2/5/25: Trump Wants US To 'Own' Gaza, Elon DOGE Kids Raid Treasury, GOP Caves On Tulsi - RFK & MORE!
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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

Full shows, unedited, ad-free, and all put together for you every morning in your inbox. We need your help to build the future of independent news media, and we hope to see you at BreakingPoints.com. Good morning and welcome to CounterPoints. We've got quite a packed show today. And Emily, I was just thinking, during the Biden era, you could actually kind of phone in the prep for these shows sometimes because it wasn't a whole lot emanating from that White House. Not a whole lot. And also...

There wasn't a whole lot going on outside of the lines. Yeah. You just kind of, they were just doing what they were doing. And they're doing a genocide over here. They're going to keep doing their genocide. With this, you have to be like, wait a minute. Is that legal? Every 10 seconds. And then you look it up, you're like, nope. What they're doing here is definitely not legal. Going to have to...

going to have to flag that in the hall. It's funny you say this. I had the exact same thought this morning that under Biden, this is the norm. This is the pre-Trump norm. It was utterly predictable. And there would be something maybe out of the ordinary every week. And you'd think, oh, what a crazy country. But it's back to the routine of 2017 through 2021 here in Washington, which is that all of

the different agencies, and I know a lot of people watching this are like, yeah, this is what we voted for. All the agencies are in scrambling, they're in panic, but as a journalist, it's a different rhythm. That is for sure. Elon Musk used the word revolution to describe what he and his... Is it Doge or Doggy? I think we should go with Doge. I think it's Doge. Let's go with Doge. This is Ryan's TikTok odyssey. Doggy. It involves him trying to pronounce Doge. Musk...

described what his doggy committee is doing as a revolution. And I think that's an accurate way to put it. And that doesn't mean that we won't continue pointing out all the different federal laws that it's in violation of because, you know, we're reporters and that's what we do. This is, here's the law, here's what they're doing. They clearly are so far beyond caring about what the law is around this stuff that it almost feels trite to bring it up. But

We're going to keep doing that. It's sort of predicated on a contempt for... Yes. Yes. Right, it's a revolution. And you also look ridiculous, as Democrats now do. You had Democrats outside of USAID. This is so good. You had...

the guy that beat out AOC for the, Jerry Connolly, saying, you know, if Elon Musk wants to run aid, then he should get nominated and get confirmed in the Senate. - Yeah. - What? - Yeah. - And then Ruben Gallego is like, if Trump wants to occupy Gaza, he should come to the Senate and ask for an authorization for the use of military force.

He should. Okay, but this is a revolution. They don't care. But anyway, we're going to talk about the substance and the legality of all this, of course, starting with Trump's bombshell announcement that we are just going to own Gaza. Okay, we'll get deeper into that.

We're going to talk to Nathan Tankus, who's an independent reporter, who's been talking to people inside the Treasury Department about what the doggy committee's lanyard kids, or maybe they don't even have lanyards, they just roll right in there.

What these little hacker kids are doing inside the Treasury Department and what they're not doing and what the risks of that would be. I talked to a very senior former Treasury official who's worked in this precise area last night. I can shed a little light on this as well.

Trump is also saying that he's going to get rid of the Department of Education, which, again, that would require an act of Congress. He's going to try to make progress toward that through executive action. Mm-hmm.

GOP, what is that one on the thing? I don't even remember that. Well, basically Republicans caved to the conservatives. Oh, that's right. The Republicans are caving to the— Tulsi and RFK Jr. are cruising. Yeah, I mean, this is—they have complied with the demands of MAGA. Bill Cassidy was really on the line and could have prevented— Yeah, he's a doctor.

But got actually some interesting concessions out of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr.'s votes will be on the Senate floor next week. They're likely to pass. Actually, their hardest battle may have just been getting out a committee, which is unusual for cabinet nominees. So we're going to break down what happened in the Senate yesterday. We're also going to talk about housing, Brian. Yeah, New York Times had a fascinating analysis in a story that it did with ProPublica where it looked at

housing price trends all around the country and found that there's now a stark divergence

that you're seeing in the data when it comes to home prices in places that face catastrophic climate threats and places like, say, the Midwest or New England that do not, and the Mid-Atlantic to some degree as well. So if you own homes in those areas, they expect that you're going to continue to see your housing wealth and your housing prices grow.

If you own homes in the other areas, you're going to see your values crash, which their forecasting could lead to like...

5 million internal migrants over the next year, 55 million over the next 30 years. It's going to have real structural implications for the population of the United States. We also have a fun Jasmine Crockett clip that we are going to play and see if maybe some... Never disappoints. No, no. See if we can maybe stave off some white tears. She is...

either for or against mediocre white people, we're not quite clear. But we'll unpack it all. Yeah, we'll make sure to do that. Let's turn to the White House now, where an absolutely wild cascade of statements from President Donald Trump came during his meeting with Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, who

was in town last week meeting with Donald Trump and Trump rolled out an absolutely shocking announcement. Actually, it was surprising even to his own White House. Just before we roll this clip, a friend of the show, Philip Wegman, reported in RealClearPolitics, quote, quote,

That was interesting. One told RealClearPolitics after the press conference wrapped, asked what the plan would look like in practice. The official replied, quote, I need to get clarity myself. Ryan. Yeah, and so Trump in his press conference said that this is not a decision he came to lightly. This is

This is the result of great and extraordinary deliberation, which is undercut by the idea that it came as a surprise to senior administration officials and even seemed to take Netanyahu a little bit by surprise. Like, it's not clear how...

What how much of this came up in their conversation because and we're about to play you some clips from? Their their little tete-a-tete before the meeting During which Netanyahu cannot wipe the smile off of his face You'll notice that in the clips and then their stand-up press conference afterwards during which Netanyahu looks a little bit shell-shocked after getting news that he

appeared not to have expected and doesn't quite, I think, know how to internalize or make of. Itamir Ben-Gavir, you know, super far right guy who's abandoning Netanyahu over striking a ceasefire deal.

tweeted, "Donald, we're going to have a wonderful relationship." This is a guy who was himself, like what, a convicted terrorist in Israel and has always wanted to ethnically cleanse Gaza, and he now sees Trump in his reflection. So let's roll a little bit of this and then try to unpack how serious he is and what the implications would be. The only reason the Palestinians want to go back to Gaza is they have no alternative.

It's right now a demolition site. This is just a demolition site. Virtually every building is down. They're living under fallen concrete that's very dangerous and very precarious. They instead can occupy all of a beautiful area with homes and safety, and they can live out their lives in peace and harmony instead of having to go back and do it again.

The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it too. We'll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site, level the site and get rid of the destroyed buildings, level it out, create an economic development that will supply

Unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area. Do a real job. Do something different. Just can't. No, they're not. Nope. Everybody's demanding one thing. You know what it is? Peace. We want peace. We want people to stop being killed.

But everybody's demanding one thing: very simple: peace. And he wants peace also. So reporters had a lot of questions about that announcement that we were going to take over Gaza. Among them was, will this involve U.S. boots on the ground? And Trump said, if that's what it requires, then it will require.

They also ask, because there obviously is enormous amounts of reconstruction and demolition work and removal of unexploded ordnance that needs to happen there. And so there does need to be some displacement, either internally or externally, in the course of doing that. And so Trump was asked, OK, you're taking over Gaza. How many Palestinians...

Do you expect will be removed from Gaza? Here's here's what he said All of them, I mean we're talking about probably a million seven people seven maybe a million eight But I think all of them so all of them and notice there and a lot of people have picked up on this This is not the first time that he has flagged

Gaza's current population at about 1.7 million. It was 2.3 million when it started. The public figures are that just over 60,000 were killed in the conflict. What we know about conflict is that there are usually four to five what they call indirect deaths for every direct killing in a conflict. And the indirect deaths, you can just use your imagination. These are people who

who die from treatable diseases, die of malnutrition, die of dysentery, or something falls on them, then they die an accidental death in a way that they would not have if they were not living in a war zone. So 60,000 times four to five, you can imagine that, okay, so now the U.S. is starting to admit that actually

Several hundreds of thousands of people were killed here. But then the final question, then let's analyze this for a bit, is, well, would the Palestinians be able to return? In this

Let's say fantasy scenario where somehow Trump manages to remove all 1.7 million people, which we'll talk about how fantastical that idea is, but would they be able to return? Here's Trump. Would Palestinians have the right to return to Gaza if they left while the rebuilding was happening? It would be my hope that we could do something really nice, really good, where they wouldn't want to return. Why would they want to return? The place has been hell.

It's been one of the meanest, one of the meanest, toughest places on earth. And right now it's, it's, I've seen every picture from every angle better than if I were there and nobody can live there. You can't live there. It's too dangerous for people. Nobody can go there. It's too dangerous. Nobody wants to be there. Warriors don't want to be there. Soldiers don't want to be there.

How can you have people go back? You're saying go back into Gaza now? The same thing's going to happen. It'll only be death. The best way to do it is you go out and you get beautiful, open areas with the sunlight coming through and you build something nice. And they are not going to want to go back to Gaza. So the second half of that clip there was actually in response to a different question, which was, would you support Jewish settlements in Gaza?

And which is what Ben Ben Gavir and Smotrich and this kind of faction of settlers are pushing for. And he was saying it's too dangerous for them, too. He's like, I'm not saying it's only too dangerous for Palestinians. It's also too dangerous. So at least he's being consistent there. Now, the other the line he said where I want to make it so beautiful that they don't want to return has been bouncing around my head because I'm like, that just doesn't make sense. I think I finally unlocked it. I think he means.

they're going to make whatever refugee camp they send them to so beautiful and so amazing and so wonderful. Well, he said they're going to have beautiful houses. Beautiful houses. Yeah. That they won't want to leave that area. So he's not saying we're going to make Gaza so amazing they won't want to come back, which makes no sense because if Gaza's amazing, forget the heritage and everything else, if it's amazing, you want to come back. He's saying that wherever they send them. So...

There are layers of this going on here. And the kind of first one that we have to confront with Trump always is how serious is this on the complete total nonsense bluff spectrum to deadly serious plan that he's going to execute on? Where are you on this, on the Trump spectrum there? Well, I mean, I think you absolutely have to take him seriously because he's...

speaking as though on the one hand this is a fully fleshed out plan. He's saying he had answers to all of these particular questions or things that he... Except not where they're gonna go. Well, he's... but that hinges on what he's saying is an agreement in the works with other Arab nations which is already dead on arrival because Saudi Arabia has said no. The sovereign wealth fund that was announced in what the last 48 hours I suppose is potentially aimed

at something like this. You can buy TikTok and redevelop Gaza, I see. Right, yeah. It seems like it was something that was cobbled together in the last 48 hours, maybe with input from Jared Kushner, as Tara Palmieri is reporting, that we covered this at the time. It didn't get a lot of pickup, but Kushner had something to the extent. This was last year that Gaza could be developed, that it was like an amazing opportunity for real estate developers. Yeah, exactly. Riviera. So, go ahead.

