6/3/25: China Popularity Soars, Zohran Surges In NYC, Palantir Surveillance, Biden Spox Admits Lies

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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Speaker 2 (00:33):
Good morning, everybody, Welcome to Breaking Points, where we have
an extra special show plan because we have celebrity guest
host Marshall Coslav, longtime, longtime front of the show and
friend also of Sager, sitting in this morning.

Speaker 3 (00:46):
Great to see Marshall.

Speaker 4 (00:47):
Yeah, I'm excited to be here and moved out to Texas.
I had a kid, I have a mustache, so everything
is different. Everything has changed, and I'm exciting back on
the show.

Speaker 3 (00:56):
Yeah, it's going to be a lot of fun.

Speaker 2 (00:58):
So Marshall, if you guys don't know post the Realignment,
he also is in deep in the Abundance world. So
I'm really excited to talk to you about some of
that because I've been listening. I told you to your
episodes on Abundance on the Realignment. It has actually helped
me much better to understand what's going on inside the
movement and what it's all about. So you can be
a little bit of our of our guide through abundance

(01:20):
World today, which I'm excited about. In addition, before I
forget guys announced this yesterday, we brought back the monthly subscription,
which I'm super excited about. I think it comes at
a really timely moment when you know, economics are a
little uncertain. That's actually what we're starting the show with today,
and we are doing a free monthly trial right now.
So if you want to try out being a premium

(01:42):
Breaking Point subscriber, go to Breakingpoints dot com. The promo
is BP free, so you can get that monthly trial subscription.
All right, So here's what is in the show today
is go ahead and put the show bar up so
I can read it and not have to use my memory,
which is a little bit suspect. We're going to talk
about the latest with regard to Tariff's back and forth
with China. We've got the continued fallout from that extraordinary

(02:04):
Ukraine drone attack. Wanted to get Marshall's take on that
in particular, and some reaction from Steve Bannon that was
kind of interesting.

Speaker 3 (02:11):
We're going to dig into.

Speaker 2 (02:12):
That New York City mayoral race which is tightening between
Andrew Cuomo and Zoron Mamdani. A lot of really interesting
dynamics there. I think that will lead us into a
great discussion imiking forward to on abundance, what it is,
what it isn't, how the left should really be thinking
about it. And then we're going to thank Marshall first time,
let him go about his day, and Ken Clippenstein is
going to join to break down what's going on with Palentier.

(02:33):
Looks like the Trump administration is trying to assemble a
mass database of all of the information that they have
on every single American. Yes, you should be terrified about that.
I certainly am so. Ken is going to talk about that,
and he is also going to talk about Matthew Miller,
former State Department spokesperson under Joe Biden, basically admitting that
he was lying the entire time he was at the

(02:54):
podium and asserting that Israel had committed no war crimes.
So definitely want to look at that. So, Marshall, before
we jump into the news, a lot of rising and
breaking points. Fans know you already. You've undergone as all
of us have, I think, somewhat of a political evolution
over the years since you started being a guest on

(03:16):
the show. So before we jump in, why don't you
just sort of like set up for everybody who you.

Speaker 3 (03:20):
Are, where you were, where you.

Speaker 2 (03:22):
Are now, and kind of your general view of politics
in this moment.

Speaker 4 (03:26):
Yeah, totally. So I think for a lot of people
with the twenty sixteen election was really huge, as it
should have been. If you serve a person who could
see both like Trump and Bernie, If you just were
comfortable with your perspectives and thoughts and evaluations of the
world before that and that did not at all change
by twenty sixteen, then I think there was probably something
wrong with you. So Sager and I have known each

(03:46):
other forever, so we started a podcast called The Realignment,
and the Realignment was really rooted in responding to this
twenty sixteen moment from both the right and the left,
and I think as someone who's sort of contrarian by nature,
I'm from like the center left Portland suburbs. I was
alway attracted to the right, especially in the twenty tens
after the twenty twelve election, where everything was up for

(04:06):
grabs right like Mitt Romney loses to Obama, you have
gay marriage passing at the Supreme Court. It seemed like
we were moving in one direction as a country, in
a more progressive direction by twenty fifty. So the question
of how would the right respond to that moment, I
think was genuinely the most fascinating question of the time.
Then that really got me into those spaces. I covered

(04:26):
a lot of those topics. The Realignment's first guest was
JD Vance before he was well. I met JD before
he was famous, But our first guest after JD was
a little more famous was JD on the show. So
covering that space was huge. After twenty twenty though, I
think obviously what kind of happened with everything from January
sixth to sort of COVID I think made pretty clear

(04:47):
that the I think most hopeful version of that right
populist project wasn't going to end well for anyone. It
wasn't going to lead to like a stronger United America,
was just leading to more division and the lack of
actual certainty on these questions. I started getting more interested
in the left and frankly started going back to my roots.
So just in the same way that like twenty thirteen
was like this big error where like the central questions were,

(05:09):
how would the right respond to how the twenty twelve
election really shattered their story? The question right now is
how is the center left? How is the center, how
is the center right? And how does the further parts
of the left I think you represent, really well, how
are they going to respond to that moment? So I
think my politics have naturally drifted towards where the big
questions are interesting.

Speaker 2 (05:27):
Okay, excellent, Well, with that being said, let's go ahead
and jump into some of what is going on with
the Trump administration that I'm anxious to get Marshall's thoughts on.
In particular, Let's go and put this up on the screen,
so we have an update on how they are thinking.

Speaker 3 (05:41):
About the tariff regime.

Speaker 2 (05:43):
And you will recall that there was a series of
court decisions that were impactful here, So you had one court,
the Court of International Trade, that came in and said, okay,
you can't actually use this particular provision that you're using.
You have vastly exceeded your authority. You can't do that
to levy the Liberation Day tariffs. Another appeals court came
in and said, well, you can do it for now

(06:04):
while this is playing out in court. So the big
question has been how is the Trump administration going to respond.
Are they basically going to take the out and be like, oh,
well we tried and we're just going to move on now.
And effectively, all the indications are that they are not
going to go in that direction.

Speaker 3 (06:19):
So that terror sheet that was up.

Speaker 2 (06:20):
On the screen indicates that they want to have countries
provide their quote unquote best offer on trade negotiations by Wednesday,
as in tomorrow, as officials seek to accelerate talks with
multiple partners ahead of a self imposed deadline in just
five weeks, according to a draft letter to negotiating partners
seen by Reuters. So effectively they're saying that on that

(06:41):
you know, the Liberation Day, which the tariffs went into
effect on April ninth, they're giving them a deadline till
July eighth, and then if there isn't some sort of
deal into place, Trump is going to levy whatever teriffs
he decides to levy. A bunch of administration officials, including
Howard Lutnik, have been asked about the court real ruling
and if it makes a difference in terms of how

(07:03):
they go about this, and effectively they're all saying, no,
we're going to do what we want regardless of what
the courts say, and we'll figure out some other provision
to use. If it isn't a EPO, which was the
original provision, let's go ahead and take a listen to that.

Speaker 5 (07:14):
Congress gives the president under this AEPA authority the ability
to take on other countries who are creating a national emergency.
And the one point two trillion dollar trade deficit and
all the underlying implications of that is a national emergency.
It's gutting our manufacturing base. The President takes that on

(07:37):
and Congress lets him do it, specifically, does not vote
to take it away, calls a vote, and says he
can keep it.

Speaker 6 (07:45):
So what's going to happen is we're going to take
that up to higher courts.

Speaker 5 (07:48):
The President's going to win like he always does. But
rest assured tariffs are not going the way. He has
so many other authorities that even in the weird and
unusual circums stance where this was taken away, we.

Speaker 6 (08:02):
Just bring on another or another or another.

Speaker 5 (08:05):
Congress has given this authority to the president and he's.

Speaker 6 (08:08):
Going to use it.

Speaker 2 (08:09):
And Marshall, my suspicion is that I and others who
were thinking that maybe the Iepacurt ruling would be like
an excuse with the Trump administration and back off of this,
we're probably mistaken, and they probably are going to just
figure out some other way to accomplish this. Because ultimately,
I'm curious this is I want to know your thoughts
on what really is going on here. I think Trump
loves the tariffs because it consolids a lot of power

(08:30):
in his hands, and I don't think that he is
going to let go of that easily.

Speaker 4 (08:34):
I think it's not just the fact that he loves
the power and using the executive branch over Congress. I
think it's that if there are I'd say there are
probably two things we could reasonably say Trump one hundred
and twenty percent believes, Yeah, it's tariffs and immigration We
should also understand that because Trump had a first term
an interoperation between his first and second term. I think
he's coming into this administration and they've made very clear

(08:55):
that this is their priority. They see terroffs and immigrations
as their unfinished business that they did not get done. Therefore,
they are going to push as hard as they can
on this issue. That's just like the number one thing here.
If you don't understand that Trump just truly believes in
this more than almost anything else, you're going to sort
of miss the fact that they're going to keep pushing forward.

Speaker 2 (09:13):
And to be honest with you, I actually think he
believes in tariffs more than he I think immigration is
more a means to an end for him because even
at times they're, you know, like he told all in guys,
the thing about we're going to staple a green card
to every you know, student who graduates, you know, would practice,
his administrations are obviously very hardline anti immigrant, and I
think he's basically outsourced that portfolio to Steven Miller, who

(09:37):
is a psycho and a white nationalist and is you know,
going full force with the anti immigrant program that he
wants to. But it seems like, the part of the
agenda that Trump has really taken the most interest in
and actually asserted himself in is the tariffs. And so
what is your view, Marshal of you know, the tariff program,
of the possibilities for do you see any upside here?

(09:59):
You know, what is your kind of like broad view
of what's going on and what the impact could be economically?

Speaker 4 (10:04):
Yeah. No, So right before the election, when Sager and
I were talking about this on the realignment, we really
focus on the fact that if we want to understand
the story of the modern American presidency, it's that when
you come into your second term or even in your
first term of Biden, presidents are going to just have
like a theory of the case. And in two thousand
and five, after George W. Bush won, his big theory

(10:24):
of the case was I won, I have my mandate,
I won the popular vote. This time, I'm going to
do a social security of form, even though the voter
base wasn't actually there in this case. And you see this,
you know, leading up to the you know, twenty twenty
four election, Trump's theory of the case was, once again,
I'm coming back. I'm going to finish the job. And
this has been something I've talked about since in the
nineteen eighties when we were talking about Japan and other

(10:45):
East Asian countries. I am going to past tariffs. I'm
going to reindustrialize America by taking that specific route that
has always been his sort of approach. And the big
problem with these like mandate theories and these big like
this is my big agenda project that I come in,
is that mandate or that idea isn't actually sinc of
what the American people are failing. You're going to run
into a huge issue. The huge issue they ran into

(11:08):
is that if there's one lesson and we'll talk about
this during the Zoran segment, if there's one lesson that
we should take from the twenty twenty four election, it's
that pretty much the main thing Americans care about is
how unaffordable everything is right now, every single level. And
it's easy for people in the Trump administration just to say, like, oh,
you know these cheap goods and do you need thirty
dollars You just have two dollars. If we look at

(11:29):
what's happened in America over the past fifty years, like education, healthcare, housing,
in those sectors, everything has gotten way, way, way, way
more expensive. The one thing we've actually kind of kept
relatively cheap at the cost of manufacturing, at the cost
of like in many ways, like our domestic politics and
domestic economy have just been these consumer goods. So coming

(11:49):
out of the COVID supply shock, coming out of Biden
ignoring this issue, we needed to pay attention to it.
Having your theory of the case be I'm going to
launch a massive trade war within the first three months
without doing the long term planning, without getting the industrial
policy together, without going to companies and businesses, even some
of the small businesses. I'm sure you saw a lot
of those small business owners who v whatever for Trump's

(12:10):
saying wait a second, like I wasn't ready for this.
I needed time to prepare for this. And what's really
frustrating and crazy about the whole program here is that
even if you buy Trump's case for tariffs, this is
just not the way you would actually do this. The
starts and stops ninety days. Now we're extending ninety days. Actually, no,
We're going to get this other deal. Tariffs and reindustrialization

(12:31):
and bringing manufacturing jobs back to this country is a
medium term project. Starting a new factory, rejigging your supply chains.
That is so complicated in such a heavy lift for small, medium,
and large businesses that you have to have a consistent
policy so they can make investment decisions based off of it.
If you and I we're going to launch a factory
in Ohio, we would not launch a factory based on

(12:53):
this current dynamic because we could have an entire situation
where if you'd premised your reindustrialization plans on what was
happening in February, March, in April, you could be totally
screwed right now, yeah, because wow, are those tariffs going
to be there? Is it going to make sense? Is
he going to get a big deal? And the last
part of here too is that, in many ways, the
big problem of his trade policies they're doing so many
different things at once. So on the one hand, the

(13:14):
tariffs could serve as a new form of revenue. They
could lead to like a income tax decreased. But if
we're actually decreasing the income tax and we're actually like
making money from this, then it's not going to reindustrialize
the country right right, So it doesn't really make sense.
And you really needed a different version of this administration
that actually took those three months to say we're doing

(13:34):
these five things. They make sense for this reason, and
we're going to stay strong on it.

Speaker 3 (13:38):
And here's the other thing.

Speaker 2 (13:39):
And guys, let's get ahead to a five, Like, if
your goal is reindustrializing the country, you're already failing. So
this usism manufacturing imports index fell to thirty nine point nine,
lowest level since two thousand and nine. COBEC letter says this,
we're saying two thousand and eight light contraction and manufacturing
imports as.

Speaker 3 (14:00):
Tariffs take effect.

