Henry Olsen Unplugged: Inside Trump, Biden, and the Political Spectacle
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Welcome to another episode of Breaking Battlegrounds with your host Chuck Morin and Sam Stone. Our first guest up today, friend of the program. I think he's been on with us, Chuck, more than anyone else. He's a fan favorite. And he's always a fantastic interview. Welcome to Henry Olson, Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Henry, thank you so much for joining us once again.

Well, thank you for having me back again. First of all, before I get into my original question, the House expelled George Santos by an overwhelming majority. What does this mean for Congress?

Well, I think it means in the short term, Republicans are down one and they'll likely lose this special election, particularly if the Democrats, as expected, pick the former representative for that area, Tom Swasey, as their candidate. So that is a slightly harder road.

Road for the Speaker to hoe. Long term, I think it's a dangerous precedent that they've set, which is it used to be until today that you had to either be convicted of a crime in a court or you had to be a member of the Confederacy who literally took up arms against the United States. And today, now we've lowered the level for expulsion down to credible and serious charges.

given what we've seen in our politics in the last three decades, don't be surprised if we try to define that level down more in the future. And that means more, not less acrimony between the two parties. I think this is what Speaker Johnson, why he voted against it today for this exact reason. He just said, we're setting a bad precedent here. Sadly, the one who gave the best speech about it was Gates out of Florida. No one trusts anything Gates says, so that has no resonation with people. But

I almost feel like Republicans, too, there's a part of them that want to show we're an ethical party because of everything Donald Trump's going through. So we're sort of like, well, look what we've done. Would you think that may be part of the equation for some of them? Yeah, I do think it's part of the equation. Look, the fact is that while Sanders hasn't been

He's been charged of a lot of stuff. Yes. And you look at the stuff that has been reported. He doesn't really come out with credible arguments. You know, like a lot of times defendants in criminal cases will say, well, X, you know, and they offer exculpating facts or Y. And they talk about interpretation of law. And you may buy it or you may not. But it's not true.

incredible. But here, the guy just doesn't have serious legal or factual arguments to say why these things aren't true. So I think that's one reason why it was so easy for so many of his colleagues to join with the Democrats. But again, I do think that we have set a new standard, and it's lower than the one before. And given what our acrimony is, I think we should expect people

people to try and lower it further and that's a problem well my mom used to say when there was somebody she didn't like she would say well i don't want to go bowling with them and i think part of its problem too is no one want to go bowling with george santos so you know you don't have people like you to begin with and then all these other factors it plays a role um you have a great new podcast called beyond the polls an election podcast with henry olson and you

Your recent one this week, you talked about something that most Americans are not paying attention to and probably most of D.C.'s not paying attention to the election upheavals in Argentina and the Netherlands. And I think people think Donald Trump and the populist movement in the United States is a United States unique movement. It is not. It is happening worldwide. Can you tell our audience a little bit about what's happened and what does this mean for Donald Trump?

Yeah, well, what has happened very quickly is that Argentina has elected an out-and-out libertarian. I mean, a lot of times the phrase libertarian is thrown around to mean somebody who likes free markets or somebody who might have picked up the book of Ayn Rand when they were 16. No, no, this guy named his dog after the anarcho-capitalist.

Murray Rothbard. He's the real deal. And not only did they elect him, they elected him with the biggest margin since the return to democracy in 1983 by somebody who wasn't a member of the Peronist Party. In other words, it's

It's an earthquake. And then you get to the Netherlands where this guy named Geert Wilders split off about 18, 19 years ago from the established party and has been basically the bad boy of Dutch politics. He is somebody who rails against immigration and has talked about mosques being illegal. And he's been under he literally lives in a safe house under Dutch state protection because I mean, he straight up said that that the Muslim population they've allowed in should be expelled. We're

regardless of status just gone yeah um like i said the guy's out there okay i mean that yeah and his party of which he organized so that he is literally the only member just just won almost a quarter of the vote and finished first and not by a close margin um so what you've got is

People in Argentina, which is suffering from massive hyperinflation again, and the Netherlands, which is a pretty stable, prosperous country with a different set of problems, both decided to put the middle finger to the establishment and pick the most outside possible person to win the election. And that's what's going on all around the world. And that is an indication that, look, no matter what,

The media and the polite people in the United States say about Donald Trump, the people who don't hate him don't care. And the fact is that for a lot of those people, the fact that he is hated actually is credibility enhancing because it proves to them that he's

that he's really the person who can fight their fight against an elite set of elites that these people believe despise them and reject them. But it's not just these two countries. So I just saw polling that shows Marine Le Pen is now more popular in France than Emmanuel Macron. And then you look at what happened in Ireland. This is there is a real difference.

sentiment of dissatisfaction among Western countries with this mass immigration that's been forced down their throats. Well, and it's not just mass immigration is often the thing that sets it off, but it's economic stagnation, it's cultural rejection, it's condescension. There is

Is there an overriding sense? I mean, I get the overriding sense, Henry, that a lot of people in Western populations just look at our leadership and say, these people hate us all.

