular. And so the fact
that this is a little behind the curtain of behind

(01:34:04):
the scenes, she wants nothing to do with them, is
actively seeking out pledges that neither one of them will
have anything to do with this administration, and is now
saying not only maybe he lied to me or maybe
you know someone is is he has no juice, someone
regularly is controlling his decisions, and it isn't President Trump.
So that is there is a whole lot there, And

(01:34:28):
I think it also comes in the context of, like
we were saying before, as the administration becomes more unpopular,
you're going to see more things like that. You're going
to see more cracks emerge, more people coming out who
are willing to be critical who were not willing to
be critical before.

Speaker 4 (01:34:41):
That's a good point. And by the way, paranoia breeds paranoia.

Speaker 3 (01:34:45):
So when I mentioned like Intel a couple of minutes ago,
the reason I say that is Robert of Kenneth Junior
is somebody who is incredibly critical of the CIA for
obvious reasons and is like actively taking steps to you know,
get these files released that obviously the intelligence world does
not want released. And we could have a separate debate

(01:35:07):
and segment all about what's actually happening in that space.
But the bottom line is he's obviously somebody who would
be a target for concern and surveillance.

Speaker 4 (01:35:16):
From that world. And you see how that is.

Speaker 3 (01:35:20):
You know, that's pretty pretty much people agree on that, Like,
it's not a that's not crazy, and it's not a
conspiracy theory. It's just yes, of course they would be
keeping track and keeping tabs on someone like that, especially
now that he's in a really big position of power
in the United States government.

Speaker 11 (01:35:35):
Now.

Speaker 4 (01:35:35):
On the other hand, because some of.

Speaker 3 (01:35:38):
That stuff is obviously just sort of true logical common sense,
you end up with paranoid people finding other paranoid people.
It's sort of a circle of paranoia that is trying
to be a governing coalition and that is incredibly difficult
to hold together, just in a practical sense, like not

(01:35:59):
even based on the of Maha, just practically really hard.
I think this we saw this happening actually at the Pentagon,
where they were so paranoid about leakers that someone who
was trying not to leak ended up getting like push
up of the Pentagon for leaking, even when he was
trying not to leak. Because the paranoia is so intense,
and I think we're seeing the same thing happen in

(01:36:19):
Maha world. But that's where just my last point is
the language about born in bred Manchurian candidates in the
Shanahan tweet is and she calls it quote very strange.
It is I think alluding to and generating a sense
of paranoia in Maha world, which is already conspiratorial.

Speaker 5 (01:36:39):
Yeah, and such a great point, not in.

Speaker 3 (01:36:41):
Ways that are entire like you, I think there are
some really suspicious things about Robert F.

Speaker 4 (01:36:45):
Kennedy. Is the shooting of Robert F. Kennedy. I don't
think that's insane.

Speaker 3 (01:36:49):
But if your gateway into politics is from those issues,
then you end up sort of in these paranoid firing
circles like Mexicans Standard spider Man means.

Speaker 2 (01:37:01):
I saw Mike Flynn is now like who's who was?
Like the number one QAnon hero is now like some
QAnon people think.

Speaker 5 (01:37:08):
That he's Oh boy, you know, I did came about
some other.

Speaker 2 (01:37:12):
Conspiracy in which he's the villain. So that speaks to
the dynamic you're talking about. I just pulled up Laura
Lumer's Twitter feed and she is going in. Oh is
she She is going in on Casey means.

Speaker 5 (01:37:22):
Yeah, she's fighting with Charlie Kirk about it.

Speaker 2 (01:37:24):
Ooh, let me just I'm just gonna read you one
of her posts because it's interesting. She says President Trump's
pick for US SARCH. In general, Casey Means said she
prays to inanimate objects, communicates with spirit mediums, uses shrooms
as plant medicine, and talks to trees. She also doesn't
even have an active medical license.

Speaker 5 (01:37:42):
That is actually true.

Speaker 2 (01:37:43):
The inmates are running the asylum. This is literally from
one of Casey means newsletters. I had the entire page
archived and took screenshot. She was just chosen by President
Trump to service the next US search in general, take
a look at this section on her newsletter. Casey Means
said she was looking for romance. She would do shrooms,
talk to trees, participate in full moon ceremonies, and to
inanimate objects with a spiritual medium. So basically, the new

(01:38:03):
Surge in general is a total crackpot, a shroom consumer,
and she talks to trees and doesn't even have an
active medical license. She's making me like Casey Means more.

Speaker 4 (01:38:10):
I was just going to say, you know who we
need to have on in all seriousness is Ryan?

Speaker 3 (01:38:16):
Well, Ryan, Yes, we should have Ryan and Mary Anne
talk about the merits of this type of WU as
Casey Means has put it, like she's openly said it
embraced the wo wou and just all of this stuff
is unfairly derided by like snobbish elites. There's there's no
question about it. Now, does the should the surgeon in

(01:38:36):
general be somebody who's writing about openly talking to trees
on her hikes? You know, Crystal, I'm less firm on
that one. I think probably no, Probably about do you have.

Speaker 5 (01:38:46):
An active medical license? How do you feel in that one.

Speaker 4 (01:38:48):
Don't love that either. Don't love that either.

Speaker 2 (01:38:51):
So her conclusion here is again is never Trump's fault,
another failure by the geniuses who work for Trump on his.

Speaker 5 (01:38:57):
Non existent vetting team. It's the vetting team's fault.

Speaker 2 (01:39:00):
I guess there isn't a single conservative doctor in America
doesn't have a history of being a Marxist tree. We
are so doomed, aren't we, and then receives so uh.

Speaker 3 (01:39:09):
If producer Mac just texted, the trees can talk if
you believe that's right?

Speaker 4 (01:39:17):
Yes, see what happened.

Speaker 3 (01:39:19):
We learned today as we were prepping this segment. I
don't want to take Ryan's thunder. You can ask him
about this tomorrow, Crystal. But he is a certified or
former certified Reiki instructor. So we're not anti WU here
at breaking points.

Speaker 4 (01:39:31):
No, not at all, not at all.

Speaker 2 (01:39:34):
But I guess to make the political point, there have
long been tensions and contradictions within the coalition which elected Trump,
and it is true that like the Marian is a
perfect example of this.

Speaker 5 (01:39:49):
The like WU alternative.

Speaker 2 (01:39:51):
Medicine hippie, like the anti vax thing used to be
like rich La, people's true we're running in some of
the same you know, social circles that used to be
on the left, and so you know, when that group
gets subsumed into the MAGA movement, there are going to

(01:40:14):
be some you know, some beliefs that clash. And in
any case, I don't know there's I'm still I think
we're just still stratching the surface of this one. I
really hope Laura Lumer comes on the show tomorrow so
I can hear more from her about what she thinks
I do too.

Speaker 4 (01:40:28):
We're going way too long on this.

Speaker 3 (01:40:29):
But the final point, I mean, because like Alex Jones
was popular on the left after nine to eleven because
of his conspiracy theories, and that's another coalition or another
coaltion that's been subsumed.

Speaker 4 (01:40:38):
Into the broader Magat coalition and is really paranoid.

Speaker 3 (01:40:42):
So again, like you put all of these eccentric puzzle
pieces together and it's really hard to actually govern. And
again it's not that there aren't good reasons to question
government and elites. It's just as a working coalition, practically
really hard to have so much eccentricity and distrust.