Speaker 2 (14:01):
The overall measure of manufacturing is has been following month
after month after month. And the reality is Marshall like
the Biden industrial policy plus protectionism in certain key sectors
was actually working. Like for the first time in modern history,
we came out of a recession, the COVID recession, creating

(14:23):
more manufacturing jobs that we than we went in the history.
You know, in recent modern history, typically what happens is
there's a recession, manufacturing drops and it never comes back
right for a variety of reasons. And this was the
first time that they had bucked that trend. And when
you're talking about EV's when you're talking about battery production,
when you're talking about you know, green energy, when you're
talking about semiconductors. It was the policy was actually working

(14:50):
because you paired the protectionism with industrial policy. And that's
the piece that's completely missing here, is any sort of
a strategic direction. And at the same time, the parts
of that Biden policy, which I'm first to say it
was like inadequate and wor should be done and it
wasn't transformational for people in their daily lives, and you know,
and wasn't sold with all of those things. But the

(15:12):
parts that were actually working are also being attacked and
dismantled by a Trump administration which just you know, hates
Joe Biden, hates green energy, anything that's smacks of like liberalism,
like evs, you know, EV batteries, any sort of green energy.
They just want to destroy. And so they've taken a
chainsaw to those pieces, and you know, are actually destroying

(15:32):
the part of our industrial policy that was actually working.

Speaker 4 (15:36):
Yeah, and the thing is, if Biden nomics, we should
think about it on two different levels. So level one
was like the political project, Biden's going to bring all
the jobs back, We're going to reindustrialize America from sort
of a center left perspective, that political project totally failed.
It didn't deliver. It didn't deliver fast enough. Like I
have a lot of like maga and laws, and like
if you tell them about like the actual policies that
Joe Biden pursued, they were like they are literally skeptical

(15:58):
and do not believe it was happening. But as you
didn't see this, there was lots of like really great
reporting on how despite the fact that they put a
lot of these jobs in red states and in purple
and swing states, it just wasn't actually felt on the ground.
So at a political level, it did not work. At
a policy level, I think what's been so frustrating about
covering this tariff topic is if you actually talk to
most people left right and center, what they will say is, wow,

(16:20):
we actually came to kind of a consensus after the
first Trump administration and the Biden administration. The Bio administration
could have jettisoned all of Trump's tariffs when they came
in twenty twenty one. They didn't, though they kept them
because they a bought into the idea that we couldn't
just treat China entering the world market as this like
chill thing that was going to work out for everybody
and magically keeped everyone's jobs together. They kept that part,

(16:43):
but then they once again added the government spending and
industrial policy site. So we found a mix that, to
your point, needed to be implemented better. So in a
better version of the Trump administration. To the point I
was saying earlier, you would have said, Okay, here's what
didn't work with the Biden approach. Here's what didn't work
far approach in the first term. Let's combine this into
a mix that actually builds us into something productive. And

(17:05):
and the key thing here, there was consensus in the
business community, in the labor with labor, and with policymakers
on the left and right around that mix. Jettising in
it just because it's like Bidenomics or because it's Biden
tied is like a huge disaster.

Speaker 3 (17:23):
Let's talk about the China relationship a little bit more.

Speaker 2 (17:27):
Can put a three up on the screen, so we
have an indication here Trump and she may talk very soon,
we'll see. In addition, this was the big news that
came out yesterday, but a three b up on the screen.
Trump has extended the China tariff, so pushing it off
into the future, allow war time for negotiation, pushing it

(17:47):
off till August thirty first, and then this was pretty
remarkable in terms of global impact on view of the
US since Trump has come back into office net favorability.
This is again global average net favorability. This is a
poll conducted by Morning Console the US. When Trump comes
into office, the view of the US falls off a

(18:09):
frickin cliff, and at the same time the view of
China has been significantly on the rise. So now you
have a positive, you know, almost nine point margin in
favor of China, and the US is underwater at minus
one point five, which is no surprise March twenty. You know,
again with the incoherence of the trade policy, it would
be one thing if you're like, we're going to specifically

(18:32):
focus on China, We're going to create a block of
our allies to you know, have some policy solidarity and
to try to isolate China. But instead they went to
war with the entire world, including like Canada and the
EU and countries that only have you know, places that
only have penguins and the whole thing. And so of
course much of the world is like screw you, like

(18:52):
what are you doing? So in that respect too, it
has been thoroughly counterproductive and is really strengthened China's hand
going into these trade negotiations.

Speaker 4 (19:01):
Yeah, and if I think the perfect so like two
examples here, So number one, like why we're replacing tariffs
on Madagascar, right, it actually does not make sense other
than the explanation we gave earlier that like Trump just
specifically does not like trade, and the kid Ben shows us.
So it's not just that like, hey, we have these
industries that really matter. Oh hey, we have this whole

(19:23):
part of the country that really relies on these jobs.
So we have to like balance the trade offs of
like cheap goods versus people actually having jobs here. No,
Trump just broadly is hostileal trade, which just blames why
we are doing a trade fight with Mexico, which explains
why we're doing a trade fight with Canada. And if
you talk to the Canadians specifically, you know, the Mexico
side of this thing has always been much more complicated
because you know, going back to like NAFTA in the

(19:44):
nineteen nineties and the Makuila Dories, like a lot of
jobs like went south. So I think people had within
their mental framework the idea that, Okay, the US and
Mexico are going to kind of have a hostile trade relationship,
and I think a dynamic where that is a fight
doesn't lead to that fall off of support for the
US in terms of these global polls. What the Canada
experience just revealed is just like a real lack of trust.

(20:07):
Like if you talk to Canadians about this, if you
talk to people across the kind of world, they would say, wait, like,
if they're just coming after us on this, why would
we assume they're trying to find the right deal for this?
Why is this about sort of us getting a good
deal with them, us getting something from you know, us
being Canadians. The Canadians they get something, Musk, we get
some of them. It's all just domestic politics.

Speaker 2 (20:27):
Well, and not to mention, so in Trump's first administration,
he renegotiated NAVDA with Canada and Mexico.

Speaker 3 (20:34):
So if you don't like.

Speaker 2 (20:35):
The deal that was struck, like you're the one who
struck that deal, buddy, So get to your point about trust,
Why should they expect that some new deal that they
would enter into this time around, would be upheld under
this Trump administration, under the next administration, whether it's Democratic
or Republican, like the word of these people is just

(20:56):
absolutely no good. Not to mention the just completely like
chao and schizophrenic nature of how the tariffs are on
and off and they're up and they're down, and you know,
he's chickening out and then.

Speaker 3 (21:05):
He's all in on a day to day basis.

Speaker 2 (21:08):
I am curious what do you make of the taco discourse,
because I'm actually a little bit skeptical to your point
about how Trump is like ideala, one thing that he
is ideologically committed to is tariffs. There and not to mention,
you know, if you had told people going into the
Trump administration that we would be at the level of
tariffs that we're at right now, and this is at

(21:31):
a time before you know, we get to July eighth
and he once again does like another Liberation Day announcement
or whatever that's going to be, people would be deeply
concerned about what that would mean for the economy because
it was an extraordinary increase. Even just the levels we're
at now are an extraordinary change and increase over where
we were previously so I'm a little bit I under

(21:51):
stand where it comes from, because he has backed off
the most maximalist positions of like one hundred and forty
five percent tariffs on China, which just completely ended trade
between giant in the US, which was completely insane. But
on the other hand, you know, I think it is
I think it would be foolish to understate where we
are and what he could potentially still.

Speaker 3 (22:11):
Do in the future.

Speaker 4 (22:12):
Yeah, And I think that that's why the court cases
is really matter here too, because once again, if we're
going to understand, like what are the consistent parts of
Trump's politics and personality over the past fifty years, he's
a negotiator. Now if I am sitting in China, if
I'm sitting in the UK or the EEU right now,
I'm much less certain that Trump is operating with a
full deck of cards here when it comes to the

(22:33):
United States. Why is there And this is the danger
of just sort of doing this, Hail Mary. We're going
to reconfigure the way we conceive of trade policy and
the trade policy with the administration to do versus actually Congress,
because if you get knocked down at the courts, even
though those are being caused by the pos Court. Right now,
why would China negotiate the other thing that really is
important to here too, And I want to go back
to the comment about how China's perception is going up,

(22:55):
is that the real problem that we're facing here is
that we sort of root our approach to China in
sort of two different periods. So a lot of people
route their approach to China. In two thousand, we let
them into the wto. They're a low cost, cheap manufacturer.
They take a bunch of our jobs and not all
basically happens there. In exchange, we get cheap consumer goods.
That's one version of China. The second version of China
is the China the Trump face down during the late

(23:18):
twenty tens. We now in the year twenty twenty five
are facing a new China where they now have BYD
who are producing the best, the cheapest electric vehicles in
the world, and they are penetrating and the most advanced.
They are penetrating European and global markets. So if I'm
sitting in let's say Germany, or I'm sitting in an
East Asian country, and we see China delivering not just

(23:42):
oh competing for jobs of US, but actually delivering like
industrial first world technological advancement that the United States cannot
match right now. But also, weirdly enough, the Trump administration
says they're just totally uninterested in China looks really great
right now, Like that's just like the key role context.
You can't just treat China like it's the two thousands,
the twenty eighteen.

Speaker 3 (24:02):
China, or even like the night.

Speaker 2 (24:03):
I mean, I feel like sometimes Trump has this like
nineteen nineties view of China almost that is completely out
of touch with where they are today. They made an
explicit government led plan to move up the value chain
and they've done it. You know, it's not the days
anymore of just like China stealing other companies IP and
using it to you know, create knockoff cheap versions of it.

(24:23):
Like they have their own very high tech advanced research
capabilities in some areas. To your point about BYD and evs,
they are out pacing the US. I think they're on
par in terms of AI development at the very least,
And so this is a very different China. Not to mention,
the trading dynamics have changed as well the US. If

(24:45):
you consider ossion as a block. The US is no
longer China's largest trading partner. They trade more with ossion
you have an entire rest of the world, So it
was easier for China to acquire more customers than it
is for the US to, you know, recurr all of
the supply lines and all of the manufacturing capability that
has been outsourced to China and other countries too, by

(25:06):
the way, over the years. And it always seemed to
me wild at the beginning of this that there was
so much confidence from the Trump administration that it would
be China that would have to come to them, and
China that would be in the more difficult political position
in terms of these trade dynamics, because that too, there
isn't public consensus around what Trump is doing, whereas in China,

(25:28):
because we're the instigators here who started this war, there
does appear to be a sort of rally around the
flag effect and a willingness to withstand whatever it is
the government policy in order to fight back against what
the US is doing to them.

Speaker 4 (25:41):
Yeah, and the case, there's been some really great reporting
from New York Times that I checked in on, So
it's not as if this is just all like a
total win for China. Like, the Chinese really depend on
being able to export goods the United States, so it's
not as if a trade war wouldn't be a disaster
for their own economy. But what the Chinese have explicitly
done since the last round of these wars back in
the twenty eighteen period, is they've made their economy more resilient.

(26:03):
They've prepped for this, They've set the national narrative. You
are not going to see Chinese aside from the politics
of it, you are not going to see Chinese small
business owners knocking on She's door saying this is a
disaster for us. This doesn't work. So they have set
the table to fight a actual trade war, and what
we have just literally not done. And I don't care
if you're on the right and you like object even

(26:24):
if you are on the right and think we need
to take a totally different approach to trade, it would
have taken multiple years of preparation to actually get our
economy to the point where we could stand off against China.
To your point, to the degree of which Trump wants
to trade off on. I want to also go to
LTINX comments about like national security, and that's why we
need to really do this. I hope no one takes
away the idea that you and I are dismissing the

(26:45):
idea of that there are national security concerns here. My
favorite topic on this is, like, we are incredibly dependent
on China for pharmaceuticals. It's a huge problem to huge risk.
This isn't just like a China Taiwan thing. This was
like a COVID thing. Like there are so many critical,
critical things that we're over dependent on China on and
in an era where we have to be ready for
supply chains to break at any any time. Once again,

(27:06):
separate from your views of war and peace, we need
to be more resilient in that category. The National Security
Emergency supports the argument that, Wow, we should really really
concentrate on these five specific areas. So once again, like
we really really really should have focused on semiconductors, which
is what the Bide administration is doing. Wow, even if
our pharmaceutical goods are cheaper because of the fact that

(27:29):
we get them from China, we can't be overly dependent
on any one country and all of the cost that's
happening right now. So if they'd come in and said, hey,
here are these five to ten areas, we're going to
hyper focus on them, and maybe if it turns out
that makes pharmaceutical drugs more expensive, because we're reassuring we'll
have some sort of subsidy or pursue some sort of
industrial policy for purpoceutical goods. That would have been met

(27:51):
not only with more policy consensus in this country. You
wouldn't see the courts fighting, you wouldn't see the the
you wouldn't see even Republicans, Republicans in Congress fighting. You
wouldn't see angry, angry town halls where Republican congressmen and
women cannot even articulate the case for this policy. That
would have been the right approach here.

Speaker 3 (28:11):
That's a good transition into the next block.

Speaker 2 (28:13):
Actually, because you know what I learned yesterday, Marshall, Ninety
percent of the drone industry is also in China.

Speaker 3 (28:19):
And obviously we covered yesterday.

Speaker 2 (28:21):
I will just put back up the images on the
screen and refresh everybody's memory.

Speaker 3 (28:25):
Ukraine was able to.

Speaker 2 (28:28):
Commit an extraordinary drone attack on far flung Russian air bases,
and it's not confirmed how many Russian warplanes they were
able to take out. The Ukrainians are saying over forty.
Of course the Russians are saying a lot less. There
hasn't been independent confirmation, but obviously a significant amount of
damage was done, and Marshall it was, you know, quite

(28:51):
an extraordinary operation. Zelensky says, this was eighteen months in
the making. They used it appears civilian supply chains, trucking
in these drones on large trucks, leaving parking them in
key positions. The drones were like hidden in the top
of these crates, and then at the appropriate time, the
crates were remote control opened and these little drones you

(29:14):
know that looked like toys, were able to go out
and to tremendous damage to the Russian air fleet. So
we've got some interesting ban In comments. But before we
get to that, since we didn't have you here yesterday,
just tell us sort of your overall view of the
significance of this operation.