Pretty much, yeah. There are very few countries where you don't see that. The next country to watch is Portugal. Portugal is going to have snap elections in March, and they've got a populist party. It's called Chega. Chega is Portuguese for enough. And a couple elections ago, they got 1% of the vote. Last election in 2022, they got 7% of the vote. They're now up to 18% of the vote.

They could very well be the leading non-leftist party in Portugal if their growth continues. And that would be yet another sea change, because this is not a country where the major issue is immigration. There the issue is corruption, stagnation, and a general...

disregard for the average person. And it could very well be that Andres Ventura is the person who's in the driver's seat. It's likely he'll finish second or third. But the fact is, massive growth in Portugal, and that'll be the next earthquake that comes. I had a person talking to me the other day who's been involved in politics for years. They're in their 70s now. They're part of the Reagan and Bush worlds and so forth. And he asked me

Why do you think these people are holding on to Donald Trump? And I said, I think it's one word, fear. They're so tired of being told that they're dumb. They're so tired of being told, just accept what you have. They're so tired of the holier-than-thou attitude that they're fearful that these people are going to come in and change their whole way of life, things that they've known.

And as you're seeing this across the world, these populist movements, how do you think this translates for Donald Trump here coming up in 2024?

Well, I think it's an indication that he's in a very strong position because what we're seeing is that if you liked Donald Trump three or four years ago, you are almost certain to still like Donald Trump. And if you loved him, you still love him. So all of the attacks he's undergone has not dented his popularity.

Then you've got the fact that people who look around and say, you know, we were willing to trust the elites, which is Joe Biden. He said he was going to unify the country. He's not. He said he was going to make things better. They aren't. And these people, the swing voters, are looking and saying, well, you know, Donald Trump doesn't look too bad. And that blows the minds of people around here. But

It blew the minds of people in Buenos Aires that probably are in L.A. It blew the minds of people in Amsterdam of Garrett Builders. The thing is, at some point when your mind keeps getting blown, maybe you should reset the parameters of your mind. You know...

What if Donald Trump had not tried to overturn the 2020 election or dispute it? We'll use semantics here. OK, if you're not trying to you don't have January 6th, you don't have faked electors. How much is Donald Trump leading Joe Biden today if he had not done those things? A couple more points. You know, the thing is, we are so partisan. I don't think that there would be a huge, huge shift, but I think he would be leading by a couple more. He probably had the he probably had independent 60 40. Right.

Exactly. Yes. The thing is that fundamentally, in the last 40 or so years, 50 years, a president gets within 1% of their final job approval rating. So if they're 42% on Election Day, they'll get 43%.

Joe Biden is under 41. Joe Biden is three. His job approval is three points worse than Donald Trump's was at this point in Trump's presidency. And this is when the first impeachment was coming up. So Joe Biden is less popular than Donald Trump during his first impeachment trial. Let that sink in. Well, and it was when every media outlet in the country was screaming about Trump killing everybody's grandma with covid.

Well, that comes up in a couple of months. But the thing is, Trump's popularity generally held up even during COVID compared to where he was. Initially, he had, as many leaders did, a slight bump. And then his shambolic or rambolic daily press briefings started to drive him down. So he didn't get the COVID bump that other people got. But he was still...

most of the year, 43, 44, 42 percent. And Biden is below that. So Biden is worse than than Trump and has been for a number of months. We have just one minute before we go to break here. Henry, I know Chuck mentioned your podcast. How do folks follow along with that and how do they find your podcast and make sure they're subscribed and listening?

Yeah, well, the podcast can be found on most normal platforms. It's being produced by Ricochet. So you can go on the Ricochet platform and download it. You can find it at the Apple podcast. I didn't know you had partnered with John Gabriel and Ricochet, right?

I talked to Charlie Cook, who brought out Ricochet. But yes, they're the producers of it. So you can go to Ricochet. You can go to Apple. That's usually where I get my podcasts from. I'm sure there are other platforms. They've tried to put it on all the major platforms. Perfect. We'll be back with more from Henry Olson in just a moment. Breaking Battlegrounds coming right back.

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Folks, welcome back to Breaking Battlegrounds with your host, Chuck Morin. I'm Sam Stone. You've been hearing us talk for over a year now about YRefi. If you haven't gone on their website and checked them out, you are just making a huge mistake. A 10.25%, up to 10.25% fixed rate of return in this stock market is the security you and your family need. We highly encourage you to check them out and invest YRefi.com. That's invest the letter Y, then R-E-F-Y.com.

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All right. And we're back with Henry Olson. I'm a columnist for The Washington Post. Henry, Nikki Haley, she seems to be the pundits choice to talk about right now. They've been doing it for about a month now. She's up and coming. She's got, you know, the Americans for Prosperity endorsement of money, which for those of us really in the political world, realize that means nothing because it's highly overrated. But what do you think about this love affair, anti-Trumpers affair?

