12/30/24: Jimmy Carter, Trump Backs Elon In H1b War, Theo Von On TikTok Ban, IDF Destroys Hospital
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Hey guys, Sagar and Crystal here. Independent media just played a truly massive role in this election, and we are so excited about what that means for the future of this show. This is the only place where you can find honest perspectives from the left and the right that simply does not exist anywhere else. So if that is something that's important to you, please go to BreakingPoints.com, become a member today, and you'll get access to our

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Good morning and welcome to Breaking Points. Crystal, how was your Christmas? It was lovely. Great time with family, all that good stuff. We went up to New York for a little bit and traffic wasn't terribly bad, so I count that as a real blessing. How about you, Em? It was good. It was good. It was a white Christmas in Wisconsin, so that was nice. It's all rainy now. Are you a fan of the white Christmas situation? My youngest daughter is obsessed with snow. She says she wants to live in the North Pole. Okay.

in the North Pole. I mean, you gotta have snow. Like it's, it's really, I find it very depressing when there's no snow on Christmas, but this is the world we live in now. Yes, indeed. Indeed. Um, lots to get to in the show today. Also because we've been off, there's like a backlog of stories for us to talk about, but we also have some breaking news, which is that Jimmy Carter has passed at the age of 100. So we'll take a little bit of a look at his, I would say sort of, sort of complicated legacy. A

Trump jumped in and shows sides in this ongoing war between Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy versus MAGA types like Laura Loomer, etc. I'm very excited to hear what you have to say about this, Emily. So I'm looking forward to sitting back and hearing your thoughts on this whole skirmish that has unfolded.

We'll also get a little bit of Sager's thoughts because this is one of Sager's hobby horses. So we'll be all over that too. Well, and Indians were catching a lot of strays in this. Oh boy. Strays is probably the nicest way you could put it. They were, you know, taking a lot of direct fire in this. So, so yeah, we'll, we'll include some of his thoughts in that block as well.

Theo Vaughn weighing in on the, uh, potential coming Tik TOK ban as well as Trump weighing in on the potential Tik TOK ban. That part is probably a little more noteworthy than Theo Vaughn, but we'll get both of their thoughts on that. Um,

In terrible news, the last hospital in Gaza has now been destroyed. The head of that hospital has been detained. Reports are that he is being tortured. His family is showing a plea for him to be returned safely. So just continuing horror in the Gaza Strip being committed by the IDF. We've got a new poll revealing how the country really feels about the murder of that health care CEO. And Joe Biden apparently thinks he would have beat Trump. Emily? Yeah.

Levels of delusion that I previously thought were not even possible are coming to the fore. Yeah, just amazing. You think you shockingly think that Donald Trump's at least sentience would have defeated. We beat Medicare Joe Biden.

It seems like he had a little bit of an edge going into that one, I will say. So anyway, Biden is finally giving a couple interviews talking about some of his regrets. None of them are the thing. I mean, some of them are like, okay, little political things that he should have done differently, but none of them are like,

hey, maybe I shouldn't have run for reelection as this old man who can barely put two sentences together. That party apparently feels no regrets over. So in any case, let's go ahead and jump into this significant news, which is that Jimmy Carter, former president, of course, has passed away at the age of 100. It's been almost two years since Emily, we received the news that he was entering hospice care and foregoing further sort of attempts to extend his life.

And he held on much longer than anyone expected. His passing leaves Joe Biden as the now oldest living president and Donald Trump as the oldest, you know, living second oldest living American president. So kind of incredible life, you know, born in rural Georgia.

obviously in the early 1900s, but it was in such a remote part of the country that it was almost like, you know, the lifestyle was still very much 1800s. So the amount of change and progress and turmoil and all of that that he's seen in his lifetime is hard to truly wrap your head around. And, you know, in some ways it's sort of fitting.

that he passed at this moment because his presidency really was a transition between the New Deal era and the neoliberal era. A lot of people think of Ronald Reagan as the first truly neoliberal president, which I think is fair, but Jimmy Carter did a lot of neoliberal policies himself. He deregulated the airlines. He deregulated the trucking industry, deregulated some of the energy industry. He's the person who installs Paul Volcker at the Fed.

There was a lot of neoliberalism that he was starting to usher in. And now here we are kind of at the end of that era now, I think, especially with Trump retaking the White House. What exactly that's going to look like, we'll talk about more when we get into this fight between Elon, MAGA, etc. But certainly here and around the world, that particular era is coming to a close. And so in some ways, it's fitting that this is when Jimmy Carter makes his exit.