Speaker 4 (29:29):
Yeah, it really shows a key way that the war
in Ukraine has changed in a way those toy different
from the Biden administration. So one of the big debates
within the Bided administration. The Biden administration as a fall
areas sort of found itself in this like middle where
basically no one was happy. Yeah, so there are always people,
sort of the more populous side who thought that the
Biden administration was escalating things in Ukraine and were way

(29:51):
too sort of in favor of Selensky's approach. The Hawks
were tit pissed because the US wasn't authorizing strikes in
to Russia. We wouldn't. We would say, hey, if we're going
to give you missiles, we're goinging you ammunition, ammunitions, you
cannot use them to strike Russia's potential nuclear accids. Because,
to build on your point, these weren't just like warplanes
like these were like Russia's like strategic that's right, strategic.

Speaker 2 (30:14):
Bombers, nuclear bombers, some of which they're not really able
to produce anymore.

Speaker 4 (30:18):
Apparently they're quite literally not able to produce. These These
are they've obviously been upgraded, but like the t U
ninety five is a Cold War relic, just in the
same way that our B fifty two is the airframe
first started in the nineteen fifties, same thing is true
of these planes. These are propeller driven bombers. They can
launch missiles. They've been launching missiles into Ukraine, but they
also can be used to drop launch nuclear weapons. So

(30:43):
the fact is now that Ukraine has this capability of
utilizing the druids the way they use them. This isn't
something that US control anymore. So it doesn't matter if
we're not sending the missiles to launch these types of strikes.
They have built their own drone industry. They've effectually become
in many ways, and this is kind of an overstatement,
but it gets to the point they've become a drone
suit power. This has really changed the way they could
approach and take this strategy. Another really interesting thing that

(31:04):
I learned too, and this is why we were speaking
earlierbout how we're entering in a really new era we
need to think differently. It should be noted all these
planes were out in the open. These were things that
people could see. That stems from the fact that ever
since the Cold War, it has been in a basic
rule that there's a degree of transparency with nuclear forces.
From a pure deterrence and awareness and safety perspective, it's

(31:27):
unclear that after this attack, any country of nuclear weapons
could afford to let their strategic bombers out in the open,
even if it means that previous nuclear limitations treaties required,
they'd be out in the open so we could monitor.
That was a very good thing. That's the type of
thing that you need to have in a cold war situation.
That's not sustainable anymore if you can get civilian drones
in or if you could convert civilian drones into military

(31:50):
use and then launch these attacks within the country.

Speaker 2 (31:52):
Yeah, no, that's I mean, that's absolutely right. And you
know you saw it also, the ability to use these
relatively small, relatively low tech, and easily accessible drones to
inflict significant damage. I mean, it really does level the

(32:13):
playing field of war fighting in a way that should
be very troubling to the US. You know, we see
it certainly here in Ukraine, where increasingly it is a
drone war where you have drones fighting against other drones.
You also saw it to a certain degree on October
seventh where Hamas. The first thing that they were able
to do was to take out the very high tech fence,

(32:35):
multi million dollar fence that Israel had built along the
Gaza border, including you know, automated machine guns and surveillance.
So they're able to take those out, and that's how
they're able to effectuate their attacks on October seventh. So,
you know, this was a complicated operation that Ukraine was
able to pull off. The US claims they had no
idea this was coming out. Don't know whether that's true

(32:56):
or not. There would be some interest both from the
Ukrainians and the US if they did collactate to deny
that there was any sort of coordination or collaboration. So
I'm not sure if that's true or not. But this
was a complicated operation to pull off. At the same time,
the tech is very easily available and very low cost,
and so you know, obviously the reason for Zelensky to
do this at this particular point in time is because

(33:17):
there are peace talks ongoing. The general consensus is that
Russia is in a much stronger position than Ukraine is
because they have much more manpower and they might have
much more industrial might than the Ukrainians do. And so
this is an effort to say, look, this is not
you know, the playing field is more level than you think,
and we can inflict damage on you deep into your

(33:39):
territory that you know, and it doesn't require the assistance
of the United States of America to be able to
pull this off.

Speaker 4 (33:45):
Yeah, I know, And The way to understand the Russian
position right now is there's some good reporting the Russians
are moving miles a day, They're sort of advancing into Denetsk.
And the thing is, if you're looking at the Ukrainian
position right now, all what the Ukrainians are basically trying
to do is just make clear of it. They are
in this for the long term, especially in a world
where they can no longer guarantee the United States is

(34:07):
going to have their back in the same way that
the Biden administration did. I think obviously the Zelensky JD
events blow up at the White House was a disaster
on like fifteen different levels. But what I think it
really accomplished in a way that the Biden administration. I've
read all the report, I still don't understand why this
never happened. I think what the Oval Office blow up
forced the Ukrainians to finally reckon with is the idea

(34:28):
that they cannot take for granted that the United States
will supply them with intelligence, to apply them with weapons,
always have their back no matter what, always be pushing
for them to sort of get some sort of settlement
in the exact way it's most maximumly Ukrainian. What happened
this past weekend is what happens when Ukraine grows is
it has to be much more independent and be able
to actually back itself up without just begging the United

(34:49):
States for war.

Speaker 2 (34:50):
So let's go ahead and take a listen to Steve
Bannon's reaction to this operation from the Ukrainians.

Speaker 7 (34:57):
The White House has to condemn this immediately and pull
all support and tell Lindsey Graham come home.

Speaker 6 (35:05):
Are we're gonna put you under a restaurant? You come home?
You're sterring it up.

Speaker 7 (35:08):
Lindsey Graham's over there saying, hey, forget Trump, I got
the house in the Senate.

Speaker 6 (35:12):
We're gonna we're gonna pass them.

Speaker 7 (35:13):
You ever see something a couple of days, Remember that
he's sterning it up over there. He's telling me the
guy backing if they did not give us a heads
up on this all full stop and no minerals deal,
walk away from all of it, they're irresponsible and they're
dragging us into a kinetic third World war. As we
said us, we're getting dragged in now or the deep
State is driving us in there.

Speaker 6 (35:36):
Either of these are not good.

Speaker 7 (35:37):
Tulca Gabbert's gotta let us know, did anyone in an
intel at all have anything to do with this?

Speaker 6 (35:42):
Did anybody have a heads up? Did anybody? And if not,
who the hell's running the Ukraine desk? Who's running the
Russia desk? Same thing with Ratcliffe.

Speaker 7 (35:52):
This is why Cash and Bongino and Pam Bondi. You
got to clear out the deep state. This is he's
a ticking time bomb. And you see what they're going
to get us into because now we're now in exorably
we're being drawn into this.

Speaker 6 (36:10):
If we didn't know about it.

Speaker 7 (36:11):
The President to me has got to condemn it and
got to say we're not gonna give any more support
because these people cannot be trusted. You're supposed to be
in Turkey today talking peace, not three thousand miles into
Russia blown up their strategic bombers.

Speaker 2 (36:23):
So what do you make of Bannon's position here and
and kind of the position he occupies in the party overall,
because you know he does this thing where he'll be
critical of certain things going on in the Trump administra.
It's never Trump's fault though, right, he's very critical of
Elon Musk, but it's not Trump's fault. He's very critical
of the direction that they're going in Ukraine. But you know,
it's it's the deep state, it's it never has anything
to do with actually the administration.

Speaker 4 (36:44):
Yeah, I think the principal thing that a, I just
appreciate you noting how in many ways Steve Bannon is
a politician, and he asked if I can navigate that.
So here's here's the prime flaw here. So Trump and
Trump now claimed that his comment that he was getting
in the warn in Ukrain on day one was was castick.
I think that was not true at the time. I
think that really did reflect his sort of perspective that
Biden had bungled this among all the other things that

(37:06):
Biden bungled, and therefore you could have gotten a deal
like once Trump was actually there. If the US just
walks away from Ukraine and not just like walks away
in terms of like giving every single ammunition they asked for,
or like saying we're going to back some fort of
NATO or like EU membership, just actually walks away and
leaves the table. Russia isn't going to settle like. I

(37:27):
think it's very clear that Trump wants a settlement. I
think in certain ways the Ukrainians and the Russians wants
and eventual settlements. It's clearly neither side at this point
is getting their end goal right. Like it should be
noted that, like Putin, we should define his end goals.
Putin launched this war claiming that Ukraine was a delegitimized,
illegitimate Nazi state. Denoxification, debasification like this really should be

(37:50):
unders this really should be understood. Is Rusia's Iraq War
here in all of the disastrous ways that that metaphor
really matters here, Ukraine's going to exist. Ukraine is a name.

Speaker 8 (38:00):
Now.

Speaker 4 (38:00):
This war has forced Ukraine into a nation, So Putin
is not going to get that full maximust extent. The
Ukrainians are also not going to get because Trump has
been very clear in a way the Biden and people
were not clear. The US is not going to back
Ukraine until they take back every single inch of their territory.
So everyone is going to have to get some form
of settlement at some point. However, the issue though, is
if the US walks away and the US makes cover

(38:22):
and not going to back Ukraine at least or even
participate in the process, why would Putin stop from that perspective,
and that's the other reason why we should understand Ukraine's
need to launch an attack like this. Ukraine has to
launch an attack like this to make clear that they
are still in this, that this is serious. And even
if the Russians are going to take miles of territory
in eastern Ukraine, if they're going to slowly but surely

(38:43):
match march forward, even though things are sort of still
kind of stealmated, Russia isn't going to get its eventual
total aim. Therefore, you have to get to some form
of settlement.

Speaker 8 (38:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (38:50):
Well, and I think this attack underscores why you need
some sort of a settlement, because, I mean, it is
a dangerous escalation, and you know, we do have to
be wary of the fact that Russia is a nuclear
arm superpower, and you know, Will Putin will be sensitive
to this attack, which is incredibly embarrassing and humiliating that
they were able to penetrate so deeply into Russian territory.

(39:12):
So I think it underscores the need for a settlement.
I mean, to be honest with you, I'm somewhat sympathetic
to the Trump administration here because I do think it
is such a mess and so difficult to untangle at
this point. You know, you're talking a little bit about
the Biden administration policy. In a lot of ways, it
really was the worst of all worlds because obviously they
short circuited and undercut the original peace talks, so there

(39:33):
wasn't pressure early on for some sort of a settlement.
I think that was a grave error, you know, underscoring
the fact that listen, there's no guarantees obviously that there
would have been an ability to have a resolution at
that point. But I've also become more sympathetic to the
sort of more hawkish faction that says, listen, you're just
letting them bleed out slowly rather than and over time
the Biden administration kept going, Okay, well you can't. You

(39:55):
can have these particular weapons. You can have the long riage,
all right, you can strike inside of Russia. So it's like, well,
if you were going to do that anyway, you may
as well have actually given them the tools to be
more successful earlier on, push for a piece and be
able to get some sort of a settlement that wouldn't
be a complete and total disaster for the Ukrainians. So
I do think that people who say that the Biden
administration policy was kind of the worst of all worlds

(40:16):
are absolutely correct. And at this point, it is a disastrous, brutal, bloody,
horrifying mess that lands in the lap of the Trump administration.
And I don't think that there is an easy resolution.
There's certainly not a resolution that is going to make
literally any side happy at this point.

Speaker 4 (40:33):
And look, and because the stakes and this is you've
rerewly highlighted this, Because the stakes are nuclear, you cannot
have a situation where the US just walks away. This
isn't just another sort of Eurasian conflict. This isn't acerby
Jean versus Armenia. The stakes here are nuclear. The stakes here,
And I think if there's obviously you're not going to

(40:54):
have our disagreements about the Cold War and the different
ways that it went. But I think a key thing
that was achieved during the Cold War is that we
limited nuclear proliferation.

Speaker 3 (41:03):
The world still exists, the world that you will still exist.

Speaker 4 (41:07):
And because the stakes are nuclear in this case, a
a Russia that just thinks it has total impunity to
do whatever it wants about consequences the world where you
could see that type of escalation. I think part of
the reason why, and this is why I'll give like
a mild defense of the Biden administration. The reason why
they are hemming and highing and were never really finding
support from either sort of like the skeptics or the
hawks was that Jake Sullivan was terrified of nuclear conflict.

(41:32):
So the well maybe this, maybe that's to your point
they're saying, okay, no F sixteen's, okay F sixteens, no missiles,
Okay missiles was because they, I think, took very very
seriously the idea that Russia could potentially nuclear escalate. Russia didn't.
Russia was bluffing. Like the actual thresholds for what Russia
would say for Russia claim would lead to escalation were

(41:53):
passed years ago. So the Biden administration slowly, slowly, slowly
like dripped in. And I think we're probably over cautious
if we look at like the pure like what are
like the best possible world that could have came here.
But they start to really manage that. But once again,
they came to an uncomfortable, unpopular position because they're just
trying to manage a nuclear conflict and that is like
the primary thing. And once again Steve Bannon's position, I'd

(42:15):
be more sympathetic to that if once again this was
Azerbaijan versus Armania. The consequences of this war going the
r on direction our order. Maybe Poland gets a nuke,
Maybe other countries become convinced like, oh wow, like we're
all in it on our own. We can't be guaranteed
that the US or the EU or other powers or
have our backs. We need to get a nuke. Maybe
South Korea needs to get a nuke. I think just
tamping that down is why we have like an exit.

