12/11/24: CEO Shooter Manifesto Revealed, McConnell Health Coverup, Trump Replacing Lina Khan, Trump DOJ Spied On Journos, Bill Maher Stunned By Pro-Trump Guest
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Hey guys, Sagar and Crystal here. Independent media just played a truly massive role in this election and we are so excited about what that means for the future of this show. This is the only place where you can find honest perspectives from the left and the right that simply does not exist anywhere else. So if that is something that's important to you, please go to breakingpoints.com, become a member today, and you'll get access to our

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All right, good morning and welcome to CounterPoints. Emily, how you doing? Good. It's really rainy here in Washington, D.C., but that's December for you here. It is. It used to be snowy here in December, but not so much anymore. Anyway, thank you for that, Exxon. Wanted to start really quick. You came in hot just now. I mean, it's obnoxious. On my way in, I'm like, this could be snow. And when I was a kid, this would be snow. Instead, this is gross.

But I wanted to update people real quickly on the thing that Crystal told you about in the morning where she encouraged everyone to buy Rayfaat Alarier's book of poetry and prose which came out yesterday called If I Must Die. We've been pushing everyone to buy it over the last week, trying to make it a bestseller. I just checked. It's number 63 in the world right now.

The publisher, as Crystal mentioned, told me that as of several days ago, already 10,000 orders had come in, probably closer to 13,000, 14,000 by now, which means it has a real shot of making the New York Times bestseller list in its first week out. So basically you have until Friday to put your orders in. It is completely out of stock. They sold out their entire first print run, but you're still able to order it. That just means you won't get it until they do another print run. So if you already ordered a copy, go get some more.

Because you know you have people in your life who need a great book of poetry and prose and it's a message to Ray Fats surviving family and to the Palestinian people in general that that he has not forgotten He has not been forgotten. They have not been Forgotten we have nothing to do with it commercially it the all the all the royalties go to a surviving family We just would love to see this

Serge. So thank you for that. Keep going. Poetry is a great holiday gift. It is. Absolutely. It absolutely is. We have a really packed show today. Really packed show today. The news is relentless. We're going to start actually with a little news, I guess, about Mitch McConnell. And we'll go then into the

breaking story that's unfolding continuously about Luigi Mangione. Ken Klippenstein secured the manifesto, released the manifesto yesterday. So we have all kinds of new details to talk about when it comes to the assassination of Brian Thompson. We're then going to talk about updates

Also, relentless breaking news cycle from Syria. We're going to break down the Pete Hegseth rape allegations from the police report for everyone. That came out a few weeks ago, but... He looks like he might get through. He looks like he might get through. So it's important for people to know whether or not they're...

Pentagon Secretary as a rapist. And Ryan suggested we actually kind of walk through the police report. So stay tuned to go through that with us. We're going to talk about the Trump Department of Justice getting caught by Michael Horowitz, Inspector General, who produced actually a very good report on Russia collusion not that long ago, finding improper spying on journalists and Republican and Democratic lawmakers. So people, it was like 20 Republicans, 21 Democrats, or maybe reversed, 21 Republicans.

Republicans and 20 Democrats, but absolutely improper spying on journalists to catch leakers. And we've got a great Bill Maher clip. You're going to want to stay tuned for the Bill Maher clip.

Yeah, and the ethnic cleansing of northern Gaza continues with these assaults on multiple hospitals, Kamal Adwan Hospital, Indonesian Hospital. We won't have a chance to talk about that today. I'll be on the show tomorrow filling in for Crystal. I'm sure we'll get to that. For our Pakistani audience, we had a big story yesterday over at Dropsite. You can read that there. We don't have a chance to get to that one either. Maybe we can do that tomorrow. Basically, we...

according to leaks we got out of Pakistan, the November 26 massacre that we covered was actually pre-planned and it was basically an ambush. So maybe we'll talk about that more tomorrow, but so much going on in the world. Let's just get into it. Let's get into it. We're going to start with this first tear sheet and just do a kind of quick report from Capitol Hill where Mitch McConnell, who is no longer the Senate minority leader, he had a fall.

We can put A1 up on the screen. This is from the Associated Press. He fell and sprained his wrist yesterday, literally on Capitol Hill. There was, you know, you could see medical personnel going in to assist him in his office. And the reason we're talking about this is that Mitch McConnell is clearly too old to be in office. And by old, I mean there are people who are older than him. I think Bernie Sanders might be older than him.

When I say old, I mean he's incapacitated. We're getting to Feinstein territory, wouldn't you say, Ryan? Yes, I'm curious. Do we know...

physical versus mental incapacity here? I mean, mentally, he seems perfectly sharp. Right, he had that brain freeze. But he had that brain freeze. Yeah, I shouldn't say perfectly sharp. He seems like an older man, but he doesn't seem like Biden. I guess Biden is the comparison. Mitch McConnell doesn't seem to have gone to Biden levels. Right, and what we can reveal here is that

There are, he's going to enormous lengths to basically cover up, you know, how physically frail at least he has gotten. Yes. Which, you know, presidents like JFK and FDR all did, you know, attempting to.

attempting to show more physical vigor than they had. But go ahead. This comes from your side. I was just going to say, I mean, I think it's, for the reason that you're saying, it's important that we probe Mitch McConnell's health right now because he's still

incredibly influential in Senate Republican leadership. They're about to have the majority, so he's a very consequential figure still. He doesn't need to be in office. He's had physical medical challenges, and yet we can put a two up on the screen. This is actually an exclusive image that we have here at Breaking Points. This was the day after the election. Mitch McConnell at Reagan International

airport in a wheelchair being pushed by a staffer. That may not seem like a big deal. There has been reporting that he uses a wheelchair, and there may or may not be a couple other photos of him in a wheelchair floating around out there. I didn't see many, and that's because they are carefully trying to prevent

these photos from being published because they to your point Ryan it's similar to FDR and JFK and not wanting to Give any sense of incapacity, but Mitch McConnell is staying in the Senate - as he said Make sure that the fight for Ukraine as he sees it is complete and a subcommittee chair Yeah of this important Armed Services panel he has personally like intervened probably

Yes. Without Mitch McConnell, Ukraine may not have the funding that it has at this point. He has made it a priority. Now, I have my own piece of reporting that I can add to that. A source of mine flew next to him on a commercial flight. And when they arrived, there was a wheelchair waiting for him. But McConnell angrily kind of refused it. So it's not that he's

constantly in need of a wheelchair, you know, and he's very clear He's very cognizant of what it represents his, you know refusals use it yesterday led obviously to to his fall into his injury to this Injured on his face and his and his wrist I think more importantly for from a political perspective the source also said that he ate a tuna fish sandwich and

on this commercial flight. But he wasn't in first class. He was not in first class. And at that point, it's like, okay, you're flying coach, despite the fact that you could fly first class because you want to be with the people. You want to show that you're a man of the people. You sit down among these people of which you are one of the men and you open up a tuna fish sandwich. Oof.

Go to first class. The level of... Take that to first class. The people will be okay without you being in there. Right. It's fine. Just get... Come on. The level of out-of-touchness at that point is astounding. Not surprising, but astounding nonetheless. I try to not bring any... Like, even like...

you know, fries or anything that's gonna, even stuff that smells good like fries. No. Nobody wants to smell your food and coach. It's such a small space. Yeah. Anyway. That's why the world made, like, granola bars. Yes, that's true. Ryan does love granola bars. Who doesn't? It does the trick. You don't need a tuna fish sandwich. Mitch McConnell, yeah, to Ryan's point, has put himself in a position on a subcommittee chair armed service where he's, and he's said as much, he's not being quiet about this.

He sees the reason that he's continuing to stick around the Senate despite having, right, he had that brain freeze. Everyone remembers where he just sort of seemed to pause in the middle of a sentence. It's actually happened twice. He's clearly, so while he may be on a good day in perfectly healthy mental shape, he may feel like he's his old self. We can put A3 up on the screen. This is more examples of his physical health problems. You can see just as clearly

That's the result of his fall yesterday. Yeah, bandaid on his face and his wrist is really swollen and purple. But when I started this block by saying Mitch McConnell is too old to be in the Senate, I mean, there are people who are older at this point who are probably sharper. I think Bernie Sanders is older than him.

Although he were in Ukraine they'd conscript him to the front line. Yeah, he'd be ready to go Bernie Sanders I think also said yesterday in an interview It's a little bit of breaking news too that this will probably be his last term He said it'll be 89 when I get out of here because he was just elected. He's got six years. Yeah. Yeah, and

But Mitch McConnell, even after all of these health problems, refuses to resign and continues to put himself in powerful positions. He did step down as Senate Minority Leader and soon to be Senate Majority Leader, but he continues to put himself in powerful positions because he is clinging to his power.

ability to continue funneling money to Ukraine. He sees it as an existential crisis for democracy. This is how he would phrase it. He's not been quiet about any of this. And we think that it's important that he should be transparent actually about what his health is and how ill he is. And there you go. And from that perspective, I understand why he would stay in because

When you're a senator and a chairman of a powerful committee that doles out money, it's not as if it's a constant intellectual contest. He's not playing speed chess all day long. He just needs to sit in that position, box everybody out, demand that they move the money that he once moved, and just stand there until it happens. So in that sense, as long as you're with it a little bit out of the day and you can be wheeled in and out, you actually can do just as much for the most part

in that position as you could as a 36-year-old spry young senator. Yeah, yeah, no, it makes sense. This is it.

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I don't even need to say his name. Mr. Bob Dylan! From the director of Walk the Line and Ford vs. Ferrari. If anyone is going to hold your attention on stage, you have to kind of be a freak. And starring Timothee Chalamet as Bob Dylan. Are you a freak? Hope so. Inspired by the true story. I want to know which side he's on. This Christmas. They just want me singing Blowing in the Wind for the rest of my life.