D.C. establishment are having about Nikki Haley.

You know, I just think it's another example of elites who refuse to look at their own country. I have nothing against Nikki Haley. I think she could be a very good president. Right. I think she has shown enormous political skills and I absolutely love her political ambition. But the fact is what she's doing is consolidating the third or so of the Republican voter base who either never liked or has moved on from Trump. And

And the fact is, you know, wait for it. It's a third of the voter base. There's a reason that she gets pasted one on one with Trump. And that's because, you know, 60 percent to two thirds of the Republican primary electorate like MAGA.

And it doesn't matter how much money she's got. It doesn't matter whether Jamie Dimon sends her love notes from Wall Street or whether Charles Koch pines for her in his secret lair in Wichita or wherever it is he runs AFP from. The fact is money doesn't trump message, and her message is not a majority-making message in the GOP electorate. No.

Yeah. One thing we keep seeing over and over is for all these years, the GOP, for lack of a better word, establishment or traditional Republicans have had a majority in primaries. And that's just no longer the case with the Trump base who outweighs them in all these primaries very significantly. And they clearly have not adapted.

Henry, did you have a chance to watch the Newsom-DeSantis showdown last night? Well, it's 90 minutes of my life. I'll never get back. What were your takeaways? Because obviously I find myself at times even in a conservative news bubble and everyone's going DeSantis wiped the floor with Newsom. What was your impression watching it?

You know, my impression is that it was not a wipeout. Now, it depends. Certainly, if you go in and you are somebody who really does not like Democrats and you watch Ron DeSantis, you would say he did a fine job.

But to me, what I was looking for was how will be how did these people profile if they actually were the general election candidate? And what I saw was DeSantis not effectively debating Newsom as Newsom was.

adopting the strategy of being bold, obnoxious, and distractionary. And that's a problem. He wasn't nimble on his feet to be able to turn and make Newsom's misbehavior effectively an issue in the debate. And Newsom, I think, got worse as the night went on, maybe because

He felt he was overconfident. But the fact is Newsom decided, I'm going to do this thing. I'm going to be completely slavish to the Democratic line. I'm going to be attack, attack, attack. And I'm actually not going to defend California. And he had a smarminess that came through more in the last half hour to 45 minutes than the first 45 minutes.

But what he does show is that he's glib, he looks good on camera, and he knows how to execute a game plan. Doesn't mean that he's the 1927 Yankees, but it means this guy's a dangerous competitor if you're a Republican. You know, wake up, smell the coffee, and don't read your own coffee points. I think it was much more of a draw than most Republicans did. Yeah, it didn't switch any independents. I do. The one thing that really stuck out to me is...

facts do not mean anything to Newsom. That's the one thing that really stuck out to me. He'll say anything. I mean, he really will. I mean, that really stood out to me. I was listening to it. Sam and I were- That's the Democrat playbook overall right now. He's king of it. Sam, I was leaving an event last night with Sam we were at, and I was listening to radio and-

I got home and just turned it off, and then I watched it this morning. I mean, it was just too much for me, and I wish DeSantis had taken a different approach, saying, here's the way things we did in Florida, and here's why we did it, and here are the results. Yeah. I think that would have been a home run for him last night.

And that's part of what I mean about the inability to shift game plan is that he had a game plan. He stuck to it, but it actually didn't meet the enemy that he saw. And if you're going to be in this, what you have to be able to do is be good enough to be flexible. So when you say, hey, wait a minute.

He's not going to play by the rules, and Sean Hannity is not going to be a referee that says when you hit below the bell or you hit out after the bell rings that you're going to get penalized. Then you have to adapt to it, and he did not adapt to it very well. There were times, again, when he could have simply said, calm down a little bit, simply said the Reagan line, there you go again, rather than hyping up. And also just say, for all of you independents out there, just note he didn't answer the question.

He was asked, why is your crime this high? And he didn't answer the question. He was asked, why is your gas so high? And the thing is that inability to talk to people who are not already in your corner was another problem. It may just be that DeSantis' strategy is, I'm only going to talk to people in my corner. I'm not interested in talking to independents. But the fact is, independents are watching now, even if they're not paying attention, if you know what I mean. And it

If you're only running one campaign, you can't suddenly switch in four months to run another one. Right. One thing that Sam and I have noticed on the show, we were talking about this a couple weeks ago. We have two minutes left here. We've had probably about 30 U.S. members of the House on, probably half a dozen U.S. senators this year.

And it's amazing how cautious they are. And I think this is hurting the political debate. People are not willing to go and articulate their views and give a reason for it. They want soundbites. Sam and I are talking. The best one we've come across on the show was Senator Marsha Blackburn. She could easily go between issues and talk about them and explain them.