Yeah, the Jordan and Egypt points I think are worth pausing on for a second because Trump seems to be, so Trump is saying, and he's going to meet soon with the King of Jordan. He talks, you know, he can get the, as he calls him, the general in Egypt, Sisi, and get him on the phone whenever he wants. Trump is saying that he's, he compared them to Mexico and Canada. He's like, Mexico and Canada said they weren't going to,

do anything about their border and then I threaten tariffs and boom, all of a sudden they're doing something about their border. Couple things there. Mexico and Canada never said they wouldn't do anything about their border. It was fairly easy. Oh, you want me to send 10,000 National Guard to our border and you'll back off these tariff threats? Okay, fine. We will do that. That's a different concession

than something that both Sisi and the royal family in Jordan believe would lead to their toppling. So think about this. They're much smaller countries than we are and you're asking them to take a million people each. And these million people are more affiliated politically with Muslim Brotherhood factions which the Hashemites in Jordan and the military in Egypt

have done everything they can to suppress. So now you're just, you're empowering them and destabilizing your country. So you're asking these rulers with threats of whatever economic, you know, threats that Trump is going to make on the one hand and carrots on the other. We'll pay this. We'll do this. We'll give you all this money from the World Bank, IMF, and we'll build this. What does that mean to a ruler who thinks that

that the end result of accepting the deal is that within some period of time, they will be overthrown. They will be out of power. Rulers are willing to take deals that are harmful to their populations if they think it's going to extend their power. That's just basic kind of power politics. So Trump thinks they're just being stubborn and that he can conjole them

But it is existential for them. And they actually also know, and this is worth pausing on, it's maybe one of the most obvious points here. The reason that Trump is asking the question, why would you want to go back? It's a place of death and destruction. They know that. They have known that for decades and they have not left. The whole point is the land. The entire country.

fight is over the specific piece of land. So to say that why would they want to go back? I mean, this is the question that they have been answering definitively for decades. So in terms of in the pragmatic terms of what Donald Trump thinks will actually happen here, when you have

Tony Blinken saying just a month ago, less than a month ago, that three-quarters of the Hamas fighters have already been replaced. They've already replaced three-quarters of the people that Hamas has lost. You have a population that is clinging to the land and has been for years, for generations, over and over again, and a militant government that

That's U.S. troops on the ground. There's no other way to put it. The other Arab countries wouldn't be able to just peel the population of Gaza away from Gaza without violence. There's absolutely no way that this happens without violence.

incredible violence and likely if Donald Trump says we quote own the Gaza Strip if he says the US is just going to come in and take ownership and he thinks he can make a deal This will be US troops. This would be kids from you know, the Midwest from everywhere boots on the ground in Gaza Peeling people away from the land that they've spilled generations of blood to stay on if they wanted to rebuild Gaza like

There are hundreds of thousands of residences that are still habitable. Like the entire thing is not uninhabitable. But let's say you do need a million people to go somewhere else. You could find some housing internally within Gaza for some portion of those. But there is another country that is right there that could take people for the time period. And that country's name is Israel. And that country also happens to be the one

that made it uninhabitable. So if they're serious here about that, like they could do that. And there's a step toward peace and coexistence. But I think it's worth underscoring a valid point that Trump makes, and that is the absolute level of destruction. And Witkoff talked about this

as well outside the White House. So let's, and you can see the real estate developer in him as he's talking about this. So let's roll 8A2 here. And then I want to skip ahead on something. Go ahead. When the president talks about cleaning it out, he talks about making it habitable. And this is a long-range plan. They've dug tunnels underneath there that have basically degraded the stone that you make that would form foundations.

We have to examine that. You do it with borings. You do it with subterranean surveys. How long could that take? And this guy knows real estate. It's years on top of years. The disposal effort in Gaza is, we estimate, three to five years just to dispose of all the things before you can look down but...

believe beneath the surface of the soil, and then before you get a master plan done, and the president is intent on getting it all done correctly. So to me, it is unfair to have explained to Palestinians that they might be back in five years. That's just preposterous. - And he's just taking a common sense approach. - So a few months ago, I spoke to a UN official

whose job it was to do ordinance removal after the 2014 war in Gaza. First of all, there are not a whole lot of people able to do this in the world. There are small teams, it's specialized work. Second of all, he described it as painstakingly laborious stuff. So in general, as he was describing it to me, and I've since been able to confirm this with others,

The munitions that Israel uses, oftentimes 5 to 10 percent of those, under the best of circumstances, do not explode upon impact. They are not operating in the best of circumstances. They're operating in this dense urban environment, which means you're going to have a much higher failure rate, which means you're going to have unexploded ordnance everywhere around Gaza. Because if

The numbers are absolutely breathtaking when it comes to the amount of metric tons that have been dropped on Gaza. And so if you take 10 to 20 percent of that and assume that that is unexploded, that's the task. And he said that these are actually much more stable than you would think.

That probably wouldn't give me a whole lot more comfort if it was in my own courtyard or my bedroom. He said, for instance, they pulled one out of a kitchen. It came to the roof, second floor, through the kitchen floor. And just getting that one single unexploded bomb out of that kitchen...

took them weeks because you got to first you got to clear the door out and you have to do all this gently because while they are stable they become destabilized if a bulldozer hits them or something else significant and so our one of our correspondents in Gaza Abu Bakr Abed who's been on this program a bunch of times so yesterday he tried to get to Gaza City couldn't get a ride ended up he's posted a bunch on his Twitter feed you can see this he ended up walking it took him like three and a half hours to walk to Gaza City and

And we can roll A4 here just to get a sense of the destruction and at the end of this clip he stumbles on an unexploded mine. Just to underline Trump's point that this is an extraordinarily dangerous situation. Let's play A4 here. Here we are. It's just 7 in the morning here in Gaza City where all you can see is just total destruction.

Here are some buildings that have been destroyed during the genocide. So I think I found a mine. Yeah, so I'm going to walk away. I'm afraid it might exclude... Oh my God, what a sound. And we often get questions, by the way, about Abu Bakr's British accent. Yes. He was a, before October 7th,

His passion was doing journalism around football, European football. And so he picked up his British accent. He's never left Gaza in his life. Picked up a British accent watching British footballers. But so you see there, he's just stumbling along and, oh, there's a mine. Like that does have to be dealt with. And I had the sense throughout this that Israel knew that, that part of Israel,

the carpet bombing of the entire thing of Gaza was to make it uninhabitable, was to produce a reality that left you only bad options for the Palestinians. And one of them being, all right, what a shame, love to have you stay, but now it's completely uninhabitable. You're going to have to leave. But like I said, if he was serious, there is a plan where 500,000 to a million people can stay, another 100,000

get relocated inside Gaza. Those are the workers who are involved in this reconstruction. It's ridiculous. What's Trump's idea? He's going to kick all the Palestinians out and then bring like

Indian and or Thai construction workers in like that doesn't make any sense you got people who could do the work and then you could have the others internally displaced in the negative desert or elsewhere in like in in Settlement camps and with a promise that they're going to return right when it's done yes, and that promise backed up by

the prospect of a path towards statehood and normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel. So all of that is pushing in the same direction. Instead of Trump getting a Saudi-Israel peace deal, in this path, he's more likely to see the Egyptian and Jordanian ones unravel. They will stop recognizing Israel if they keep pushing this. That's a great point because this plan is, I think, on the one hand, hyper-pragmatic and not pragmatic at all.

Like that's the tension between this. On the one hand, he's saying, he's making this very obvious point that everyone dances around, which is, okay, if this is a ceasefire, we're about to repeat a tragic cycle. He's making that point. Everyone dances around it. But on the one hand, that's absolutely true. And it's from the sort of

pragmatic lens of a non-ideologue. And so he made that point. On the other hand, the idea of peeling people off the land that they fought generations to keep, there's nothing pragmatic about it unless you're willing to actually do a significant Iraq-style nation-building operation in the Gaza Strip, which is what, about the size of Las Vegas?

If you want to go and do that and then have the U.S. own a strip of land in the Middle East that is sacred to many, many people, you're asking for, again, generational nation building. And so it's exploded all of these typical, I guess, fault lines of what MAGA means to the Republican Party. But beyond that, what MAGA actually means to the American people, to the people who voted for Donald Trump, is it

about this sort of expansionism, imperialism, or is it about actually like quote unquote America first? Josh Hawley right away told the New York Times, I don't think it's the best use of U.S. resources to spend a bunch of money in Gaza. I'd prefer that to be spent in the United States first. That's the logic of MAGA. So maybe... Which rose out of the ashes of the Iraq occupation. Exactly, exactly. I mean...

what about all of the tunnels? Let's just take the point that you hear from Netanyahu. Yeah. What does it look like if Hamas says you are not taking us? And if you tell them they're not coming back. Which they will. Right. If you tell them right out front, okay, we're kicking you out and you're never coming back. Then...

of course they're going to fight you. Yeah. But this brings us to your original point, which is how serious is what Donald Trump laid out yesterday. And my impression is that this is something he's thought about for a while with Kushner. They've kicked around the sort of like galaxy brain. Real estate brain. Right. Yeah. It's sort of been kicked around. And then just in the last few days, um,

they decided, oh, Netanyahu's coming, we can actually really do this. Let's see what we can actually put together. Because again, actual people in the White House, senior officials were caught off guard by this. That much is very clear. So whether this is a starting point

tariff style, 25% tariff style or 100% tariff style starting point is unclear, but Ryan, it's the same thing with the tariffs. I think he should be taken seriously because he's not, he is not an ideologue. He's not ideologically committed to one outcome or the other. So when he does these negotiations,

he could kind of land wherever he thinks it works for him. And confusing the situation further, he's now talking, as of this morning, his most explicitly about reaching a deal that he will celebrate with Iran, which obviously cannot happen if he engages in full-on ethnic cleansing activities.

in Gaza. So let's put up a three here where he's talking about the role that Iran negotiations play here. - It's Iran and their proxies who threatened to retaliate against you and your team by killing you guys for taking out Soleimani. - Well, they haven't done that. And that would be a terrible thing for them to do. Not because of me. If they did that, they would be obliterated. That'd be the end. I've left instructions.

If they do it, they get obliterated. There won't be anything left and they shouldn't be able to do it. And Biden should have said that, but he never did. I don't know why. Lack of intelligence, perhaps. But he never said it. If that happens to a leader...

or close to a leader, frankly, if you had other people involved also, you would call for total obliteration of a state that did it. That would include Iran. - So that's the shot here. So here's the chaser, and we can maybe add this in post on Truth Social this morning. Trump says this, quote,

"I want Iran to be a great and successful country, but one that cannot have a nuclear weapon. Reports that the United States, working in conjunction with Israel, is going to blow Iran into smithereens are greatly exaggerated." In other words, he's referring to his own comments. The entire bluff. Yeah. "I would much prefer a verified nuclear peace agreement," and this is all caps, so that's VNPA,

which will let Iran peacefully grow and prosper. We should start working on it immediately and have a big Middle East celebration, celebrations capitalized, when it is signed and completed. God bless the Middle East. And so here you have Trump who has hired an enormous number of people who want to reach a peace deal with Iran and get back into the nuclear deal that Obama struck, that Trump ripped up in his first term.