Bobby, what do you want to be? Whatever it is, they don't want me to be. He defied everyone. Turn it down! Play it loud! To change everything. He's our Elvis. With no direction! Make some noise, BD. Track some mud on the carpet. A complete unknown. Only in theaters Christmas Day. Rated R. Under $17.99 without parent.

Let's move on to the unfolding saga of Luigi Mangione whose manifesto was first released in full by a friend of the show, Ken Klippenstein, yesterday. We can put B-Zero up on the screen. This is the manifesto itself. It's very short as far as manifestos go and it has- Barely a manifesto. Barely a manifesto. It has a banger of a first line here. To the feds, I'll keep this short because I do respect what you do for our country.

one of the weirdest openings that any manifesto in history, Ryan, you wanted to do a somewhat dramatic reading of this. Uh, we should, we should add that Mangione had an extradition hearing yesterday. He's being extradited from Pennsylvania where he was caught at that Altoona, Pennsylvania McDonald's. Um, and he's being extradited to New York to face murder charges. So that's

what was unfolding yesterday. We'll play clips of this and everything, but Ken said a lot of people in media had this manifesto, but were not publishing it. They were publishing just snippets of it and not releasing it in full. Yeah, and what's wrong with me? Why didn't I have this yet? Yeah, why did nobody give this to Ryan? I mean, Ken has been all over this from being one of the first edgelords to celebrate the

the murder of Brian Thompson. And since then has gotten some videos out of United Health from, you know, obviously leaked by United Health employees who agree more with Ken than Ken's critics.

And then he got the manifesto as well. It is utterly bizarre. I can't even think of a reason why the mainstream press got their hands on this and didn't publish it but did quote from it. What on earth are you doing? It's so short. I don't even see how this helps manufacture consent. It's just a little manifesto. We can read some more of it.

I state plainly that I wasn't working with anyone. This was fairly trivial. Some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, a lot of patience.

the spiral notebook if present has some has some straggling notes and to-do lists that illuminate the gist of it my tech is pretty locked down because i work in engineering so probably not much info there yeah we'll see about that i do apologize for any strife of traumas but it had to be done frankly these parasites simply had it coming and there's a tick tock going around of they had it coming the song from chicago uh with some nice edits

A reminder, the U.S. has the number one most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly number 42. Roughly number 42 is kind of a funny phrase. Roughly number 42. You're either 42 or you're not. Say roughly 40. I'm doing edits of his manifesto. I would say just say roughly 40, because when you say 42...

That's implying some specificity. He should have submitted this to DropSite. He should have. United is the largest, is the indecipherable largest company in the U.S. by market cap. I don't think that's true. Oh, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. I'm editing the guys. Everyone's in the process right now. You're seen behind the curtain. It has grown and grown, but has our life expectancy? No, the reality is these indecipherable have simply gotten too powerful.

They continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allowed them to get away with it. Obviously, the problem is more complex, but I do not have space and frankly, I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument. But many have illuminated the corruption and greed, e.g. Rosenthal, Michael Moore, I'm assuming he means Michael Moore there, decades ago, and the problems simply remain. It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently, I'm the first to face it with such brutal honesty."

You know, that last line is actually kind of, I think, central to the debate over ethics and people's reactions here in that, Ryan, I'm genuinely surprised there haven't been similar acts of anti-healthcare terrorism because that's how bad the health insurance system is. And I'm not saying, obviously, nobody is saying, well, maybe some people are. Obviously, nothing is justified as...

horrible thing to do, but I'm very surprised that we don't see actually more violent protests of how bad our health insurance system is. It is a little surprising in that sense because being on the phone with these insurance companies in the best of times is a nightmare situation. Being on the phone with them when they are delaying your treatment for trivial paperwork reasons that obviously were manufactured for the purpose of delaying your treatment in the hopes that

you either die or it moots the treatment at some point. Yeah, you would kind of

think that somebody would have done this earlier. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of surprising in that sense. Yeah. So, uh, I was gonna say, we have a video of him being, he shouted something that people were trying to put together. Um, and I think we have a decent transcript of what was said. This is Luigi Mania Mangione yelling. Uh, what you're, what you're probably going to hear here is, uh, something to the extent of it's an insult to the American people. Uh, there's some debate about what he's actually saying. Um, Ken says that it's,

him saying this is completely out of touch and an insult to the intelligence of the American people. So let's go ahead and roll this video. So what his lawyer is saying is that they're strongly implying that a lot of evidence was planted on him. And what I think is going on there and with his this thing stinks here is that

They want to give a jury a reason in the face of overwhelming evidence to acquit him. And so what they're trying to do, this is just my guess, is give the jury an excuse to do jury nullification. And people can look that up. A lot of people have looked it up over the last several days. Jury nullification is when you

You know that somebody did the crime, but you think it was either there's something wrong with the law or you think the crime was justified in that particular circumstance. And so the jury, it's kind of, I think it's even illegal to do jury nullification, but how are they going to prove it? And so the jurors will say, you know what? We find this guy not guilty. And so by saying that all this stuff is planted in this

It would then give a juror who wanted to do that some read to hang on to. That's my guess because they're saying he's caught with everything.

Manifesto. We just read his alleged manifesto. He's on tape. Allegedly on tape. You can't really see his face in the fuzzy CCTV video. Found him with a gun. So if you believe that all of that evidence is real and is actually his, he's 100% guilty. If you believe that and you don't want to find him guilty...

Then you say, well, maybe they planted it on him. It's very similar to the kind of OJ defense that they did, that they said, look, maybe they planted this glove. Like these cops are racist. Like here they are saying the N-word. And so for jurors who were like, you know, I kind of want to find him guilty, there was enough of they were able to say, look, maybe this was planted because there was so much evidence they couldn't.

So that the evidence wasn't beyond a reasonable doubt. They had to say the evidence is itself fake. So his attorney to Ryan's point said you can't rush to judgment in this case or any case yesterday. And we can put the next element up on the screen. He was fighting his extradition to New York City where actually Alvin Bragg will quote seek the governor's warrant to secure his transfer.

I'm coordinating with the DA's office and will sign a request for a governor's warrant to ensure this individual is tried and held accountable. Public safety is my top priority and I'll do everything in my power to keep the streets of New York safe, said Kathy Hochul, New York governor, in a statement. So that's it.

Mingione is fighting this. He's not sort of just like putting his hands up and being like yep, I wrote it all in the manifesto. I'm sorry if this causes any trauma, which by the way is a line from the manifesto. So it's kind of an interesting disconnect between what the manifesto says and his approach to the case so far.

Yeah. The manifesto is literally, I did this and I'm really sorry it had to be done. Gonna have some problems. That's a pretty significant disconnect between what he's saying, which is an insult to intelligent American people. We don't quite know what that's referring to, but it sounded like he was

And we know from his attorney that he's fighting the charges. So anyway, all that is to say that's a pretty significant disconnect Obviously now this is a quote from an NBC article. This is b3. We can put this up on the screen They're digging into his video game use so in the game call Well, I'll just read from this first graph Luigi Mangione once belonged to a group of Ivy League gamers who played assassins a member of the group told them

NBC News in the game called Among Us, some players are secretly assigned to be killers in space who perform other tasks while attempting to avoid suspicion from other players. Ryan, on a scale of zero to 10, how newsworthy is this? - It's not even on the scale, it's just funny. It's just hilarious. People watching this have probably played Among Us. I've played it actually with my kids.

It's a little kid's game. It's a silly game that, you know, college kids play too. You can play it as a grown-up, whatever. That's hilarious. That's utterly hilarious. Someone said to NBC News, I just found it extremely ironic that, you know, we were in this game and there could actually be a killer among us. Okay, it's funny. I mean, if you actually played Among Us with the assassin...

That is a fun story to tell your friends. I'll give them that. Is it a fun story to tell NBC News? Yes. Because they will take it. And then if you're NBC News, it's

It's fun to put at the bottom of the story. Yeah, right. I hope that they understood how ridiculous they were sounding. Among Us is a child-friendly whodunit game in which a group of friends run around several space station-like maps. The crewmates, who are simply drawn, cartoonish-looking astronauts, run around the ship and complete tasks. The intent of the game? One member is a killer and attempts to off the other crewmates. Actually, if you remember, Hasan Piker, AOC, and Ilhan Omar played it on a stream together. Oh, really? Back during the pandemic. Yeah.

Gotta watch out for AOC. Interesting, yeah. Another New Yorker who's mad about the healthcare system. Yeah, just facts. Yeah. Yeah. Putting out facts here. Yeah, just spitting facts. Now, before, there's also some, obviously, probing of Luigi Mangione's Reddit history. So Forbes reports, UHC shooter Luigi Mangione appears to have been a Redditor, and he researched back pain and backpacks. This is really sad.