Yeah, by far. And it was really interesting to see, and I saw that last night with him, because you're right. I think DeSantis had a real opportunity to say, look –

we started this way in COVID. I followed the facts. This is what we did. Here are the results. This is why we did it. That would have been such a whole different scenario for him last night at the end of the debate. I think you probably had a lot of infants saying, okay, this is the guy we need. I just need a reasonable leader now. And that's actually a great point because I kept thinking, people used to argue. I wrote a piece about

about the 1967 debate between Robert F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, where they had took questions from foreign students. It was CBS's way to show off that they could do live events across the Atlantic when that was a big thing. They argued. They made arguments instead of just turning back on talking points. And it's disturbing that neither DeSantis nor Newsom were interested in making arguments.

Yeah, no, that was clear, and it was not to wipe out anyone hoped for. Folks, make sure you catch Henry's podcast, Beyond the Polls with Henry Olson. You can get that wherever you get your podcasts, Apple, Substack, Spotify, all the good stuff, just like you can Breaking Battlegrounds. And we look forward to having Henry back again in the near future. Henry, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me back. Breaking Battlegrounds will be right back with Noah Smith in The Washington Post.

Welcome back to Breaking Battlegrounds with your host, Chuck Warren. I'm Sam Stone. Big thank you to Henry Olson, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, for joining us for our first couple of segments. Now up, Noah Smith. He's a journalist for The Washington Post, focused on the business, political, and cultural implications of video games. Noah?

And so kind of a different subject for today, Chuck, but one that I think if you're over 30 or 40 like we are, this may be flying a little under the radar how big video games have become, how culturally relevant they've become, how much is going on in that world that most people don't know. So Noah Smith, thank you so much for joining us and welcome to the program.

Thank you guys so much. I appreciate it, and great to be joining. Let's start off with just how big has the video game business become? Because I think people don't understand how big.

How much reach it has in how many places? 100%. So there's so many different ways to get into how big it's become, depending on what flavor appeals to somebody. The most we can talk, you know, money. That's usually a good one. So there we're talking, I mean, depending again, how you calculate it. Some will say 50 billion. Some say it's up 10%.

past 100 billion in terms of annual revenue around the world. Importantly, that's gonna include also mobile games, which is the biggest segment of games that people usually don't think about when we talk about video games. So that'd be one way to look at how big it's become. Another way to look at it would be looking at who is investing or otherwise playing

In the space, you can look at folks, you know, Michael Jordan has invested into the video game industry in different ways, LeBron James, his son. So, you know, from a cultural touchstone standpoint, you have all of that. And then even getting into things like fashion, you know, some of these video game, what they're called video game orgs or video game organizations, esports orgs, esports organizations, which are kind of like

The easiest way would be like teams, like the teams in this space for professionals. You know, like their gear, their swag, you know, they'll do what they call drops, right, where they like release a special version of it, and those will sell out in hours. So you have all of those elements, and then you have even things like, this is getting a little bit older in the space, so like

maybe a few years ago, but even like doing the dances that you see in certain games, so like Fortnite, you know, some of the animations, people, you see kids doing that, you see professional athletes doing that. So, so many different ways to measure it, but it's safe to say it's a pretty big deal these days. Let me ask you a question before we get started with a bunch of serious questions about video gaming and its power. How did you get into this specialty in journalism? I mean, what,

you know, I mean, you know, I know probably in college, you didn't think like, this is going to be my specialty. I'm going to do it for the Washington Post. I mean, how did you get into this? Did you fall into it by accident or did some vendors say, you know, this is an upcoming trend. We probably need to pay attention to it. How'd it happen? Yeah. So I, I wish that there was some like great plan. And I, you know, I saw this whole thing coming, you know, after my parents told me stop playing video games every weekend and nights and everything like that. But no, it's a, it,

It was a total fluke in a way. I have a colleague, a dear friend, Rory Carroll, who is still a reporter for The Guardian. He got a pitch from some e-sports thing. He couldn't do it, gave it to me. I didn't, to be honest with you, I didn't really know 100% what it was. Kind of pitched it to my editor at The Post. They had passed it along to Mike Hulme.

And Mike Hume had the vision and the insight to say, hey, that's actually a pretty big deal. It turned out to be the launch of the Overwatch League, which is one of these pro leagues. Robert Kraft, the owner of the Patriots, was a major investor into that and just basically wrote a story on that, ended up on A1 front page of Washington Post and

I wish I could say happily ever after. It was quite a struggle to get more coverage on it, but it's one of the things that fell into place, where you have this confluence of social, cultural, even political, especially political, things like that, political implications. And so, yeah, just more and more coverage, and that's kind of how we've arrived here. How much money can someone make in these esports leagues?

More than Tom Brady annually during his last year in the NFL. How many people make that much money in those leagues?