Here you have him the most explicitly stating it outright that that is a goal of his. And it comes after he threatened to obliterate them, basically if they kill him. Which, fair, right? Look, you kill me, I've left instructions that you're dead too. Yeah. Again, it's a hell of a bluff.

But it all came on the heels of this New York Times report on Monday that because of all of the insanity going on, sort of ended up being buried in the news cycle. The Times reported, quote, new intelligence about Iran's nuclear program has convinced American officials that a secret team of the country's scientists is exploring a faster, if cruder approach to developing atomic weapon if Tehran's leadership decides to race for a bomb, according to current and former American officials. Now, if you are like many people, Tehran,

vague New York Times reporting about nuclear programs sends a chill up your spine because you just don't know if you can trust it. But they are saying essentially the timeline could be severely minimized or significantly minimized based on these new efforts down to something like a month if Iran wanted to enrich uranium and have a crude nuclear weapon. So Trump is then asked

in this context. That was the broader thing that was happening when he gets these questions from Peter Doocy. And scientifically or practically whether that's true, we don't know, but strategically we can see the internal logic.

The deterrent that Iran had up until recently was its massive sprawl of proxies throughout the region that could threaten Israel and threaten U.S. forces in Iraq or Syria if Iran was attacked. Plus, it's what they believe to be sophisticated air defenses. Israel apparently massively degraded their air defenses with that counterstrike.

leaving them significantly exposed to future strikes and their own proxies are significantly degraded, Hezbollah in particular, as well as Hamas. The Houthis are still very much capable of firing missiles out of their mountains and that will be the case for the foreseeable future no matter what Trump wants to do about it. So with those kind of

those protections, so to speak, kind of beaten down, strategically you could understand why they say, okay, well, all we have left then is a race towards a nuclear weapon. Because they look around and they're like, who's not around? Like, oh, Gaddafi. Gaddafi struck a nuclear deal. Not long after that, he was ousted. Who is around? Kim Jong-un. He's around. And for no other reason than he has a nuclear weapon. So you can understand the logic at least, even if

we don't necessarily have to believe the precise contours of the reporting. Yeah, I'm trying to imagine Gaddafi with a nuclear weapon and

Well, what you'd be imagining is a man who's going to die of natural causes. Yeah, that's right. So before we wrap this up, it's also absolutely important to note that Trump was asked about, quote, Judea. And by the way, Libya would be so much better off than it is now. The real Middle Eastern Riviera, as Trump is now saying Gaza will be. Libya is just completely destroyed by the U.S. and NATO, like absolutely ravaged. Mm-hmm.

Well, on that point, though, I have to mention that Trump was asked about, quote, Judea and Samaria, about his ideological disposition, what he believes, if he believes that Judea and Samaria, that Israel has a biblical right to them. And we can put this VO up on the screen here. This is from the West Bank. Trump essentially, this is A5, Trump essentially was saying that

Well, you know, we're gonna make a big announcement about that in the weeks ahead. So Ryan, as the West Bank... Four weeks or something he put it, he said he'd... Three or four weeks. Yeah. So as the West Bank is now, these are startling images if you're listening to it, you're seeing, you know, the like familiar... This is Gaza. But before you were seeing the familiar sort of skyline of the West Bank with all kinds of explosions.

That is huge and another one of those things that keeps getting buried in these news cycles. But in a matter of weeks, we could have some announcement that Trump also wants to do something significant major with the West Bank. Yeah, he's saying he'll decide whether or not he's going to allow Israel to annex the West Bank, which, again, you're not getting a peace deal. You're not getting a normalization deal with Saudi Arabia.

You're not getting a deal with Iran. You might lose your deals that you already have with Egypt and Jordan if you do that. But Sheldon Adelson's widow, Miriam, gave him $100-plus million and asked him in return to allow for the annexation of the West Bank. As shocking as it is to say, that's a thing that happened.

in 2024 and 2025 and so he may give it to them. And as an update, my colleague at Dropsite News, Jeremy Scahill, has an official statement from Bassem Naeem, a spokesperson for Hamas, in response to Trump's claim. He says the US plan to seize Gaza and remove the Palestinians, quote, "is a crime against humanity and a reinforcement of the law of the jungle at the international level."

He goes on to say, "The problem of reconstruction is not in the presence of the Palestinian people on their land, but rather in the continuation of the Zionist occupation and the stifling siege of the Gaza Strip for more than 17 years with American support." Naim called for "urgent regional and international action to put an end to these malicious plans."

Scajo writes, as reports emerged that Netanyahu intends to sabotage future phases of the ceasefire deal, Naim reiterated Hamas' position that it intends to abide by the terms. Quote,

We demand that the mediators, especially the United States, oblige the occupation to implement the ceasefire agreement in its three stages without procrastination or manipulation. We are committed to implementing the agreement as long as the occupation commits to it and any manipulation in implementing the agreement may cause it to collapse. So interesting statement from Hamas because there are some people who think that Trump's

bluffing here to just make sure that the agreement actually does continue to be implemented. We'll see.

Turning now back to Washington, which as I was saying a moment ago, Chris Murphy said the whole Gaza thing is just a distraction for what we're going to talk about in the next couple of blocks. We can do both at the same time. We can. We can walk and we can chew gum. So here is President Donald Trump being asked whether Elon Musk is a total rogue agent or not as he's going about this doggy revolution.

And Elon Musk, how often are you talking to him? And have there been ideas that he's brought to you that you've said, oh, no, wait a minute, this is going a little too far? Well, many ideas. But look, he's done a great job. Look at all the fraud that he's found in this U.S. AID. It's a disaster what the people, radical left lunatics, they have things that nobody would have even believed. The whole thing with 100 million spent on you know what?

with money going to all sorts of groups that shouldn't deserve to get any money with the money. I'd like to see what the kickbacks are. How much money has been kicked back? Who would spend that kind of money to some of the things that you read about and I read about and I see every night on the news and every morning when I read the papers? Who would spend money for that? I would say this. The people that got all that money, are they kicking it back to the people that

gave it from government. No, that's, to me, very, very corrupt. They're really... Some of these Doge engineers that Elon Musk has helping him are as young as 19 years old. That's good. They're very smart, though, Peter. They're like you. They're very smart people. Thank you. Has he... Have you met any of these guys? No, I haven't seen them. They work, actually, out of the White House. They're smart people.

unlike what they do in the control towers where we need smart people, we should use some of them in the control towers where we were putting people that were actually intellectually deficient. - Democrats, of course, are reacting quite angrily to this. Let's roll some of them. - So today, Leader Jeffries and I

are joining together to push legislation to prevent unlawful meddling in the Treasury Department's payment systems and protect Americans across the country. Our bill aims to do a few simple things. One, to deny access to special government employees, employees that don't have to disclose their conflicts of interest or any other ethic agreements.

Two, to deny access to anyone with conflicts of interest or lack of appropriate clearance. And three, include personal tax information into existing privacy protections. We call our legislation "Stop the Steal." They are raiding the government, attempting to steal taxpayer money. We don't pledge allegiance to the billionaires. We don't pledge allegiance to Elon Musk.

We don't pledge allegiance to the creepy 22-year-olds working for Elon Musk. We pledge allegiance to the United States of America. God bless the city. We are at war. $50 million into a campaign and they be given access for Department of Treasury. United States of America, we war. Thank you. In Congress, in the streets, not citizens.

The thing that has Democrats most alarmed is what's going on at the Treasury Department. And we can put up this next element. Wired has been doing some really good reporting on who is actually involved in this Doge committee. It's a group of kids that range in age from 19 to 25. If we can get Nathan Tankus on the line, we're going to talk to him. Unfortunately, he just had to cancel. He's got a problem with his internet connection. All right. No Nathan Tankus. They're hacking him. Yeah.

He's been working triple overtime basically in the last several days. Yes. So Nathan Tankus, we could send people over to his newsletter, which is called Notes on the Crisis or CrisisNotes.com. What he has been reporting based on Treasury sources and which the Treasury so far has been denying,

is that the Doge team has what's called, quote, read and write access inside the bowels of the Treasury Department. So very quickly, Elon Musk's team went directly for the pipes, said, okay, who is pressing the buttons? Who's cutting the checks? Like who's, after everything gets, so Congress approves the spending, directs it,

The agencies then confirm that this is how Congress intended to direct it, and then they tell somebody to send the checks. Musk is like, "How is that? Where's the system that that is happening?" They went to this system, and the bureaucrat who is in charge of that, David Lettick, is that his name? He'd been a treasury official since 1989.

And he said, no, you cannot have direct access to this system. They insisted, and he resigned in protest, which really sent a shock through the Treasury Department. I spoke with a former very senior Treasury official yesterday who worked directly with this guy, and he said he's the most small-c conservative bureaucrat, the absolute definition of a civil servant. Could be frustrating at times because...

He's going to tell you chapter and verse what the statute is that you need to comply with for him to do the thing that you're asking him to do. You can imagine Elon Musk does not want to hear anything about statutes and laws. No. He just wants access. This is the guy whose job it has been over the last decade to do what are called the extraordinary measures when we –

Pierce the debt limit which we already have like it was in January. We went we went through the debt limit we're now in the period of what's called extraordinary measures, which means

There isn't enough money in the treasury to basically pay everything. So you and anybody who lives on the margins knows exactly how this works. You move things around. You got this money coming in here. What's the latest I can pay this bill? What are the late fees on this one so I can move this? You're just trying to keep your head above water. And so right now,

They call it extraordinary measures. The Treasury is just trying to keep its head above water and make sure that the must-pay bills get paid. And the must-pay bills are the Treasury bonds and Treasury-like instruments because those are the collateral for the entire global financial system. So if you are due cash for your Treasury note and it doesn't come

then now your counterparty is screwed. That counterparty was counting on this thing that has never broken in the system. So this guy, as we've gone through debt ceiling crises under Obama and under Trump, and now a new one, and then Biden, then a new one under Trump, this guy has been the one that's made sure that all the payments have kept flowing. And people say he's like a magician. Like his ability...

to do this is, it leaves people utterly amazed. He's the one that has always briefed Treasury and also briefed Congress about how this is going. And everyone has always said, like, God does just an absolutely incredible job of it. The X date they're estimating is about six months from now.

Like we can move money around until then. In April, obviously, when you guys all send your checks in to the IRS, we're going to see a big plus up in the bank accounts. And so that and then June, there's more money that comes in with the extensions and stuff like that and corporate taxes. And so they think that maybe we've got till July-ish, but we're not sure. That's when it's run meticulously. So now this guy's gone.

And let's hope that his deputies and whoever's left know how to move this around. That's whoever's left. Whoever's left. That's kind of an aside. The other point that this senior official made to me is that, and it's one that you probably already figured out. The code and the hardware and the software for these pipes that are the most important pipes in the global financial system

are many decades old. Congress just has not appropriated money to redesign the pipes using modern technology. So my late great aunt, Mimi, she started coding in the 50s and 60s and was doing some of it for the BEA and for the government. The code that she was touching in the 60s is still there.

Like 60 years later. It's incredible. And so these 19-year-olds who have probably, you know, they were taught about this stuff. They don't have, I guess it's COBOL. Yeah.