Brian, the more that we're learning about Mangione's experiences with his own long-term, it looks like he had a chronic back problem. Again, this is all being pieced together from the trails, like the breadcrumbs that he left on the internet. But it's turning out to be an extremely sad story. Yeah, back pain, which thankfully I have not really had to suffer with in my life, but from people who talk about it, is utterly debilitating. It

When it's not with you, you're thinking about it, thinking about the possibility that one little tweak and it's going to be back. When it's with you, it is just absolutely all-consuming. And the medical profession when it comes to treating back pain is just no better than random quackery, it seems like. And so he wound up getting some screws put into his back that his family and friends say, like,

ended up making him crazy. That's not an uncommon response from people who've gone through this, because it's just the grieving from the life that you had to the life that you

now have, I think can send people around the bend. Well, it's frustrating when you're trying to solve a problem and you're paying into a system and then the system is blocking you. And that brings us again to as awful as Mangione's alleged decision seems to have been, it

It is surprising to me that we don't get more domestic unrest from how bad our healthcare system is because it will drive people crazy. It will drive people crazy. I wonder if psychologically it was a little bit

Harder for him because he grew up a rich prep school kid. Mm-hmm who is not used to being told no well Apparently his family owns a nursing home that is riddled with problems complaints also called a nursing home, right? Yes, absolutely. Yes But actually this one appears to be exceptional and rankings like national rankings. I can find it what we're trying, but yes Exceptionally, he went to this rich prep school called Gilman in Maryland if you're from Maryland and you saw this you're like, oh

Okay, this tracks. Yeah. Gilman. Gilman Kidd. Yeah. Gilman Kidd could pop and do this. Well, that's... I just think it's an insane statement on... Well, not insane. It's like the least surprising statement, actually, but it's a very powerful one on how horrible the healthcare system is, is that you can come from a background of privilege. And unless you're like tippy-tippy top of the 1%, you can have the same terrible experience once

with the healthcare system. It's like a shared socioeconomic experience. Now, it's obviously much worse for people who can't afford health insurance and are struggling to pay their bills and have kids and are doing two jobs to have their health insurance. It's insane. But you can actually still be wealthy in this country and our health insurance system can utterly fail you in the most frustrating ways. And that actually

Goes to your point about how fresh it must be if you are privileged and you're used to having everything be at your fingertips You see psychologically how that could drive you and even crazier. Yeah, and also and not to undermine our man's fundamental point here, but the healthcare system is also not magic like there are there are some things that even the best the best providers the best physicians

with all of the money in the world can't fix. Like that's just a fundamental part of the human condition and it always will be. Right. No matter what Peter Thiel tries to do with young people's blood or whatever. It's just, you know, we are who we are.

So some level. Yeah. So his family, including his father, apparently this is just they own Lorien Health Systems. It's a for profit nursing home. They've been fined for health inspection violations, according to records that have been posted as all of this has come out. And it's got like a two out of five Medicare rating, quality measures rating of two out of five.

So it appears to be, you know, not a... Someone was posting about it saying that it was a measure of hypocrisy. And it's like, well, if Mangione is guilty in this case, it may not be hypocrisy. It may be his partially psychologically. And we're trying to do like armchair psychiatry here. But it might have been what drove him insane is that his own family and his own privilege was built on hypocrisy.

system that was hurting him too. I mean that's something that can flip the switch. He volunteered at that nursing home, according to reports, when he was in high school. Right. So he may have seen it all up close. Yeah.

Well, Bill Burr on his Monday morning podcast went on a similar rant to the one that he went on over the weekend that Crystal and Sagar covered. Let's roll this clip of Bill Burr weighing in on the media coverage this time of what media coverage and just general people's general reactions to what's happened with Mangione. You know, what's annoying me about this this kid who killed the CEO is none of these news programs are talking about the incredible lack of empathy.

from the general public about this because of how these insurance companies treat people when they are at their most vulnerable after we've all given them our money every fucking month. And now we finally need you. And all you do is deny us. And then these pussies and all of these things are taking the pictures of their CEOs off their websites. You know, I got to be honest with you. Okay. I love that the fucking CEOs are fucking afraid right now. You should be.

By and large, you're all a bunch of selfish, greedy fucking pieces of shit. And a lot of you are mass murderers. You just don't pull the trigger. That's why it looks clean. That's why these people look, oh, my God. Oh, he was just...

you know, walking into a hotel. It's like, okay, but what was his job? What did he do? What was the results of it? The everyman, truly. And if you're not, if you are horrified by that argument from Bill Burr, um, and you're like a beltway journalist or pundit, then you should go sit down at a bar, um, in normal America and talk to people. Yeah. And a lot, and

A lot of the people who are saying, look, we have lower costs and these people have some of these outcomes are better and also the insurance companies are not the real problem. The problem is the providers. A, UnitedHealth is a provider too. They're massively involved in the provider side as well.

But the CEO was making $10 million a year. It's one thing to say, this is a really difficult problem to solve. And we're all working together to try to make sure that we can give the best care to the people who need it. When you say that and then you walk out of the room with a bag filled with $10 million...

People are going to give a little bit less credibility. Yes to how concerned you are and When that 10 million dollars is just a little kickback for the billions that you're sending to shareholders who are also walking away with that money and

you lose even more credibility around how serious you are about taking care of patients. I had Ken on actually undercurrents to talk about. I was like, Ken, I kind of disagreed with the way that you reacted immediately. But I also think it's really precious to see Chris Cuomo

just retired to his fainting couch and clutched his pearls over the reaction of people like you and Taylor Lorenz because about like just tone policing about the United Healthcare CEO. Like he doesn't have a leg to stand on unless he's using all of his journalistic resources to probe the corruption in the health insurance system regularly, which he's not doing.

He only cared when Ken was mean to the dead CEO who appears to be unjustly murdered. And so it doesn't make the murder right, but it also doesn't give you any more credibility when you're weighing in to tone police, people who are upset about the healthcare system, and you're not regularly concerned yourself about the healthcare system.

Yeah, and Don Jr. showed unusually poor instincts out of the gate on this. He did the whole, put the image of the guy up and said, you know, Internet, do your thing. And all of his replies were just like, I don't see anything, Don. He put the image of Mangione up? Yeah, yeah, saying, like, Internet, do your thing. Like, go find this killer. And all of his followers were like,

I don't see nothing. So it was like, oh, I forgot Don Jr. is a prep school kid, but not the kind that Luigi became. Because he's really done a good job of donning the garb of the populist. And his dad would not have made that mistake.

- It'll be interesting to see, I mean, 'cause at first it started, nobody really knew what to make of it and it started as an example of disorder and chaos on the streets of New York City. - Right, nice try to squeeze it into that. - It starts as a narrative like that, which by the way, as it unfolds, this is Gotham City. This is straight out of a freaking Batman plot. That's how sad and tragic and twisted this is. - Except Bruce Wayne got caught. - Yeah, it's insane. - Bruce Wayne was the victim, not the killer. - I don't know.

Bruce Wayne's the richest man in the world and all he wants to do is go like round up a few muggers. Right. How about you build a hospital, Bruce Wayne? Come on. Actually, I think I'd actually watch the Ryan Grimm written Batman cartoon. Tax that man. It's ridiculous.

But that is exactly what you're like. It is like ripped out of a Batman plot. But I mean, it's just like if your energy, if your moral energy is going to is like more directed to being outraged at edgelords like Ken for like maybe being callous. You don't have to agree with the way Ken and Taylor Lorenz and others approached the story.

initial reports to be like, hey, maybe the main story here, you know, it's like don't kill people in the streets of Manhattan in cold blood and don't run a system and benefit from a system that is like sucking the life out of people. Seems like a fair two things can be true assessment here. Maybe. No, yeah. Okay. I don't like killing. Yeah. I'm uncomfortable about killing. Okay. Well, we've established that.

Everyone should see Ryan's belt today, by the way. It's very whimsical. It's not the belt of an edgelord. This is it.

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I don't even need to say his name. Mr. Bob Dylan! From the director of Walk the Line and Ford vs. Ferrari. If anyone is going to hold your attention on stage, you have to kind of be a freak. And starring Timothee Chalamet as Bob Dylan. Are you a freak? Hope so. Inspired by the true story. I want to know which side he's on. This Christmas. They just want me singing Blowing in the Wind for the rest of my life.

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In news out of Syria, we can put this first element up on the screen, top U.S. military commander in the Middle East, General Michael Carrillo visited U.S. commanders and troops, as well as members of the SDF at several bases in Syria yesterday. That is courtesy of reporter Jared Zuzba. And Ryan, also the New York Times was just like tallying up all of the countries that are currently bombing in Syria yesterday. Worth mentioning, it's

Russia, Iran, Israel, the United States, and Turkey. So five countries right now actively bombing Syria. So you can understand. Everybody getting their licks in. Yeah, that's right. And C2, we want to put this up on the screen as well. U.S. troops are staying in Syria, according to the White House. And I actually asked Rand Paul yesterday, he

that it'll air today on Undercurrent. So I asked him if it's possible that we actually might end up sending more troops to Syria as a result of this, because he's saying, you know, we do have 900 troops in Syria right now, at least. That's the troops that we know about in Syria right now. And he was saying, that's a target, that's not a deterrent, was the line that he used.

totally fair assessment. But I asked, you know, are some of your colleagues going to use the point that you just made as an excuse to bring more troops in? And I think the Reuters article by Jeff Mason that we just had up on the screen seems like it's potentially going in that direction. I don't know, Ryan, do you think it's possible that we end up putting more troops actually in Syria right now amidst all of the chaos?

You know, I think that they're much more likely to flood weapons to our proxies and mercenaries rather than try to deploy more troops, more U.S. troops just before a new president comes in. Because I think

I think that's tricky politically. I don't know. But let's play your Rand Paul clip. I think C3B? Yep. Let's roll. In the scuttlebutt on Capitol Hill, of course, and in Beltway media, is that this is just posing a real threat to Tulsi Gabbard getting confirmed as Trump's director of national intelligence. She's literally meeting with senators like yourself on Capitol Hill this week.

Do you think that this helps or hurts Tulsi Gabbard's actual ability to be confirmed in any way, Senator Paul? Not necessarily. I think that the history of Syria in the Middle East is such a complicated one that it isn't really clear. Like I say, were there positive aspects to the Assad regime? Very few, but one of them was the protection of Christians. Is there...