(42:37):
And here's the key thing too, And this is what
the Hawks did not do. US helping to bring this
conflict to an end does not mean Ukraine gets an
unlimited sort of amount of munitions or weapons. It doesn't.
And this is what the Bidomen efficient also did not do.
They should have made much clearer because they knew this
internally that the American people did not support a US
Ukraine policy that equaled they take back Crimea in every

(42:59):
single part of Eastern Ukraine. That was never the actual
in the administration consensus. What the American people want is
a situation where this war comes to an end and
Trump participating and negotiating and driving this process, him serving
as the third force that's pressing these two sides who
know in their heart of hearts they need to settle
in some ways, but our incentivized not to do it.
Like once again, more New York Times reported that I'll

(43:20):
shout out of breaking points, you know, space to the
mainstream media. Mainstream media has its actual functions. I'll pointed
out that part of what's driving Russia's unwillingness to take
the negotiation, and seriously, like they sent junior diplomats, not
serious senior level diplomats, is they're like, actually, we've got
a summer offensive. It's kind of moving. Let's take as
much territory as we can over Things slow down in

(43:41):
the winter. So that's really the situation that we're playing
with now.

Speaker 2 (43:44):
Yeah, that's exactly right. And the last week we can
put up on the screen here is before guys. So
there were negotiations yesterday. They were among low level delegations.
As Marshall was just gesturing towards Ukraine. Russia remain far
apart on ceasefire terms at these Istanbul talk apparently you
know they're they're nowhere really in the ballpark of any
sort of agreement. There was a prisoner swap that was

(44:07):
agreed to, but that's really all that came out of that. So,
you know, you have the the Ukrainians that were able
to pull off this dramatic, risky but quite you know,
damaging an effective attack within Russia. You have the Russians
who've been able to claim quite a bit of territory
actually just in the recent paths, and neither side really

(44:27):
looking to uh, really looking to bring it to a
close or you know, take the losses that would be
entailed in bringing this to some sort of a settlement.

Speaker 3 (44:35):
In the near term.

Speaker 2 (44:38):
All right, let's turn to the New York City mayoral race,
which has become much more interesting, I think than people expected.

Speaker 3 (44:45):
It can put C three up on the screen.

Speaker 2 (44:47):
There's a bunch of contenders here, but the two that
are really in contention are former New York Government Governor
Andrew Cuomo and Democratic Socialists Zoron Mamdani. So this looks
very complicated. This is a recent Emerson poll that can
came out. They do rank choice voting in New York City.
That's why you have all of these different rounds. But
the one that really matters is if you look all
the way to the tenth round, you've got Cuomo coming

(45:09):
in at fifty four, so we're still winning, but his
edge has significantly declined, and nipping at his heels at
this point is Zoron Mamdani at forty six percent. So
we definitely have ourselves a race here. You know, mum
Donni obviously not enjoying the vast name recognition that Cuomo
has in the establishment backing, et cetera, really been an

(45:30):
upstart Marshall. There's some indications that even he and his
campaign were not expecting him to have this much traction
in this race. And so we've got a couple of
clips of Zoron that we can play here in a minute,
but just wanted to get your reaction off the top
of some of the dynamics that you see unfolding here.

Speaker 4 (45:46):
Yeah, so several things here, I think, so, and we'll
get into this Zoron. What I love about this race
that that's sort of like a microcosm of all of
the challenges facing the Democratic Party as we like look forward.
So you have an aging, sort of like unattractive, establishment
centrist candidate who doesn't really stand for anything, Like I
genuinely do not know if you said to me, Marshall,
like what is Andrew Coomo running on beyond just like

(46:08):
post me to redemption, I could actually like not articulate
that for you, and I don't think most people can. Versus,
Zoran clearly believes in things, and I think is being
really responsive. He's really great social media. He's also bringing
the suit back. This is where I will speak for Sager.
I think he looks so great in his suit, and
I think that hopefully he can move us past like
the very condescending era of like politicians like dressing down

(46:29):
sort of act like they're like fake and that sort
of with it. So like maybe there's a fashion trend.
We could do a breaking point spin off on those
cultural things. But I think so really, but that's the
but here's the problem for Zoran though he's still underperforming
with like over forty black voters, Like that's the central
So if the central challenge for centrism is it's like
central casting problem, the challenge for democratic socialism and Zoran

(46:50):
is just the fact that like with like black and
like Hispanic working past voters, just a real amount of
skepticism about the project.

Speaker 2 (46:57):
So I want to talk more about that. Let's go
ahead and put C four up on the screen, just
to underscore what Marshall is saying here about what the
various coalitions are. Coloma's strongest support comes from black voters
at seventy four percent, older voters over fifty at sixty six.

Speaker 3 (47:10):
Percent, And this one kills me.

Speaker 2 (47:12):
Women really guys fifty eight percent to forty two percent.
Mom Donnie leads among voters under fifty with sixty one percent,
holds an edge among white voters fifty seven to forty three,
and college educated voters fifty eight to forty two. So
it's the exact opposite of the coalition that he would,
you know, claims to speak to, and that his agenda

(47:33):
is really crafted to attempt to appeal to. Before we
talk a little bit more about that, because I do
want to dig in on that piece. He was on
MSNBC recently and I thought was asked a good series
of questions about his platform and especially about the critique
of like, yeah, you know, you're really too far left
to appeal to be able to govern effectively. There's a

(47:53):
concern within the establishment quarters of the Democratic Party that
what's gone wrong with the party is that it's gone
too far left. Obviously I have my disagreements with that,
but is an important question ask let's go and take
a listen to how Zorun responded.

Speaker 9 (48:06):
What New Yorkers deserve is a plan that actually speaks
to the crisis in their lives, and affordability is the
number one crisis. So we're going to freeze the rent
for more than two million New Yorkers live in rent
stabilized housing. We're going to make the slowest buses in
the nation fast and free. And we're going to deliver
universal childcare to each and every New Yorker, whether their
child is six weeks or five years of age, because
today childcare is the number two reason people are leaving

(48:28):
our city, and it makes sense. It costs twenty five
thousand dollars a year to raise a kid here, which
is more money than it would cost to send that
same kid to Quney eighteen years later.

Speaker 10 (48:37):
What do you say, though, to Democrats who look at
what we saw in November with Vice President Harris losing,
and a lot of the postgame analysis, if you will,
was the party had moved too far to the left
that it was actually time to come back to the
center a little bit, to connect to a lot of
those working class, blue collar voters who have broken for
Trump in recent cycles. That seems to be what Governor

(48:58):
Cuomo is saying. You say to people who say, well,
I like the guy, but he's not right for this moment,
he's too lefty.

Speaker 9 (49:04):
Well, you know, I think we as politicians need to
lecture less and listen more. And when we saw New
York have the greatest swing towards Trump in the entire
nation eleven and a half points, we saw that it
took place in the hearts of immigrant New York. And
so I went there to Fordham Road in the Bronx
Hillside Avenue in Queens. I asked those voters why did
they vote for him, and they told me they remembered
having more money in their pocket four years ago. I

(49:25):
asked them what it would take to bring them back
to the Democratic Party. They said, a relentless focus on
an economic agenda. And when I told them my plan
to freeze the rent, make buses fast, and free deliver
universal childcare, they said that they would vote for me.
And I think ultimately that's what we need, is a
recognition that for too long, our party has moved away
from working class voters. It's time we actually bring them back.

Speaker 2 (49:44):
So I personally think that's a great answer because he
reframes it as not just like a where are you
on the left right ideological access, but hey, we need
to deliver for people in cost of living? Is this,
you know, crushing burden, especially in a city like New York.
And so here are the really super concrete ways that
I'm going to try to make life a little bit
easier for working class voters.

Speaker 3 (50:04):
What did you think of how he responded, Yeah.

Speaker 4 (50:06):
I know it's really funny because if and this is
why I'm just really down on Cuomo as a candidate.
If you think of like what the best version of
like the centrist, pragmatic, technocratic prinches is just like, look
forget the lofty stuff. People aren't trying to have a
big ideological debate about socialism or liberalism or whatever. They
just like are trying to put food on the table,
and they care about things. So Zoran is given just

(50:28):
like a perfect like, hey, life's expensive, rent control, life's expensive.
We're going to focus on like housing and those other issues.
In childcare. I just had a kid, myself, and even
in the Texas suburbs, it is incredibly expensive. I cannot
imagine how expensive it is in New York right now.
So it's just wild to me that Cuomo and his
team I think it's because they were asleep at the

(50:48):
wheel allowed themselves for Culoma to take like the general
like rhetorical attack of what centrist moderate candidate is and
just like bring it that way. Like I think that
their worst sort of DSA candidates come off like they
and this is the diploma divide that center were of politics.
Too many DSA candidates come off like they're sort of
like campus organizers or they're sort of in academia and

(51:09):
they're having this big debate about worker power versus. I
don't think that means anything to most people. Zora was
just like this, this and that. Yeah, Cloma hasn't responded
to it, and I, you know, you know, since my
politics is more to the center here, like I have
like qualms and concerns about like rent controlling those different issues.
But it's just like really frustrating that like if and
if you're actually kind of this is kind of what

(51:30):
we want politics to look like, we actually want politics
not to just be like a you're a socialist, Well
you were a me too, monster Like that's like very
destructive and unhelpful. I love how Zoran has brought policies
to the table when I wish we had a politics
where Cuoma could say, hey, rent control, I get why
you're doing it, here's why it doesn't work. Here is
my actual plan. The lack of that Onquoulos side is

(51:51):
a huge problem. And then the other big issue I
want to respond to the comment about didn't voters perceive
like Kamala Harris is being too left? And you know
this is a left to yourself. Of the big issues
facing the American left right now is when voters say
the left broadly, they conflate like a bunch of different things.
So the left doesn't just mean rent control, minimum wage increases,
universal healthcare, things that pull really really popularly. It also

(52:15):
means certain positions on crime and immigration, especially with working
class voters. There are a lot of working class voters
who want the minimum wage to be higher, but also
are skeptical of like democratic approaches to crime, especially in
a post twenty twenty one era. There are a bunch
of people, the voters who he's going to speak with
who are going to say we support economic populism, but
actually we're really worried about like migration in the ways

(52:36):
that it's like overstrained the city and its resources. So
I think the thing that Zaron is really getting out here,
and this is why he's not talking about the cultural
issues as much, is he's focusing on that part of
the left another thing, and this is just like so fascinating.
This is the type of thing which centrist and my
sort of can't need to really reckon with. We're assessing,
you know, Kamala Harris's campaign obviously in the wake of
Original Sin, but it was revealed that her most popular

(52:59):
ads had to deal with building more housing mm hm
and cracking down on landlords. Those messages actually broke through.
So I think the problem was sort of like the
left camp that like Zoran is there to engage with,
they are a little unfocused on like the building more
housing part. Like this Zuri politics are kind of the
mb Rent control is effect for people who have housing

(53:21):
right now, but what are the people who don't have housing?
It's it's not a full spectrum approach, and housing policy
actually requires that we do a bunch of things at once,
but once again Zorn is speaking to an environment where
people saying they don't like the left, but Kamala Harrison's
most popular policies are a weird mix of like centrist
the mbiism, but like left oriented landlord punching.

Speaker 2 (53:43):
Yeah no, I mean my politics are the center of
the policy conversation and the center of the political narrative
that should be pushed by you know, by the left
and by Democrats. More broadly, focus is on economic populism,
where you have the impeding like Trump has this narrative
about immigrants are ruining the country, trans people are ruining

(54:04):
the country, cultural elites, college educated women, they're destroying your life,
ruining the country, destroying your.

Speaker 3 (54:08):
Communities, et cetera.

Speaker 2 (54:10):
And Democrats basically don't have a consistent coherent story of
what has gone wrong in the country, What has gone
wrong that led to your life being difficult, What has
gone wrong that led to the rise of Trump, that
led to the rerise of Trump. They have not really
had a coherent storyline about that. And you know this
will we'll get into this more in the abundance discussion.

(54:33):
But the story that resonates with the majority vast majority
of Democrats and vast majority of independence and majority overall
of the American people. Is the reason life has gotten
difficult is because you have a bunch of greedy billionaires
who have rigged the system and we're effectively incompatible with democracy.
And I think that's just you know, with the rise

(54:53):
of Elon Musk and what we've seen in this administration,
they've sort of made the case that the acceleration of
oligarchy truly does represent both a democratic threat and an
economic threat to people overall. So, you know, that's why
this conversation about you know, well, should should we like
throw the trans people overboard or should we throw the
immigrants overboard? I think sort of misses the point because

(55:16):
the reason those issues were made so salient and so
effectively by Trump is because they fit into his narrative
of what had gone wrong in the country. The reason
why Democrats were unable to stand up to those narratives
is because they didn't have their own story and theory
of the case of what had gone wrong that made
any kind of sense to people. So that's sort of

(55:39):
my view of why that conversation really misses the mark.
I mean, if you think about this is what always
strives to crazy. Like if you think about polling the
comments that Trump has made and the things that he
has done, including things like, you know, you want to
talk about crime and safety and policing whatever, Like he
pardoned all the violent January sixers who beat up a
bunch of cops. It pulls it like five percent support.

(56:01):
Even one of the January six ers was like, I
don't even.

Speaker 3 (56:03):
Want this pard and I broke the law. I shouldn't
be forgiven for it.

Speaker 2 (56:07):
So, you know, that's where I get frustrated with some
of the conversation around, like let's just pull out what
the right positions are and let's just locate ourselves on
the ideological spectrum.

Speaker 3 (56:16):
Number one.

Speaker 2 (56:17):
It ignores the fact that people's minds can be changed,
as they obviously you know, have been on a variety
of issues over time. It also ignores the fact that
Trump won while holding some like insanely unpopular positions. Why
because he had a compelling, wrong, evil crule in my
opinion storyline, but that rang is true to people and
sort of hung together as a narrative.