They don't, and I'm sure they're brilliant. I'm sure they are. Like these kids. Yeah. One of them was the one who won the contest being able to figure out Julius Caesar's father-in-law's like Roman texts that were burned. With an algorithm, right? Like he figured out using AI to like read some of these things. Like, you know, some of the smartest people on the planet, I'm sure. Mm-hmm.

Being that smart doesn't mean you won't make mistakes. So according to Tankus and others, these kids now have the ability to push new code into the system here, which is utterly alarming to everybody who's familiar with the system. Because if you do it wrong, and not even necessarily wrong, like you could do it right, but like the system is such that it is, that it can't handle this system.

code that you've just pushed in there and it breaks it. Like you don't know how it breaks it, where it breaks it, how to fix it. And then now you don't know who didn't get paid. Now in your effort to clean up fraud, waste and abuse, you might end up costing the government so much extra money getting sued and then also trying to figure out which payments didn't go out and then being liable for all of the downstream consequences for the payments that didn't go out.

And there's also reporting that some of what the coders are trying to put in reduces visibility of what Musk's doggy team is doing here. So, in other words, this is... They're trying to pick a fight around the Empowerment Control Act. They've been very clear about that. The Empowerment Control Act was brought in in the 1970s by Congress

to try to put a check on Richard Nixon, who was claiming that he as the executive had the power to just stop a payment. Congress says we're going to fund this bridge building project over here. He signs that into law.

And then he turns around and says, "Actually, we're not going to do that." And Congress is like, "No, that's clearly not constitutional. You're the executive. You execute our laws. And just to be clear, here's the Impoundment Control Act. Here are the circumstances under which you can do this. They're very carved out. Otherwise, you just have to spend the money." Russ vote. The Republicans believe that the Impoundment Control Act is unconstitutional and they want a court fight. But in the meantime,

Elon Musk is saying, okay, well, if we're going to stop payments and these bureaucrats aren't going to let us because it's illegal, we just need to take the keys from them and start pressing the buttons ourselves. And let it play out in court. Somewhat let it play out in court, but also prevent it from getting to court in some cases if there's no visibility into who blocked the payment, who the payment was intended for.

So a scenario that people have laid out. So let's say a member of Congress says, all right, this I want in my district, this homeless shelter to be built and to get, you know, 50 million dollars from the federal government. And then I'll vote for your spending package that that passes into law. The president signs it. It's right there in the law. Treasury Department then says, OK, here's the project that they're talking about. Here's the EIN of this

of this organization. We checked out. They're legit. All this tracks. $50 million payment goes out. They send it to this system, which is supposed to be separate from politics. Half of it's in West Virginia. Half of it's in Maryland. Some of it is in D.C., but most of it is out in West Virginia and Maryland. And then they just, they're like, okay, EIN, here it is. Payment goes. What Musk's team is trying to do is go in there and say, actually,

I don't think we want to fund that homeless shelter. And just stop it. So you either then get a court challenge when the homeless shelter realizes it didn't get its money, or they're like, we just never got paid. They don't know why. And when you ask why, then there might not be an answer. Because it might be like, well, we don't know. It's been approved. We don't get there eventually. And so the court might be like, well, come back to us when you've got some evidence that you're not going to get this.

It'll definitely make it to court, though, in the first place. Eventually, something's going to get to court. Something has to. Yeah, absolutely. And I think probably sooner rather than later. Let's put the next element up on the screen because it gets to the point that you were making, Ryan, about who...

who is in charge here? This is a meme that says, who are these little boys and why are they in charge of our money? And it's running down the guys who are behind all of this. And they are young, but clearly, to Ryan's point, brilliant. It says the U.S. Treasury is usually run by grownups. Mamas, come get your babies out of our government. You know, Ryan, I actually—

I get that impulse. I think there have been people of similar age groups that have been behind some of the most important and actually well-respected political movements. Napoleon. Yeah. Throughout history. Wow, the founding fathers were actually kind of young. Not all of them, of course. Jefferson was 26 when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. Some of them were young. But to that point...

You also flagged this next element. We could put this Andrew Tate post up. This is something that one of them retweeted from Andrew Tate where he's... I missed this. I didn't flag this. Somebody else did. This is interesting. Okay, so yeah, in majority Filipino areas of the UK, it must look and feel British. This is, by the way, from January of 2025. In majority Indian areas of the UK, it must look and feel British. He's basically saying...

Immigrate, expect to adapt to British culture no matter how small the norm. We like quiet Sunday mornings. Problem, leave. And what's interesting about that, Ryan, is... So Gavin Cleggor is one of these kids, basically? Yeah. So he retweeted this, yeah. What's interesting about that, I think, is...

Ryan, even just openly retweeting Andrew Tate, totally common among young men, by the way, horrifying to people in Washington, not uncommon among young men who are trending further and further right. But yeah, not one of these young men is holding the keys to a significant portion of government and potentially outside the boundaries of

Yeah, right. Yeah. This is so like, you know, we just talked about the framers, some of the framers being very young when they built the Constitution. I've spent my entire life being lectured by the right about how brilliant the design of our Constitution is and our checks and balances are.

And to now be told, you know, all right, get the hall monitors out of here. Musk has good ideas and smart kids.

So he's just going to clean this mess up and this is what I voted for is kind of preposterously disorienting. It's like either you believe in representative democracy or you don't. And Musk very obviously does not. He very much seems to be in one of those Curtis Yarvin camps. I know Curtis Yarvin is all over the map, but in general there's this techno-feudalist idea that

that we know better. - It should be run as, this is directly from Curtis Yarvin, who was here for inaugural festivities, by the way, who believes in, I think techno-feudalism is a good word. I think he would say almost like a corporate monarchy, that the United States should be controlled by a single monarch and run like a corporation, CEO style, and it's,

Something that gets kicked around a lot in online right circles, the same places that Elon Musk seems to dwell when he's spending time on the internet. So it's not impossible that there's an actual sort of ideological strain being pulled from that into Musk's mind and the mind of some of these people.

that seem to be pretty, I shouldn't even call them kids. I mean, they're adults, but they're young and they haven't been in D.C. long at all. One funny thing I saw being passed around like Capitol Hill circles is like people are upset about the 25-year-olds running the government. Wait until they find out about Capitol Hill. It's pretty funny because 25-year-olds have been running the government for a while, unfortunately. Although, the,

One of the versions that I saw of that going around was they were saying, wait until they find out about the rest of the government. And that's actually not accurate. It is 100% true that if you go around Capitol Hill, people are 25 and under and hello to everybody on Capitol Hill. I don't know how often you go to the House office buildings anymore. I practically have to stay out of it. There's so many breaking points. Everybody there is 25 and under. Yeah.

But in the actual government, the departments, education, treasury, et cetera, those career people, some of them are very young, but they stick around for 20, 30 years, which is what's so frustrating to Musk. Because only 20,000 people have taken this fake buyout offer so far out of the millions that they sent it out to. Right, right. Okay, well, let's take this next. This is B6. There are sleep pods. Yes.

Going around. I think they're poorly described as pods because I looked into it and essentially what it is is a wrap for a mattress that does seem pretty technologically impressive. It's sort of like a sheet you put over your mattress that can monitor your – it can track your sleep basically and it can – But there's no mattress?

You have to put it over a mattress. So where's the mattress? Don't they need a mattress too? Yeah, presumably they have mattresses in there, which is some of the reporting is that, yes, they have been bringing basically like bedroom stuff into some of these buildings so that they can sleep and do this like Silicon Valley style, this hostile takeover Silicon Valley style, which I actually think is interesting, Ryan, because, well, I mean, for a lot of reasons, but from the perspective of like movement conservatives and

They wanted a lot of this to be done by conservative movement lawyers. First of all, this was always a fantasy that you would actually have this generational opportunity to start slashing and burning and to do it without regard or even with contempt for the sacred norms that the political establishment reveres. It's a literal fantasy of the conservative movement.

Just like overturning Roe. Nobody ever thought they would actually have the opportunity to do that, or most people didn't really think they would have the opportunity to do that. Now that Donald Trump has it, it's in the hands of an industry that just a couple of years ago conservatives were at war with.

But because of the vibe shift, you're able to take the – pluck the MAGA people out of Silicon Valley world, import them into DC and they have the support of the conservative movement at least for now. So it's like this hostile takeover that was always planned to be ideologues from the conservative movement now being done by an industry or members of an industry, denizens of an industry that was decried.

by the conservative movement that was at war with the conservative movement. So it's really an odd tension. And it's because it's really what it is is a dual personality movement. And it's whatever Musk says is good and whatever Trump says is good. And when the twain don't meet, we'll find out who can win. But

As of now, Trump seems to be... Musk seems to be taking the lead. Like, over the weekend, he's like, I put USAID in the wood chipper, and then on Monday, Trump's like, yeah, it's okay, you can do that. So it's like, Musk is very much...

asking, you know, moving first and then, you know, he's asking for forgiveness rather than permission. Yeah. It's what seems to be clear. And then, you know, how much does Trump need him, care about him, like fear him because of his money, be amused by him? I don't know. We're going to find out. And what happens if they do break the system, treasury system, and the payments start

I'm not going out. What happens if... Now, I don't think we're going to have a debt ceiling situation six months from now because I think Trump will just ignore it. He'll say, there is no such thing as a debt ceiling. He's not inclined to follow laws, it seems. At that point...

Bassett will be like, okay, I agree. Which, you know, when Obama was president, I argued that the 14th Amendment means that there is actually no debt ceiling because the 14th Amendment says very specifically that the debts of the federal government shall not be questioned. So...

It's similar. No, I mean, seriously, some of these are legitimate constitutional questions that need to be worked out in the courts. Like if Russ Vogt were here and he was arguing with us over impoundment, he would make a case that is substantial and we may disagree with it. I'm honestly fairly persuaded by it. But either way, it raises a legitimate constitutional question about separation of powers and how we have just by norms –

allowed the government to sort of be in a state of inertia in the executive branch because a lot of this stuff just didn't get challenged. And Congress increasingly relies on the executive branch to go through its power. But speaking of separation of powers, a U.S. attorney, this is B7, initially, this is a weird subplot that we can get into maybe more next week, but said that

So he's kind of agreeing with Musk there, but then at the same time, it's just unclear of where this is really...

where this is really going. This is the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia region because there were conflicting, I would say there's conflicting information about what he's actually talking about there. It could be straight up death threats. And I've seen, I think on Blue Sky, there were some circulating that looked like pretty

like death threats. Mm-hmm. And those are, you can't do that. Yeah, obviously, yeah. And if there's a, if there's a clear directed death threat, the FBI should get involved. Yeah. Um, Musk kind of took that and tried to suggest that, you know, any kind of aggressive criticism of, of the Doge boys is going to be illegal. Um,

We'll see. So finally, Kim Kelly reported that sources have told her that Doge is going after the Department of Labor next. This is the final element for this block. And labor workers have been ordered to give Doge access to anything they want or risk termination. Similar to what we heard about Treasury and USAID. We're supposed to stop everything we're doing and do whatever the Doge kids ask.