Okay. So in the leagues themselves, there's two things. So there's the leagues, Overwatch League called Duty League. There's something called League of Legends. So in those leagues, it's going to be more capped. That's going to be generally in the, say, depending on where it is, like upper, I forgot the minimum, but the minimum was pretty good, like $50,000, $60,000, $70,000.

And then the other ones will be low six figures, and then the stars will make seven figures. But then the real money came in through exclusivity deals on platforms like Twitch. And that's where the really big money came in. That kind of has gone away at the moment because there's no competition for Twitch. But then sponsorship deals. So, yeah.

You know, you get a lot of people who just generate a lot of attention, a lot of eyeballs, and then advertisers want to put their money through them so that they can speak to audiences. So it's not many who reach the Tom Brady numbers, probably like a handful, if that. Not many in the NFL either. Yeah. No, that's true. That's true. That's amazing. We've got just about 30 seconds, and then we're going to break. We're going to be coming back right after that with more from Noah Smith of The Washington Post. This is a fascinating discussion, Noah, because –

I mean, I grew up playing video games, but it was before this era of commercialization. And it's amazing how much it's exploded. And I'm very much looking forward to continuing to explore that and some of the security and other implications that are coming 100 percent. That's coming up after the break, folks. Make sure you stay tuned. Breaking Battlegrounds coming right back.

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We're with Noah Smith of the Washington Post. So, Noah, there was a survey done last year of 1,128 gamers in the U.S., United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Korea that found 51% reported encountering some form of extremist statement or narratives on video games. And they said those under 18 were likely to encounter statements promoting genocide, political violence, etc. Is this becoming a real big problem on video games?

So the 51%, I'm actually shocked to hear that. I would expect it to be much higher. So basically, it's not a new problem. It's an ongoing problem, and it's a serious problem, and it comes in different versions, I would say. So there's a version of, say, people getting ready to go into a

So there's some of these games, just so everyone, all the listeners and everyone's on the same page. Some of these games are, you know, you go online, whether it's on a console like PlayStation or on your computer, and you can join other people and play games together, right? Like Call of Duty and multiplayer games. And so you're matched with different folks. And that's an automatic thing that happens on these platforms. And while you're waiting to join,

those games with other people, people can just say, you know, a lot of times whatever they want. And then when you get into the games, you're on a team with people and you can hear them, they can hear you and people say things. And so there's, there's instances of people saying the kinds of things that, that people are reporting. And I would say, and I've reported on this, basically a total lack of responsiveness from both the platforms themselves and the

video game publishers. So you have that certainly, and that's again, a multi-decade issue going back to the beginning of multiplayer games, online multiplayer games. And then you have recruitment, which kind of gets into a different thing, but that's absolutely taking place as well as is documented across several academic studies and news media reports where, you know,

You know, that may be the start of it is people saying something like hateful and then maybe somebody responds to it in a positive way. And then, you know, you're kind of off to the races. It's more complicated than that. But ultimately, the platforms and the games do become very fertile ground for recruitment and for building, you know, hateful communities. How much we had a guest on recently talking about child sex exploitation.

And that there were a lot of forums where people were trying to reach out and recruit or groom these kids via these platforms. And there's been a case fairly recently of the classified documents being shared on one of these type platforms. How much is this or should it be a concern to governments and to society what's going on in all these various forums? Yeah.

I don't think it can be overstated how important it is because I think that what folks need to realize is that this is the major social platform for young people. This is the public square for them. And so all the things that we would be concerned about taking place outside of our front doors are taking place now here, except with, you know, tremendous outsized reach, right? I mean, if you're just outside your doors, how many people are going to walk past you? Even in New York City, right? But here, you know, you're talking about

tens of millions of players for some of these games, even more per month. And so having this be sort of, you know,

Now, I don't want to say it's unregulated. There's regulation and things that apply, certainly, but it's very complicated. It's very difficult to get these video game companies, publishers, and the platforms themselves, again, the PlayStations, the Microsofts of the world that make the video game consoles, people that make the games, to take serious action on it. And, you know, I've even spoken to the heads of some of these platforms, and, you know, they've said, look, I...

we don't want to be responsible for it. We don't want to be police, excuse me, free speech, right? We're not the Supreme Court, but in the lack of other, you know, in the lack of the ambiguity, this is, this is what happens. And so, um,

To get back to the original question, yeah, it's a huge problem. And I would say very importantly, unlike the discussions that took place around video games, like when I was growing up with Columbine and blaming the content of the games themselves for violent acts, which I think has been largely disproven, this is not that, to be very clear. This is people interacting with other people on a social platform that just happens to be video games. And so I think that that distinction is important.

I actually kind of got a little bit of an experience of that. So I do. I started during the pandemic playing this game true number operator to improve my math skills. And there's a discord community attached to it. About half the people in that community are Russian. And so when the Russia Ukraine war broke out, boy, that became a nasty community overnight. And then after about a month, we all had to agree that we just weren't going to touch on that subject and we were going to stick to math. But.