Pluses and minuses to Ghulani or this new offshoot of al-Nusra? Yeah, there certainly are. One, they got rid of the dictator, but two, will they replace that with a religious intolerance towards others?

I don't know that it definitely changes her chances. I think her 20-year military career, she's a lieutenant colonel. The way she's been treated unfairly by the intelligence state, putting her on a terror watch list and obstructing her ability to travel. I think that she's gaining momentum. There was a rally recently with military veterans. There's a lot of senators that have come out for her.

So I think they're going to have a tougher time defeating her. They will try. And these are the people who are part of what they call the bipartisan consensus in Washington, foreign policy consensus, which is one of give aid to everyone, give arms to everyone and be involved in everyone's wars. It's a policy of...

you know, eternal intervention. And those people are always going to be opposed to anybody who questions that. But I, for one, am enthusiastic about her nomination and will do anything I can or everything I can to try to help her. I really like that music behind the clip there. It had me on the edge of my seat listening to Rand Paul. I'm like, where's this?

This is really suspenseful. It's like you're watching Jack Ryan. Yeah. Yeah. It was a teaser clip. Yeah, you're ready to. Yeah. So but anyway, I think that gets to the point about the future of U.S. involvement in Syria, because the scuttlebutt being that Tulsi Gabbard, now she's just tanked. And I think and I say this in the episode, which is going to air in a bit, that it's

it's maybe more likely that Tulsi Gabbard gets confirmed as a result of this because now you have even people like Lindsey Graham talking about the problems with the rebels now that they're in power. And so it all becomes so apparent. Like post-Assad, the various factions and the sort of ridiculousness of the United States arming, Rand Paul mentions at one point in 2016, Elon Musk tweeted this recently to an LA Times article about how the Pentagon and the CIA were funding different

Warring factions in Syria at the same damn time. It is so absurd. And that will be in full bear now that Assad is gone. Yeah, and the awkward part here is that

Right. So Gabbard has always had these kind of complex politics that are not squarely put into isolationists or anti-war because she was a strong and relentless supporter of the global war on terror against whatever she wants to call it, like Islamic terrorism. It's a hedge, right? She's pro-Modi. Yes. Like she seems like her...

Her hostility to Islamism, and sometimes even Islam, just shines through as powerfully as Erdogan and the Kurds. It's intense. And so now that those factions that she has been fighting against literally and also politically for a decade have actually won right before potentially she gets into the position,

Is she going to be trying to arm opposition groups to the new kind of dominant groups in Syria? Right. Because she's so hostile to them. It's going to be interesting. I mean, the whole thing is like it's just absurd. Like there was a New York Times report that said in Washington,

American policymakers are telling all of the kind of jihadist groups or whatever you want to call them That they better not ally with Isis mm-hmm, which means the American policy is basically coming down to We draw the line at Isis right al Qaeda You know what? Okay, Nusra al Qaeda offshoot former Isis

Okay, but ISIS? Absolutely not. We have standards. It's a line in the sand. This is our red line. Yeah. We're not outlying, but yeah. We have standards here. Meanwhile, literally the Al-Qaeda guy.

Yeah. In Damascus now. Well, he has such an interesting story, by the way, and I was curious to ask you about this. His personal story is in itself a testament to the follies of U.S. interventionism. He was at least reportedly radicalized by U.S. policy in Israel, right? Well, yes, his family was displaced from the Golan Heights in, what, 67, when Israel occupied the Golan Heights. Right.

And then, yes, and then he was radicalized further in 2000 during the Israeli crackdown on the second Intifada and the collapse of the peace process there. And then he goes to Iraq to fight along with other insurgents against the American invasion of Iraq. And he talks about that in his CNN interview and elsewhere where he says basically what the argument that he's making is like,

The U.S. was wrong to invade. Everybody believed the U.S. was wrong to invade and occupy Iraq. I went there to fight them. That was the right thing to do. But the way that many of the people who fought them did so, deliberately killed civilians. He said, I never participated in that. Groups I was involved with did. I have broken with them. A lot of that is...

The ideological splits with al-Qaeda and ISIS are overblown. The ideology is still pretty similar. What he has recognized is that politically speaking, this idea that you're going to create a caliphate in a world that is hostile, abjectly hostile to you and that you're hostile to as well, is absurd and will never work. That the world will unite against you and destroy you.

So it is a pragmatic pivot to say look we just you can't do that We don't have the assets to accomplish this goal Therefore, it's a complete suicide mission and he and he was not interested in a suicide mission. So He understood that he had to talk about Recognizing, you know all the different sects and ethnicities and religions and in Syria and so

if he's going to get off the U.S. terror list. And he had to pick the right enemies. What he did is he very strategically targeted, went after violently, went to war with al-Qaeda and ISIS in Syria. And then kept coming back, and this is what you were hearing from American sources, kept coming back to the U.S., look, we're fighting your enemies here. Aren't we your friend? And they'd be like, eh, maybe. So it wasn't as if the U.S. started arming

necessarily this force, but they stopped trying to kill him and otherwise made it possible for him to have room to maneuver.

Interesting other anecdote from his life or a point. It's probably more powerful than an anecdote is that he was actually detained in Abu Ghraib. When he went to Iraq, he ended up detained in Abu Ghraib by U.S. forces. So he has his own history with American interventionism. And I think that's why it's sort of naive to...

and probably why even the Lindsey Grahams of the world are now expressing sort of skepticism about how Golani governs as they're cobbling together a new government in Syria right now. So the pessimism is probably more warranted than any optimism we're hearing from people referring to the freedom fighters in Syria right now. And also we can get to some of that pessimism in this next point, which is that

The two main invasions and incursions going on in Syria are being led by Turkey and by Israel. On the Turkish side, they've been relentlessly attacking Kobani, which was a symbol of Kurdish resistance to ISIS back in 2014-15.

And when the U.S. got involved in that fight, bombing kind of ISIS positions as the Kurds held out in Kobani, that ended up turning the tide and creating this and really cementing this alliance between the Kurds and the U.S. in northern Syria. For our Friday show, we're going to interview an American journalist.

who fought with the Kurds and was there even fairly recently. So stick around for that Friday show to learn more about that conflict. Now, the American alliance with the Kurds appears to have led to, and this is all developing now,

Something of a ceasefire around Kobani in exchange for the Kurds withdrawing from Manbij, which was another huge battle back in 2016, which our guest actually participated in. So he can talk about that. The liberation of Manbij by the Kurds was enormous.

was a pivotal victory. They are with, this is what the news reporting is, that the Kurds are going, agreeing to kind of withdraw from Eastern Aleppo province and from Manbij in exchange for Erdogan calling off the massive, you know, murderous assault on the Kurds. Right. We'll see how long that lasts. The Kurds, nobody has been betrayed, I think, in the region

more times and by more people than the Kurds who were absolutely screwed in Sykes-Picot by the Kurdish region covers

deliberately Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey. So if you look at the map where those four countries intersect, that's all a Kurdish region. They basically just drew a circle around it and divided them among those four different countries. The thinking being making these countries more ethnically diverse would make it easier for colonial domination of them. And then

dividing the Kurds would make it harder for them to attain any semblance of self-determination or nationality. And in fact, you know, it has, there is obviously Kurdish, you know, ethnic solidarity, but all of the different Kurdish groups, Iranian Kurds, Iraqi Kurds, Syrians, Turks, like they have their beefs inside Iraq. You've got two Kurdish factions that are constantly, they went to war with each other in the 90s. And, you know, there's a lot of kind of

hostility among them and you divide and rule. It's like, you know, classic British policy updated for today. And so if you want to bet on anything, you can bet on the Kurds being betrayed. The even more threatening assault on Syria has been coming from Israel, which, and we can put this up on the screens from Dropsite News, which is they have been

just absolutely annihilating any semblance of Syrian self-defense or sovereignty. They started by going after what they said was a chemical weapons depot. Like what? What, you want chemical weapons to wind up in the hands of ISIS or Al-Qaeda? Right. I was like, okay, well, you've launched more than 300 airstrikes at this point, according to the Syrian observatory there.

And only a couple of those were at the alleged chemical weapons place. Otherwise, you're going after

radar, you're going after defensive weapons, you're going after helicopters, airplanes, airports. They're rapidly and systematically destroying the entire kind of infrastructure of the Syrian state while creeping further and further into Syrian territory around and beyond the Golan Heights. There was an opportunity

to reach out and even if you want to stick with the chemical weapons, the OPCW is there to deal with chemical weapons. This is the United Nations institution that is set up for this. Jolani has made it very clear that he wants his group delisted from the terror list, that he wants to be part of the world of nations. If the requirement is that you send in inspectors and you put the chemical weapons in trucks and you take them out, obviously he's going to agree to that.

Instead, and so Israel had an opportunity, and Jolani and the rest of this faction that took over Syria has been very clear that they don't actually have a beef with Israel to the chagrin of the axis of resistance. And so Israel had an opportunity to say, good, welcome, give up those chemical weapons, sign a peace deal, and let's coexist here peacefully.

Instead, immediately they send in the tanks and are just leading this kind of rampage across Syria.