It feels dirty and illegal, that source told Kelly. So this is developing literally by the hour. So we'll obviously keep following it. Chris Lensdager will be back here following it more tomorrow because we'll likely have more information on what's going on over at Labor. Kelly says there's a rally scheduled for 3 p.m. outside the Department of Labor, which is right near where we are. It's 200 Constitution Avenue. So it's 3 p.m. today.

saying, you know, keep the Doge kids out of the Department of Labor because they're having a kickoff meeting apparently at 4 p.m. between the Department of Labor officials and the Doge folks. Well, so we've covered Treasury, USAID, now Labor. And Ryan, at this point, we can turn to Doge and Trump's plans for the Department of Education.

Well, earlier in the show, Ryan made the point that Elon Musk is very intentionally using the word revolution for what is happening here in Washington, D.C., just in the early weeks of the second Donald Trump administration. And indeed, one of the goals of the Reagan revolution may be realized by the Trump

revolution. We can put C1 on the screen. This is a post from Jeff Mason of the Associated Press who reported a White House official says Trump will take steps later this month to fulfill a campaign promise to defund the Department of Education. Now, Trump was asked a bit about whether the Department of Education will shutter in the Oval Office yesterday. Let's take a listen here. And on the Education Department.

Why nominate Linda McMahon to be the Education Department secretary if you're going to get rid of the Education Department secretary? Because I told Linda, "Linda, I hope you do a great job and put yourself out of a job." I want her to put herself out of a job, Education Department. So we're ranked number 40 out of 40 schools, right? We're ranked number one in cost per pupil. So we spend more per pupil than any other country in the world. And we're ranked at the bottom of the list. We're ranked very badly.

And what I want to do is let the states run schools. I believe strongly in school choice. But in addition to that, I want the states to run schools. And I want Linda to put herself out of a job. So do you think that's something you can do with an executive order? I'd like to be able to. Look, if I could give the schools back to Iowa and Idaho and Indiana and all these places that...

run properly. There's many of them. Now, of course, when Ronald Reagan took office, the Department of Education was not even really a decade old. It was something that was brought into existence by Jimmy Carter. And Reagan said the exact same thing about his first Secretary of Education, that he wanted Secretary Bell to put himself out of a job. So this is C3. More Perfect Union noted a picked up on a Musk comment that looked

back to Reagan, said actually that Musk is now saying Reagan campaigned on ending the department and Trump will succeed where Reagan failed. That was a criticism that was floated of Ronald Reagan during his administration from some people on the right that he didn't end up shutting down the Department of Education. He couldn't really get Congress's buy-in. And Donald Trump might be in a position now where you look at what happened with USAID or what is happening right now with USAID, one of the ways they may be skirting

Congress is just by quote restructuring it and pairing it back to something very small under the auspices of the State Department. So it's not shut down in a case like that. It's just been restructured to the point where it's tiny. Let's take a listen to how Ronald Reagan talked about this early in his presidency. We can roll this clip. We propose to dismantle two cabinet departments, energy and education. Both secretaries are wholly in accord with this.

Some of the activities in both of these departments will, of course, be continued either independently or in other areas of government. There's only one way to shrink the size and cost of big government, and that is by eliminating agencies that are not needed and are getting in the way of a solution. Now, we don't need an energy department to solve our basic energy problems.

As long as we let the forces of the marketplace work without undue interference, the ingenuity of consumers, business, producers and inventors will do that for us. Similarly, education is the principal responsibility of local schools, systems, teachers, parents, citizen boards and state governments. By eliminating the Department of Education less than two years after it was created,

We can not only reduce the budget, but ensure that local needs and preferences, rather than the wishes of Washington, determine the education of our children. Yes, you note there he was mentioning the Department of Education was like two years old because it was something that Jimmy Carter brought into existence and at the time was new. Obviously now it has been around for decades, so it's quite a different task to sort of

wind down the Department of Education, right? In disclosure, I will say that's something that I'm generally supportive of with one caveat, which is you need a significant off-ramp. So if you have this idea about sending education back to the states, I mean, Trump is absolutely right about the disconnect between the amount of money we spend on students and the outcomes. It is shameful and pathetic.

that this is what it looks like, this is how much money we spend, and these are the outcomes that we get per student. It's awful. But if there is no off-ramp to kind of helping the states retake control of education and make up ground, whether it's money or resources that the federal government had previously provided, and it's just kind of a quick severing of the ties, then

that is not great either. So, you know, this is a significant question about everything that Elon Musk is doing is whether, you know, it's worth it to just...

From any even like an ideological conservative perspective toss a hand grenade into everything Let it fall let the chips fall where they may and say it's okay. We'll pick up the pieces later Probably not Yeah, and Trump and Musk are both not well known for their kind of well thought-out and smooth transition These are much more hand grenade people. I think it's worth contextualizing this

as quickly as we can and you could probably do this better than me but you know the the fight over public education has been kind of central to our politics over the last 150 years like when as the as the progressive era you know boomed you know that was really the advent of the idea of of public education

and the idea that every student had a right to a free public education in their community, free as in funded, though of course by taxpayers, that ran headlong into the religious institutions, which

Christian churches had been the ones that had run most of the private schools up until that time. And the Betsy DeVos dominionist types very much argued that the public school

had unfortunately in their, from their perspective, replaced the church as the central social organizing tool in communities. - Or the family as well, yeah. - And to some degree the family, because from their perspective you need the church to support the family. And so where it used to be people would go to church on Sundays and there'd be potlucks and everybody's kind of ethics and social lives would flow through the local churches,

Now, potlucks would be organized, you know, they'd be fundraisers for the school or there'd be bingo night at the school or everybody would go on Friday night to watch the teams play. And so, and certainly, I've seen it in my own life with kids in elementary and middle school, the social fabric of the community does actually, you know, organize itself around the public schools. So that's the higher level and the mid-level

One is, of course, its integration with desegregation and the civil rights movement. That inherent in this idea that you'd have private schools was the idea that you could have racial segregation. And after Brown v. Board of Education, you have all these different efforts to keep schools segregated despite the laws. Fights that are still going on during the Carter years. Carter...

you know, sick the IRS on Christian private schools, right, during his term. And my understanding is that, like, it was that. And there was some desegregation element to that fight that, so not only are you guys furthering segregation, you're getting involved in politics, and you're no longer really

tax-exempt organizations. So he sends the IRS after these schools. And that, in my understanding, I'm curious if you're taking this, really was the gasoline that kicked off the kind of right-wing evangelical movement. Once Carter came after the private schools, that sent them wild. And it helps to explain Reagan coming in. He's coming...

at both things at once, segregation, Brown v. Board of Education, and also this like, what they see is this attack on the Christian society, and replacing it with this godless public education.

I would say there is also, though, a more charitable interpretation, which is this was in the midst of a pretty rapid federalization of a lot of things that hadn't been federalized for many years. And that includes absolutely civil rights. We didn't have prior to the Civil Rights Act in the early to mid 1960s, this sort of federal federalization.

hand in local private businesses. And, um, you know, there are a lot of conservatives who will still argue Rand Paul among them against like ideologically against the civil rights act of, uh,

1964 and the subsequent civil rights legislation in the same way that Barry Goldwater did. And Reagan really comes out of the Barry Goldwater movement. And most of the sort of people that staffed the Reagan administration and the campaign came out of that movement. And there was tension. There's no question about it. There was always a lot of tension about it. But this was this sort of ideological, I don't know, like shambles.

shock to the conservative mind that suddenly for a extraordinarily just and important cause, which was civil rights, and it's kind of what happens with the Southern strategy. It's sort of how things end up flipping, and George Wallace comes along and all of that. You have conservatives, some reacting by saying, this is going to put us in trouble down the road. This civil rights administration, this

rapidly being federalized from the Department of Education was one of the focal points for conservatives by saying, now you have the federal government with sort of its hands in every local school district and that

sounds great on paper and it will backfire immensely eventually. And a lot of conservatives have looked at the last five, ten years in education and said this is kind of what everyone had always been talking about. Christopher Caldwell wrote a book called The Age of Entitlements back in, I think it came out in 2016, saying it's kind of making a Goldwater is right argument all along. But no, I mean, I think the tension was between the conservative ideologues

who from a charitable perspective just had this very deep revulsion to the idea of the federal government within a period of 20 years suddenly taking over so much from local control, and then people who actually were segregationists and racists. And that was significant tension. The Department of Education was very much the center of that. And so the reason Reagan failed is that you need Congress involved.

to get rid of the Department of Education because the Education Department is congressionally authorized and appropriated by Congress. So there are rules. This is not Vietnam. And so Trump, the reporting is that Trump's executive order is going to move elements of the Education Department that are not legally required to be under it elsewhere. And then...

as we talked about in the in the last block he's using he's going to push the impoundment control Act powers as far as he can and perhaps just defund different programs which which according to the current law would be illegal whether the courts let him get away with it is a Different question and if Elon Musk's hackers can like hide that you're even doing it then then who knows now there are also significant laws

the books that people will notice if he's breaking them. So I think there are roughly one of them is called IDEA, like Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. And a lot of viewers are probably familiar with it because they interact with it. It is the federal law that says that public schools are required to teach

and to basically cater to children who have disabilities, special education or different types of contingencies that would be offered within mainstream classrooms. Something like 15 million students currently have protections under this law and this can be a spectrum. This can go from you can have extra time to take a test because you have ADHD

all the way to significant interventions in a special education classroom or even funding to go to a school if the public school, it's a private school if the public school is not equipped to handle it. So you're running headlong. If you go after that, you're running headlong into many millions of people who are currently, you know, 15 million kids, you know,

That's 30 million parents. That's 50 million aunts and uncles. You're running headlong into that. Then, of course, there is Pell Grants, other financial aid for college. That is required by law. Now, can you move that under somewhere else? Then you have student loan repayments. Biden, people may not have noticed...

was not allowed, you know, people did notice that he was not allowed by the Supreme Court to kind of restructure and forgive some significant number of student loan debts. But what he did do is set up this repayment schedule

that makes it actually genuinely affordable for people who are in enormous amounts of debt. It caps what you owe, the amount of income you have. They're trying to make it a fair system. If you have a huge amount of debt but you have a small amount of income, then you owe this much smaller amount of money until... And when your ship comes in, then you owe us more. That's how a decent society kind of ought to be organized.

If you get rid of the education department, then who's collecting these loans? Who is implementing these programs? Do people just stop paying their loans? No, I doubt. That's highly unlikely. That would be incredibly ironic if the Supreme Court is like, no, you can't do this student loan program.

payment policy. But yeah, you can actually go ahead and just get rid of the entire education department. I mean, wouldn't necessarily put it past them, but it would be certainly the height of irony. Somebody joked on Twitter like, let me get this right. So to do progressive legislation, you need 60 votes. To do national conservatism, you don't need any votes at all.

Just so we're clear on the different rules that apply here. Well, you know, it is kind of what's funny in all of this, the extent we can find humor, is that conservatives were saying part of the problem with federalizing all of this is that at one point someone can just come in and flip a switch because it's so centralized. Elon Musk's boys have found the switches. They're looking for them.

the quote MAGA chuds, as Lomas said on Twitter. So there is a, I should say, just as we were talking, I pulled up the Project 2025 Education Department plan. Which, by the way, they assured us had nothing to do with Trump and would definitely not be implemented in any way. Which, to be fair- Which we reported was a total lie. Yes, we covered that. So if you watch this show, you're not surprised by any of this.