Speaker 2 (01:40:59):
Yeah, I thought I can't remember who wrote Maybe it
was Naomi Klein, I'm not sure, wrote about like a
crank realignment where it's like, yeah, all the various conspiracy
branches Naomi Woolf, Yeah, also, yeah, exactly, all sort of
like coalesced within the Republican movement, and sometimes those conspiracies
clash in important ways, and I think that's part of

(01:41:19):
what's playing out here. That's right, Okay, let's go ahead
and get to the latest. With regard to deportations, this
is another one that I guess it's a little bit
of a mystery at this point, although some pieces of
it are significantly reported out, so it looks like the
Trump administration was, maybe still is planning on expanding their

(01:41:41):
worldwide foreign bolog deportation policy beyond El Salvador. Also to Libya.
President Trump was asked about this specifically. He says he
doesn't know. There's so many parts of his administration that
he just has no idea about, apparently Emily.

Speaker 5 (01:41:55):
And that may be the case.

Speaker 2 (01:41:56):
Actually, it may be the case that Stephen Miller is
just handling this sport folio and Trump is like, do
whatever you want to do, and that's how things are going.
In any case, Let's take a listen to the president.

Speaker 5 (01:42:06):
They're the questions, amnustriction sending mans to Libya.

Speaker 10 (01:42:13):
I don't know. You'll have to ask Homeland Security please,
So doesn't know.

Speaker 2 (01:42:17):
Seems like a kind of important piece for him to
have some insight into it at this point, but he
claims he has no idea what's going on here.

Speaker 5 (01:42:24):
So let's put this up on the screen. This has
now sparked a.

Speaker 2 (01:42:28):
Court fight because you first had the New York Times
and one other outlet I want to say it was
Reuters reporting that the administration was planning on shipping some
migrants to Libya in an expansion of the El Salvador program,
and they you know, it's pretty well reported out.

Speaker 5 (01:42:46):
We talked about a little bit on the show yesterday.

Speaker 2 (01:42:49):
Then lawyers started getting win from clients that they were
being transferred and they were being asked to sign papers
that told them that you know, required them to agree
to getting deported to Libya. And most of the immigrants,
I think all of the immigrants who were receiving these

(01:43:10):
papers were from somewhere in Asia, different Asian countries that
were being given these papers and being told you are
going to be you are going to be shipped to Libya.
So let me read a little bit from that political
report we just have up on the screen. The Trump
administration's reported planned to hurriedly deport immigrants to war torn
Libya would clearly violate an earlier court order barring such

(01:43:32):
summary deportations, a federal judge warned Wednesday. US District Judge
Brian Murphy's assessment followed an emergency motion filed by lawyers
for a group of Asian immigrants seeking to block a
military flight that appeared to be on the verge of
taking off from Texas, even as the two competing governments
that control portions of Libya rotally indicated they would reject
deportation flights from the US. Libya remains divided after years

(01:43:54):
of civil war, thanks to US controlled by a U
unrecognized government in the West and basically a war lord
named Khalifa.

Speaker 5 (01:44:01):
Haftar in the east. Half.

Speaker 2 (01:44:03):
Tar's son, Saddam Interesting, was in Washington last week meeting
with Trump administration officials.

Speaker 5 (01:44:10):
Interesting.

Speaker 2 (01:44:11):
Libya has a number of detention facilities for refugees and migrants,
which human rights groups have described as deplorable. I saw
others described it as a hellhole. Have warned that abuses
are rampant, including torture, forced labor, and slavery. That's what
these Libyan prisons are known for. So effectively, you get

(01:44:32):
the New York Times report saying they're planning on dow
This Marco Rubu had previously said they were going to
expand beyond El Salvador, so fit with his comments. Then
you have Asian migrants being moved around and asked to
sign these papers telling them asking them to accept their
deportation to Libya. Lawyers intervene. They followed this file, this
emergency motion.

Speaker 5 (01:44:52):
There was also a.

Speaker 2 (01:44:53):
Flight that you know how you're able to look up
scheduled flights. There was a flight that appeared to be
the militi terry flight and then going to take these
migrants to Libya. So lawyers intervene. They have this hearing.
The judge says, you can't do this. If you are
planning on doing this, this would violate prior orders. So

(01:45:14):
it's blocked for now. And then both of the Libyan
governments are in this divided country are saying no, no, no,
we wouldn't accept deportation flights. But the son of the
warlord part of the government had met with Trump administration
officials last week.

Speaker 5 (01:45:29):
So that's kind of where we are.

Speaker 3 (01:45:30):
Yeah, here's apart from the political the Politoco article. They
say they've also worked to reach potential agreements to the
Trump administration with countries to detain people deported from the
United States, similar to the agreement they reached with El Salvador.
And so when you factor that in the United States
feels that it was getting a deal with the Seacott deportations,
but it was also helping to fund Bucala's prison expansion.

(01:45:53):
And so you could see how warlords in war torn
Libya would maybe see all of this money as potential
like I'm going to say jobs program, but that means
you know, spoils program in like really corrupt countries and
all likely war torn corrupt countries. You can see where
their motivations would would be, like we're going to actually

(01:46:16):
get more power and control in our own country with
these deportations. I mean, it just the motivations on Libya's part. Uh,
there's just there's it's money. It seems pretty clearly that
it's money which puts.

Speaker 2 (01:46:29):
In power because if you're in the midst of you
know what's effectively you know, a civil war. You want
to bolster your position as the true legitimate government of
Libya with the US doing a deal with Trump the
Trump administration seems like a pretty solid.

Speaker 4 (01:46:43):
Way to achieve that.

Speaker 3 (01:46:43):
Yeah, it's I mean, I'm looking enough how many people
are registered lobbyists for Libya right now? I just went
the fair doac of because that's typically how these sort
of deals get greased. You you have some lobbyists whose
client is one of these governments, and they make the
introduction and then it goes from there. But Gunn has
talked about this, Grinnell has talked about this, how you

(01:47:05):
actually can't deport people to prisons with particular conditions.

Speaker 4 (01:47:09):
You have to have conditions that are the same that
are like in compliance with US. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:47:15):
This was I mean, this was established during the War
on Terror, where it was like, no, you cannot deport
You can't send people to Egypt knowing that Egypt will
torture them and then be like, well, we didn't torture them,
even though you know that, you know this other country
is going to torture them. It's the same law applies here.
You can't say, well, you know, well it's up to Bucali.

(01:47:36):
What he does with them. No, you know the record
of these prisons, you know the record of these prisons
in Libya which are described as a hell rife with
you know, slavery and sexual abuse as well, by the way,
and just horrific, every horrific condition you can possibly imagine.

Speaker 5 (01:47:53):
So that appears to have been the plan.