The infighting over chemical weapons is just such a disaster in Syria right now. They could easily just get the OPCW to come in and grab them. And different groups are getting bombed by other groups for taking the Assad, what is said to be the Assad stash. And it's just a complete disaster, which is obviously what was always going to happen if

Assad ended up being toppled. Right. And remember, in 2003, when the U.S. invaded Iraq, the thing that we did was called debathification, which meant we wiped out the entire Iraqi bureaucracy and military. Anybody who had anything to do with the military or the bureaucracy was fired, done, you're out. And what did that do? It took tens of thousands of men, many of them young men,

who were just punching cards, who were willing to work for whatever government came next, and it made them completely untouchable. And so they funded an insurgency, they joined an insurgency. If you collapse the state, some power is going to come in. So Israel, by deliberately destroying the state capacity right at the outset,

is going to create a failed state and a civil war. And not a clean civil war, but just faction against faction. And clearly, strategically, they believe that a massively weakened and constantly fighting Syria is somehow geostrategically beneficial to them right across the border, rather than having an actual functioning state. But that misunderstands

What has always come out of those types of situations when you get your failed state in Afghanistan, you know, Al Qaeda gets refuge there. Failed state in Iraq and Syria over the last 10, 15 years, then ISIS blows up out of it. You don't know what you're going to get. So I guess good luck with all that. But it seems like the only strategy they have is...

throwing more American bombs at wherever they feel like. Let's watch Matthew Miller, a State Department spokesman, respond to some questions along these lines. This was from yesterday, Ryan? Yeah. A lot of sentiments have been expressed such as Syrian-led smooth transition, unified Syria, although we are seeing it being dismembered before our eyes and so on. But nobody speaks of the Israeli attacks

They struck 300 military sites. So why is that? Why are you not talking about what Israel is doing to Syria, what it has done to Syria in the last 24 hours? It destroyed the Navy. It destroyed all the air force. It did all that. Is the purpose, and that's my question, is the purpose to have a

demilitarized Syria, disarmed Syria? AMBASSADOR COHEN: I will let Israel speak to its own operations and what it is they are trying to accomplish. I will say that on behalf of the United States, we're going to discuss these matters with them privately before I opine on them publicly. I would say that broadly speaking, we of course don't want to see any action that makes a Syrian-led process more difficult, and we ultimately want to see a peaceful process forward, not an escalation of the conflict.

So you think what you're saying is that what Israel is doing, whether it's conquering the rest of the Golan and so on, the attack that it's conducting, it is like 35 kilometers from Damascus and so on. That is a private matter? Is that an Israeli decision? First of all, let me just point out with respect to the location of Israeli forces,

And I'm not attesting one way or the other. I know there are conflicting claims about where they are. And they have they have strenuously denied that they are close to Damascus. They have said that they are in the buff in their forces on the ground or in the buffer zone. And I spoke to this at length yesterday. But no. But when it comes to their operations, I think it's appropriate for us to speak to them privately first, ascertain what it is they're doing before we opine on that publicly. They're a close ally of ours and that's what we're going to do. This administration cannot leave soon enough.

What have you been here for? They'll leave and I don't think you'll like who replaces them, Ryan. No, I don't think so either. No. But we'll be here to complain then too. This is it.

Your moment. This is your time to make your comeback with Purdue Global. When you come back with a Purdue Global degree, you create opportunity for yourself, your family, and your future. It's a degree you can be proud of, a degree that employers will trust and respect. Purdue Global offers working adults like you over 175 flexible degree programs to meet your specific career goals.

goals. These include associate, bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees and certificates. Purdue Global degree programs range from nursing to business to communication and more. Whatever your interests, we have the degree that will move you forward.

You have the knowledge. You have the experience. Now it's time to get credit for the work you've done and earn the recognition you deserve with Purdue Global, Purdue's online university for working adults. You know you're worth it. We do too. So don't wait another second to get the degree that will take your career to the next level. Start your comeback today at purdueglobal.edu.

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i don't even need to say his name mr bob dylan from the director of walk the line and ford versus ferrari if anyone is going to hold your attention on stage you have to kind of be a freak and starring timothy chalamet as bob dylan are you a freak hope so once upon a time inspired by the true story i want to know which side he's on this christmas they just want me singing blowing in the wind for the rest of my life

Bobby, what do you want to be? Whatever it is, they don't want me to be. He defied everyone. Turn it down! Play it loud! To change everything. He's our Elvis. With no direction! Make some noise, BD. Track some mud on the carpet. A Complete Unknown. Only in theaters Christmas Day. Rated R. Under $17.99 without parent.

Pete Hegseth, obviously Donald Trump's nomination for defense secretary, went on Hannity this week. And while the Trump campaign and Trump himself has been backing Pete Hegseth pretty enthusiastically, along with basically the entire conservative movement and the MAGA movement at this point, Hegseth went on Fox. Obviously, his mom went on Fox last week as well, but he went on Hannity to offer an obviously vigorous defense of himself. So let's go ahead and roll this clip of Pete Hegseth on Sean Hannity's show.

You had a consensual relationship. It was investigated. You were fully exonerated. And correct me if I'm wrong here. Wasn't there videotape evidence that was largely responsible for exonerating you?

I mean, in addition to personal witnesses and all of that, it was fully investigated at the time years ago, and I was completely clear. And that's why, Sean, you know what I look forward to? I look forward to the FBI background check. I look forward to the actual under oath conversations with senators as we go through the process, because, again, this is what the left does, Sean. It's the anatomy of a smear.

They take something and then they add anonymous sources and contortions and flat-out lies, and then they try to try you in the media before you can even get into the doors with senators. So that's Pete Hegseth commenting on these rape allegations, or this rape allegation from 2017. And now that his confirmation, having met with Joni Ernst and Joni Ernst saying she's had very good conversations with Pete Hegseth, Ernst serves herself as survivor of sexual assault.

She says that she is now feeling good about the nomination. They're having good conversations. It looks like Hegseth is on a path to being confirmed, whereas a week ago people were more skeptical about whether that happened. I think it has always been likely that he was going to get confirmed, even if there were going to be troubles along the way.

But Ryan, you thought it would be good now that it looks like Hegseth actually is going to be confirmed and there's doubling and tripling down on the nomination to actually go through the police report from 2017. And you've pulled the relevant excerpts. Yeah. And in the spirit of treating our audience like adults, I wanted to go through and put forward the different pieces of the police report that would enable Hannity and Hegseth to make those claims.

To be clear, none of what we're saying here is that this is a good guy. This is a good dude. This is a moral guy. He's not nominated for being a moral guy. He's nominated to run the Secretary of Defense, which is reminiscent of Arlo Guthrie's line in Alice's Restaurant where he gets a deferment to get drafted to go over to Vietnam. And he's like, you're telling me that I'm not moral enough to go burn babies, women, and children over in Vietnam because I'm a litterbug?

So that's the scale that we're talking about here. But the question is, is he guilty of sexual assault and why were charges not pressed? And I think if you go through the police report, you can decide for yourself whether or not he should have been. But I think you'll understand a lot more about it than we get in the press, which is just...

kind of vague allusions to it. But the police report is out there. It's 22 pages. It's not that long. You can read it. You could put up D2 here, which is the beginning of this police report. Jane Doe in 2017 goes to...

A hospital where she is from says that she was the victim of sexual assault about roughly a week earlier at a conference in Monterey. The nurse reports it to the police and put up D3 here, essentially her version that she tells the police.

is that she's at this conference, she goes to a bar, she's hanging out with Pete Hegseth and another woman. Hegseth is a speaker at the conference. She's his handler. Yeah, and she winds up blackout drunk, either drugged, some other situation, she has barely any memory of it. The memories come back to her over the next several days. Then she goes to the hospital and reports this crime. So that's

That's essentially her version of it. So to counter that version of it, Hegzether's defenders would basically have to show that she was not significantly intoxicated. And so the rest of the police report kind of basically investigates Hegzether.

question and so We can put up the next element on the screen here. This is her saying she was in contact by text messages between Jane Doe Oh, they got in a fight at the pool. Yeah. He was giving off quote creeper vibe a Creeper vibe. So to the point you were making Ryan. This is information about Pete Hicks. It's like sort of

being very flirtatious. He has a new baby at the bar with all of these women who are not his wife and he's just giving off a vibe. He's trying to get people up to his room. That's the gist of those memories from the night. - So you can put up the next element here. These are text messages that she exchanged with her husband.

And you can read them for yourself. You can find them in there. And he's like, whoa. He's saying to her, whoa, it's like 2 a.m. You're usually not out at 2 a.m. She doesn't respond to him anymore after about 2. Are you okay? Where are you? What's going on? And you can see that. He was at the conference. Her husband's also at the conference. Right. You can go to D6 here. This is another person that was, you know,

Yeah, with them. She was aware of the situation. Right. That's her sort of use of the police report here. She told this person, or the Jane Doe told this person, that she, quote, must have fallen asleep. Yeah, that's right. And this person said that the Jane Doe did not have a hard time walking and was not slurring her words, which is from Hegzeth's

You can read that in different ways depending on how you're seeing the situation. You can say that means she knew exactly what she was doing, or you can say that means she must have been later drugged if she had no memory of the situation. But I think probably Hegseth sees that as a sort of notch in his corner. And so D6 is the key spot here that is kind of what Hannity—

and Hegseth they're referring to there, they found a bunch of surveillance video from the hotel. So they're walking together, kind of arm in arm, neither-- - It's 1:30 in the morning. - 1:30 in the morning, she doesn't appear to be intoxicated because her assertion was that she was blackout drunk. Video of her kind of arm in arm walking normally-- - Yeah, at 1:30 in the morning. - At 1:30 in the morning undercuts that. Basically here they talk, they get surveillance video of them

by the pool and also looks like talked to a security guard who kind of went to break up kind of an argument that they were having by the pool. The security guard says that Hegseth actually

Seemed kind of drunk. He yells at the cop at one point. I have freedom of speech Mm-hmm. It's 2:00 a.m. And he's being told to quiet down at a conference He's drunk and he's like yelling at this I've got free speech yelling at a mall cop that he has free speech and this is gonna be our Secretary of Defense But what so none of this is funny except that I mean that's pretty funny the security guard says that

Jane Doe was there and did not seem inebriated at all. So again, think about if you're a prosecutor, you're going to have to bring all of these

You're gonna have to bring this surveillance camera. You're gonna have to bring this security guard who was gonna say, okay, she says she was blackout drunk. She did not look that drunk to me. And that excerpt also showed the police officer saying, I found additional security footage of them walking arm in arm, smiling, and neither appeared to have an unsteady gait. That's the quote from the report. So was that, so we could put up the next one here. This is him touching at the bar.