There's an exposure to this that even if video game companies were to step in, there are these third party apps and gaming related things like Discord that they then have a whole nother frontier that they would have to try to monitor.

Well, exactly right. And I'm so glad you brought that up because Discord and, you know, with the course of my reporting, I've spoken to leadership there. That is, I would say, the major forum for what we're talking about here. I mean, certainly you have Twitch. Certainly you have the games themselves, the in-game chats and things like that. But Discord is, I would say, should be the biggest focus for whatever, you know, if there's going to be regulation or if parents are concerned about their children. That's what I would be concerned about because there you have these walled gardens, right?

what they're called, private servers, so people can get in there. And, you know, Discord, I don't know, I'm not up on the exact list of how they monitor, if they monitor, what's going on in there. But it's certainly an order of magnitude harder, I think, to track that. And the country should be aware at the very minimum. And I think encouraging lawmakers and other regulators to do more to be abreast of what's going on.

Let's talk about this regarding national security. So earlier this year, you had the National Guard Airman Jack, the 21-year-old kid that was sharing classified documents with his online gaming community. Is this a real problem or is this a one and done type deal?

I just said something. I want to just be clear because it didn't come out exactly right. I'm not saying that the government should eavesdrop on the discord conversation. I'm just saying that there should be clear – Guidelines. When we're talking about incitement or police – or especially towards minors, which is a major concern that I personally as a father have when it becomes – Right. So I just wanted to clarify. No, thank you. To your question, yeah, so –

Tashara is one of several people who have posted classified documents over the past, I think, two to three years to essentially win an argument on life or to sort of like bolster their status among their friends. Like, hey, look what I have, guys. You know, like,

That kind of deal. Not to degrade or hurt any particular nation, but we have him, and then there was another game where people were posting specs on tanks. Like actual, like, what would happen if you hit a tank here, or this is what a shell could do, or this is the thing.

And the whole reason for that was because one guy was saying, well, this game is unrealistic because, you know, in real life, the Challenger 2 tank wouldn't take damage like that if it got hit, you know, in this place. And someone was like, oh, really? Well, look at this. According to the actual thing, it says that, you know, so...

And that happened three times in a British tank shelter, too, that Leclerc called in France and then a Chinese shell. So I would imagine military contractors actually have to watch out for this because my guess is young engineers that the types of they're getting who are generally digital, you know, digitally focused. I'm guessing there's a very high participation rate in these type of things.

Yeah, well, I mean, you've nailed it. So the specs, the operating manuals, whatever it is for these things, are classified. But certainly, they're not just, for instance, like top secret, eyes only, something like that. I mean, they have to get distributed even to foreign countries that are going to operate these tanks. So yeah, I think that, again, I'm going back to the whole topic of this conversation, is that just –

an awareness that this forum exists, right? That video games, that, you know, places like Discord, that these places exist and that people might not be motivated to

in the same way as they have been in the past when it comes to leaking information, not for instance to get money or to support a foreign enemy nation or something like that, but literally just to win an argument with a random person on the internet. That's sort of where we've arrived to. But it hasn't damaged that we know national... I mean, the Teixeira one is different, but I think there's still time to do things to sort of address this before it escalates further.

This is fascinating to me, Chuck, because you don't hear this discussion at all. What would Noah Smith of the Washington Post, Noah, what would you tell parents?

About their kids spending all the time on these video games. How would you monitor it, or what advice would you give their parents? What do you do for your own kids? Well, my daughter is two and a half, so we try to just keep her away from all of it. Even the phone, everything, as much as we can for as long as we can. But for parents with older kids...

So it's tough. I think that it falls in the same template as other public forums and other ways that they prepare or educate their children on how to participate in public and really trying to hone in on the fact and really trying to have the kids understand that, you know, yes, they might be sitting at home, they might be sitting in their living room, they might, you know, be next to their parent, might be next to their family, be in a very comfortable, safe environment, but having them

you know, with an understanding that they are in a public, uh, largely unregulated space with strangers who they don't know who they are. So the same, you know, stranger danger going out, you know, to the park, don't, you know, just don't talk to random people, whatever it is, just to, to make sure that their kids understand that that's what is going on. And that's really hard to do. Um, I know even like my, my younger siblings, um,

you know, it was different for them than it was for me because I sort of remember the world before all of this, before the Internet, before. But, you know, when you grow up natively, I think it's really tough. And so I think that would be the central piece of advice. I mean, as a parent of a two-and-a-half-year-old, I'm certainly not giving advice to parents even of three-year-olds. Or even to three-year-olds, I'm not the person to give advice. But I just think that that is the key. And really having an understanding of how big and how vast –

This whole industry ultimately is. You know, when I was growing up, one of the things that you kind of got taught by both your parents in schools, there was sort of a book, if you will, for teaching your kids how not to basically get killed in the real world. You know, look both ways when you're crossing the street. Keep awareness of your surroundings. Do we need to develop that same sort of like –

you know book essentially if you will for hey kids this is what you need to be watching out for when you're in any any online type forum yes i think it's a million dollar idea i might do it i'll i'll give credit if i do you should do it yeah i'll buy it yeah it's a great idea you should do it fair enough uh i think it's a tremendous idea it's funny like i never thought i'd

Even like three years ago, be on a show advocating for these things. But yeah, it is real. It's not like a shrill pearl clutching, like, hey, we need to be... It's a real threat. And obviously...