Speaker 2 (01:47:57):
Now it's interesting that both Libyan governments are denied that
they would accept these deportation flights. That either could be
Cya with regard to domestic population that they feel would
not you know, like this arrangement, or it could be
that the Trump administration asked them to say that they
were not going to accept these deportation flights, because you know,

(01:48:18):
when you look at the it looks quite clear that
this was there. They were planning to do this if
they were not immediately blocked by the courts. They were
moving aggressively, you know, quite hastily to move these Asian migrants,
to get them to sign off these papers to you know,
they had the flight ready to go, and it's only
because the courts were able to intervene pretty quickly that

(01:48:39):
this was blocked. But I wouldn't, you know, I wouldn't
say that this is off the table at all, So
we'll just we'll keep an eye on this one, and
certainly gives credence to what Marko Rubio had said previously
that they are looking beyond just El Salvador to other
countries around the world as well. Gouad and put D
four up on the screen here too, guys, because we

(01:49:00):
had just a couple of other updates we wanted to
bring to you guys. So federal court, this is from
Prem Thaker. He says, a federal court has denied the
Trump administration's efforts to stop the transfer of Ramesa oz
Turk to Vermont.

Speaker 5 (01:49:13):
This is the student who wrote.

Speaker 2 (01:49:14):
The ab ed and then was you know, arrested by
like six some of the masked agents of the state.
Court orders that she be there by May fourteenth. The
Trump administration was trying to keep her in Louisiana. She
has been accused of no crime, just co writing a
campus op ed arguing for divestment. And this is really

(01:49:35):
significant because the administration was really judge shopping and that's
why they wanted her in Louisiana. So they were Khalil
was as well, That's exactly right, and they thought they
had a much better shot there and wasn't Kalil also
wasn't didn't he Khalil. It wasn't Khalil. It was the
other Madawi who was released in Vermont, Vermont. So I

(01:49:56):
think that they, you know, they feel like the Vermont
judges are going to be more fam verable to these cases.
So this is a really significant win for her in
attempting to be released. And you know, and and this
deportation based purely on speech to be denied. But you know,
these cases are definitely going to go all the way
up the chain, I would say to the Supreme Court
is going to have to say whether or not Marco

(01:50:18):
Rubio can just decide based on your student oup ed
that you're a threat to our foreign policy and that
you're an anti Semite and therefore you must be deported.
That remains, you know, ultimately unresolved, but big, big temporary
win for her to be you know, force them to
move her back to Vermont.

Speaker 3 (01:50:34):
Well, yes, and I think if the government this has
happened a little bit with kil mar Abrego Garcia, you
have to wonder why all of this information like the
video FROMUS traffic stop and in Tennessee and additional information
about like the restraining order allegations of domestic abuse, which
his wife has since walked back. It's very strange to

(01:50:56):
me that that stuff wasn't immediately presented when the media
started to focus on the Abrego Garcia case. It first
happened with an Atlantic article actually, and the administration's response
was piecemeal, and some people have speculated that what they
were trying to do was lay a trap for Democrats
like Chris van Holland who were going to El Salvador,
and then as after he's an l Salvador released the

(01:51:18):
spousal abuse allegations. And the reason I'm connecting this to
oz Turk is that I genuinely think if they had
any other information other than this obed, there's any other
evidence than this otbed that went into this woman's arrest
by thugs. Sorry, but that's what they're like, masked all

(01:51:41):
black wearing ice agents.

Speaker 5 (01:51:44):
We actually kidnapping.

Speaker 3 (01:51:45):
We still don't actually even know what government agency did this,
and so if we if they had more information, I
think we would know it. At this point, I don't
actually think the administration was strategically dripping out information on
Abrego Garcia. I think they're they're just shooting first and
asking questions later. Yeah, and flying by the state of
their pants. And so again, I think if there was

(01:52:06):
more evidence that oz Turk was like a reasonable candidate
for this kind of deportation on some sort of actual
hamas operative or exactly right right right, then we would
know it by now. And literally nothing in her case,
like nothing has come out. They had that court filing
in the case of other Vermont Madawi, Yeah, they had

(01:52:29):
that court filing about the gun store clerk that came out.

Speaker 5 (01:52:34):
It took them a while story, by the way, but anyway.

Speaker 3 (01:52:36):
It was a wild but anyway, they at least have
the story. They at least have that allegation. And in
this case, there's been absolutely nothing over the course of
more than a month now since her arrest.

Speaker 2 (01:52:47):
Yeah, nothing, And she really has been one of the
cases that has captured people's attention because it is first
of all, we have the video. Second of all, it
is so preposterous the idea that you would write a
notp ed for a student newspaper and be disappeared and
vanished and you know, disappeared into Louisiana and attempted to

(01:53:09):
be deported just over that.

Speaker 3 (01:53:11):
Well not a crazy ap at either, like disagree with it,
but not like an actual antisemitic screen.

Speaker 2 (01:53:16):
Yeah, it was just like, you know, politely calling for
divestment from, you know, by the universities. It's just really
standard stuff in terms of basic campus activism.

Speaker 5 (01:53:28):
And yeah, so I think I think you're right about that.

Speaker 2 (01:53:31):
I saw some speculation also, like oh, maybe there's something
else that we don't know about it. It's like, I
do think we would know at this they would have
dug something up if they there was anything to.

Speaker 5 (01:53:40):
Dig up whatsoever.

Speaker 2 (01:53:41):
So in any case, that's a significant win for her.
Just one last piece here, just to keep an eye on,
in terms of the conditions in our own detention centers,
which are wildly overstretched and overcrowded.

Speaker 5 (01:53:53):
Put this up on the screen.

Speaker 2 (01:53:54):
We've had a fairly significant number of migrants who have
died in custody during Trump's first one hundred days. These
are still under investigation, so in many instances we don't
know the details of what happened, whether they had pre
existing conditions that contributed to these deaths, but certainly something
to keep an eye on. Seven migrants have died while

(01:54:16):
in the custody of immigration police or Ice. One woman
in particular, Blaze, and two other migrants dide in Florida,
one died in Arizona, another in Missouri, went in Texas,
one more in Puerto Rico. Individuals raged in age from
twenty seven to fifty five, came from different corners of
the globe, embarked on the odyssey the US for various reasons,
through various means, but ultimately ended up in the same place,
imprisoned in an infamous network of migrant detention centers, denounced

(01:54:38):
for the mistreatment and conditions. So one other piece to
keep them an eye on is even as we focused
on the conditions in seacatt focused on now the conditions
in Libyan what that would potentially look like.

Speaker 4 (01:54:48):
You also have.

Speaker 2 (01:54:50):
Allegations, significant allegations of mistreatment and lack of sufficient care
in the detention centers here as well.

Speaker 3 (01:54:58):
I still look at these k I think one of
the big questions is whether this rate is outpacing what
we've seen before. That's one of the questions that the
Trump administration is going to face. A lot of migrants are,
for understandable reasons, in poor health, and it's obviously incumbent
on the US you know, this is part of the
problem with the law that people. I don't mean that's

(01:55:21):
the problem with a lot. I mean it's a problem
for providing health treatment to people. The law says you
do have to detain people while their asylum cases are
heard out. The Biden administration actually found ways to not
do that, which is part of people like my criticism
of them. But when you detain people, then that does
create a huge burden on the health system because you

(01:55:41):
actually have to attend to their well being, and so
to let that sort of drop in the priority list
is obviously that should be a huge, huge area of
concern for DHS and anyone who's overseeing these facilities.

Speaker 4 (01:55:57):
Who are absolutely crowded.

Speaker 3 (01:56:00):
But are they then redetaining people for the sake of
deportation at a rate that allows them to provide adequate
medical oversight a big question for them going forward.