So basically what's going on here, Hegseth is at the bar and he's hitting on a woman. The woman wants absolutely nothing to do with him. And she goes and gets Jane Doe, which she tells the police. She brought her in to be a crotch blocker. Now, I think she was being polite to the police there in her description of that term. Everybody knows what the term is. We don't have to use it here.

And so brings Jane Doe in there to just get this creep off of me. And so then Jane ends up spending a lot of time chatting with him. Right. She was hoping that Jane Doe's presence would detour Hegza's attempt to have sex with that witness. And he was touching her knee and it's uncomfortable apparently and he's

She said that Hexeth invited her back to the hotel room and she politely declined that and this is where the Jane Doe gets involved So we go to d10 then this is Hex this version of the story where he's basically saying that they walked back to his his room together he doesn't remember even getting into that argument by the pool, but again, that's There's witnesses, right? So he did the guys seems like pretty drunk. Yeah based based on all of this

He says he's kind of surprised that she's coming back to the room with him. You know, because clearly, like, he was hitting on somebody else the whole night. He's like, what's going on? Like, how is this happening? So Hegseth independently, you know, told the police Jane Doe stated that she would tell her husband that she had fallen asleep on a couch in someone else's room. Hegseth continually asked Jane Doe if she was okay because he did not want Jane Doe to get in trouble.

Hegseth told Jane Doe that she did not have to worry about him saying anything Hegseth stated Jane Doe showed early signs of regret Hegseth did not elaborate on the signs of regret I think why that's why this part is relevant the stated that she would tell her husband that she had Fallen asleep is that Hegseth would not have known that there were these other text messages Yeah, where she's telling other people that she kind of fell asleep, right? That would be kind of corroborating evidence that she like how would he have made that? Mm-hmm

Because that's it's a pretty specific detail and then she did then go and say tell people like right look You know, I I fell asleep in somebody's room. Sorry elsewhere in the police report They quote the person that whose room she came back to saying that she got into the room with her own card No problem didn't seem drunk and and then did not seem hungover in the morning. Yeah, so No, you know, nobody can know what what happened in the room, but the claim was not

that he violently kind of forced himself on her. The claim was that she was blackout drunk. Too drunk to consent. Or drugged. Too inebriated to consent, essentially. And you can see why there's so much evidence that would have been presented in court that would have undermined that claim. It would have been very hard. And this is what law enforcement in the area has since said, is that we would have to have had proved this beyond a reasonable doubt.

And this is very much a he said, she said situation with a lot of evidence against the she said part of it. It doesn't mean that's impossible. It doesn't mean her story is impossible. It just means that proving her story would be borderline impossible. And so this is 2017.

But she gets a lawyer and starts making noise in 2020. And it looks like we don't know the date of the settlement, actually. It looks like it happened shortly after the lawyers got involved in late 2020, so around December 2020. So I would assume that the settlement happened in early 2021.

You can see why someone would try to make noise about a Fox News host that they had an encounter with. And obviously there's a police report in this situation. She got a rape kit the next morning and there was same men. So you can understand why she would try to bring this up and why Hegseth, who didn't want to go public about it. She she still we still don't know who she is. The situation. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Her husband's now being interviewed and like.

Like her husband in this police report is presenting evidence that undercuts her own story. Yes. If you're reading between the lines, you're like, he doesn't seem to buy it. You can see it. If you're reading this police report. And you can read the Me Too part of this either way. You can say you can understand where it would galvanize her to say, hey, this...

powerful married man was being really creepy to me and it ended up in a tragedy for me. Or you can see where it would be like, I bet I can get money at this point because he's not going to want this to be public. So you can read it in a couple of different ways, but I think the most important way to read it, Ryan, is that it just can't be proven. Hegseth has obviously copped to the adultery. He's admitted that. Right, and he literally had just had

Yeah. With the woman he had an affair on, his previous wife. Yeah, it's really gross. You can read the email from his mom. His mom's like, dude, you're such a dog. Yeah. Stop treating women so awfully. Yeah, it's really gross. And it's extra gross when he's then draped with all this like, you know, Christian like morality.

Morality and preaching well, you know, I will say a lot of people who are late in life converts to like zealous Christianity like they're really on fire have very hard backgrounds and they tend to be people who are Clinging to their faith because they they feel so emotionally desperately in need of it self spiritual medication

Maybe. It's kind of what it's there for, but to me, that's not a surprising thing from somebody who's ardently Christian. I've interviewed Pete Hegseth, and he's surprised me. I interviewed him last year, and I was just surprised by how sort of

I was surprised by how intellectual he was and that may sound ridiculous, but I know people like have biases against Fox and friends hosts I kind of did going into the interview because they're they turn out a lot of books that are you know, they're books to sell books, but he's he's more and he's a more nuanced figure than I think people give him credit for being but I

Clearly a rampant adulterer does not have a history of treating women. Well, he's a dog. He's a dog Clearly drinks too much, but I also or drank too much that night. That's for sure There's there was a there's right now a weaponized smear campaign. That's very obvious to Republicans and it's backfiring. I

on people who don't want Pete Hagseth to be the defense secretary, including Joni Ernst, who's very close, I think, with people in Pentagon circles who don't want a disruptor, obviously, to get in the middle of their system. Two things can be true. The system needs to be disrupted, and this particular disruptor might not be qualified. The thing I would worry about, and I'm curious what you think about this, is compromise blackmail on the head of the Pentagon if he's been drinking and sleeping around for so long. That seems to be a pretty serious concern.

I mean, for the intelligence community, you know, that's a big concern. I have no interest in the Pentagon being a well-functioning institution. That's such a good line. And, like, waging effective wars. So if he's compromised, good. Like, it's bad. Like, it's a bad thing. It's bad for the world. Yeah. So if he's bad at running it, good.

And maybe he'll bring a wrecking ball to some of the corruption in there. Maybe. More likely, he's just completely ill-equipped to run an institution of this size, and the institution will eat him up. Who knows? We'll see. This is it.

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Donald Trump announced yesterday that he was picking FTC commissioner, current FTC commissioner, Andrew Ferguson to lead the agency, which is obviously now helmed by Lena Kahn, who we cover a lot on this show. Ferguson is kind of a known figure for people who follow these types of things. But let's go to the next element here. This is Trump appointing Andrew Ferguson. And this was being circulated by his allies. Ferguson, there

There's some question as to whether or not Ferguson himself was circulating this, but certainly his allies were circulating this. And if you're just watching it, I mean, if you're just listening to it and not watching it, Emily, this is kind of,

Not great if you like Lena Kahn. Yeah, it's a big chunk of text, but it says, successfully fought to end the Biden FTC's anti-business policy of refusing to end merger investigations early and allow firms to close their deals as soon as the FTC finds no competitive harm. Representative Virginia and numerous other states in the landmark antitrust suit against Google's ad tech monopoly. So I just want to

Note those two things being literally together and the bullet points. This is the nuance of the right's opposition to Lina Khan.

There are some people on the right, including JD Vance, who have been very positive about Lena Kahn. Others who have been sort of in the middle about Lena Kahn. And then a third group that are just absolutely opposed to Lena Kahn at every turn. Ferguson appears to be somebody in the middle. Yeah, so like you can see they're bragging there about him being part of the antitrust monopoly suit against Google. I'm sorry, the ad tech monopoly suit against Google. Obviously, it's an antitrust one as well.

And then the next bullet point is about overreach, right? Antitrust overreach. And that's sort of interesting. Yeah, and that sheet talk, that memo talks a lot about being too tough on mergers. That Lena Kahn's too rough on the business community, that they're going to do a lot of deregulation. It's ironic and almost poetic and anti-poetic, whatever, that

Trump made this move ousting Lena Kahn and replacing her with Ferguson on the same day that one of her most significant victories came through. If you can put up this Fox Business article on the screen next. The Kroger-Albertson merger was blocked as a $24 billion merger that Lena Kahn had fought.

and arguing not just that it would be bad for consumers. There's kind of, there's been, there's agreement across the spectrum, even among the kind of pro-business side that

If you can prove that there is going to be harm to consumers, then you can block a merger. That's called the consumer welfare standard. Now, the if you can prove it is the part that the pro-business side hangs their hat on and just constantly argues, well, all these mergers are going to be good for consumers. We're going to give you lower costs and it's going to be wonderful. Trust us. And then it happens and then it's not and it's done. So you're screwed.

In this case, she argued that actually, additionally, the FTC, going back to its original meaning, when it was created and some of these acts were created that enabled its powers,

The power of workers and the well-being of workers matters too. And so she argued that this merger would depress wages, would make it, and would hurt worker power, which is also an interest of the federal government, of the people of the United States, which is kind of a radical take. Like, well, we're supposed to care about workers? What? Yeah, actually, it's in the law. You're supposed to. Here she is.

I love this, talking to Hasan Piker on his stream about this. This decision being blocked, what kind of labor protections does that offer to people that are working at these corporations?

So one thing that our lawsuit alleged was that if this merger goes through, it's going to mean higher grocery prices for shoppers, but it's also going to be worse for the workers. And this is the first time that the FTC has ever sought to block a merger, not just because it's going to be bad for consumers, but also because it's going to be bad for workers.