Speaker 4 (56:39):
Yeah, and I said earlier, I didn't re understand the
rationale for Cuomo's candidacy, but like in your comments you
kind of revealed it, like Cuomo's candidacy was really was
really premised on this November December, January vibe shift where like,
oh wow, like Democrats overreached in so many different ways.
We overreached on me too, in the sense that like
young men are incredibly skeptical imat, we overreached on immigration,

(57:01):
we overreach on LGBTQ rights. It it I think makes
sense to look at a bunch of policy issues that
when I think the DEVI has to defer over reaching
those categories. But if you really understand what's being said there,
it's incredibly defensive, right. It's basically this theory of the
way we come back into power is by recognizing where
we overreach and basically either explaining or not explaining why

(57:22):
our position is different. I think that's needed in a
bunch of cases, especially where those positions like lost trust,
like I think Biden's immigration policy really damage the party's
long term trust with like these same like working class
black and Hispanic voters who like Zorin is really speaking to,
So that has to be acknowledged. But what Centrist did
not do, and I say this is the person who
is more of in decently centrist coded is they didn't

(57:42):
actually focus on what does the offense look like? So okay,
we need to get a more moderator, or not even
moderate in the sense of like we're just moving the
chessboard pieces around. But like I love zorro UN's quote,
listen to voters. Let's listen to what voters are actually
saying on socio cultural issues and have an agenda's response
to the step one. But step two is also what
else are they also saying that requires us to have

(58:04):
something to say. So Cuomo was ready to basically just say, hey,
I'm the research and center left. Everything that's gonna be normal,
and twenty nineteen, again that wasn't enough when people were
facing an affordability and housing crisis.

Speaker 2 (58:15):
Well, and not only that, it's very convenient for a Cuomo,
who is an establishment politician who is very closely aligned
with business interest and you know, interests of the wealthy
in New York City, and you know that comes out
in is a rhetoric, et cetera.

Speaker 3 (58:30):
It's very convenient for.

Speaker 2 (58:31):
Him to say, well, the parts of the agenda that
don't threaten wealthy interests, those are the parts that we
can dispatch with, and that's going to enable me to
keep together, you know, my wealthy donor base and make
sure that there's nothing that infringes on the things that
they want to do. And I think we saw a
lot of that coming out of Trump's reelect, where there

(58:51):
was an immediate effort to basically do the things that
are easy in terms from a sort of like wealthy
donor perspective, and not analyze any of the failings on
the like you know, economic populist front and in the
areas that you know would be more challenging and uncomfortable
for some of those alliances with mainstream democratic politicians. I

(59:12):
do want to go back to THO because I'm curious
your view of, you know, the demographics that we put
up earlier. There was all kinds of conversation during Bernie
twenty sixteen and again in Bernie twenty twenty about the
nature and demographics of his coalition, and I think, you know,
parts of that were always really unfair because it was
very much stereotyped as like it's just a bunch of
white bros. Well, now that the white bros have shifted

(59:35):
to the right, the Democrats would very much like to
get those white bros back, But it was also never
truly representative of what his coalition was. Bernie did have
a largely working class coalition. His his greatest weakness with
older black voters, and I think we can talk about
why that is. It's now increasingly apparent that that's not
a Bernie Sanders weakness, that is a left weakness in general,

(59:56):
as evidenced by you know, Zorn and as evidenced by
any number of other you know, sort of left progressive
DSA type candidates. But you know, he had a it
was a diverse working class base, including Latinos in particular,
and certainly among young people. And that generational divide is
important as well, because the stereotype was always like, oh,

(01:00:18):
black people just don't like Bernie Sanders. If you looked
at young black people, that was not the case. You know,
he had a very diverse coalition among young people. So
why do you think it is that the left consistently
struggles with older black voters in particular seemed to be
the greatest sort of challenge point for you know, for
people who have a DSA style ideology.

Speaker 4 (01:00:40):
So yeah, so I think a we should understand that
there's a policy pitch and there's a political pitch and
a lot of what when I talked to sort of
like you know, when we used to do Breaking Points
live show, Like when we actually would talk to people
who were attracted to these sort of ideas. Yeah, they're
really attracted to like the anti Democratic Party, anti status
quo part of the Bernie pitch. It wasn't talk to people.
They'd say, yeah, I like universal health care, Yeah I

(01:01:03):
want Medicare for all, Yeah, I want them minium wage increases, etcetera, etcetera,
et cetera. They would say those things, but like what
was really animating them was just a deep distrust and
not just distrust, but deep dislike of center establishment politics.
These are people who came of age after nine to eleven,
after the two thousand and financial crisis, right after twenty sixteen,

(01:01:24):
after COVID. There is very little to no reason why
people should trust if you grew up in that environment
the center. If you're looking to order black voters who
are rooted in the civil rights there, who are rooted
in a different era of the American political system, that
appeal of like, don't you just hate these old bums
who just like screw everything up that just is not
going to resound as well. So I think it's particularly

(01:01:44):
attractive of the way that Zorin's approaching this is he's
making this much less of a establishment versus anti establishment
pitch though like it's obviously there and more just I'm
going to go down the line and find the positions
that you actually agree with and you were actually thinking about.
So this is also another broader and there's a there's
a warning here two min all offer at the end
of this, but there's also a broder lesson here for
the left, which is that, like you know, my takeaways,

(01:02:06):
I'm actually thinking that like city issues and municipalities are
probably a better fit for left politics right in this
immediate most So, like you know, if you figure out
it this way, like what is the central challenge that
like centrists like to say to like leftist who say
they want to take other political system they say, like, okay, cool,
then like flip a red state or flip a purple state,
or when a congressional district the same way that we're

(01:02:27):
doing right now. It's a tall order and it is
and I think it's a real serious challenge that left
politics needs to really answer. And the thing is, though,
if we're actually looking at like these actual cities, we
look at the combination of policies and political dynamics that
are better suited to the local rather than like the
national wise dynamics. Sara's not having soon. It's not having

(01:02:47):
to debate LGBTQ people. He's not debating immigration policy. He's
talking about specific city issues. The warning though for the
progressive left though is Chicago and Brandon Johnson, because the
in this is we'll get into this during the abundance
a conversation. I think a problem the left has yet
to reconcile is that it's one thing to run successful campaigns,
to put together narratives that I think are clearly like

(01:03:09):
winning the long term narrative war, and actually governed. So
he could say we're going to make buses fast and
free so that during the clip, okay, can you actually
do that? And okay, we're going to impose rent control,
But if you don't actually make more housing over more people,
if that's what we're going to help people who I
kind of have theirs, what are you actually going to
do when these actual challenges come in?

Speaker 6 (01:03:30):
Okay?

Speaker 4 (01:03:30):
Cool. You're going to do paid Sicklyave. That's really great.
How I know this is usually a cent for stunk,
but it really matters in like city and states where
the budget is actually constrained and where voters also do
not want tax increases. How are you actually going to
pay for this program and make it actually work? Brandon
Johnson's one of the least the mayor of Chicago is
one of the least popular politicians in America because he

(01:03:53):
campaigned on these sets of issues, but he did not
have the talent, the coalition, the ability to actually get
it done. So that the warning for the left.

Speaker 3 (01:04:01):
I think that's fair. But I also would say that
the left always has.

Speaker 2 (01:04:04):
To answer for any politician on the left who doesn't deliver,
but like the center never has to answer for Gavin
Newsom or Kathy Hokle, who's you know, pretty profoundly unpopular.
And I would also say that the most popular Democratic
governor in the country is any Bushier in Kentucky, who
may not be DSA, but he is an economic populist.

(01:04:26):
I mean, you know, I used to live in Kentucky,
have followed I know him a little bit, and I've
followed his career and his pitch very closely. And I
still talk to people in Kentucky about what it is
about him that's really resonating there. And it's not because
he you know, did a hard right turn on any
particular issue. He stood up for transparently close churches during COVID,
you know, he went all in on, like, you know,

(01:04:47):
protecting people from the disease. But there are two things
that people mentioned to me. Number one is just that
he is hyper accessible. During COVID, he was doing like
weekly certainly and maybe daylight briefings where he would just
go out and talk to people in this way that
was felt very approachable.

Speaker 3 (01:05:05):
And like you actually had a direct line to him.

Speaker 2 (01:05:07):
In number two, you know, his pitch has been on healthcare, education,
and good union jobs. And he's brought a lot of
good union jobs. Some of that came from the Biden
administration into the state of Kentucky, and so he really
has sort of delivered on this economic populist message. So
I would put him up as proof that that general direction,

(01:05:30):
when executed effectively, is highly successful, both in terms of
the policy and in terms of the politics. You know,
if you also look at congressional districts across the country.
A lot of the candidates that have overperformed they may
not be you know, exactly Bernie Sanders, but they have
really featured a challenge of corporate power in their messaging

(01:05:54):
and have used that to consistently outperform you know, the
top of the ticket. So I do think that there
is plenty to suggest electorally that there's a lot there.
But you know, to your point, obviously, it has to
be competently executed, and at the city level, especially when
you're talking about you know, any sort of executive position,
it has to be competently executed because at the end

(01:06:15):
of the day, it's like did the trash get picked
up or did it not get picked Did the snow
get removed or did it not get removed. One thing
I want in this will helps transition more into the
abundance conversation is that one thing that's interesting to me
about Zoron and this actually isn't unusual on the left.
Oftentimes the left does focus on issues like zoning reform
and some of the things that are you know, considered
to be abundance policy. He has not only gone leaned

(01:06:39):
into those more like DSA policies like the rent freeze
and the free busts and those sorts of things. He
also has made an explicit focus of zoning regulations of
you know, streamlining bureaucracy for small businesses. He's talked about,
you know, some of these things that are like single
staircase reform and some of the things that are like

(01:06:59):
core the abundance movement and the zoning reform movement. More broadly,
let's go ahead and take a listen to this ad
that he cut about small business in particular.

Speaker 9 (01:07:07):
There's a lot of things that make New York City
special for me. It's the delis in Bodegas. Hopey be,
could I get an egg and cheese on a roll
with jalapeno ones don't want especially coming up. Small businesses
employed nearly half of all New Yorkers in the private sector.

Speaker 11 (01:07:21):
They keep the city running.

Speaker 9 (01:07:22):
But the last four years have been hard. We've seen
the dollar slice go extinct, storefront after storefront close and
had a mayor and Eric Adams who has ignored the
struggles of small businesses. That's why it is Mayor, I'm
going to make it faster, easier, and cheaper for small
businesses to get started and stay open. First, we're going
to cut fines and fees for small businesses by fifty percent.
Regulations are important, but small businesses have to navigate more

(01:07:45):
than six thousand of them with far fewer resources than
the big chains. That's why is Mayor, I'll appoint a
mom and popzar with the clear goal of making it
easier to run a small business. One thousand dollars isn't
a lot to our city government, but it can be
make or break for a small business trying to get
off the ground. Next, we're going to the mom and
pops are will coordinate with agencies to speed up turnaround times,

(01:08:05):
cut rent tape, and letting Yorker start businesses soon because
you shouldn't have to fill out twenty four forms and
go through seven agencies to start a barbershop. But most
of all, we're putting our money where our mouth is
by increasing funding for small business support programs with five
hundred percent. We're going to invest twenty million dollars in
our business express service teams.

Speaker 2 (01:08:22):
So very abundancy messaging. I would say, you know, what
do you what do you think of the pairing of
the you know, the rent control, the free public transit
and some of those other policies alongside the zoning reform,
the cutting red tape and the kind of like abundance
suite of policy options.

Speaker 4 (01:08:42):
Yeah. No, I think you are going to talk with
this later. But as someone in the Abundance camp who's
probably done more speaking with the left than like anyone
else in that broad coalition, Yeah, what I keep hearing
is obviously there's like the ang for your like Twitter
discourse and they're all like the negative reviews. But when
I talk to people in the know who I would
take seriously, they're like, look, Abundance at its best has
pointed out some real problems, and we'd like to get

(01:09:04):
to a yes and from a progressive perspective that doesn't
just treat us as these people to be left punched,
but like a broader conversation, because like this is like
I'm really interested in, like UK politics. I always like
to think of American politics in a sense of like coalitions,
Like this is a coalition, And if a coalition is
going to be like fifty plus one and actually have
a governing majority, it has to take everyone's different perspectives

(01:09:24):
of mine too. So I really think that like the
best version of the abundance agenda is going to be
a set of policies that a politician like so around
kid likes take and leave. This is good, this is good.
That isn't good, That isn't good. Okay, I'm governing. How
do I actually make this happen? That's my best version
of the project, rather than just a version that equals okay. Now,
we ought to support Richie Torus for governor.

Speaker 2 (01:09:47):
When I saw the reaction to that ad from specifically Mataglesius,
who's an abundance guy.

Speaker 3 (01:09:53):
And his position is you should basically rank zoran last.

Speaker 2 (01:09:58):
Cuomo would be superior Quomo, who we know was a
failed governor and to you know, like older elderly people
like to die in nursing homes during COVID is. Obviously
there's the me too issues. Doesn't really stand for much
of anything other than preserving the status quo. He thinks
that he would be superior to Zoron, and there's just
it seemed to expose that abundance is not really about

(01:10:22):
getting to yes, and it is actually an attempt to
compete with what is an ascendant narrative within the Democratic Party,
a very popular narrative within the Democratic Party about fighting
corporate power and fighting oligarchy.

Speaker 3 (01:10:34):
So how do how should I think about those things?

Speaker 4 (01:10:37):
Yeah, so the key thing here is abundance is rooted right,
So actually abundance is a bunch of different things, right, So.

Speaker 3 (01:10:44):
Like, yeah, so maybe startof do you define about He's.