Speaker 2 (01:56:10):
Yeah, let's turn to what's going on in the crypto world.
You know, favorite favorite topic of mine here, Emily, I
still am not over the fact that Trump launched and
then his wife launched these meme coins days.

Speaker 5 (01:56:25):
Before I mean literally like a day before he.

Speaker 3 (01:56:28):
Was inauguryan it is Hunter Biden's art on sterils.

Speaker 5 (01:56:32):
I mean Hunter Biden's art could not have imagined.

Speaker 4 (01:56:36):
I mean Hunter Biden's damn it, I should have done that.

Speaker 2 (01:56:38):
Yeah, I have I have a friend. I don't think
he'll mind me sharing the story. I have a friend
who was convicted of He ran for state Senate in
Missouri Congress in Missouri. Yeah, and he was convicted of
he was coordinating with the super pac. It was the
most penny anti shit you could possibly imagine. But the
government really wanted to wrot the book at him an

(01:57:00):
example of him, and the Karnahan's ers were very powerful
Missouri hated his guts and so anyway, he gets sent
to prison for a year and his fellow inmates were like, well,
what did you you know? How much money did you
get out of this kiving is like literally nothing? And
they're like, what's wrong with you? Like, if you're gonna
do something and end up here, you may as well
at least like really properly better. And that's how what

(01:57:20):
I keep thinking about with regard to the like the
Hunter Biden, the Nancy Pelosi insider trading, all this shit
looks like nothing compared to the billions that they're collecting
through this these meme coins, through their development properties around
the world. I mean, it really boggles the mind and
is in my mind one of the top examples of

(01:57:43):
how we just are not a functioning society.

Speaker 5 (01:57:45):
Agree the fact that this just happens and everyone just
moves on.

Speaker 4 (01:57:48):
This is like capitalism. You couldn't script it better.

Speaker 2 (01:57:51):
Yeah, this is this is has to be in stage
capitalism where it's just eaten everything.

Speaker 5 (01:57:57):
It's eaten everything.

Speaker 2 (01:57:58):
So in any case, but this article up on the screen,
all right, so we are learning more about who exactly
are the top Trump crypto buyers vying for dinner seats
since he's giving away these, you know, the top crypto
investors are going to get to have a special dinner
with him, which just again astonishing.

Speaker 4 (01:58:15):
More than half of the talks about maybe some maybe
some business.

Speaker 2 (01:58:19):
I'm sure just how much they appreciate the uh, you know,
his his crypto savvy. Anyway, most of the more than
half of the top holders here have used foreign exchanges
that say they ban US users, suggesting many of the
purchasers of these Trump crypto meme coins are based outside
the US. Buyers of the Trump token, a cryptocurrency the president,

(01:58:42):
began marketing two days before his inauguration, drove sales higher
in the past two weeks after its issuers announced an
unprecedented promotion, more than two hundred of the meme coin's
largest holders would be invited to attend a May twenty
second dinner with Trump It's Virginia Golf Club, or the
top twenty five would qualify for an exclusive reception for
him and what the meme coin's website discret as a
VIP tour.

Speaker 5 (01:59:01):
Now.

Speaker 2 (01:59:02):
An analysis by Bloomberg News shows that all but six
of the top twenty five holders who've registered on the
website's leader board used foreign exchanges that say they exclude
customers living in the US. More broadly, at least fifty
six percent of the leader board's top two hundred and
twenty holders used similar offshore exchanges. The present prevalence of
these likely foreign buyers echoes concerns that congressional Democrats have

(01:59:24):
expressed about the essex of marketing the coin with the
promise of presidential access. Raises questions about how attendees at
the promotional dinner, who are publicly identified only by three
or four letter usernames they've chosen will be vedit. So
the tld R here is that the Trump administered Trump himself,
not the administration, just Trump has opened up the most
brazen avenue of obvious corruption you could possibly imagine, where

(01:59:48):
if you are foreign government, foreign person, a company, a
US person, whoever, rich person who wants to get access
to and get a goodie from the Trump administration, which
has consolidated all this power within the singular person of
Donald Trump, what do you do. Well, perhaps you buy

(02:00:09):
millions and millions of dollars in Trump shit coin, which
personally benefits him, show him brag about how much you
pumped up his crypto coin, or you know, you get
to go to this fancy dinner and get to get
your time with him and plead your case.

Speaker 4 (02:00:25):
It is completely insane.

Speaker 2 (02:00:26):
It is insane. It is inane, absolutely insane. And again,
if we were anything approaching a functioning society, there is
no way that we would just permit this and go
on and that this would be okay. We are talking
about world historic levels of corruption endemic in this whole play, and.

Speaker 5 (02:00:46):
I just I don't even know what to say about it.

Speaker 2 (02:00:49):
It's so naked, it's so incredibly naked, and of course,
the idea that this administr oh, it's America first and
all for US interests, and how does that possibly comport
with allowing whoever around the world, but apparently a majority
of foreign buyers to outright bribe you through the mechanism

(02:01:11):
of this meeting coin.

Speaker 3 (02:01:13):
It's I mean, it's exactly what we said it would
be all along. It's a complete and again going back
to the Clinton Foundation, remember that the claims.

Speaker 4 (02:01:25):
Actually, I think people on the left and the.

Speaker 3 (02:01:26):
Right could probably agree, like left left and populist right,
populist left and right coul probably agree that what Hillary
Clinton was doing with the Clinton Foundation was completely insane percent.

Speaker 4 (02:01:35):
That is what Donald Trump is doing with this mean coin.

Speaker 3 (02:01:37):
Right, It's like a way for to pedal influence and
access with what is no with no transparency at all.
That's exactly what this is. So the concept and in
principle it's very much the same thing.

Speaker 2 (02:01:49):
Yeah, it's like country friends are just accelerated through the
magic of crypto.

Speaker 3 (02:01:56):
And it's always been again like this Donald Trump is
were naked, and it like they've never really been particularly
ashamed of this. I remember, you know, you would all
these events would be had at the Trump Hotel during
Trump one point zero, and you would see, I mean
this never ending door of people from like diplomats, foreign businesses,

(02:02:18):
American businesses, all mingling together literally in the lobby, which
is the actual the etymology of our phrase for lobbyists
is because people used to hang out in the lobby.

Speaker 4 (02:02:27):
I think it was of the Willard and talk to
like Ulysses us Grant. But that's what it is.

Speaker 3 (02:02:32):
It's it's getting access and influence to people in positions
of power. And yeah, that's always I mean Trump divested
from the Trump organization, I think in one point zero,
in two point zero, and it's like, why why even bother.
It's just like I don't even bother, Like just buy
the hotel back, you know, might as well just like
move the White House business to the hotel.

Speaker 4 (02:02:52):
Well.

Speaker 2 (02:02:52):
And I want to emphasize too, the way this relates
to the tariffs, because and this has always been my
contention with the that yes, there may be various people
in the administration have various goals, but one of the
primary goals for Trump is power and the ability because hey,
this is a great marketing scheme for his cryptos shit coin.
Because now everyone in the world has incentive to pay

(02:03:17):
the money, give you your millions, come to your dinner
and make the case for why they need this exemption.
They need this car bount, they need you know, this
particular goodie so that their business can survive and thrive
in the Trump terror regime.

Speaker 5 (02:03:32):
That which is precisely.