In context, I would say that most of the time when you're playing a video game, you're just playing a video game. Somebody might say something foul, but you can mute them, and if you want to report them, you can report them and go on with your life. Again, it doesn't absolve the groups of responsibility to take care of these things, but

I think, though, that while that is true and while most of the time people are having fun, which is why they're participating in these games in such high numbers, especially for younger kids, and I think that I saw the figure 75% of kids, I think this was under 18 years old, play video games. So three quarters. Yeah, I think that strikes me as low. Yeah, I was going to say that.

I've not met a kid who doesn't these days. Yeah, exactly. And so I think that, yes, absolutely. Some sort of basic rules of the road, so to speak, or some sort of basic awareness, some sort of basic understanding for kids that like, hey, here's what you're doing. Have fun, you know, whatever it is. But just understand that, again, this is a public forum. You don't know who you're talking to. And these are the risks. And yeah, I think absolutely.

Noah, thank you so much for joining us today. Folks, big thank you to Noah Smith of The Washington Post. This was a fascinating discussion, and I think we'd look forward to definitely having you back on again in the future. Absolutely. If you have things that you think people need to be aware of, please let us know. We'd love to get you back on. How do folks stay in touch with you and your work? So a few different ways. I'm not quite as active on Twitter or X or whatever they're calling it these days, but I'm on there. Quicks. Yeah.

Yeah, V-I-L-D-E-H-A-Y-A at Buildahia and then also Washington Post. And then I also work with a nonprofit called Direct Release. Do some great work in the U.S. and around the world. And so also follow some of the stuff we're doing on that website as well. Fantastic. Thank you so much, Noah Smith. Have a great weekend, Noah. Folks, stay tuned. We've got a great podcast segment for you. Also, Breaking Battlegrounds back on the air next week.

Welcome to the podcast segment of Breaking Battlegrounds with your hosts Chuck Warren and Sam Stone. I want to give special thanks to Henry Olson, a longtime friend of the program, for joining us once again today, and Noah Smith of The Washington Post. Really appreciate having him on to talk about something you don't hear on these kind of airwaves very often, about the intersection of video games, culture, and society. So good stuff there. Now we're going to go to – is it sunshine? No.

No, no, no. It's Piety's Corner, but I'm thinking it's Kipper Chipper Corner. Anyway, Kipper Chipper Corner. Why don't we talk about our triple homicide today? The Wood Chipper Corner. Fargo. All right, let's go. Well, a little update on the Brian Koberger case because they ruled out cameras.

news cameras, but they're going to live stream the case. So this will be exciting. I can talk about it on Kipper's Corner. We're very excited about that. Yeah. So that was a new ruling that happened this week. So make sure we got to put that up on the battlegrounds, you know, all the social media, the links. And I'll be here every Friday to give you the ins and outs of that. But today I have a story out of Oklahoma for our Oklahoma listeners about a woman named Keegan Harrowes. She was a woman described as a, I'm putting air quotes because

I don't know, but she was a highly sought after criminal defense attorney in Oklahoma City. She was described to be someone that believed in you even when you stumbled. People give stories about how she came and cleaned their house. She was a client and she would come and clean their house just to help them kind of get back on their feet. Well, this was until she fell in love with one of her clients that she was representing on drug and firearm charges.

then she started representing him on domestic assault and battery charges against his ex-girlfriend who had a restraining order etc right so she's representing him and one of the actions that she had asked was one of her other clients she asked them to go into the ex-girlfriend's home and plant fake methamphetamine the client then reported that to either the cops or something and they said no I'm

like whatever they spoke to about it, case was going to go on. That wasn't enough for Barry. Barry wanted to make sure that she could not testify against him. And so Barry,

Keegan and Barry, Barry is a client that she fell in love with, broke into the home of his ex-girlfriend and shot her and her parents because the parents were witnesses in a triple homicide. Jeez Louise. So now she is, her and Barry are being, they're going on trial in 2024. They're going up against the death penalty.

for this triple homicide. They ain't going to hesitate to fry them. Yep. So basically they just said that they went to Keegan's home or Keegan's parents' house that day in Texas to try to say that that was their alibi was there at the home. But they had then broken to use three different firearms. It looks like Tiffany was like chased down in the home because she was shot from behind.