Well, yes, that's an interesting point because right now preparations are underway, obviously, for the funeral. And so typically that brings together all of the living presidents and first ladies. And we've seen that handled a little bit differently during the Trump era. It always does provide some insights into, for example,

just how well the Bush family gets along with the Obama family. And you sort of get to see some displays that I think are often unfortunate and displays that are in some ways, you know, give people like Whoopi Goldberg hope that the country is just going to keep on keeping on because, you know. You get to see also how much Jill Biden apparently likes Donald Trump. Yes. Yes. Oh, maybe he'll wear his cologne again. Yeah.

We'll have to see. But all that is to say, Jimmy Carter, to your point,

was born in the 1920s. He was born before nuclear weapons were invented and became a president in the middle of the Cold War and to this day, our foreign policy, for example, think about Israel and Iran, is informed by our conduct during the Cold War and the way that the world was dramatically shrunk because of nuclear weapons, which happened

literally in his youth. So it's just an incredible, it's an incredible life. And Joe Biden was apparently the first senator to endorse Jimmy Carter in that Democratic primary all those many years ago. So some things, some of our political figures still definitely hanging in there from that era.

One of the things that are typically cited as a signature achievement of his administration, certainly in terms of foreign policy, is the Camp David Accords, which brought peace between Egypt and Israel. You know, as a supporter of the Palestinian cause, I see that somewhat differently. It really was a blow to Palestinians. They were excluded from the negotiations. It broke up this sort of pan-Arab unity. Egypt was in many ways their most powerful ally.

ally. And there were demands there, there are conditions for Israel to respect Palestinian sovereignty in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip, but they were never enforced and were sort of always loose enough to allow Israel to continue the project of settlement expansion, which has continued under every single Israeli prime minister, regardless of party or political, you know, political inclination.

And so, you know, on the one hand, it did bring peace between these two neighbors, resolve issues with the Sinai Peninsula. But on the other hand, it really was a blow ultimately to the strength and the solidarity, the pan-Arab solidarity of the Palestinian movement. You know, a lot of people also make a distinguish between Jimmy Carter in

in office and most people see his presidency as, you know, sort of a failure. There's a lot of economic turmoil, a lot of political turmoil, obviously the, um, you know, Iran hostage situation, which in many ways was engineered by the then incoming Ronald Reagan administration. We can leave that aside for another day. Um,

clearly was a blow to American self-esteem. I mean, it's true. It was pretty well documented that they had this back channel negotiation of, hey, you hold on to these hostages until I get into the White House and then you release them, which is exactly what happens. I mean, you want to talk about foreign election interference, that kind of takes the cake. Most people feel, though, his post-presidency has been quite remarkable and quite dramatically different from the way that

Whether certainly Clinton, Obama, whether the way that most presidents have in the modern era just used the post-presidency as a chance to effectively cash in. And yeah, I think Obama is in some ways the worst example of this because with the Clintons, at least there was some semblance of even though we're not big fans of the Clinton Foundation here, there was some semblance of like, oh, we're doing this for the international good, et cetera. This is for the people of Haiti. Yeah.

It's been clearly like just their own personal sort of like brand building and, you know, their own legacy protection versus truly being associated with any larger cause of themselves. Jimmy Carter, of course, famously very involved in global health initiatives, was working, building himself homes for Habitat for Humanity into his 90s, which is quite extraordinary. And the other thing is he and his wife lived in the same modest Georgia house for

until the very end, until they both ultimately passed. And part of, this is a point that Michael Tracy and others have been making, the fact that he didn't sell out to the corporate world left him free to speak out quite plainly and boldly on any number of issues, one of those issues being Israel and Palestine. A lot of people are sharing this interview that he did a while back with Amy Goodman. Let me go ahead and pull up a little bit of this where he not only talked

calls out Israel for creating an apartheid state, but he also calls out AIPAC and the influence of money in politics and explains why Americans are unable to see this conflict as clearly as he is. And let me go ahead and play a little bit of what he had to say. The word apartheid is exactly accurate. This is an area that's occupied by two powers,

They're now completely separated. The Palestinians can't even ride on the same roads that the Israelis have created or built in Palestinian territory. The Israelis never see a Palestinian except the Israeli soldiers. The Palestinians never see an Israeli except in the distance, except the Israeli soldiers.

So within Palestinian territory, they're absolutely and totally separated, much worse than they were in South Africa, by the way. And the other thing is, the other definition of apartheid is one side dominates the other. And the Israelis completely dominate the life of the Palestinian people. Why don't Americans know what you have seen? Americans don't want to know.