No, not at all. We covered that extensively. And in fact, that was a huge part of my conversation with Ezra Klein. I was like, they're, of course, going to be using Project 2025. Yeah, they got nothing else. This is their plan. Now, that is to say, Trump still had nothing to do with Project 2025. He wouldn't really care. He would spend like 10 seconds reading what I'm looking at right now. And he'd be like, yeah, it sounds good. He's not reading a PDF. Nope.

But they do have, I mean, a lot of this is kind of off-ramp type stuff. So, for example, restore revenue responsibility for Title I funding to the states over a 10-year period. Like, if you're trying to conceptualize, as I am, what this would mean for your community, your local school immediately if it were to happen, the plan in Project 2025, which I'm sure is something that's on the desks of people

people in Linda McMahon's circles and Elon Musk's circles because, frankly, it was a MAGA-friendly conservative plan that people put a lot of time into. It does look like it's significantly off-ramping things and not immediately cutting them, but we'll have to... I actually think we might be able to get the person who wrote this to talk to us. We'll take a look.

Yeah, and we can also put up C5 here.

which is early indications from Patty Murray, who would be the senator who kind of oversees this on the Democratic side. She's hearing that the doggie committee people have gone in. Sorry, doge committee people have gone into Veterans Affairs now and are thumbing through all of the information around those payments. Now, the VA is in desperate need of reform. Veterans Affairs

Medical records are not in desperate need of Doge committee people thumbing through them. So this is something people are going to keep an eye on too because these are fragile and sensitive systems. And by the way, separately and actually relatedly,

Musk is out here, if you haven't noticed, accusing everyone he sees on his website of breaking the law. He accused Ilhan Omar the other day of breaking the law because she was giving general advice to people here illegally about how to not incriminate yourself. It would be like saying that it's illegal to

tell somebody about their Fifth Amendment rights. It is specifically illegal to aid a specific individual person here illegally. Like that actually is a crime. But giving general advice is a First Amendment protected act. So anyway, and then anybody who says something mean about the doggy committee, he says you're breaking the law. He should check. There are, the federal law

The federal books are filled with laws around privacy and record protections that he and his doge boys seem to be breaking at a just absolutely relentless clip. A lot of this is going to be tested in the courts and already is to some extent, but we'll see if some of it ends up getting rolled back. But his status as a special government employee is

which is what the White House says he's taken on. If you go read the Justice Department's outlined restrictions for somebody who is a special government employee, unless Elon Musk takes very quick and significant steps to deal with his financial conflicts,

he's in flagrant violation or gets some type of special waiver for them, which as yet he doesn't have. He may be able to get that in quick order now that Hambondi has been confirmed, but it's impossible to see how what he's doing sort of fits within those boundaries. Oh yeah, it doesn't. I mean, which, you know, he called it a revolution. And so if the revolution fails, like if you come at the king and you miss,

Yeah, you actually, in this country, you get a second shot, as we showed after January 6th. If you don't get a third shot, for people who are curious, a buddy of mine collected some of these. 18 U.S.C., 1505, 1519, 2071, Federal Records Act, then you get...

5 U.S.C. 552, the E-Government Act of 2002, the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act, the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act, 18 U.S.C. 208, 18 U.S.C. 205. There's a ton of them. And each of them have various penalties with them. And each record could be an offense. And we're talking about hundreds of millions of records.

Like I said, this is not a time of hall monitors. It's a time of revolutions. So if it moves back toward the time of hall monitors, those are the crimes that we know you're committing and there are probably a bunch of others. So I guess the advice would be your revolution better work. I wish we had your Lenin book behind us. I actually looked back there to see it. We'll have to put it back up.

Anyway, I feel like Kerensky being like, the provisional government authority here is duly constituted by the Duma and you are not able to just take power. Oh, producer Griffin is reading the book. It's an incredible book, that biography of Lenin that was up there.

So let's move on to Republicans actually embracing, with some hesitation, fully embracing Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the Senate yesterday. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard made it out of committees, respective committees that they're being considered before the Senate yesterday. And this is significant because there was a point about a week ago, Ryan, where

It was seeming like because of Bill Cassidy in particular, who is a doctor and likes to have everyone know that he's a doctor, and Susan Collins, a fairly hawkish Republican, it seemed as though they might be so pressured out of voting for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Actually, they wouldn't have needed too much pressure in either direction, but because Susan Collins obviously represents a state that is...

not super friendly to Republicans always. And she's up. She's up. So that looked like it. Maybe Jared Golden. But you know what? I mean, Tulsi Gabbard, I think probably plays well in Maine. This is the type of Democrat that probably plays well. Former Democrat, I should say, that probably plays well in Maine. Oh, absolutely. This is a voting no for Susan Collins would have cost her more with Trump's people

I think so. Yeah, yeah. I think Colin's obvious political choice was voting for Tulsi here. Yeah, no, I agree with that. But even Todd Young, who's somebody that is a fairly, like, red state Republican, he's from Indiana, had his famous back and forth, we'll get into this in a minute, with... With Musk, right? With Musk, right. He was called, like, a deep state... Called him a deep state stooge or something? A stooge, something like that. And then flipped. I mean, Musk flipped right away and said, my apologies, I talked to Todd Young on the phone and...

He's a stalwart MAGA defender. Well, who flipped there sounds like Todd Young is the one who flipped. Well, he seems to be planting the seeds of possibly voting against Tulsi Gabbard. Right, and then he's like, no, no, no, never mind. And so I think the question here is...

similar to the question between Trump and the oligarchs that were sitting behind him on his inaugural day, this is who conquered who, right? Like who is the conqueror in this situation? Was Tulsi and RFK Jr., were they the ones who are now captured and in the pocket of the quote unquote deep state?

And Bill Cassidy did RFK Jr. absolutely no favors in that direction. We can put D2 up on the screen. Cassidy said he was able to get a significant number of concessions out of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in exchange for his vote. He said that they're going to have monthly meetings. It was sort of like a babysitting arrangement, kind of.

said CDC will not remove statements on their website pointing out that vaccines do not cause autism. He'll maintain the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommendations without changes and said he would not create a parallel structure for vaccine approval.

There's a lot more, but these are already just what I've run through here. Fairly significant concessions. It's also worth noting that Tulsi Gabbard basically flipped on Section 702 in order to... And Snowden. And Snowden, in order to... Kind of Snowden. She refused to call him a traitor. Right. Which I thought was...

I actually thought that was a fairly principled mood. It would have been pretty easy to say yes, you know, and say like, yes, he was a traitor for reasons X, Y, and Z. She didn't do that. She knows he's not. She does not believe in Section 702 or believe that Edward Snowden is a traitor. So we will see how she acts. Just to be clear on Snowden, the knock against him is that he's in Russia. Pardon the guy and he'll come home. Like he's in Russia because...

the US stopped his plane on the ground in Moscow and basically forced him off the plane. Yes. So the US pushed him

into Russia. So, and Tulsi Gabbard, I think, also said she would do a very important thing if she's confirmed, which is have a direct hotline. This could go many different ways. But she said she would have a direct hotline to her for whistleblowers. And that is exactly how you prevent a Snowden because he tried to blow the whistle, as many whistleblowers did, without success on what the government was doing. And that's actually a significant component of how that entire story unfolded that gets completely well-shared. Right, and also, like,

telling the government what they're doing when it is like top-down secret government policy and they're doing it on purpose is kind of pointless. It's like, hey, do you guys know that you are tapping everybody's phone here through these underground cables and reading everybody's... Yes, we know we're doing that because we do it on purpose. It wasn't... Whistleblowing is effective internally against a rogue project, but not against...

a project that is in line with the actual top-down policy. And so on, on Dr. Cassidy, so he's a doctor. I'm curious for your take on the politics of what moved him. He committed the unforgivable sin, if I recall correctly, of voting for Trump's impeachment. He did. And so he has a target on his back, primary-wise. Do you think that Trump and Musk

promised to help him out if he would get on side for the foreseeable future? Well, they definitely promised to make his life impossible if he didn't. So there were threats from Nicole Shanahan, even like Meghan McCain. Oh, that was a Tulsi Gabbard one, actually. Never mind. So scratch that on Cassidy. But Nicole Shanahan and Elon Musk,

Cassidy, by the way, already has a primary challenger who announced back in December. But the question is if he gets $10 million from Elon Musk and Trump's endorsement. Right. So did Cassidy not only manage to stave off potentially that scenario where there's a ton of cash going, being infused into his opponent's coffers,

But did he also secure significant funding from Trump and Musk and potentially stave off a MAGA challenge just in terms of endorsements and resources? I don't know. It's entirely possible. He sort of likes to march to the beat of his own drum. He's from, obviously, a politically fascinating state, sort of thought of as a deep red southern state, but definitely more interesting than that. They elect Democrats.

to the governor's mansion. Right, and it's a fairly recent flip to, we don't have to get into the history, but anyway, he feels more comfortable marching in the beat of his own drum, but that's what's interesting, I think, about somebody like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or Tulsi Gabbard in Susan Collins' case. If you

go out and talk to average people. Some of them really hate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. A whole lot of them really love Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And it's easy to rage against that from Washington, but it's harder when you're on the ground in your own state like Louisiana to talk to especially Republican voters.

He said, you know, you heard a lot from pediatricians that opposed Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s nomination. And so as a doctor that was weighing on him, I may continue to weigh on him. And that's a key concession then, keeping the vaccine protocol as it is, is a key concession to the pediatricians there. I would think that's enormously significant from their perspective. So, yeah, this is the question for Tulsi Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and the entire... The anti-measles coalition coming together here.

Well, the entire Maha agenda hinges on Robert F. Kennedy Jr. doing sort of what Musk has been doing at other agencies to his own agency, significant radical reform. You know, when Brooke Rollins...

was confirmed as Secretary of the Department of Agriculture. A lot of people, Matthew Stoller pointed this out, were wondering in the Maha movement why she moved immediately to force California to sell the meat of crated pigs. Change in regulatory interpretation there. And they backed off their promise to ban forever chemicals. Yeah.

It was a Biden regulation to ban forever chemicals that was rolled back. And that's obviously not Kennedy's department, but how serious is Trump world about MAHA? The voters, if you talk to voters, they're extremely serious about MAHA. The ideological conservative movement is very serious now about MAHA, partially because they know they have to be, but how serious will the administration be? I don't know. When they come up in conflict with Trump.

Plastics, which is the oil industry. Mm-hmm and whoever you know funds Bill Cassidy and pharma Which I should be more precise about I don't have that in front of me I assume that he gets significant money from them So I I think your theory is probably sound. Good place for a rubber meets the road metaphor Rubber meeting the road it spits those forever chemicals right into your bloodstream. Yeah, the PFAS rubber is meeting the road is meeting the the pothole riddled road

But then Bernie. Yes, Bernie did not just reluctantly say he was voting against Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Somebody who you may know more about this than I do. I think Bernie probably for a long time saw Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as sort of a coup in the Kennedy family from a leftist perspective. Somebody who was an ally in the fight against like big corporations because of his environmental work.