Speaker 4 (01:10:46):
Hard to find abundance. So Ezra and Derek have written
this incredibly successful policy book, and yes, like it's an
airport book. It's a quick read, but policy books like that,
even short and accessible ones, do not sell as many
books as they have sold. They have big platforms, they're
really good writers. Like this is speaking to a set
of people who have like real organic like interests and

(01:11:07):
thoughts behind this. So that's that's one part of it.
The other part is there's a right wing people call
it dark abundance that anyways is sort of more of
the vcs like Mark Andrecent people in the Trump administration
sort of a lot of the tech right falls into
that sort of like right wing abundance kind of because
they're like, look like Trump's going to build nuclear Trump's
going to deregulate everything and help us build again. Technology

(01:11:30):
is the way to the American future, etcetera. Etcetera. That's
part of the abundance movement as well too, though I
would not overstate the use of the word abundance. And
then there are sort of like this I think unhelpful
sort of version of abundance that in many ways is
this center that was finding itself in a defensive position
after November December, where they said, Okay, we have to

(01:11:53):
moderate on LGBTQ issues, we have to moderate an immigration etcetera, etcetera,
but we actually do need to have something like forward
facing to say, and they've adopted abundance as part of
that project because though the project is like moderating and
making the Democratic Party more centrist, abundance has been mixed
into that. What I'm trying to do with my work

(01:12:13):
from my small podcast perch is build out abundance as
a broader sort of approach or set of policies and
questions that any sort of like from the center to
the left over we thinking about it, and I think
the way about to tell a story. And I'm not
saying this as a dunk on you. This has become
a sort of close table. I'm actually asking did you
read the book Abundance? Yes? Okay, so you noticed the

(01:12:36):
first the first chapter is this like twenty to fifty
vision of the future where like technology and growth provided
us all these different great things. I actually really did
not like that first chapter, especially from the perspective of
articular into the left. Why that should actually care about
these ideas because I think a to your point, we
live in an error where people are backlashing against oligarchy,

(01:12:56):
where people like aren't excited about technology or resubating smartphones
like that is a version of the book. Because this
book was supposed to come out in twenty twenty four,
I've suspect if they were to start this project today,
the book first chapter be a little different. So my
pitch for what the first chapter should have looked like
is rooted in me not being a New Yorker or
a San Franciscan, which is where a lot of the
mb House people come from, with me being like a Texan.

(01:13:17):
I live in Austin, I lived next to the hill Country,
and I haven't looked at the books in a while,
but the Path to Power that Robert Carrow's biography LBJ
is no longer back there. But that was a really
informative book for like Sager and my politics. And here's
my favorite chapter of the book. It talks about how
in nineteen thirty seven LBJ is a Congressman and during

(01:13:40):
the New Deal there's something called the Rural Electrification Administration
and what it literally did was bring power to rural America.
We had electricity in the country of more than fifty years,
but the private sector was not delivering electricity to the
hill country to pour like hard scrabble farmers. And what
the New Deal did used a combination of private actors

(01:14:02):
and public actors to create these co ops that brought
and Robert Carroll's telling I really reckon people read this
book brought people into the twentieth century from the Stone Age. Effectively,
people are like didn't have powered, Now they have power.
That is a vision of broad left liberalism that deliver
for people and really mattered and got over the actual

(01:14:23):
objections and things that wouldn't make that happen. So rooting
abundance in the story of Like Wow, Like it used
to be that we had like a majoritarian left liberal
politics that could fundamentally change people's lives by delivering them
things that are powered by technology, that are powered by
different forms of organizing and when the private sector or
the public center can't get it done. That's really what

(01:14:43):
I want abundance to be rooted. And I think the
first chapter of the book that we pitched to the
left would be rooted not in the future in a
way that people aren't really bought into, just in the
like why was it that nineteen thirties liberalism could deliver?
But if we asked basically anyone, they would say that
like New York, California, etc. All these like bastions of
like left liberalism can't really deliver. That's why I want

(01:15:04):
abundance to be rooted in.

Speaker 2 (01:15:05):
I think the whole country can't deliver. Though I mean,
I am perfectly willing and happy to admit I'm in
favor of, you know, zoning reform. That there are you know,
ways that the Texas housing zoning policy is superior to
the California zoning policy. But I feel like the differences
between Texas and California are less important than the differences

(01:15:26):
between America now and America during the New Deal.

Speaker 3 (01:15:30):
As you're laying out and so, you.

Speaker 2 (01:15:32):
Know, I was telling you before, I feel a little
bit gas lit on abundance because sometimes it will be
pitched to me this way of like we're just talking
about the new deal, like you like the new deal,
right bro?

Speaker 3 (01:15:41):
And I'm like, yeah, I like the new Deal.

Speaker 2 (01:15:43):
And then other times it's pitched like screws or on
Mundani and we just need to you know, effectively, like
abundance is just a new pitch for neoliberalism where we
get the regulators out of the way and these out
of touch do good or liberals so that the big
business can do their thing. And it can't be both

(01:16:04):
of these things. So there is a part the goals
of abundance. Who could disagree with, right, building more stuff,
building more housing, making housing more forward to actually being
able to do the high spreed rail like really building out.
And this is where there's another i think tension within abundance,
like really building out the capability to move into a
green energy future. But to your point about there's this

(01:16:26):
other part of abundance that also is very fossil fuel
aligned and is you know, exist in the Trump administration,
which does not actually want that green energy future. It
certainly starts to feel like, okay, this is being used
whatever the intentions of you know, various people in the
movement are it's being used as a way to stop

(01:16:47):
a shift in the Democratic Party that would otherwise organically happen,
and that you see happening towards, you know, a framing
around corporate power and checking oligarchy. And so that's where
the concern comes in, is that you've got this moment.
You have this reckoning with the you know, the wreckage
of neoliberalism that has been repudiated sort of across the board.

Speaker 3 (01:17:09):
Here and around the world.

Speaker 2 (01:17:10):
By the way, you have a moment where Bernie and
AOC have never been more popular, not just with the
original Bernie base, but with the broader Democratic Party. You
have a really clear reckoning with oligarchy, which has been
made you know, abundantly evident by the Trump administration and
Elon and Doge and the tech right, and having all

(01:17:31):
of those oligarchs behind him at the inauguration, and the
way that so much of their policy is driven towards
providing for the billionaire class.

Speaker 3 (01:17:38):
You also have this.

Speaker 2 (01:17:39):
Reckoning with AI coming where these people are trying to
become the first trillionaires and eliminate like half of the jobs,
and into this march is effectively what appears to me
to be basically like a rebranding of neoliberalism to say,
oh no, this is new and different, but really try
to preserve the status quo. And that's where you know,
I think evidence for this in terms of the way

(01:18:00):
it's being used is by how eagerly it's being accepted
by the richie tours is of the world, by the
entire Senate Democratic Caucus and the establishment democratic figures who
are most comfortable with trying to preserve the status quo.

Speaker 4 (01:18:16):
Yeah, and I think that I'll offer you kind of
a rubric here, so you should note that when I
was sort of giving my pitch for abundance, I wasn't saying,
and we need to get America back to growth. Growth
is the key key thing. Growth growth, growth, growth growth.
You'll kind of hear that from sort of like the
right wing like tech billionaire crowd here. That is like
the version of abundance which is basically just like a
substitute for like neoliberalism, just substitute for me, we regulate

(01:18:39):
and something that that is a key thing that I
really should out for here. But let's go back to
this Zorron conversation. What I love about abundance, and this
is like the key thing. We're going to talk about
this pole in a second. But there's you know, there's
a poll out there it by Demand Progress that revealed
that abundance messaging is far less popular when you're not
door knocking for voters than a more populis centric pitch.
So I think that that's fine, Like that is not

(01:19:01):
a shocker, Like if you are running for office right now,
you should not be talking about bottlenecks, and like the
fact that like our NEA laws have made it so
permitting doesn't Like that is not the pitch. The pitches
that like Elon Musk is like literally killing kids in Africa.
He's cutting your grandmother off of Social Security. So a
bunch of like eighteen year old you know dudes can
like play around and pretend they're like new dealers or

(01:19:22):
something like that. Like that is what you are talking about,
right and to your point about Zora, And you're also
talking about like housing and afford a bit like actual
not not just like housing in the Astra, but like actually,
like I am meeting you as a voter, and I'm
recognizing the number one thing you're worried about right now
is how truly precarious American life is right now, So
like that is what the actual electoral pitch is. But

(01:19:42):
what abundance should be in response to voters not being
jazzed about bottleneck reforms is a tool kit to help
politicians actually think through how freaking complicated and difficult it
is to navigate this country. So back when I was
first getting into policy, if you were reluctive, you're talking
about people talking people about housing, we just say, like, yeah,
like rend control or you know, like let's just like

(01:20:03):
kind of do that. Abundance expands the set of policies
in a bigger direction, So it says, okay, soron. So like,
I'm not going to convince Ron in any way whatsoever
that rent control isn't what like New Yorkers are demanding
or what wouldn't be informer delivery for his base. What
I could offer with the abundance toolkit is, but hey,
we really should also build more housing because there's a

(01:20:24):
real gap and shortage of housing. And yes, there are
two million New Yorkers who want rent control, but there's
also like other New Yorkers who don't have apartments right
now in the first place, and need apartments to actually
exist in the first place. So my real like and
the good news here too is.

Speaker 3 (01:20:38):
What would she embraces Yeah and so great?

Speaker 4 (01:20:41):
Right? That is that is that is what yes and
looks like. And once again yes and should also be
rooted in that Kamala Harris poll. And add thing we
talked about earlier where it's like voters love more housing,
talk about the new dear or like what did Harry
Truman do after he comes into office? There was a
housing shortage in America. Whence all the g eyes came back,
We built more housing. This is we have to people
do in this country. So we're gonna have to come

(01:21:02):
up with a broad mix of doing these different things.
I think part of the issue too, of abundance what
kind of Ezra and Derek or pundits like that is
their job, Like if you're a pundit, you noticed like
you have to make your argument, dial it up to
one hundred and twenty percent and advance the argument. So
they in their argument really focus this on the deregulatory story.
The reason why I went back to the New Deal

(01:21:23):
story in terms of my telling of abundance is more
just that we should be focused at this point in
the conversation, or we put it this way because people
what I wear are conversations they want. We should root
our abundance conversations when we're trying to engage between like
the center and the left in objectives and then work
our way backwards rather than just sort of saying, hey, guys,
guess what deregulations they answered all of your problems. You're

(01:21:44):
not going to agree with that. What I want you
to agree with me here, and I suspect you will,
is we need to approach housing through a bunch of
different vectors. Rent control is not going to solve everything.
That's your concession. I'm going to concede that if we
magically also a we're not going to magically just relax
zoning across the country because the incredibly unpopular, ironically enough,
even with moderate centrist voters. I live in the Texas suburbs.

(01:22:05):
I promise you these mind. And this is also why
the centrist like Abundance Project is going to run into
like a weird place. I promise you like my centrist
Texas voters definitely would like they're down for the moderate
on social cultural issues part, they are not down for
like a mass GMBD regulatory program that fundamentally transforms the suburbs.
So we're both going to have to make some of

(01:22:25):
some sort of like concession here and build an approach together.
And that starts with recognizing, wow, we need to get
more housing for people and make housing more affordable. That's
a bunch of different approaches.

Speaker 2 (01:22:36):
I agree with all of that when you read the book.
That is not actually the message of the book. And
I think one of the things that has been useful
to me in listening to the re alignment is helping
to understand, like, Okay, the book is not the entirety
of There are different factions here and the book is
not the entirety of the movement. But you know, when
we were talking about narratives before, the narrative of the

(01:22:59):
book is that there were these liberal do gutters who
put a bunch of regulations in place, well intentioned that
have been that have you know, outserved their usefulness and
need to go. And a lot of this becomes very
squishy because there are difficult moral choices involved in, you know,
pushing to the side any of these you know, regulations

(01:23:20):
or any of the interest groups involved in what Ezra
Client calls everything bagel liberalism, so he never wants to
actually say, like, and that's why we shouldn't use prevailing
wage standards, right, Or that's why we shouldn't require childcare
as part of building these projects, or that's why we
shouldn't do environmental review, or that's why we shouldn't have
these air protections to make sure that when we do

(01:23:41):
build public housing that poor people aren't like suffering from
asthma and other conditions that.

Speaker 3 (01:23:45):
Would be avoidable.

Speaker 2 (01:23:47):
That's all kind of pushed to the side so that
it feels like there are no difficult moral choices that
have to be made there when there actually are.

Speaker 3 (01:23:54):
So that's number one.

Speaker 2 (01:23:56):
Number two is what I would say is like on
some of the concrete examples about you know, zoning regulation
and about building out green energy, I don't even I
don't disagree. What I disagree with is making that story
the central story to politics, because I don't. It's not
that it's not part of the picture, but I don't

(01:24:18):
think it is the central story to politics whatsoever. And
just to give one example, you know why when they
did this massive study to look at, okay, when zoning
reform has been implemented, what has been the impact on
the housing supply, and it's it's not that it had
no impact, but it increased housing supply.

Speaker 3 (01:24:32):
By like point eight percent.

Speaker 2 (01:24:34):
So to have it as part of the agenda and
to understand these issues in terms of governance and being
able to better deliver, yes, absolutely. If you're trying to
supplant an oligar anti oligarch agenda with a yimbi agenda
and a deregulatory agenda, yes, those two things are actually
at odds with each other, and I.

Speaker 3 (01:24:56):
Think they fail.

Speaker 2 (01:24:56):
I think they fail on both the I think abundance
as like this narrow we need to deregulate project fails
both on the policy level to deliver the things that
we would want to deliver and on a political level
in terms of winning elections at a time when you know,
the stakes are really existential. Like you know, if you
zoom out for a minute, here we are, and I

(01:25:19):
don't know if we agree on all of the contours
of this, but I think we're witnessing the rise of
a sort of like would be fascism and techno authoritarianism.
You have these you know, powerful billionaires who are have
vast control over our government, who are doing things like,
you know, just cutting the funding of USAID so that

(01:25:41):
millions of people around the world may die as a
result of those cuts.