And many Israelis don't want to know what is going on inside Palestine. It's a terrible human rights persecution that far transcends what any outsider would imagine. And there are powerful political forces in America that prevents any objective analysis of the problem in the Holy Land.

I think it's accurate to say that not a single member of Congress with whom I'm familiar would possibly speak out and call for Israel to withdraw to their legal boundaries or to publicize the plight of the Palestinians or even to call publicly and repeatedly for good faith peace talks. There hadn't been a day of peace talks now in more than seven years.

So this is a taboo subject. And I would say that if any member of Congress did

speak out, as I've just described, they would probably not be back into Congress the next term. So there you go. And I do think part of why he was able and felt free to speak out such as this, to go visit any world leader that effectively asked him to, even people like Castro, who obviously most living American presidents would not be going and visiting, was because he was not

bought off by anyone. He truly was his own man until the end. And I think, you know, that aspect of his legacy to me is very, is extremely admirable. Well, I think that's a really good point. There's this sense of, you know, I hate when politicians say I've served in Congress or I've served the constituents of my district for a decade. It's not service to people anymore. That ethic is completely scrubbed from Washington. But Jimmy Carter is sort of old enough

that in a lot of ways he represented how elites used to see politics. I'm not saying it's like better or worse, but there's like this noblesse oblige about the privilege of power and that it would sort of be shameful and embarrassing to be so brazen as the Obamas are. Or another great example is actually as the Bidens were in Biden's post-vice presidency, the brazenness with which they exploited their power

would have been really shameful in other eras of American history. And Jimmy Carter is somebody for whom that is like very obvious. And we look at him as different now because he has handled it differently in the last year compared to how our presidents have in the last couple of decades. But the only thing I wanted to mention on that, Crystal, is he's also old enough as a Democrat that he was friends with Billy Graham and the sort of evangelical,

wave in the like moral majority people in the 70s and the 80s. And to have him talking about the Middle East and

in the way that he's talked about the Middle East since, is incredibly noteworthy, really rankles conservatives, obviously. Nobody needs me to say that. But it's clear that he really was informed by his faith throughout his tenure in office. Yeah, that's so true.

and afterwards. And in a way that again, is seen as crazy. Now it's seen as exceptional and different, uh, before a Southern Democrat in the 1970s. Um, you know, it really wasn't. Well,

Well, and the contrast with Trump is also quite remarkable because Trump didn't wait till his post-presidency to cash in. You know, famously, if you wanted to get in with him, you would stay at his hotel and make sure you ran up a big bill. Now he has his own crypto coin selling sneakers, selling it, as you referenced before, selling a cologne.

Jimmy Carter sold his peanut farm before he entered the White House just to make it clear that he had no potential conflict of interest.

That's how dramatically different his view of the responsibilities of the presidency were versus Trump and the Trump family. I mean, Trump cashing in with Live Golf, Jared Kushner getting $2 billion from the Saudis. The list goes on and on. And you had David Sirota pointing out that another area where Carter was very clearly outspoken in a way that you just don't see from any of the other living American presidents is on money and politics.

And he says he was the one ex-president of the modern era to openly admit and lament the truth about what America has become in the post-Citizens United era. National Press Corps probably won't mention this, but it was really something. Jimmy Carter said U.S. is an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery and, you know, and really sounded off against the Citizens United ruling, which was one of a number of Supreme Court rulings that really opened the floodgates of huge money in politics, the likes of which were not possible in the past and which have reached

you know, unbelievable new dystopian heights with Elon Musk in particular, putting in more than a quarter of a billion dollars to

Into this last presidential campaign and basically expecting to run the government and achieve whatever policies that he wants to achieve, not the guy that just got elected, but that he wants to achieve. And so, you know, it's that's been a long time coming. And obviously, both parties have decided to fully embrace big money in politics. But it's also not worthy that, you know, as Jimmy Carter said,

officially exits the scene, you know, we've reached a new, I think, undeniable peak of American oligarchy that is quite disturbing and, you know, has clearly now not just disturbing lefties like me, but plenty of people within the MAGA coalition who are saying, you know what, this is actually really a problem.

Totally. And it's for Jimmy Carter, someone, again, who was born in the 1920s, we sort of had this voice from the past and he was a relic of a different era. And I think that's kind of what's disturbing reflecting on his life is that, you know, there were many, many deep, deep imperfections in the United States of America throughout his life, some of which have gotten dramatically better. But the political system is

He's kind of a voice of moral clarity, I think, from the past, and a lot of conservatives would tell me that's crazy. But from the populist perspective about the American political system, he was able to see it a little bit more clearly from his vantage point. And it's a sorry contrast with where things are today. As you mentioned, the Trump Organization, Eric Trump right now just brokered a deal in Saudi Arabia for a giant tower.