And the mom was shot in a closet. And so they described her as being she was hiding in the closet trying to save her life. Yeah. Yeah. And her sister said that even prior to this happening, Tiffany would sleep on the very top floor, far corner of the house because she was afraid someone was going to break in. And no matter how many times they called the authorities or like reported this stuff to the authorities, there was like really nothing to be done because the case was just basically waiting to go to trial. And so, yeah, now they're, you know, it.

The tragedy of this is if you think – I think the last two prison breakouts have been assisted by a female guard or employee who fell in love with the prisoner and helped him with this. And they always – this never turns out well for them. Yeah. And one of her coworkers describes her as cherishing R2-D2 slippers and wearing funny T-shirts to work. It's the worst outcome of the Florence Nightingale syndrome, right? They're stepping in and trying to help her.

Yeah. And you just, they get caught up and then they end up doing this stuff. It goes beyond that. It's really remarkable. But you see this, it doesn't happen a lot, but you never hear of a man helping his female acquaintance. Prisoner to escape or anything like that. It's reversed and there's something to it. I'm sure there is some psychological factors they all align with. I think she did have like other...

a little dark side because she did have a domestic assault charge against her ex-husband for kicking him in the face twice. I think anyone who's a dedicated criminal... There's a little edge there. A little history there. I got to say, I met a bunch and I got to tell you, I think almost every dedicated criminal defense attorney, like that's been their life. Mm-hmm.

There is something dark inside of them because otherwise you're dealing with so many people you know are guilty of heinous crimes. They become numb. Yeah. I remember years ago I was in California. My dad knew a police officer in Oakland and he had been in some undercover group and

And he said he's being transferred out. And my dad said, why this? You can't stay more than three years. You become a different person. Yeah. And I think it's a good lesson for all of us, whether it's our bubbles or the case may be. You need to take a look at your surroundings, what you're doing day in, day out, because after a while, it seems normal, especially if you're doing something that's bad.

Speaking of normal. So, as we all know, dear listeners, I'm subscription poor, so I have some English newspapers I subscribe to. And this was in today's Telegraph. Chuck subscribes to literally everything on the planet, and he sends me these links, like 15 links a day that I can't access. I'm like, oh, okay. And I tell Sam stop being cheap. But here it is in the Telegraph today. So, Britain's gas network.

has already hit full capacity as renewable energy fails to generate the power needed to heat UK homes. For those who don't know what UK is, it's called the United Kingdom. John Butterworth, chief executive of National Gas, said demand for gas-fired power stations would be maxed out from today, folks, it's December 1st, through the weekend.

So when you ever hear this garbage that renewable energies can take care of us, they have Gretchen Rittmer, the governor of Michigan, who's basically going to have people freeze to death in four years. You need to pay attention to this. Now, Sam and I have said this. Both you and I are like, look,

We need to do everything in the book, throw everything at the wall for energy independence. And renewables are part of it. But you're not going to get rid of gas. You're not going to get rid of nuclear. You're not going to get rid of coal. It's crazy if you think that's going to happen. How do you think you get these electric cars charged? And I'm not against. I mean, this is the thing I think a lot of people don't understand. And I think if you broke down with most Republicans where they are on this, we're not opposed to renewables.

What people are calling renewable energy at all, what we're opposed to is destabilizing the grid and driving the price through the roof so that people can't afford it or can't heat their homes. That may not work. John Butterworth said freezing temperatures mean energy demands have soared in recent days. Again, folks, it's December 1st today. OK. And he said they're having low wind output. So if you're counting on a wind farms, wind is important.

Actually, so this is something from growing up in the north. Really cold days tend not to be super windy. Like really cold days tend not to be super windy because the air is so heavy. Right. It doesn't blow. Yeah. So according to the National Gas and the National Grid in the UK, the UK is reliant on gas for up to two-thirds of electricity. So that means this isn't even a majority. Renewables aren't even a majority. It's a third.

And it can't meet the needs of the people in the UK for a very cold weekend. I just want to be realistic about if you're trying to make this transfer, you have to have the ability to keep people's lights and their heat on. You cannot go down this road. You've got to have a plan A, a plan B, and a plan C. Yeah. Will, kipper chipper corner. Anything else today? No, I just, do you know about the Young Thug case? No. No.

So he's being charged for he's a rapper. And he did the abbreviation. What's the acronym he gave it? Yeah, I just want to talk about it because it's funny. So his criminal defense attorney, so his name's in quote, Young Thug. And he said that Thug stood for truly humbled under God. And he has a song called Push and Pee.

which he said stands for pushing positivity. However, if you listen to the song, Pushing P sounds. Sounds like what it is? Yep, sounds like what it is. But everyone's like he's trying anything to get this man off. And if he gets it off, he's going to be the new Rob Kardashian. Yeah.

for convincing these this trial well Samuel on that note that's the final word for today Chuck let's just get out of here folks have a great weekend visit us at breaking battlegrounds dot vote or wherever you download your podcast or check our website breaking battlegrounds dot vote and you can find out all the stations where are across the country coast to coast have a great weekend