Speaker 3 (01:25:45):
We're stripping the social safety net.

Speaker 2 (01:25:47):
Who are deregulating AI so that there's just this you know,
massive rush into an AI arms race that could have
completely devastating consequences for the human race. But in the
war immediate term is certainly going to cause significant labor
and worker displacement. And you know, this agenda is being

(01:26:08):
pursued at a rapid and terrifying pace. And so to
fight back against that with zoning reform and you know,
getting the regulations out of the way, it's just to me,
it feels so wildly inadequate to the moment and what
we actually need to deliver as a you know, counter

(01:26:29):
political project to what is rapidly coalescing in this country
right now.

Speaker 4 (01:26:33):
Yeah, So two things. So number one, I want to
focus on like the liberal do good or deregulation story
because I think it's really important. So what's been unfortunate
from an abundance perspective is like Derek and Azer, because
they're the size of their audience has just blotted out
the sun. There was another book about abundance that also
came out a month before. It's called Why Nothing Works
by Market Dogglement. It's a very very good Frankly, it's

(01:26:54):
actually a much better book. It's one hundred pages longer. People,
if you want to really learn about these books, should
read these books. They Why Nothing Works and when. What
Mark does an amazing job is he tells this abundant
story through the lens of like debates about America and
the left and liberalism for the twentieth centuries. Here's here's
the way he tells the story. In the nineteen thirties,

(01:27:14):
you saw he explains us that liberalism and by the way,
I know people, you know this, people get so nitpicky
with the terms basically describing like left of like center
left thought in America extends all the way out during
the nineteen thirties. The way he explains this is liberalism
has like two instincts. Like one is like the Hamiltonian
instinct after like Alexandra Hamilton. It's it's big, it's making moves,

(01:27:37):
it's trying to force change, it's aggressive. So the New
Deal was a Hamiltonian project. We were going to once
again electrify the whole country. We're going to build the TVA,
we are going to build the Hoover Dan. We're gonna
do all these big, big, big things and bring America
into the twentieth century. We'll also like regulating capitalism, all
these like different aspects. So that created a lot of
really great stuff. And also, though, and this is why

(01:27:59):
I think this needs to be more rooted in the
story of abundance, it created a lot of bad things,
Like what is Rachel Carson's Silent Spring about? Like what
were all those nineties? What is Ralph Nader is like
unsafe at any speak? All these sort of like left
movements that came out of the nineteen sixties looked at
a lot of like the benefits of what we got
from that Hamiltonian New Deal era, where we also had

(01:28:19):
business and government working very very and labor working very
very comfortably low two entangled together. There was a real
industrial complex there. We got a lot of benefit, but
we also got crazy costs. We have Robert Moses like
destroying whole neighborhoods of people in New York City, We
had the police, We had all these different issues. So
that activated a Jeffersonian instinct once again named after Thomas Jefferson,

(01:28:41):
what's going to listen to me? Just citing Mark here,
But the Jeffersonian instinct is like, nah, what about the people?
What about the local community. Did anyone ask, like a
small community of black people in New York City whether
they agree with Robert Moses's grand Hamiltonian vision of what
the twentieth century city looked like. So, coming into the
sixties and seventies, as weocused more on the costs of

(01:29:01):
everything liberalism accomplished, we got movements and said, hey, let's
focus on the on the on the downsides of that,
and that's really important. And I would really push back
on your idea that the best version of abundant says
we're just going to jettison We're going to jettison those
regulations because they are just slowing us down and they're
a whole problem. No, like democracy, like all our politics

(01:29:21):
needs to be rooted in a belief in democracy and
once again a balancing of the Hamiltonian vision and the
Jeffersonian vision. So the way that he kind of explains
this is what's going to work out during this era
is how do we balance the recognition And I think
this is what The Green New Deal is the definition
of a Hamiltonian project, right. The Green New Deal recognizes
that in a climate crisis, America has to move, It

(01:29:42):
has to move fast as to be big, and it
has to be bigginning. It's it's an ambitions. We're not
going to get this done via a bunch of tax
credits to a bunch of corporations. You get this done,
that's Hamiltonian. Jeffersonian side, though, is hey a Hamiltonian project
that has premised on us bulldozing in the entire country,
not listening to communities who may have pollution, not listening
to local communities who have their own Actually, it's also

(01:30:04):
not going to work. So what I'm trying to do
with my work, and this is why I'm really grateful
to have a platform to talk about this here, is
how do we actually balance the Hamiltonian instinct with the
Jeffersonian instinct. And I think if Ezra and Derek spoke
from the perspective more of like balancing those dynamics, And
that's what we're trying to really get to. How do
we recognize a climate crisis? How do you recognize the
fact that you really need to get how do we

(01:30:26):
recognize the fact that we need to reshore our semiconductors
in this country with the fact that we have local
communities and democracy. So that's what I'm trying to basically
get to. And the last thing in the second part
of your response is, look, I think an abundance And
this is why I said that Ezra and Derek are
doing the pundant thing where they dial everything up to
one hundred and twenty percent to sell their argument. This
is everyone does this right. This is a left fright
of center thing. I think there's been a serious overstatement

(01:30:49):
of effect of abundance and gender policies, and I don't
want to I would, and that's why my pitch for
what we do moving forward. I'm doing this on my
own and other people are thinking about this too too.
When when I talk about this on the podcast, I
get input from actual politicians and actual staffers of what
they're looking for. Is what we're talking about this here too.
That's actually the funny thing, Like most people are not

(01:31:11):
actually looking to do a big like centrist versus like
progressive fight. Most people recognize what time it is and
how we need to build something together. So my point
is let's focus on I would love to sit down
with Stora and right here and say, look, let's just
start the fact that housing is a crisis and we
need more of it and it needs to be more affordable,
and then we work our way backwards to how we

(01:31:32):
actually get there. If abundance people are not willing to
do that, then A they're not going to gain political
power in the first place, given your point, but B
it's not going to work.

Speaker 2 (01:31:40):
So Unfortunately, at the very end of that segment with Marshall,
I collapse into a coughing fit, which took me a
while to recover from. But I just wanted to make
sure to say thank you so much to Marshall. Really
enjoyed seeing him, enjoyed engaging with him. I thought it
was really great to have his insights on what is
going on in the world and abundance. All right, let's
go ahead and move on to what is going on
with Palenteer. Trump administration, according to The New York Times,

(01:32:02):
is launching this elaborate project to hoover up all of
our data to consolidate it in one database, and they
are working with Palenteer in order to accomplish these goals.

Speaker 3 (01:32:14):
So let's talk to Ken Clippenstein about what's going on here.

Speaker 2 (01:32:19):
Joining us this morning is Ken Klippenstein, who is a
fantastic journalist over at Substack and has been following I
guess you'd probably called the deep state the national security
state for a long time.

Speaker 3 (01:32:30):
Great to see you again, Hey, good to be back.

Speaker 2 (01:32:32):
So I have grave concern and interest over these reports
that Palenteer is going to be working with the Trump
administration to compile this massive database of information about American citizens.
We can put this up on the screen from the
New York Times, they say Trump taps Palenteer to compile
data on Americans. The Trump administration has expanded Palenteers work

(01:32:54):
with the government, spreading the company's technology which could easily
merge data on Americans throughout eahencies. So help us understand
stand the contours of the story and what Palenteer even
is and what it means for ordinary people.

Speaker 8 (01:33:09):
Yeah, so Palenteer is this sort of AI fueled software
tech company that is a contractor for all sorts of
national security agencies across government. I believe they had a
meeting with the IDF last year in relation to the
war in Gaza. So basically because of the advancements in
AI that we've seen over the last several years, it

(01:33:30):
has become an integral part of basically every major military
at this point, for things like targeting kind of the
roat stuff that it would have taken a lot of
human manpower to do. Now they're no longer limited by that.
And I think the concern on the part of ordinary people,
even if you're not someone that lives in Gaza or

(01:33:51):
in Ukraine where it's being used, or wherever else, is
that something that has preserved our civil liberties for a
long time has been just the pragmatic fact that as
much information as agencies collect, it was never feasible for
them to be able to go through it.

Speaker 4 (01:34:06):
All.

Speaker 8 (01:34:08):
AI now is making it possible to do that, To
triage these huge amounts of data that are being siphoned
up not just by social media analysis but network analysis
ways that they try to map out connections between people.
All of that now is able to be done in
near real time without that delimiting factor of how many

(01:34:30):
people you can actually have to go through it.

Speaker 3 (01:34:32):
So more perfect.

Speaker 2 (01:34:33):
Union put together a good video explaining what Palenteer is,
what it does, and how the Federal government may be
planning to use it.

Speaker 3 (01:34:42):
Let's go ahead and take a listen to a portion
of that.

Speaker 12 (01:34:44):
There's a reason Palenteer just replaced Ford Motors in the
S and P one hundred in the months after Trump
was elected. The Trump administration is an ideal customer for
what Palenteer is selling. First, there are many former Palenteer
employees sprinkled across the administration, from inside DOGE to foreign
policy advisors to high level technology appointees, and Palenteer co

(01:35:08):
founder Peter Thiel, heavily invested in the company, is also
heavily invested in President Trump and Vice President Vance. He
was a major campaign donor to both. Then, the stated
goal of DOGE is to streamline and combine government data,
which is exactly what Palenteer does.

Speaker 10 (01:35:27):
The ways that the government is defrauded is that the
computer systems don't talk to each other.

Speaker 12 (01:35:31):
And obviously Karp is.

Speaker 6 (01:35:33):
Loving in disruption.

Speaker 7 (01:35:34):
At the end of the day, exposed as things that
aren't working, there'll be ups and downs, there's a revolution.

Speaker 4 (01:35:38):
Some people can get their heads cut off, Like you know,
it's like we're we're.

Speaker 7 (01:35:42):
Expecting to see really unexpected things.

Speaker 4 (01:35:45):
And to win.

Speaker 12 (01:35:45):
And what is winning. According to Palenteer, this is CTO
Shamsen Karr in twenty twenty.

Speaker 11 (01:35:51):
One, turning to government, we continue to advance our mission
of becoming the US Government's central operating system as we
extend our footprint across defense, healthcare, and suit allien agencies.

Speaker 12 (01:36:01):
The government's operating system, they want everything to funnel through, Palenteer.

Speaker 2 (01:36:06):
So the US Government's central operating system, and we can
put E four actually up on the screen here. Jason
Bassler tweeted about some of the data the government already
collects on everybody that would now be centralized and unified.
He's talking about tax filing, student dead, social security bank accounts,
medical claims, immigration status, and he says no previous database
system has ever centralized as much personal info across various

(01:36:29):
federal agencies. So help us understand the extent of this
in the ways in which this could be deployed. You know,
I think we already have some inklings of this from
the War on Terror and the way that you know,
dissent in various administrations has been has been curbed and
people profiled who may be at odds with administration priorities.

Speaker 8 (01:36:52):
Yeah, so the national security state is so pervasive in
the United States that if you look at a case
like ICE, which you mentioned a moment ago, they're being
our on a large I think it was a thirty
million dollar contract that they were rewarded. People think of
ICE as the deportation Squad, which that's obviously part of
their job, but they have another lesser known division that
it's kind of like the Homeland Security Department's own equivalent

(01:37:16):
of the FBI. It's called Homeland Security Investigations. And if
you go and look through some of the stuff that's
been released under FOYA about them, they're involved in monitoring
protesters related to the Gaza war, stuff that you wouldn't
think of as what you think of as ICE's remit,
you know, being going after people that they're going to deport.
That's what it's other function, called Enforcement and Removal Operations does,

(01:37:39):
But that's not all they do. So these guys have
a very broad mission set. It's not just immigration, it's
also quote national security threats, which can encompass a lot.

Speaker 4 (01:37:48):
They've got thousands of special agents.

Speaker 8 (01:37:50):
It's kind of the biggest law enforcement agency you've never
heard of Homeland Security Investigations.

Speaker 4 (01:37:55):
So not only is that all true of ice. ICE
is not actually a.

Speaker 8 (01:37:59):
Member of the intelligence community, so at the very least
we hear more about it because it's less secretive than
some of the other agencies. My concern is the contracts
that a company like Pound is being awarded on the
classified side. On the side that is the national security agencies,
you know, the part of FBI, CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency.

(01:38:19):
We're not going to hear about any of that. And
my sense from talking to people is that there is
a massive deployment going on at that level, as well
as the you know, lower law enforcement agencies that are
not a member of that system of the of the
intelligence community like I. So so what we're talking about
now is just the tip of the iceberg and what
you're actually able to see.

Speaker 4 (01:38:39):
All this is important thing to talk about. What you
did there.

Speaker 8 (01:38:44):
All this is important thing to talk about because when
Trump talks about cutting these agencies, and in some cases
he is trying to cut them. He proposed to five
percent cut to FBI, for instance, and cutting certain things
in the Department of Defense, the military. He's cutting legacy systems.
So we're talking Lockey Martin. It's going to affect the
old school companies but what's happening at the same time

(01:39:05):
is more money is being thrown at these newer entrants
who are focused on AI technology. So it's sort of
misleading to say he wants to cut these deep state agencies.
It's more like he wants to move the money from
these legacy platforms, which I think there's a good argument for,
but towards these AI fueled ones that raise all these
civil liberties concerns that we're talking about.