I mean, just like a completely different level at this point. Yeah, so true. And the Obamas are out making Netflix documentaries and cashing in that don't make any money, but are worth millions to Netflix because, well, it's the Obamas. Yeah. Carter was also apparently the last Democrat to win a majority of counties in a presidential election. Usually Democrats win.

In the modern era, they sort of run up the score in the cities. But we're all used to seeing the map where many of the rural areas are Republican. Now all of the rural areas are Republican. And so it was a very different Democratic coalition at that point. I would say that some of the neoliberal policies that he helps to usher in, the trucking deregulation, the airline deregulation, ultimately the attacks on unions, all of that shift away from the New Deal era is a big part of the story of why. Yes.

Democrats lose so much of the country, lose so many of these, you know, rural areas and rural states. And he really, you know, starts the trend in that direction. And the door on that era has been, you know, officially, I guess, slammed shut here with with Trump retaking the White House. So in any place, in any case, rest in peace, Jimmy Carter. And we can go ahead and move on to what's going on with Elon Musk and Donald Trump and Laura Loomer and all these characters. This is it.

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Well, Crystal, it's a great day for Sagar to be gone because not only do we have a significant moment in presidential history, but we also have this roiling skirmish in MAGA world over H-1B visas. And we know that Sagar has so little to say about both of these topics. So I'm here.

And Indian Americans and their place in the country. Very few thoughts on any of these topics. Yes, and about American culture and Silicon Valley. So nothing to worry about. We will do our best to channel Sagar's energy, if not his ideology. We do have a little bit of Sagar's thoughts to share with everyone because he made some excellent points, which will surprise nobody. But right now,

MAGA world is, as we just alluded to, absolutely riven. And this is not a media narrative. This is a significant division. Just to be meta for a moment, we are not in any way making this sound worse than it is. This is a very significant division in sort of Trump world. And we've seen that just on Elon Musk's X feed itself over the last couple of days. So

We're gonna start with kind of the basics here. I'm gonna share a little tear sheet so that you can see what some of the coverage has looked like over the last couple of days. Actually, really, this has been going on for a while, but this all started

When Donald Trump announced the appointment of somebody who is supportive of H-1B visas to his new administration shortly before Christmas, and if you've been following this, if you're on Twitter, what you saw was immediately a major divide open up between people who support H-1B visas and people who don't. And this sounds like maybe a minor wonky set of differences among Donald Trump's circle.

But what it was actually doing was pitting Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy and people like David Sachs, another person who has been actually formally appointed to a post in the incoming Trump administration, against the quote unquote like America first world, the Stephen Miller camp of people who thought, listen, this was going to be the administration that is serious about actually cracking down on Trump.

the sort of foreign labor competing with domestic labor. And so Donald Trump, a couple of days into this, you can see the dateline on this is December 28th, comes out and says, I have many H-1B visas on my properties, which, Crystal, is probably the funniest way for Donald Trump to wade into this debate, to be honest. But people were with bated breath. You had Elon Musk

tweeting ceaselessly for a couple of days, again, going into Christmas. Laura Loomer jumped in on this, and we're going to basically break this all down. We have Ro Khanna, Congressman Ro Khanna, who's been roped into this as well because this is an issue that he's worked on and was invoked by Laura Loomer at one point, going to join the show and break some of this down for us as well. But this opened up a

massive fight in mega world, essentially. And Elon Musk and Donald Trump are on the same side of it now. So, Crystal, this is a big chunk that's been happening. Again, this predates Christmas by a couple of days, but it is still raging. It seems like it's about to carry into the new year and into the new administration, which is now some serious baggage to deal with.

Tell me, as somebody on the left who's watching this play out over the last couple of weeks, what your reaction has been to it.

Well, I mean, it doesn't surprise me that it sparked such a war because it really does get at like a foundational question of how you see the world. And the campaign kind of glossed over some of these differences. But I think you and I and Sagar and Ryan have been talking about some of the very clear ideological differences, especially between.

Elon Musk, David Sachs, Vivek Ramaswamy, the sort of new tech bro coalition and the Trumpist view of the world as it's been presented to the electorate. Now, I'm careful about how I say that because obviously Donald Trump has just sided with the globalists here. So what is Trumpism is always a little bit up for debate. But effectively, you know, the Trump narrative of the world is that you are struggling and you are getting screwed.