Speaker 2 (02:03:33):
Why the power to levy these terrors is supposed to
be with Congress to avoid exactly this, you know, sort
of direct favor trading and having to come and you know,
petition the king. That's precisely why those powers are supposed
to be with Congress. So it really fits together. I
do want to say, Democrats, don't get off the hook here.

(02:03:55):
Put E two be up on the screen. This is
our other David Dan work reporting here. So you got
really a lot of bipartisan support for crypto at this point,
and not just crypto, but like allowing crypto to do
whatever sort of scams and schemes that they want to.
And there was this bill that relates to a light
regulatory touch for what's called stable coins that looked like

(02:04:17):
it was on its way to sailing through because crypto
has massively invested in funding the campaigns both of Democrats
and Republicans and punishing any Democrats by the way, Katie
Porter being the primary example of this, who were crosswise
with them. So this bill looked like it was going
to sail through. Then all of this Trump mean coin
stuff really starts to bubble and Democrats start getting and uncomfortable. Okay, well,

(02:04:40):
do I really want to associate ourselves with this industry
when you see what Trump's doing, et cetera. So there
it became somewhat of a question whether this pro crypto
bill was going to be able to get through the Senate.
And so, basically, in a classic Schumer move, in fact
one quotes to this as being quote unquote Shtumer one

(02:05:02):
oh one, They're going to add an amendment to the
shitty crypto bill that allows Democrats to virtue signal, an
amendment that is definitely going to fail. It allows Democrats
to virtue signal about how much they disapprove of what
Trump is doing and allow them to be able to
message that like, oh, they were really trying to stand

(02:05:23):
up to Trump, when really they're just enabling the very
corruption that Trump is aggressively partaking in.

Speaker 5 (02:05:31):
So that's their that's their move.

Speaker 4 (02:05:33):
Yeah, great, I love them. Yeah, classic, things couldn't be better.

Speaker 5 (02:05:36):
Things could not be better?

Speaker 2 (02:05:37):
And last one here before we get to Emily's breakdown
of what's going on with punch Bowl. Jeff Stein great
reporting on another facet of extraordinary corruption within the Trump administration,
which is the use of put each re up on
the screen. Here, guys, the use of pushing starlink as
a tool in the tariff trade war. So Jeff sign says,

(02:06:00):
we've obtained internal cable showing how the US government is
pushing countries facing tariffs to clear the way from Musks Starlink.
State Department says it's good to encourage other countries to
adopt starlink. Others point to blurring of Musk's private and
government roles, and you know, in fairness, if Elon Musk
was not one of the most powerful people within this administration,

(02:06:21):
maybe it does make sense to you know. The Biden
administration also did some promoting of starlink as an alternative
to Chinese telecoms, Like, who owns the satellites and the
telecom infrastructure is very important personally, I don't want it
to be owned by any singular person, even if that
person does business in America. You know, or's American citizen,

(02:06:41):
as Elon Musk is.

Speaker 5 (02:06:43):
So let me just give you a little bit of the.

Speaker 2 (02:06:45):
Details here, because I think that is extraordinary, he says,
less than two weeks after President Trump announced fifty percent
tariffs on goods from the tiny African nation of Lesotho.
Something we talked about here.

Speaker 4 (02:06:53):
But I think you pronounced it incorrectly.

Speaker 3 (02:06:55):
I think this was the whole thing when remember Lesotho
was one of the everyone's like such a random country, right,
and then everyone's like, you're pronouncing everyone's pronouncing.

Speaker 5 (02:07:03):
Oh, so I don't say that the thh it's just
t okay.

Speaker 4 (02:07:06):
I'm sorry.

Speaker 2 (02:07:07):
I didn't take apology at Lesoto, the country's communications right
regulator held a meeting with representatives of Starlink after their
hit with the tariffs. The satellite business owned by Elon
Musk had been seeking access to customers in Lesotho, but
it was not until Trump unveiled the tariffs and called
for negotiations overtrade deals that leaders of the country of
roughly two million people awarded must firm the nation's first

(02:07:27):
ever satellite Internet service license, slated to last four ten years,
and it goes on to say They're far from the
only country. It has decided to suddenly take up Starlink
company reach distribution deals with two providers in India and
March has won at least partial accommodations with Somalia, Democratic
Republican of Congo, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Vietnam, although this is probably
not a comprehensive count, just so there you go, congratulations,

(02:07:49):
Elon Musk dose was not a complete and utter failure.
Tesla may be in the tank, but your Starlink business
is thriving well.

Speaker 3 (02:07:55):
This is one of the complicated things about Elon Musk
and it's with SpaceX and Starlink, and particular I think
they're the best examples. Is that starlink is an excellent product,
Like it is genuinely a significant innovation, and it's helpful,
and it like probably is the best candidate, like SpaceX,
and a lot of these different bidding processes and a

(02:08:16):
lot of these different negotiations, but you can never actually,
like we nobody will ever know whether Starlink or SpaceX
during the Trump administration were chosen because they were the
best candidates because or other Musk products, by the way,
get contracts because they were the best candidates because obviously
there's not a fair process period. The illusion of a

(02:08:36):
conflict is a conflict of interest. Anyone who studies conflicts
of interest knows that that's tell you just the appearance
of a conflict in and of itself is undue influence.

Speaker 4 (02:08:45):
And so that is a problem with having Musk and
the meme coin.

Speaker 3 (02:08:51):
Just be hovering over every policy decision that the Trump
administration is making foreign and domestic, is you can never
disentangle the influence, that's right, that their personal interest has
in all this. And I think that's probably why the
meme coin, and I think even like Starlink, is part
of the background of our conversations, not our but like

(02:09:13):
the national conversation about Trump.

Speaker 4 (02:09:14):
And Musk, because it's never in the foreground.

Speaker 3 (02:09:18):
I mean not often, although Jeff found a great example here,
but it is always it's part of the landscape. It
is a permanent fixture, and you can never go back.
You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. When
you have Musk not divesting, you have Trump with the
meme coin coin. It just it adds a permanent question mark.
And that's what banana republics like, That's what happens in

(02:09:38):
Banana republics. You have just these permanent question marks and
you can't always prove things A plus B.

Speaker 4 (02:09:44):
You can't do you can't do it in every case.
But that's the problem in and of itself.

Speaker 2 (02:09:48):
Yeah, and sometimes it does seem actually quite clear in
this administration what is going on. Last thing I'll say,
with regardless Starlink, just as a broader concern is you know,
in the early days that Ukraine War, elon Mus comes
in and so I'm going to provide access starlink access
to the Ukrainians in their fight against Russia. And starlink

(02:10:11):
has been extremely important for comms on the front lines
in Ukraine.

Speaker 5 (02:10:16):
And then there were certain.

Speaker 2 (02:10:18):
Things that Zelenski did that he didn't like, and then
he decided to pull access, I think in crime or whatever.
Whether or not you support the decisions he made in
that instance, it was very troubling to realize this man
is basically doing foreign policy as like a private businessman.

Speaker 5 (02:10:31):
And that's just to underscore I remember his meeting with India.