But Bernie Sanders put out a scathing statement. Let's put D3 on the screen. He said, you know, we don't disagree on everything, but he said, I cannot in good conscience support someone who denies and will dilute our public health protections, so distrust in science and oversee massive cuts to healthcare programs for vulnerable Americans. Vaccines were obviously front of mind for Bernie Sanders. Ryan, do you have any other context you think is useful in the Sanders-RFK Jr. war that's bloomed? I feel like culturally...

Sanders has become a fairly normie Democrat. Interesting. And like culturally when it comes to the pandemic and the way that Democrats approach the pandemic, like you could have imagined a world in which he went either way on that. And he went the way that he went. And I think that... And also...

I don't know how much of a role it played, but RFK Jr.'s obnoxious and willfully dishonest attack on him as being in the pocket of pharma CEOs. And then seeing so many morons circulate that video as evidence that, oh, we discovered that Bernie Sanders is actually corrupt. And for people that didn't watch this,

RFK Jr. did this thing where he's like, you said you don't take money from the pharma CEOs, but actually it says you took a million plus dollars. It's like, bro, those are like pharmacists, those are pharmaceutical reps, those are people who work in manufacturing of pharmaceuticals. The pharmaceutical industry is a multi-billion dollar industry.

Which contains workers. If you go and look, go to like, go to Open Secrets and look at Bernie's like top industries that support him, it'll be like Amazon, Walmart, you know, pharmaceutical industry, plenty from the oil industry. Like, that's because that's where people in our economy work. Yeah. They are workers. It'd be like saying that Bernie Sanders is in the pocket of Amazon or Walmart. Yeah.

Because people at Walmart are giving him $25. It's so dumb that it's like it crosses the threshold into being offensive. And so I could imagine that Bernie's like, you know what, F this guy. That's not how you should do politics. You got to go past those lights. But it's also so dumb that you're like, so either this guy is this deeply dishonest or

That he's going to make this attack on me, which does not speak to qualifications for a secretary. Or he's so dumb that he doesn't know what it means to get $25, $30 contributions from workers. Yeah, he knows.

I hope so, because he himself ran for president. So he can go to Open Secrets and see his own top industry. He's a significant student. He was a longtime student of money and politics, and he's serious about it. So then it's dishonest. He definitely knows. And I think in his case, he feels like a lot of the attacks on him have been

dishonest and there's just a lot of attacks on him so of course some of them have been dishonest but that seemed like an odd way to talk to Bernie Sanders somebody who does have a lot of common cause with him exactly and by the way if you're watching this clock in your mind anybody that treated that as a serious attack and do not listen to them about anything ever again because they think you're an idiot

And if you are an idiot, then continue to listen to them. It is sort of a funny litmus test for people who don't look at the FEC data a lot whenever someone does that. So I'm speaking to the not idiots and people who are casually following this and are like, oh, wow, I didn't know that. That's really interesting to me. They're playing you because they think that you're not going to look one layer deeper.

So don't listen to them ever again. Or some of them just don't know and are like new to this. Speaking of which, by the way, Ken confirmed that Bill Cassidy is a major recipient of donations, not merely from people who work in pharma, but from PACs. Yes, there you go. Right. There's PACs, there's CEOs, there's executives. Those are the people that give you the max donations or the $5,000, $6,000 checks. Yeah. That's completely different than somebody cutting you $30. And then it says employer. You ever given money?

It asks you, your employer. And then that puts you into an industry. Right. Yeah, so if we gave money, we would put down journalist or media. And then it would clock, if you're reading the FEC reports, as hypothetically Bernie Sanders just took money from the media. Yeah, big media. And so it would look similar to if...

like funny enough, like the head of NBC News or the head of NBC Universal as a media company, it would look the same. Right. So anyway, you can find all kinds of strange stuff in there if you go into the FEC reports. But Ryan, you picked up on this really interesting report in the New York Times on housing that we want to get to.

New article with ProPublica in the New York Times. You can put this E1 up on the screen here. It's a deep look at the fluctuations in home values relative to regions in the country that are being hit or not hit by climate implications. So what this is doing, I think, kind of for the first time, it's relying on a lot of data from the financial firm First Street,

which tries to figure out which direction real estate prices are heading for their own kind of internal commercial reasons, they teamed up with ProPublica and New York Times to unload a bunch of their data so they could try to clock it by

climate. And so what they found shouldn't be surprising to anybody, but has deeply profound implications. And we can actually put up E2. They have a couple of these maps that make clear what's going on. You can see the red there is basically a heat map of where you are screwed if you own property. And the clearer it is,

the better off you are in terms of climate implications. And so what they're finding here is that over the next 30 years, they expect home prices to not rise very substantially on average.

But when you break it out by climate implications, if you are in a place impacted by severe weather and flooding, you're looking at over the next 30 years something like a 6% decline. Whereas if you're not, you're looking at something like a 10% increase.

The American dream has been built around the idea that home prices are going to continue to rise, that that's how you build your wealth, and that's the wealth that you're eventually able to pass down to your family. Something like two-thirds of adults own homes and more as you get older. And First Street is estimating that 5 million people will move this next year, significantly as a result of these climate implications. And they're saying...

That along with kind of location, seafront view, that kind of stuff, and public schools, like the quality of the school in the area, climate is becoming for homebuyers something that they are now actively considering. Did anything in this surprise you? And more importantly, do you think the implications are going to be as profound today?

as they're forecasting. Yes, but probably from a different perspective here, if we put E2 back up on the screen, one of the interesting things here, we were just talking about Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana. Look at the dark red in southern Louisiana.

Well, we were talking about what industries he takes money from. One of them actually is construction. And what's funny about that is almost a decade ago, I was working on a story about flood insurance reform. That really opened up my eyes to a lot of the ways that we subsidize rebuilding in areas like that. And Cassidy was sort of opposed to this very conservative, ideologically conservative idea.

idea about flood insurance reform. And in states like Louisiana, in states like Florida, I remember when we talked about in Miami Beach when the condo complex collapsed several years ago. This is why I think the implications of it are going to be profound because we've had these technological advances in the last 100 years that have allowed us to feel like we conquered nature and to build in these areas.

that are vulnerable when the climate changes naturally or otherwise. And whether you believe in man-made anthropogenic climate change, whether you believe in that or not, the climate changes. Like you don't even have to buy into the ideology of climate change to recognize that some of these developments, you know, what's been built up in California. I talked to James Pogue and Leighton Woodhouse about this on Undercurrents recently. This is

new developments over the course of a hundred years that sprang up really quickly because we were able to build quickly, we were able to build close, we were able to build these areas that required conquering nature. And so

If you're somebody who doesn't believe in anthropogenic climate change, the climate is going to change no matter what. So you have to have a plan for people's properties because that's important to them. It's what the American dream is. It's the cornerstone of the American dream, literally the cornerstone of the American dream. So I totally agree that this is a significant, massively significant issue. And the phenomenon that this article zeroes in on is the way that climate denialism is

fueled by governments has blocked, interestingly, the market from producing the signals that it otherwise would have produced that would have driven home construction and population dispersal that would have been more in line with climate developments. In other words, Florida is a good example. The insurance industry

has been at the forefront of the climate science. They're like, have fun over here with your documentaries pretending that climate's not real. We have actual skin in the game. We have money on the line. We're going to study climate.

the actual implications of the changing climate. And they looked at these studies and they came back and they're like, oh, this used to be a 100-year floodplain. This is a 50-year floodplain. This was a 10-year floodplain. This is now a two-year floodplain. You're going to get a flood every two years. Therefore...

here's what you're going to pay for your insurance. So hazard insurance used to be, they estimate about 6% of your overall kind of monthly mortgage payment. And so it was relatively trivial. It wasn't something that people really factored in. Now it's pushing closer to 20 and is growing faster than inflation, which is the reason then

that you have to factor it in as you're thinking about where you're going to buy. Well, people don't like to do that. People then complain to their county commissioners, to their state lawmakers, to their members of Congress. And those lawmakers say, that is really unfair of those insurance companies to be charging that. So we're going to subsidize it and we're going to make a law that they have to do it, etc. Yeah. And so...

here I am on the left talking about the free market and its value in setting signals. And so then people are like, okay, great. Thank you for that. We will build here. But it's not just about signals. It's about people's physical safety. And I remember that. I was actually talking to Sean Duffy about this at the time. This was when I was doing a flood insurance reform story. The NFIP, the National Flood Insurance Reform. I remember that giant fight, yeah. Yeah, well, the NFIP subsidizes rebuilding homes in genuinely dangerous floodplains over and over again. So in Houston, for example-

people who are low income, middle income who own these homes keep rebuilding because it's subsidized in these very dangerous places and it's a not ideal situation at all and so there's serious problems with

the programs uh... that you get incentivized because of crony capitalism to keep redoing and redoing and Duffy was trying to lead the charge against it at the time now he's transportation secretary it does create these really perverse systems of incentives and so the insurance

I mean, I think this Times report is interesting from the perspective of like where insurance companies are coming down on this and how they're looking to influence government policies amidst all of this. Like there's serious problems with – both people have genuine interests here in doing the wrong thing and genuine interest in doing the right thing. So how do you marry them? Well, ultimately, things that can't go on don't go on. And so –

The numbers that they're adding up in this article, $250 billion for the LA fires, you can call it climbing, you can call it poor fire management, you can complain about Gavin Newsom not opening up the spigots for you, it doesn't matter. All this stuff is legit. It's going to cost $250 billion with a B. On top of that, you've got tens, maybe hundreds of billions if you combine Western North Carolina, Florida, Georgia, these other storms that we saw very recently.

You're very quickly getting towards half a trillion dollars in damages there. That threatens the entire stability and solubility of insurance companies and reinsurance companies.

And they say that when the floodwaters recede, it's when you really start to see who's naked. And we may find out that there are some budgetary gimmicks going on at the insurance and reinsurance companies such that when homeowners with valid policies, I don't know if it's going to be this time or next time or down the road, but at some point they're going to go to this insurance company

and be like, look, here's my valid policy, here's my claim, I need to be paid out. And they're going to be like, yeah, sorry, we're bankrupt. We don't actually have that amount of money because the actuaries weren't allowed to do the math accurately. And so we charged everybody less than we understood it would cost if we hit these worst case scenarios and now we've hit them. And then you kick it up to what's called the reinsurers, right?

who are kind of the backstop for the insurance companies. And once you're in that world, who knows what kind of counterparty risk they have and whether or not they're completely solvent either. And then you're back to the federal government needing a bailout. Yeah, and so this is, again, the, I guess,

of institutional trust, like having record low levels of institutional trust, is that you can't agree on the science, the capital S science, or as we call it, the Fauci, because it's sort of interchangeable. He is the science and vice versa. But in all seriousness, when you can't agree on some basic principle

well, you can't agree on some basic research and it's been polarized and politicized, then there are all kinds of things that get affected by that, including insurance rates and people's decisions about where to build and invest, like individual homeowners' decisions about these things. So we sort of think about institutional trust as a very abstract conversation. This is just something that the professors discussed

talk about with their tweed elbow patches, but it's really consequential on people's everyday lives, and this is a good example of that. - Which, by the way, I understand why you would need elbow patches. I'm already getting a little faded here. - You're gonna come in next week with your elbow patches. - Up next, Jasmine Crockett, congresswoman from Texas, has thoughts on mediocre white men. If you are a mediocre white man, or you are friends with mediocre white men, stick around for this one.