And, you know, especially in recent decades, antitrust enforcers had not really been focused on the worker harms as much. And that's something we've really looked to change. So the complaint lays out how previously when there was when there has been competition between Kroger and Albertsons at the workers at each store were able to use that competition as leverage when they were trying to bargain.

And that if you allow these two companies to merge, that leverage that comes from having a potential alternative employer or an alternative store where customers can go if there's a strike, but eliminating that leverage point and bargaining leverage would ultimately be bad for workers. So again, this is still being litigated, but that was in the complaint as an explanation for why this merger would be bad for workers. When the FTC team postulated

put on the trial. They actually had on the stand some of the workers that are currently employed by these stores so that they could also share their experience. And just generally, I mean, there's a lot of empirical evidence that now shows that

that after mergers, workers have seen pay cuts or a limit in any pay rises. You often see layoffs. You can see workers have less negotiation power to figure out, will I even have a stable, predictable schedule? And so these are all dimensions of competition on the labor front that are important to protect for people. First of all, it's pretty cool to have an FTC chair that goes on a soundbiker stream. Mm-hmm.

We were four years in power. It was quite a run. We'll see where it goes from here. The big fear among supporters of the kind of Lena Kahn approach to FTC was that Melissa Holyoak, who was a commissioner on the FTC, that she would get the chair gig and she's as hostile as you can get to the kind of Kahn canter.

wing of that bipartisan, transpartisan movement. So the fact that she didn't get it is something. But the fact that somebody got it who says that she was too tough on mergers, like the day that she blocked this huge... Because what the Wall Street Journal would always say about her

She filed another frivolous BS case that's just going to eat up money. And then when a judge gets this complaint, he's going to knock it away because this is a child who doesn't even belong in this job. And she doesn't understand how the law works. And time after time after time, the judges are like, these are good points. This merger is blocked. Right.

Well, what she said on Hassan show there is like, so it's one of the reasons conservatives don't like her is because as Rachel Bovard has talked about to us and others is the consumer welfare standard of Robert Bork was gospel on the right for a really long time. Not just the political right, but just sort of the pro-business community for a long time, the consumer welfare standard. And what Lena Kahn was saying there is that it's not- And when we're saying pro-business, they mean pro-big business. Yeah. And also the mergers and acquisitions lawyers who make money on these mergers. Absolutely. Pro-big business. And-

the consumer welfare standard is predicated on this idea that consumers will choose to shop at places

where they treat workers well. And that is not the case when you have monopolies, right? Like it's this ridiculous sort of cycle. And Ryan, I just looked this up actually. We invited Andrew Ferguson to come on a Friday show with Matthew Stoller to talk about conservatives and antitrust policy back in June and never got a response. So your point about Lena Kahn going on the Hassan Piker stream is really interesting because we're

One of the reasons Khan irked a lot of people in the business community is that she's just the new Brandeisian, right? She's actually very much in the moment. And that was irritating because it was a threat. It's like this is a popular movement behind Lena Khan. People seem to like what she's saying. There's a lot of media interest in her. And that poses a threat because it –

makes the right more interested in supporting Lena Kahn. Matt Gaetz, very supportive of Lena Kahn, for example. Calls himself a conservative. Yeah, conservative. So you can see why they would be threatened by Lena Kahn, like actually getting an invitation even to go talk to Hasan Piker. I don't know which way it went. Maybe they pitched her to Hasan. But either way, Andrew Ferguson is going to have a slightly tougher...

for time on this one because Lena Kahn obviously was popular in new media spaces like this one. Yeah, yes indeed. This is it.

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I don't even need to say his name. Mr. Bob Dylan! From the director of Walk the Line and Ford vs. Ferrari. If anyone is going to hold your attention on stage, you have to kind of be a freak. And starring Timothee Chalamet as Bob Dylan. Are you a freak? Hope so. Inspired by the true story. I want to know which side he's on. This Christmas. They just want me singing Blowing in the Wind for the rest of my life.

Bobby, what do you want to be? Whatever it is, they don't want me to be. He defied everyone. Turn it down! Play it loud! To change everything. He's our Elvis. With no direction! Make some noise, BD. Track some mud on the carpet. A Complete Unknown. Only in theaters Christmas Day. Rated R. Under 17, not admitted without parent.

Let's move on to this inspector general report that was published yesterday by DOJ IG, Michael Horowitz, a familiar name to a lot of people because he published an inspector general report on some of the Russia collusion, FISA application malfeasance that happened surrounding Carter Page and all of that stuff and was popular on the right because of that report, rightfully so, because it was a good report and

needed to be done. But this next one may be slightly less popular with the right. It was published yesterday and found that the Department of Justice under Donald Trump and his attorney general, Bill Barr, improperly spied on members of Congress, congressional staffers, and actually journalists as well in an effort to track down who was selectively leaking. We can put the first element up

On the screen, this is a report from Politico. The headline is, Watchdog Faults, DOJ and Trump's First Term for Secretly Obtaining Records of Lawmakers and Journalists. It's a little bit more complicated than just having done it secretly. And we can go through some of the Inspector General's report, Ryan, because I'm not going

I think it's fairly important now that we have another Trump administration suiting up. And before we do start going through it, we can put it up on the screen here. This is the E2 tear sheet. You can see the PDF of the report itself. You can go through it yourself. It's very long, but very long and very detailed sort of step-by-step process of how warrants were retained, how warrants were obtained or obtained poorly or improperly in many cases.

Essentially, the Trump era Justice Department was doing something that was, I think, perfectly reasonable and understandable for the Attorney General to do, which is track down the selective leaks that were coming out of classified information weaponized against Donald Trump. We now know for sure, and we knew this at the time in many cases, that these selective leaks were giving a very false picture.

of what was happening with Carter Page. They were leaking to show that Carter Page and others were definitively involved in some strange plot, like ripped from a Clancy novel about Russia collusion. That just, the there wasn't there.

And so Bill Barr was trying to track down who was leaking this classified information. His deputies were trying to track down who was leaking this classified information. So in the process, though, the DOJ was not following the proper channels that you need to. Man, reading this report, one reason it's kind of an interesting read is that the bureaucratic process of obtaining these forms.

is insane. Which it should be. As it should be. Yes, absolutely. 100% as it should be. Were you going to say something, Ryan? No, no. Just, yeah. And Eric Holder put this into place actually after the DOJ

basically spied on James Rosen, the Fox News White House correspondent who was working on a story with a source regarding North Korea's kind of nuclear, something involving North Korea. And they swept up his communications. And the entire media, left to right,

stood up to Eric Holder and said, this is outrageous. Many of us called on him to resign over that, including us over the Huffington Post. And

In response to that pressure, he put in this new policy that if you're going to pick up the communications of a journalist, even if it's incidental in a report on investigating a cartel or something, if you wind up, if you see a journalist there, you need to come to the attorney general himself and make your case that this breach of our norms, because it's just norms, legally illegal.

You know, if they get a warrant, they can go after anybody they want. But the norms are that journalists are to be protected. And so they've set up these special protections that also cover members of Congress, which to me, I think,

are also good. Like members of Congress, whether you're Marjorie Taylor Greene or Adam Schiff or AOC, I think should be off limits. Dana Rohrabacher. Yep, absolutely. So let's get into what Horowitz found a little bit here. This is where we'll start on page five. We can put the next element up. He says he found that the department failed to convene the News Media Review Committee. They have a committee to review such things, to consider the compulsory process authorization requests.

The department did not obtain the required DNI certification in one investigation, and we were unable to confirm whether the DNI certification it obtained in another investigation was provided to the attorney general before he authorized the request. And the department did not obtain the attorney general's express authorization for the NDOs that were sought in connection with compulsory process...

with compulsory process issued in the investigations. So that's from the executive summary, basically. But yeah, on this next element, you can see they're talking specifically about the New York Times and the Washington Post. CNN is swept up in this. They say, as we describe in this chapter, it's chapter three of the report, the department complied with some but not all

of the then-apical provisions of the news media policy in CNN and New York Times and Washington Post, many of which provisions have been put in place beginning just six years earlier. That's what Ryan was referencing from 2014 and 2015, which Horowitz references a lot in this report. He says, in our judgment, this deviation from the department's own requirements indicates a troubling disparity between, on the one hand, the regard expressed in department

policy for the vital role of the news media in American democracy. Yes, I know the DOJ loves that so very much. And on the other hand, the department's commitment to complying with the limits and requirements that it intended to safeguard that very role. So basically, if you go into the report, what happens with these journalist communications? These are non-content communications requests. So they're trying to pull who the journalists were emailing and calling.

And that in and of itself would be enough obviously to figure out who's leaking and that's why you need to have the provisions that were put in place followed because it's a very serious thing when you're looking at who journalists are talking to. It should be the absolute highest standard.

And so when we have potentially Kash Patel coming into the FBI and a loyalist like Pam Bondi coming into the DOJ, Bill Barr was kind of a loyalist but ultimately really bucked Trump. So imagine what a loyalist who's even sort of more MAGA than Bill Barr might do in some of these situations, even if they're kind of swampy like Pam Bondi legitimately is.