Speaker 2 (02:10:34):
Yes, absolutely, yeah, And that's just to underscore how important
these this infrastructure is, how significant it is to our
country to foreign policy. And you know, the fact that
one business with the wealthiest man on the planet has
so much control over it. I think everyone should be

(02:10:55):
really uncomfortable with that to start with. And when you
layer on top of that, the level power he has
within the Trump administration without having been elected, just you know,
installed in there in this role has always been really
really deeply troubling to be and continues to be so.
And this is the case in point of why this
is really problematic in terms of, you know, our country

(02:11:17):
and representing the best interests of Americans versus the best
interests of Elon Musk.

Speaker 3 (02:11:24):
It just makes me so mad because Musk, you know,
leads this argument against George Soros's influence over the American government,
and Trump will talk about the same thing too, And
it's just frustrating because it exploits the genuine concerns of
a lot of Americans who feel like they get the
short shrift and like they get left behind in this
economy that's designed for political elites and a spoil system

(02:11:45):
that's designed to benefit elites over them, and they're exploiting
that in ways that's like give me a break, give
me a break, and entirely predictable, not at all surprising,
and Trump has always been much more open about it.
I think that's what's even more grading about Elon Musk
because he still sort of claims the moral.

Speaker 4 (02:12:03):
High ground in no way that Donald Trump yeah knows
what he can't. Yeah, and he almost just doesn't care.

Speaker 3 (02:12:08):
He's a he's like a he's Roy Cone, right, like
he's a mob boss and he kind of rebels in that.
But Elon Musk really like has an Arab sanctimony about
him when he talks about these things, and I mean,
he just isn't even trying to look like he's not
part of it.

Speaker 2 (02:12:24):
George Soros could never dream of the level of power
and influence that Elon Musk has it and the government
at this point. Yeah, all right, Emily, what are you
taking a look at?

Speaker 3 (02:12:32):
Okay, Well, we have a little exclusive here at Breaking
Points this morning punch Bowl News, the media startup launched
by three Politico veterans back in twenty twenty one.

Speaker 4 (02:12:41):
We have a new document that.

Speaker 3 (02:12:42):
Reveals new details of how that company is supporting its
journalism by courting deep pocketed corporations obtained by US at
Breaking Points. The document, which is offering twenty twenty five
partnership opportunities is hardly an aberration here in DC. We're
outlets from Axios to Politico take major cash from corporate sponsors,

(02:13:02):
hoping to influence coverage and reach beltweigh readers.

Speaker 4 (02:13:05):
The leaked punch.

Speaker 3 (02:13:06):
Bowl deck, though, is rich with specific details about their
business model, including a quote two hundred and ten thousand
dollars going rate for sponsorship of punch Bowl's flagship daily
newsletter two hundred and ten thousand dollars ahead of publication.
A spokesperson at punch Bowl punch Bowl News told us
at Breaking Points that a chart reflecting those numbers from

(02:13:27):
the leaked document quote is an outdated price sheet that
no longer reflects accurate data about punch Bowl News. They added, quote,
we are proud to be a growing, profitable media startup
that employs nearly forty people.

Speaker 4 (02:13:40):
So the deck that we got our hands on touts a.

Speaker 3 (02:13:42):
Quote from house speaker Mike Johnson on March eleventh, saying
he reads all of punch Bowls newsletters, indicating that the
deck is recent to at least the spring. And actually
we verified that punch Bowl was passing the deck along
just within the last week. So in its pitch to
potential sponsors, unch Bowl claims that the newsletter reaches two

(02:14:02):
hundred and ten thousand inboxes every morning with a forty
to fifty percent open rate. The outlet says the midday
and PM editions of that newsletter reached sixty six hundred
inboxes with an open rate of fifty five to sixty
five percent. Punch Bowl also bragged about internal polling that
found quote k Street leaders resoundingly pointed to us, invoking,

(02:14:23):
of course, lobbyists, when asked about the newsletter, they would
characterize as the most important.

Speaker 4 (02:14:28):
Part of their media diet.

Speaker 3 (02:14:30):
What a pitch to sponsor the site for a week,
during which punch Bowl claims to get sixty five thousand impressions.
The rate is thirty thousand dollars. Custom content will run
sponsors of cool two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Summits
and editorial events featuring two lawmakers go for three hundred
and fifty five thousand dollars, which then drops to three
hundred and twenty five thousand for editorial events that feature
a single lawmaker.

Speaker 4 (02:14:51):
Great deal.

Speaker 3 (02:14:51):
Punchbowl describes its audience as being made up of quote
elite influencers, including one hundred percent of Senate and House
offices and committees, with a fifty fifty split between Republicans
and Democrats, ninety seven percent Fortune, one hundred saturation, one
hundred percent executive departments, and eleven offices in the White House. Indeed,
when Caroline Levitt hosted punch Bowl in the White House's

(02:15:13):
new media seat and in April twenty ninth briefing, she said, quote,
it is the first newsletter that Capitol Hill and the
White House reads every morning, in the middle of the.

Speaker 4 (02:15:22):
Day and throughout the evening.

Speaker 3 (02:15:24):
Amusingly enough, as it seeks to appeal to corporate sponsors
in the Trump two point zero administration, punch Bowl claims
that it's quote not a legacy media organization, which allows
us to be more nimble, more authentic, and more trusted
by our core readership similar Beltway outlets. You probably remember,
this came under fire from the Trump administration earlier this year.
In February, Team Trump ordered quote the General Services Administration

(02:15:46):
to terminate every single media contract expensed by the agency.
We knew that, according to an email that was obtained
by Axios, which directed the GSA to quote poll all
contracts for Politico, BBC, E and E, which is.

Speaker 4 (02:15:58):
A political newsletter, and Bloomberg.

Speaker 3 (02:16:01):
So at the time, Levitt said, quote, I can confirm
that the more than eight million taxpayer dollars that have
gone to essentially subsidizing subscriptions to Politico on the American
taxpayer's dime.

Speaker 4 (02:16:10):
Will no longer be happening now.

Speaker 3 (02:16:11):
Just last week, if you read Political Playbook, you probably
saw it was sponsored the entire week by Planned Parenthood,
perhaps as a consequence of the outlet's rocky relationship with
the current government. Gotta find more money somewhere asked by
Breaking Points, though, whether any of the subscriptions punch Bowl
may have from cabinet agencies and executive branch offices violate
any instructions regarding media subscriptions, a White House official confirmed

(02:16:34):
to US yesterday quote three subscriptions terminated, two at SBA
Small Business and one at RRB as part of a
broader effort to eliminate unnecessary media subscriptions. Little news there
in the deck. Punchbowl tout's past partnerships on custom content
with Google, Amazon, Walmart, and Defense Congloberate RTX quote Google
and punch Bowl news partner together in twenty twenty one

(02:16:56):
through twenty twenty four on a sustained messaging campaigns, letters,
custom products, and events supporting its work focused on small
businesses and local economies that outlet outlet boasts. Now, this
reflection on the outlet's quote support for Google's work is,
of course not easily reconciled with punch Bowl's repeated claim
in the deck and elsewhere to present quote unbiased coverage. Well,

(02:17:18):
the company may believe it's cover just free from partisan bias,
it can't seriously claim to be free from ideological biases
given that its corporate benefactors are deeply ideological entities buying
influence to advance those causes. And the deck punchboll sells
its custom quote the future of collaborations as actually including
quote editorial features exploring different areas of a mutually agreed

(02:17:40):
upon topic, and a podcast series. So in other words,
it is selling influence over specific editorial decisions to major corporations.
And this is exactly what corporate funded news outlets deny doing,
often arguing they do not allow advertisers or sponsors to
influence covers. We'll take your money, but we're going to
do what we want that's the line you. Heretually includes

(02:18:00):
a Venn diagram illustrating the quote custom product as the
overlap between the interests.