Speaker 2 (01:39:26):
Now, right, And you wrote an article called Homeland Securities,
pre Crime Push where you're talking about some of these elements.
I mean, one of the things that I've been really
thinking through in this era where the Trump administration is
trying to fectuate this policy of mass deportation, there's a
conception that you can sort of limit those tactics just
to the immigrant or the undocumented immigrant population. That's not possible,

(01:39:49):
And I mean, we already see this in ways that
American citizens are getting swept up by ice. You see
this in the way that American citizens who may be
married to an immigrant are having their liberties infringed upon.
But more broadly, in order to figure out who is
citizen and who is non citizen, you got to take
a look at and surveil everyone. It necessitates a vast,

(01:40:12):
massive police state. Again, the priorities of which are quite
evident in the Republican Trump budget, which massively expands ICE.
It also expands the Pentagon budget, massively expands detention facilities.
Like those things don't just stay aimed at a the
non citizen population. It necessarily has to take a look

(01:40:35):
at everyone in order to figure out who are the
goodies in their view and who are the baddies.

Speaker 8 (01:40:41):
Yeah, a critical point here is that what AI allows
you to do is map out networks, connections between people,
and that's very explicitly what they're trying to do, and
that's going to, you know, pull people into the drag
net far beyond the only individuals you're talking about. So
when you send ICE out to conduct things like what's
called pattern of life analysis, see or someone walks to
and goes back from before they deport someone, they try

(01:41:03):
to get a sense of their pattern of life, where
do they go about their day, Where can we try
to intercept them? And as you're mapping that out, you're
going to sweep up all sorts of other things. So
in the case of Mackmood Khalil. They're going to be
surveilling the demonstrations of which he's participating in. It's impossible
to separate those two things, and that's what we've seen
again and again there are you know, Foyer records to

(01:41:25):
show this that ICE is looking at the demonstrations more
generally and not just people they suspect of immigration violations.
So yeah, that has to be front and centered everything
we think about, because again, now they can process this
stuff at scale in a way they never could before.

Speaker 2 (01:41:40):
And so that is really the sort of I guess
tipping point that we're at right now is just the
technological development has advanced to the point that they are
able to accomplish this grand scheme of having a mass
database of all of the information and tracking us in
these significant ways. You know, there's been a lot of
conversation about Elon and Doses. There's actually a little clip

(01:42:02):
of him in the more Perfect Union piece, and in
some ways DOJ's this total and complete failure didn't save
any money, made the government less efficient, but in other ways,
you know, I have a lot of questions about what
was going on there and what sort of data was
being collected what sort of data was being consolidated. And
you know Elon obviously very close to Teal and to

(01:42:22):
Alex krp over at at Pallenteer. You know, what do
you make of how the DOGE project sort of is
connected to this move towards massive data collection.

Speaker 4 (01:42:34):
Yeah, AI informed that as well.

Speaker 8 (01:42:36):
I mean, Musk has his own company x AI, which
the most common part of that that we think of
is is Grock on Twitter. But the idea behind that
is that all of these companies are trying to take
the information that they already had. And you know, there's
a lot of speculation that that's why Elon Musk bought
x in the first place, is to be able to

(01:42:57):
access that data and then have some sort of input
to use to train AI on. And so there is
just this Blitzer out Just to give you just one
random example, since the budget came out, I was looking
through it, the Department of Homeland Security has an AI core,
just like the Peace Corps or any other you know,
subgroup that an agency might have that has an entire
team of people going on to these different agencies figuring

(01:43:19):
out just like we saw with DOGE, but happening at
the agency level, which we might not hear about how
do we take these breakthroughs that these these advancements that
are happening and apply that to case management, to information processing,
and like you said before, sharing across agencies. Even though
ICE is not in the intelligence community, they have a

(01:43:41):
they have a formal mechanism by which they can share
information with them. So something that ICE might sweep up,
maybe they'll get passed along to FBI, maybe it'll get
passed along to military police.

Speaker 4 (01:43:52):
Or whatever it may be.

Speaker 8 (01:43:54):
So there really needs to be a debate about this
brave new era we're entering in because protecting ciblierties can
go completely different than it did prior to prior to
machine learning and some of these large language models.

Speaker 2 (01:44:08):
Yeah, I think that is all well said. I wanted
to talk to you also, Ken about another issue. We
got some extraordinary, I guess comments from former State Department
spokesperson Matt Miller, who became, you know, quite infamous from
being up at the podium and defending things that should
be indefensible in the context of our support of Israel,
as Israel is committing what I and many scholars see

(01:44:30):
as a genocide in Gaza. Now he comes out and says, Yeah, obviously,
Israel is committing war crimes. You know, that's that's completely apparent.
I just couldn't say it at the time because I
was representing the government.

Speaker 3 (01:44:41):
Let's take a listen to what he has to say.

Speaker 4 (01:44:42):
Now, do you think what's going on in Gaza and
now is a genocide?

Speaker 11 (01:44:47):
I don't think it's a genocide, but I think the
I think it is without a doubt true that Israel
has committed war crimes.

Speaker 12 (01:44:56):
You wouldn't have said that with the podium. Yeah.

Speaker 11 (01:44:57):
Look, because when you're at the podium, you're not expressing
your personal opinion. You're expressing the conclusions of the United
States government. The United States government has had not concluded
they've committed war crimes, still have not concluded that.

Speaker 12 (01:45:09):
But your personal view is they have. Well so they will.

Speaker 11 (01:45:11):
Well you with that. But here's here here, yes, but here,
let me let me qualify that there are two ways
to think about the commission of war crimes. One is
if the state has pursued a policy to deliberately committing
war crimes or is acting reckless in a way that
aids and abets war crimes, And that I think is
an open question. I think What is heart is almost

(01:45:32):
certainly not an open question, is that there have been
individual incidents that have been that have been war crimes,
where members of the Israel and military have committed war crimes.
So ultimately, in almost every major conflict, including conflicts prosecuted
by democracies, you will see individual members of the military
of militaries commit war crimes. And the way you judge
a democracy is whether they hold those people accountable. But

(01:45:55):
Israel has and that's my point is we have not
yet seen them hold sufficient numbers of the military accountable,
and I think it's an open question whether they're going to.
I'm really struck that you think now that Israel did
commit war crimes and yet at the time and I
get why, but at the time you were at the
podium and you couldn't say that.

Speaker 6 (01:46:14):
I mean, personally, that must be very DIFFERENTIVE tell you.

Speaker 11 (01:46:16):
So the State Department itself had concluded not in these
they didn't phrase it in these terms, but I think
I did it. The podium a few times had concluded
that it was likely that Israel had committed war crimes.

Speaker 6 (01:46:27):
But I do think it's almost certain your thoughts online ken,
I mean, on the.

Speaker 8 (01:46:32):
One hand, it's of course outrageous that he's willing to
work for an administration that he clearly didn't agree with.
But on the other hand, I'll tell you, and I
talked to a lot of people from State, including diplomats,
what he speak what he's saying is pretty much in
line with what a lot of these guys would say
privately when I talked to them.

Speaker 4 (01:46:48):
I mean, it's the Agency for Diplomacy.

Speaker 8 (01:46:51):
It shouldn't surprise us that they see these things that
have these attitudes. But what does surprise because it shows
you how out of step President Biden was with his
own administration. Yeah, that so many people, including this spokes
this paid flag are coming out and saying this stuff
like Biden had really, you know, strongly held views about

(01:47:12):
Israel that were not consistent with much of the rest
of his of his administration.

Speaker 2 (01:47:18):
I mean, I think most people would feel like even
if even if you are a paid spokesperson like that
doesn't just give you license to lie. And that's I mean,
that is the moral position that he's effectively articulating here.

Speaker 3 (01:47:33):
So there's that.

Speaker 2 (01:47:35):
It's also astonishing to me the continued levels of spin
at this point in time. I mean, You've got frickin'
Piers Morgan out being like, what can I say? All right,
it's a genocide. I mean the number of Israeli officials
all you have to listen to is their own statements
when he's trying to parse, well, there might have been
individual war crimes, but I don't know if it was
government policy. It's like, really, did you not see them

(01:47:57):
announce a policy of mass starvation and blockade of the
entire gaza strip?

Speaker 3 (01:48:02):
Like have you not watched as we've had.

Speaker 2 (01:48:05):
Month after month after month of total annihilation and people
being massacred as they go and try to get food aid?
Have you not listened to what BB neat and Yahoo
was saying about how you know, we're just going to
use this aid as a pretext to basically.

Speaker 3 (01:48:17):
Engage in ethnic cleansing.

Speaker 2 (01:48:19):
Like it's wild to me at this point that you
could still engage in that level of self delusion to
pretend that maybe this was just rogue actors within the
IDF and though they haven't been punished appropriately, but they
were just doing, you know, their own thing, rather than
a very clear, consistent, concerted government policy at a time when,

(01:48:39):
like I said, even figures like Piers Morgan have figured
out that this is the case.

Speaker 8 (01:48:44):
Yeah, not just Peers, but very sufficials from powerful European
governments in France for instance.

Speaker 4 (01:48:49):
I mean, this is your changed.

Speaker 8 (01:48:50):
I don't even d these are very powerful, wealthy European
states saying these things. Something is happening over the last
several weeks. I looked at that. I couldn't figure out
what was driving it. But there's absolutely a shift that
we haven't seen at any point since October seventh.

Speaker 2 (01:49:05):
So just for people's recollection, let's go ahead and take
a listen to some of the ways, some of the
things that he was saying when he was at the podium.

Speaker 11 (01:49:12):
I think it is without a doubt true that Israel
has committed war crimes.

Speaker 4 (01:49:17):
You wouldn't have said that with the podium. Yeah.

Speaker 11 (01:49:19):
Look at bureaus that look at facts, apply them to
international law and make assessments. Those assessments are ongoing, and
we have not yet at this time concluded that Israel
has violated international humanitarian law. But we have ongoing assessments
across a number of different fronts.

Speaker 12 (01:49:33):
So all these organizations are just wrong. They just see
the little difference.

Speaker 11 (01:49:37):
I'm telling you that we have ongoing assessments and we
have not yet reached that convailed to implement all the
things that we recommend in that other Now that said,
we are not at the end of the thirty day period,
and we are. It's not the end, it's not the
end of the semester. You don't give out you don't
hand out grades in the middle and gives you the
right to lecture other countries on there. More So, if

(01:49:58):
you have a policy question for me, I'm happy to
take it. If you want to give a speech, But
I think spa places in Washington where you can give
a speech.

Speaker 4 (01:50:03):
Yeah, but people are sick of the bullshitting here.

Speaker 6 (01:50:05):
I mean it is a genocide.

Speaker 1 (01:50:07):
Another question, a real blowing up an entire village in
southern Lebanon.

Speaker 4 (01:50:17):
What do you make of that?

Speaker 11 (01:50:19):
So I've seen the footage, I cannot speak to what
their intent was or what they were trying to accomplish.
Sometimes everyone likes to make this seem like a black
and white issue that it's completely simple, where there's somebody
that's blocking humanitarian assistants, when it actually it can be
much more complex. Targeted attacks on civilians could not be justified.

(01:50:39):
But Israel does have the right to go after terrorists.
I mean, that is just a fact under international humanitarian
law that every country has the right to defend itself.

Speaker 3 (01:50:48):
So Ken, I'd like you to.

Speaker 2 (01:50:49):
Talk a little bit about the moral calculation that goes
on here, because I think in some instances people could
be sympathetic to the idea that like, look, you're a
spokesperson for this other politician. It's impractical to think your
views are going to line up one hundred percent of
the time. You aren't speaking for yourself. You speaking on
behalf of this agency. You're speaking on behalf of the president, whatever.
So there are going to be times when you represent

(01:51:11):
something that is not truly your own personal view. It
seems very different when you're talking about something like war
crimes and crimes against humanity. And I do think the
willingness of someone like a Matt Miller to stand up
there and say things he knows is not true to
remain in that job, even as it's not just Israel

(01:51:31):
committing war crime, it's US funding, providing diplomatic cover for
lying on their behalf shipping weapons in order for them
to perpetrate those war crimes. Like that is to me
a morally unconscionable decision to make. So talk a little
bit about that moral landscape and the rationale that does

(01:51:51):
go through the minds of people like Matthew Miller who
end up adopting this pathetic line of Defenso I, you know,
I was just following orders.

Speaker 8 (01:52:01):
Yeah, the capacity for rationalization has to be strong if
you're if you're going to be a spokesperson for an
organization like that, and he clearly has that. I was
amazed how breezely he was able to put it off.
I mean, if I did an interview like that, I'd
be kind of embarrassed and kind of like, here's what
I'm doing to try to, you know, make up for
what I said before?

Speaker 4 (01:52:18):
Right, Yeah, But you know it speaks to the it speaks.

Speaker 8 (01:52:22):
To the culture, because he must be surrounded by people
that also are making these you know more uh, you know,
very morally compromising decisions, and they're also used to it
that it doesn't even merit thinking looking a little embarrassed
or trying to explain what what you're doing to to
make up for your position before. That's the most disturbing

(01:52:43):
feature of it is how when they're breezy about it.
That means that they're used to it and they're surrounded
by other people that are used to it.

Speaker 2 (01:52:50):
Yeah, that's such a great point. Can tell people where
they can follow you and support your work.

Speaker 4 (01:52:55):
I'm on substack. You can find me at kenclipansign dot com.

Speaker 3 (01:52:58):
All right, Ken, Great to see you, my friend, Get
to see you again.

Speaker 2 (01:53:01):
All right, guys, that does it for me here today,
Ryan and Emily will be in tomorrow. Reminder, Reminder, reminder,
we are doing a one month free trial of Breaking Points.
If you go to Breakingpoints dot com and you put
in that promo code BP free YouTube. Can be a
premium subscriber, Participate in our live amas. Get the full

(01:53:22):
Friday show, Get every show full and uncut early in
your inbox. Thank you so much to all of you
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and made this work possible.

Speaker 3 (01:53:31):
And thanks for watching today. I'll see you soon.

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