These are really serious things, really serious powers that I would just tell the right, can and will be abused against conservative media, little guys. Imagine, imagine the slippery slope as these powers start getting abused because there are, and it always happens this way, there are rightful uses of these powers when selective leaks of classified information that can damage national security, literally can,

Yeah, that's a reasonable use of trying to figure out who is leaking. I don't think it's necessarily a reasonable use of going after journalists' communications, but it may be a reasonable predicate for an investigation, and it is what convinces you to let those powers get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. Right, exactly. And these norms get loosened in a ratchet effect. It moves one direction and only...

tends to move in one direction. So let's say Adam Schiff is one of the members of Congress that they spied on here and Swalwell. Let's say you hate Adam Schiff. And Kash Patel, by the way. And Kash Patel. 21 Democrats and 20 Republicans. And Kash Patel is a great example here. So take Adam Schiff. You hate Adam Schiff. You think he's a traitor. You think he should be spied on. He's now an incoming senator.

If there's a Democratic administration in the next 10, 15 years, he's going to be likely CIA chief. He's going to be pissed. You spied on him. You want him with all these powers? Now he can spy on you in reverse. So that's my message to the right. Now, the message to the left would be like, all right, you spied on Kash Patel, the left. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Democrats. You spied on Kash Patel when he was a Hill staffer.

Now he's going to be running the FBI. He's pissed. He's very pissed. He has sued everybody involved. His case got thrown out. But he's like, guy's angry, as he should be. You don't spy on a Hill staffer. And so now he's going to run the FBI. Look what you did. So don't do this stuff.

Yeah, it's serious. I mean, it is really serious when you start setting, when you let the precedent slip like this and don't get caught until there's an inspector general report a long time later. And part of this is you're supposed to give reporters enough time to respond. And that wasn't done in all of these cases. To actually have a legal response to their communications being pulled to the government as journalists.

I mean, right now we've seen how crucial independent media has been and independent voices in Congress, like people who are willing to block the party line. We've seen how important that is to understanding. Like Kash Patel, as Matt Taibbi came on Undercurrents last week and made this point, he was like, the Nunes memo that we were told before

by selective leaks, by the way, was absolutely wrong, was vindicated. And Kash Patel was basically the author of the Nunes memo. Those independent voices have been really important to understanding what's going on when nobody else in the Republican Party wanted to really talk about how bad the FBI was, were hesitant.

to question the Russia investigation. Initially, it's easy to forget there was even hesitation on the right about that, but there was. These independent voices in Congress and in the media are some of the more important voices right now. There's a lot of literal disinformation coming from the establishment, and so as soon as these powers sort of slip into getting bigger and bigger without proper oversight, then guess who's coming after independent media?

It'll be Adam Schiff. It'll be Eric Swalwell. It'll be those types of people. Or maybe even like on the right, I think right now people on the right are primed to overuse these powers because they have good reason to want to know what happened. And that's how things end up getting expanded in very bad directions because it's like it's easy to convince people you should be going after and you should be using this power.

And so you sort of feel like you have permission to make the power broader and broader. Yeah, got to protect what's left of this republic. Let's do it. And so it's been a bleak show. We talked about war, ethnic cleansing, sexual assault, the selling out of the antitrust agenda. So let's do a little palate cleanser and talk about Bill Maher for a little bit. Let's talk about Bill Maher. And it's a palate cleanser because this clip is sort of delightful in some ways as either a...

point about cancel culture never existing or about cancel culture being over. So let's go ahead and roll. Bill Maher talking to actor Zachary Levi on Club Random. And Zachary Levi, for context, came out in support of Trump like right before the election. It was a matter of days before the election. And he was talking to Bill Maher on Club Random. Let's go ahead and see how their exchange went.

You got canceled for basically saying... Have I been canceled? I don't know. Well... I hope I haven't been canceled yet. I mean, if it happens, it happens, I guess. I mean, come on. Didn't you lose jobs for that? Isn't that what canceling is? No. For coming out and voting for Trump? Yeah.

I mean, listen, I have yet to see what the ultimate effects of all that are going to be. I already had multiple jobs that I was in the process of shooting or that I have yet to shoot. And none of those have been compromised. All of those, like none of my producers or any of the studios behind those films or projects have called and said, Hey, listen, this is a, you know, a line too far and we can't have you associated with the project anymore. We're all still full steam ahead on those projects.

How it ultimately like plays out in the future. I don't know. You know, I'm going to sit down with my team. I have yet. I've been in Eastern Europe making this movie all during the election and everything. I mean, I was all, you know, kind of disconnected a lot from what was going on other than social media and following the news and kind of seeing the play by plays. But, you know, I'm going to sit down with my team and we'll talk about it because I haven't talked to any of them. They might say, hey, listen, we've had some phone calls with some people and they don't want to work with you anymore. I don't know.

I could have sworn that already happened. No, no. I think it was because when I, when I did the town hall with Tulsi and Bobby, so basically I was, I was stumping for Bobby. I really wanted Bobby to be Bobby Kennedy. Yeah. Uh, he sat there and you know, I don't agree with everything, but among people in my field, especially who were considered liberals, uh,

I have definitely been the most supportive. You know, his general view of health and medicine and how it all works and what's important is closer to mine than Western medicine. So the, I think funny thing there was Zachary Levi saying he hasn't yet lost jobs and Bill Maher saying, I could have sworn that happened because it takes us back to the central point of the cancel culture debate, which is, are you just getting criticism or are you actually facing consequences? And I,

I don't know. I think, Ryan, we probably agree. And it gets to your great essay, Elephant in the Zoom, or reported essay, Elephant in the Zoom. Part of cancel culture was absolutely, absolutely real. There are people who said it never happened. It was never real. It was consequence culture. It was sort of always incoherent. On the one hand, people were saying, it's just consequence culture. But also, it's not real, right? You're just getting...

You're just facing consequences for your... It's so frustrating to talk about because nobody would name it. Right, yeah, exactly. You're just facing consequences for having unpopular opinions, but also this thing is not really happening. It's not at all a problem. Don't worry about it. There's nothing to see here. So that said, I think this is maybe becoming incoherent on the right because the second Trump administration or the second Trump election...

What's interesting about it is you get the guy winning the popular vote. You do have sort of a broad swath of celebrities coming out and supporting him. Still a lot of celebrities supporting Kamala Harris, no question about it. These tech guys now coming out in support of Donald Trump. We talked about the Federalist headline like the day before the election, which was it's no longer, there's no social stigma anymore.

around supporting Trump anymore. So this is gonna, this could potentially be incoherent, right? Like if the social stigma around supporting Trump is mostly gone, which I agree, in the rest of the country outside, you know, some type of like C-suite at the 30 Rock building. If you say that, then it also says like cancel culture is kind of over. Yeah, it was a wave. It was a wave. Yeah. Totally over in some, I think, I think the more hermetically sealed

ecosystems are still operating under some of its ideological rigors, but in general. Yeah. Oh, of course. Yeah. Yes. Not so much. Yeah. There was a time. And the rights probably isn't quite over yet because you guys were later in adopting it.

internally and so you've got to it's got to work through your system your own like mirror world bizarro version of cancel culture yeah well you're not sufficiently the woke brain sufficiently anti-woke like this is a raging debate on the right right now by the way which gets weird because it's like

You say anything related to racial justice diversity make any basic point Tell me if I'm wrong on the right people like dei woke. Yeah, you're like no no whoa whoa whoa I'm just saying like everybody should be treated with equality. Did you say equality this equity? This happened to me once what I was like, maybe the like conservatives should put a woman on the Supreme Council her cancel this woman

I was like, it doesn't have to be any specific woman, but if you believe that men and women are different, then maybe a woman will have valuable takes on abortion. Maybe a pro-life woman. Yeah, drag this woman. It's been nice working with you. You're finished. But that is the kind of thing. You say anything that gets anywhere near it, it's like, whoa.

- Well, because, and this is actually, I think becoming a serious problem because there is a need, there's a legitimate need for litmus tests. If you're the Trump, if you're the incoming Trump administration, you are trying to put all kinds of litmus tests. And this was a problem for Joni Ernst about loyalty.

on the hiring process or the confirmation process because you know that the second somebody is like Bill Barr and is not fully loyal to Donald Trump or Mike Pence is not fully loyal to Donald Trump, then boom, like your whole agenda could crumble. It could become a house of cards. So they're trying to not build a house of cards. They're trying to build a house of stone. And that's where their litmus tests are becoming important to them. And so they use these types of stand-ins as litmus tests. And it can, I think, really poison

or pollute, I should say, pollute the discourse because it's not honest always. Take it from me, it's toxic. Take it from Ryan, it's toxic. It's toxic. And so maybe the mainstream wave of cancel culture is coming to an end. There was a time when if Zachary Levi had just breathed so much in Trump's direction, he legitimately probably would have lost jobs.

In Hollywood. Maybe, yeah. It happened. I mean, there were some pretty... Yeah, 2016, 17. 2016, 17, 18, Trump is a Russian asset. Yeah, 100%. You're a traitor. All of that. So this is sort of a fun note to end the show on, Ryan. There you go.

Thanks for tuning in. I'm excited about the Friday show. Me too. Yeah. If you missed earlier on the show, we're talking to basically an American leftist who went to fight for the Anoko Kamis of the YPG, which...

Good for him. Yeah, it'll be interesting conversation, especially this week. So thank you so much for tuning in. BreakingPoints.com. If you want to become a premium subscriber, there's also fun Christmas merch. I've enjoyed seeing everybody's pictures in their Breaking Points sweaters. I was wearing my sweater the other day. Oh, you were? Yeah. All right. I was like, is that you on the sweater? Yes, it is. It's really, it is awkward. Yeah.

It's the same thing with the mugs. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I'll be on Zoom calls sometimes with the mug at home. I'm like, oh, shit. I've got my face on a mug again. Not a good look. Not a good look. Well, thank you, everyone. BreakingPoints.com as a reminder. And we'll see you back here on Friday. See you then. At Amica Insurance, we know it's more than a life policy. It's about the promise and the responsibility that comes with being a new parent. Being there day and night.

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