Speaker 4 (02:18:05):
Of your brand described as a quote true partner and
the publication I mean it's amazing.

Speaker 3 (02:18:10):
Punchball also uses a document to pitch social events, which
range in price from one hundred thousand dollars to two
hundred and.

Speaker 4 (02:18:16):
Seventy five thousand dollars.

Speaker 3 (02:18:17):
Quote a social gathering with Punchbowl News community members exposes
sponsor brands to Washington's elite insiders. The deck says, adding quote,
punch Bowl News will work to bring together a high
level audience of DC insiders from across industries and the
public and private sectors. Throughout the deck, Punchball highlights its
previous partnerships with McKenzie, Blackrock and Goldman Sachs. One slide,
This is amazing practically resembles like a NASCAR vehicle. It

(02:18:41):
has the logos of thirty seven major corporate quote partners,
from massive pharmaceutical companies to defense contractors to oil and
gas heavyweys. If you're listening to this and not watch
it watching it, go to YouTube and look at the video,
because just seeing those logos in one place on a
news outlet's pitch deck is incredible. It's again worth emphasizing
know that punch Bowl is not alone and broker in

(02:19:02):
these financial relationships or using them to get more business
from the Fortune five hundred world. The leaked deck is
just a glimpse into the ordinary Beltway corruption of these outlets,
where they pedal access to corporations and lobbyists, and they
deserve very little credibility when repeatedly insisting that those critical
sources of cash do not at all influence editorial decisions.

(02:19:22):
It was plain of day, Actually plane is day in
this deck that they do as both the journalists and
their corporate sponsors know. That's kind of the whole point, Crystal.
When we were flipping through this deck, we were having
a good time.

Speaker 5 (02:19:36):
Yeah, I mean I said to you.

Speaker 2 (02:19:37):
I was like, here, we are appealing to the unwashed
masses like suckers, when all we need is to be
like Mike Johnson watches.

Speaker 4 (02:19:43):
Breaking Points sponsors by Walmart.

Speaker 2 (02:19:45):
Yeah, I mean it's but yeah, this this is not
a unique model to punch Bowl whatsoever. Political pro operates
and these there's other like trade pubs where basically you know,
they gather information that is very valuable to one specific
industry and then expect those members of that industry toppony

(02:20:05):
up very significant sums for those types of subscriptions. But
the DC newsletter tip sheet business is so incredibly lucrative,
and then you expect.

Speaker 4 (02:20:17):
So lucrative two hundred and ten thousand dollars a week.

Speaker 2 (02:20:19):
And they say, like almost they have almost forty staff
members and their overhead is very low. And then to
be raking in these kinds of you know, oh, you're
going to pay three hundred and fifty thousand dollars to
have some one day event with two lawmakers or whatever.

Speaker 4 (02:20:32):
Google and Goldman have done it.

Speaker 2 (02:20:34):
It exposes the very corrupt dealings between corporate America, the media,
and these members of Congress who are also showing up
at these events and participating in them.

Speaker 3 (02:20:45):
Every consumer of the news knows that corporations, and any
person with common sense knows that corporations want good press
and they want good access in Washington.

Speaker 4 (02:20:54):
Journalists have absolutely no right to give it to them.
I mean, it's insane.

Speaker 3 (02:21:00):
They have no reason to just give it to them, unless,
of course, it's you know, genuine and vetted and reported
out they have no reason to give corporations this access
and good press, which they do. You see it again,
like this has been going on for years. They will
always embed a nice little ad when you're scrolling. It's
not just the bar at the top that says punch

(02:21:20):
Bowl am brought to you by Goldman sax or McKinsey
or whatever. Yeah, has that, But then it usually has
a little blurb that's the skies to look like news
in the middle of it, and most people just scroll past.

Speaker 4 (02:21:29):
But at the same time, it's like, give me right.

Speaker 3 (02:21:33):
Yeah they say in it, because usually they'll say that's
not editorial content, that's an ad, but they say in
this deck, the punchbol deck.

Speaker 4 (02:21:40):
This is one of my big takeaways from it.

Speaker 3 (02:21:41):
They say, we will do events on a mutually agreed
upon topic, or we'll do custom content on a mutually
agreed upon topic, and we will give you podcasts for
It's those are editorial decisions that you're farming out.

Speaker 4 (02:21:52):
That's right, you're selling them.

Speaker 2 (02:21:53):
Yeah, I mean you can't look even if you are
the most you know, the most honest human being being,
trying to maintain your integrity. When you structure a system
where you are financially rewarded for towing a certain ideological
line or reporting something and not reporting something else.

Speaker 5 (02:22:12):
Human beings are subject to those incentives.

Speaker 2 (02:22:14):
They can talk themselves into it and why it's the
right choice, and why it's noble, and why actually they
really do believe in going in that direction. So that's
why it's so important to understand the incentives of your
business and the way that you're structuring, which is of
course something that we thought about very intentionally here. But
you know, one of the things that's ironic to me
is in Trump two point zero they're trying to brand

(02:22:34):
themselves is like we're new media. We're not like that,
like the media that's like biased against it. We're totally different.
And you know, in a sense, this is the danger
of the new media era because those old boundaries that
are in place. Look, I worked at a cable news network.
The advertising department is kept totally separate. When I was on,

(02:22:56):
you know, hosting a show, I had no idea what
commercials were going on in the break I was involved
in that. I didn't talk to corporate sponsors. I wasn't
hosting events for a pharma or whatever, getting along, you know,
there was none of that. And when you break down
those traditional norms and boundaries that have existed, one of
the things you open the door to is just more brazen,

(02:23:18):
outright corruption because it is lucrative and it does allow
them to be quote unquote more nimble in servicing Google
or you know whoever is willing to pay the two
hundred and fifty thousand dollars price tag. So that's been
one of the things that has been troubling to me,
frankly about the new media era is that oftentimes it

(02:23:38):
doesn't actually lead to more honesty and more independence. It
leads to more brazen, more direct ties to whatever interest
it may be. And you know that's certainly the case
here with what we can see in this in this
pitch deck.

Speaker 3 (02:23:53):
You know, it's also like not the same as for example,
Rogan selling express vps right, Like, these are massive corporations
with significant public interest. I mean, it's like it's been
political interest. And I always love when the whether it's
Politico or Axios, their line is we are not this
does not this is a firewall. It doesn't influence our

(02:24:15):
editorial decisions whatsoever. But of course if that was true,
these companies would not pay them. They would absolutely not
pay them if that were true. And it's also always
on the front of your mind. If Meta is giving
you money for your newsletter, you're very conscious of that.
And as a writer, you know because it's filed, like
it's when you file, you then see it in your

(02:24:37):
publication or you see it in the commercial break whatever.
They know they get special access. They know that they
get warmer sentiments from you. The other point I want
to make, Crystal is that is so funny to say
they're unbiased, right, because they genuinely believe that, they really
truly think that they don't have a bias R or D,
and that means that they're quote unquote unbiased. But what

(02:24:57):
they are is biased towards towards the ideology of corporate influence.