Congresswoman, Democratic Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett had some thoughts about, quote, mediocre white boys on CNN. Let's take a listen to what she said the other night. I am tired of the white tears. Listen, if you are competent, you are not concerned. When I walk

into Congress every single day, you know why I don't feel a way and why you can't make me doubt who I am? It's because I know that I had to work 10 times as hard as they did just to get into the seat. When you look and you compare me to Marjorie Taylor Greene or me to Lauren Boebert, there is no comparison. And that is the life that we have always lived. So the only people that are crying are the mediocre white boys that have been beaten out by people that historically have

have had to work so much harder. This is why they don't want us to have education. This is why they are trying to literally say we won't fund the HBCUs because they know that if they've already gone after affirmative action and they're saying, you know what, don't allow them to come into, say, these schools

PWIs, as we call them, don't allow them to come into these institutions. We know why they created the HBCUs in the first place. It was because they wouldn't allow us into the white institutions. And so now they're not allowing us in. And now they're saying, you know what, we're also going to defund the HBCUs. You know why? Because they don't want any more Kamala Harris's.

They don't want any more Jasmine Crockett's. But I got news for them. I don't care what they do. We will fight to the end to make sure that we get our due. Because, again, if you want to talk about the people that shouldn't be in this country, you probably need to look in the mirror. Because the last time I checked, the Native Americans who Summer Ice have been rounding up or the Puerto Ricans who are absolutely Americans. Listen, the only people that came and colonized this place are your ancestors, Trump.

I don't know, Ryan. By the way, for people just tuning in, PWI, BP is a PWI, stands for Predominantly White Institution. There you go. So people can keep up there. Now, not only did this spark controversy, there was a sub-controversy that we can get into in a minute where the DNC's rapid response shared this, which I think is... And then was attacked pretty viciously by the left, saying...

DNC, what are you trying to do? Who are you winning over by pushing this content out? Who is this for?

And you can be you can even be smug about it if you want like and the smug the way to be smug about it would be to quote that at least that famous Adley Stevenson line the guy who Democrat Adam an egghead who ran for Congress I mean, I mean for ran for president a whole bunch of times in the mid 20th century lost every time He famously perhaps apocryphally said on

Somebody yelled at him and said, you have the votes of every thinking man in this country. And Stevenson yelled back, yeah, but I need a majority, which is funny and everybody laughs at it. But it also there's a through line from that all the way through to this election.

party, which runs through Barack Obama's guns and religion and the whole, which you kind of talk about this in this great new essay that you wrote. What's it called? The Point. The Point. About the...

the kind of cultural elitism that kind of seeps out. It used to come from white eggheads like Adlai Stevenson. I thought you were going to say like Obama. Now it comes, well, a half white egghead. Half white eggheads. And now it's from somebody like Jasmine Crockett. But to take it on its own terms, it's,

We actually should all care about all mediocre people. There was this joke where they nominated a moron to the Supreme Court. I forget the moron's name. People can remember the comment section. And the defense of him was,

Well, you know, idiots need representation too. And the counter argument was, okay, but not necessarily on the Supreme Court. Yeah, right. This may be the one place where representation doesn't matter. Let's get the smart cats on there. Yeah. But mediocre is another word for average. Average is a word for in the middle. Like people who are in the middle, their grievances are entirely legitimate. Mm-hmm.

Period. Period. Like, so to say, and so I think there are a lot of obvious things you can say about what Crockett said. I'm trying to say the non-obvious thing. And the non-obvious thing would be if you are an average person in this country and you feel like you're being screwed over, then that's probably a legitimate grievance. Well, yeah.

- Because the country should be fair for everybody, including mediocre people. - Yes, but that was the sort of victory of the Civil Rights Movement, and it's why there are a lot of people who were involved. I mean, the Civil Rights Movement veterans are sort of split on these questions, but there are a lot of people who were involved who are deeply uncomfortable with where DEI has gone.

And actually, this was in your great story a couple of years ago on the elephant in the Zoom that people have sort of seen unintended consequences as the experiment has played out in ways that create more rancor and are not as fair. And it's not just mediocre white boys. It's also Asian-Americans who get short the short straw in a lot of these situations. It's not it's it's it's not this is not it.

This is not the right Democratic answer to DEI. And I get that Jasmine Crockett is a representative of a blue area around Dallas. I understand that. There are a lot of people in blue enclaves that are offended by the walkway from DEI. As an increasingly prominent spokeswoman for the Democratic Party,

mocking people who are upset about DEI is probably not the way to go. Now, to try to defend the impulse that Crockett is coming from, I think there is something, I think, interesting and insightful that she's trying to get at, which is basically that, so what she's arguing, if you've sheared of a lot of the rhetoric, is that there are a lot of people who

who are much more talented over the last 150, 200 years, who have been kept out of positions of prestige and authority because of their race and gender. That is true, and we should absolutely acknowledge that. That is a fact. And that racial and gender segregation and exclusion did in fact allow mediocre white men

to get into positions that if they had to compete with the entire population of men and women, black and white and brown, would have been harder for them. That is a fact. And we should all acknowledge that. And so because that is a fact, it is the case that some people who feel like they deserve positions are not getting those positions and now they're angry because

at the women and the black people who are getting those positions. So I actually think on one level she's making a point that is accurate and is getting at something real. But to kind of blanket, just go after all mediocre white men or white boys? Yeah.

is not a very effective way to do it. Well, and to assume those are the only people who are concerned about DEI, or maybe not to assume, but to argue those are the only people who are concerned about DEI is just not correct. And I think Democrats choosing to fight bitterly back in the culture war over DEI is enormous. It actually bums me out as somebody who's more on the right because I think one of the reasons that there's going to be overreach from Donald Trump is that there's just not a potent response

opposition party. And part of that is because what we saw from the DNC election over the last couple of days where you have Jonathan Capehart asking you, you know, what actually happened here? Oh, it was just a bunch of racists and bigots that made sure Kamala Harris didn't get elected. And I'm paraphrasing kind of, you know, that wasn't very... Not much, though. Yeah. Anyway,

It wasn't the most charitable interpretation, but it wasn't entirely inaccurate. So anyway, all that is to say, I think Jasmine Crockett's message is not the one Democrats should, for moral reasons or political reasons, be landing on here. Right. In politics, you're supposed to pander to people, not insult them. Yeah, that's true. Lesson one. Yeah. And another word for, like I was saying earlier, mediocre would be like regular.

We're just talking about regular people. And you want to reach out to regular people. You don't want to just aggressively assault them. I think that Obama's guns and religion argument, he was saying, and he was making a cultural connection too, as you talk about in your piece, a cultural connection to economics. He was saying, as people saw the economic rug being pulled out from under them because

because of NAFTA and offshoring and collapse of manufacturing and the collapse of the American dream, that one thing they retreated to was guns and religion. That's where the clinging to guns and religion comes from. Bitterly. Bitterly clinging to guns and religion because they're upset about the direction of the world. There is an analysis that is vulgar, but you can see it directionally. There's some insight into it. But even Obama as a politician is like, I should...

It's not good to talk about people in those bitter terms. It's much better to talk to them as part of a collection of us who's going to work together to overcome this in the way that a Bernie Sanders would talk about it. Like, yes, we are bitter, but we're bitter at the 1% who has done this to us and together. Mm-hmm.

mediocre and excellent people together. Black, white, brown, men and women, we're going to come together and make the world better for all of us.

And there's no all of us in the way that Crockett is talking there. Right. And I don't know that she buys into the, I guess, ideological leftist argument about capitalism being the real enemy. But this is really to the extent that she does or to the extent that she did. You would recognize from that vantage point that mediocre white boys, this is the argument you're saying, are a victim of that system.

in the same way that people that you're trying to help with DEI are a victim of that system. So it's not coherent, it's not helpful. And maybe Democrats should take a step back from the Jasmine Crockett train if that's where, if this is an intentional strategy. - The problem is she rates. - I believe she probably gets funds, she probably brings money in too. And we saw that throughout the resistance. The same thing with the lawfare people. Everyone who was engaging in lawfare was raising money for Democrats.

See how that worked out. Anyway. And she had that, like, what Democrats really want right now is somebody who is willing to just punch Republicans right in the face. Like, they're hungry rhetorically. They're hungry for somebody rhetorically to just scream out.

and just take them down. And she's delivering that in that sense. People go find that, she had that, was it Marjorie Taylor Greene or Lauren Bulber? She had some like poetry slam-esque riff. Just like. Yeah, it was Marjorie Taylor Greene. And she delivered it. Blonde, beach, built, butch, body. Just delivered it impeccably. And you're like,

Politics aside, just the performance was just utterly impeccable. Yeah, it was something else. Oh yeah, I loved it. I unironically loved that exchange. Great place to land on at the end of today's edition of CounterPoint.

Sometimes you just have to let them yell at each other. Let them tire themselves out. We would play that out as a moment of zen. Moment of zen. That is such a throwback. Does he still do that? I don't know. I don't think so. It's probably Comedy Central's, see,

Is he back on comedy season? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe he does. We'll have to check it out. We will report back. We will. All right. To figure that one out. Thank you so much, everyone, for tuning in. BreakingPoints.com is where you can go to get a premium subscription and you get the show right in your inbox early. No breaks. Full coverage.

Full show. Listen to the whole thing. All gas, no brakes, as they say on TikTok where Ryan is now a celebrity. Get over there. Follow me there. On Friday, so Thursday, it'll come out Thursday afternoon for premium subscribers. We're going to have Natalie Winters, who is, I told my wife this this morning, I said, Steve Bannon's White House correspondent. She's like, I'm sorry, what? Like I said, it's Steve. She's Steve Bannon's White House correspondent. She's like, yes, I heard you.

What on earth are you talking about? Just like mad limbs. How does Steve Bannon have a White House court? Don't worry. Well, I was like, so Steve Bannon has a podcast called War Room. The podcast has a White House court. She's like, oh, okay. Interesting times that we're living in. I was talking to Crystal yesterday. We were talking about how Friday morning we should probably also do like an A block because there's just so much news.

that's going from like Thursday to Monday. So we'll put out the Friday show. If Emily's around, and if I'm around, we'll also do like a, you know, round up some news for you too. Because like, good Lord, there's a lot going on. So much going on. But looking forward to that for sure. So make sure you stay tuned. And if you want it early, breakingpoints.com.

My name is Paola Pedrosa, a medium and the host of the Ghost Therapy Podcast, where it's not just about connecting with deceased loved ones. It's about learning through them and their new perspective. I think God sent me this gift so I can show it to the world. And most of all, I help people every single day. Listen to the Ghost Therapy Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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