Speaker 5 (02:25:02):
That's right, like this, like that's ideological.

Speaker 4 (02:25:04):
That is a bias in and of itself.

Speaker 3 (02:25:05):
Yeah, we're biased against that, and we're open about that,
Like we don't just pretend to be like neutral. We
are very against corporate influence. Yes, and so that's you
have to recognize. It's just like brain did not to
understand that that's a bias.

Speaker 2 (02:25:20):
That's such a great point because to them. It's just
like it's just the air that they breathe. Just this
is the default, and so they don't recognize you're supposed
to be adversaries. What an extorary bias it is and
one that exists, yes, in both parties, so you can
be very highpartisans but also very biased in the direction
of corporations should get whatever they want.

Speaker 4 (02:25:42):
Two final things.

Speaker 3 (02:25:44):
White House confirmation that Punchable subscriptions were canceled quite interesting
because that was you might remember when the USAID money
was being tracked by all of the right wing sleuths
on x Politico got hit pretty hard. A lot of
unsubscribes from government offices where you get premium subscriptions to
punch Ball that gives information that you pay a ton

(02:26:04):
of money for the access to. So it looks like
the White House, I don't know when that happened, can
follow up with them on that, but looks like they
had a few offices unsubscribe to punch Bowl. I'm not
sure if that was the results of our reporting or
if it happened before, but either way, that's that's also happened.
And then secondly, punch Bowl giving us a comment that

(02:26:26):
this is out of date. You know that at best
it would be out of date, you know, within a
week or so.

Speaker 5 (02:26:33):
That's technically out of date.

Speaker 4 (02:26:35):
Sure.

Speaker 5 (02:26:35):
I used to say.

Speaker 2 (02:26:36):
The other thing that I noticed is like their numbers
are pretty small, you know, but they don't need them
to be big as long as there is long as
the power players are reading their publication, small group of people,
that's all it takes.

Speaker 4 (02:26:50):
And small group of people with a lot of money.

Speaker 5 (02:26:52):
Yeah, that's it. That's it exactly.

Speaker 2 (02:26:54):
And I think Ryan made this point when we were
talking about like the USAID political pro subscriptions.

Speaker 5 (02:26:58):
I think he was the one that made the point
of life.

Speaker 2 (02:27:01):
Those publications, like the trade pubs in particular, that go
deep in different industries where there's not a widespread news interest.
But you know, if you're in this industry, like you
need to of like let's say you're in the trucking industry,
logistics industry, you need to know like what's going on
and what's going on in.

Speaker 5 (02:27:14):
Capitol hell, et cetera.

Speaker 2 (02:27:15):
And so it does create a genuine need for that
information that's important for lawmakers and important for those industries
to understand what is going on. So probably the only
answer to that really is like public funding of those
type that type of information being created.

Speaker 5 (02:27:33):
Otherwise it is going to be just like.

Speaker 2 (02:27:35):
The politicos or the punch bowls or whatever the world
that you know capitalize on the need for that, and
the extraordinary benefit to a small handful of people that
you know, justifies huge, huge sums of money being spent.

Speaker 4 (02:27:47):
Fun little uh, fun little documentary.

Speaker 5 (02:27:49):
Yeah, nice work on.

Speaker 4 (02:27:53):
Lots of fun too. I mean I did almost the
whole week. I think maybe I did do.

Speaker 2 (02:27:57):
Yeah, you were a rock star this week. Thank you well,
thank you for having all of us have lets of
things going on our lives.

Speaker 4 (02:28:02):
It's it's crazy. Yeah, across the board.

Speaker 5 (02:28:04):
Appreciate you being able to jump in.

Speaker 2 (02:28:07):
And I heard you and Ryan unilaterally decide that we're
ditching the counterpoints. This is actually something we've been talking
about because yeah, because it is like, you know, the
original ideas you and Ryan show like it would be
you know, it'd be different and be your own brand
and whatever. But increasingly like we're all just we're doing

(02:28:28):
a thing here, you know, and it's everybody's you know,
it's very egalitarian. We're all all on and even footing here.
There's no counterpoints and breaking points separations. So I think
we are very much in agreement that we should move
beyond these artificial borders, artificial arbitar arbitrarily drawn on the

(02:28:48):
show schedule.

Speaker 3 (02:28:49):
More to come in that space. I think, yeah, people,
we'll be around, We will be around. Finally, Chris, I
just want to make this point. We were talking about
Livia earlier and I mentioned I was looking up at
Fara dot gov. Is there any registered lobbyists. Indeed, there
are registered lobbyists and I have for Africa Confidential actually
notice one of these filings back in November twenty twenty three,
and this is still an active registration if you go

(02:29:09):
to Fara dot gov. Ibrows and raised in Washington, DC
by the lobbying contract filed in October between the Libyan
House of Representatives now based in Bengazi and K Street
outfit Vogel Group. It's a Republican led biorepublican which could
benefit the political allies of Libyan National Army leader General
Khalifa Haftar.

Speaker 4 (02:29:26):
The contract is curious and that it is.

Speaker 3 (02:29:27):
Signed between CEO Alex Vogel, a former Republican staffer, and
Josephi schmidz On behalf of the Libyan Parliament. Thousy Alnuari,
the ambitious Deputy Speaker of the Assembly, is named as
the principle. So to the point that farophiling. Actually, if
you read it, you have to say what your work
is going to look like. You have to say, like roughly,

(02:29:48):
what it's going to look like. And of course it's
enumerated here Government affairs and media consulting, including but not
limited to providing introductions and to engaging with federal government
bodies and entities, think tank trades and other public policy groups.

Speaker 4 (02:30:01):
Blah blah blah goes.

Speaker 3 (02:30:02):
On to say that, so we'll look into it and
try to get answers to see if that had anything
to do with the attempted flight. Yeah, but we were
talking in the segment about how those introductions between lobbyists
are often how that happens, and come to find out,
we see there is a lot being contract that is
specifically saying they're getting paid for introduction.

Speaker 4 (02:30:19):
So we will try to put those dots.

Speaker 2 (02:30:20):
The sun was here last week, yeah, and then a
flight was put on the schedule to shift my grids
s Olivia.

Speaker 3 (02:30:27):
So it could be nothing, I mean like it genuinely
could be nothing. We're just you know, noting this, but
we will look for answers.

Speaker 5 (02:30:33):
A lot of journalisming this morning, Emily.

Speaker 2 (02:30:35):
A lot of googling, nice Mark, all right, last saying,
last thing, last thing.

Speaker 5 (02:30:40):
We'll be here for the Friday show. Ryan and me. Definitely.

Speaker 2 (02:30:42):
You, I think have some other things going on, so
we'll see if you're able to drop in or not.
In any case, thank you guys Breakingpoints dot com. For
those of you who are premium subscribers, we super appreciate it.
You have enabled the expansion and you know it's been
I think really important in Trump two point zero to
be able to have that extra day and give you
coverage Monday Friday, So thank you for that. If you're
not a member yet, if you're able to sign up

(02:31:03):
as a premium member, we're going to have more news
to come with regard to the premium subscription and membership.
But I just want to say thank you to all
of you guys, and if you are not a premium subscriber,
like share, subscribe, share the videos, give us the good
rating on the podcast, all that good stuff. It really
does help a lot. Thank you, guys, Love you, see
you back here tomorrow,

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