Because of immigrants and quote unquote cultural elites, basically trans people, gender ideology, like things coming out of Hollywood that you don't like and you don't think are the right values or direction for your family. But immigrants are a big, big part of that story of why Trump,

is telling you that you're struggling and you're screwed. That is a break from the traditional Republican message of if you're struggling, it's because you, or in this instance, your culture is failed, failing, flawed in some way. So,

Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, get it together. And effectively what you have in this proxy war over the H-1B visas is a clash between these two worldviews. You know, Trump is like I said, his ideology can be sort of hard to pin down at times because the truth of the matter is when he governed last time, he basically governed as like a Paul Ryan Republican president.

with some exceptions, you know, tariff policy certainly being an exception there. But his biggest accomplishment is this giant tax cut for the rich, very traditional standard Heritage Foundation type of Republican policy. A literal Paul Ryan tax plan.

Yeah, I mean, it was actually literally crafted by Paul Ryan. However, you know, in having this different narrative and story that he's selling, that was a break from the way that Republicans had traditionally talked about economic issues. Elon is much more actually ideological.

He's a fan of Javier Millay. He has been talking about how he wants to slash $2 trillion from the budget. He believes that there needs to be this level of quote unquote pain among the public. Obviously, cutting $2 trillion from the budget is going to necessitate significant cuts to Social Security and Medicare programs that Trump has always pledged that he wouldn't touch.

He also went out and was praising Javier Malay for rolling back tariffs. Trump always obviously is in love with tariffs and has embraced tariffs more than ever before, at least in terms of his rhetoric. So ideologically, there's always been this huge divide.

Between. Musk. And his. Pretty clear. Like kind of. Anarcho-capitalist. Ideology. And. The way that Trumpism. Has been sold. To the MAGA base. So.

So that's where this really comes to a head, because what Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy and all of them are saying is effectively like, yeah, we've got a problem with illegal immigrants, but actually we love legal immigrants. We want more immigrants in the country. And specifically for Elon Musk, he wants more immigrants.

workers that he can pay lower wages and that who are completely beholden to him because that's, you know, as as a lefty who does, you know, want more immigration in this country, I think we should have more legal immigrants. I believe that it's good for everyone. It's certainly good for those immigrants themselves.

I have issues with the H-1B program because it is so exploitative of those workers. And it is damaging to the American tech workers as well. Because if you look at the numbers, people who are brought in, these quote unquote high skilled workers who are brought in on H-1B visas, number one, they're paid less. And number two, if you don't play ball with your employer and they fire you, you get deported.

So I agree with the Ann Coulters and the Steve Bannons of the world when they say this is effectively a program of indentured servitude. But, you know, as the world's richest man and a huge capitalist who also, by the way, gets massive government subsidies and all of those goodies. H1B kind of is a government subsidy. That's 100 percent true. That is 100 percent true.

he is looking out for his own capitalist interests. And this is a huge issue among the tech, not just the tech, right. Just among the tech sector, tech capitalist period, which is why when Trump went on the all in podcast, which is like the tech bro podcast, uh,

back several months ago during the campaign, Sagar took immediate note of the fact that Trump offered up in that interview, hey, I think if you graduate from any college in this country, you should have a green card as stapled to your degree. That was clearly something he was saying

knew he needed to give to that community in order to take in the hundreds of millions of dollars and the political support that he ultimately got from them. So he chose his side quite a while ago. So it doesn't surprise me here that in the end, he decides to side with Elon Musk because look, that...

$250 million plus that Elon threw into the campaign, like, that wasn't for free. This is a key issue for him. He's going to get what he wants because he effectively bought his way into this government. Well, what's funny is what you said earlier about this also being a key issue for Donald Trump, the rhetoric that Donald Trump used repeatedly in his 2016 campaign and his 2020 campaign throughout his presidency and since about immigration has actually captured a sentiment

that is not false. It's not rooted in some false narrative. It is absolutely true. I mean, you can look at all of the Cato Institute studies, etc., etc., but you can also listen to people like Oren Kass who make the point, or Bernie Sanders circa 1999 who make the point plain as day that when you are

creating so much unfair competition for American workers, meaning people who can be paid less, you're going to naturally depress the wages. Now, whether or not that is made up in different sectors of the economy is a different question. But when you are bringing H-1B visa people into the country to do sort of mid-range coding, whatever it is, Elon Musk has been tweeting again sort of relentlessly about how this is not work that Americans want to do. It's sort of the work that allows us to attract folks

foreign labor like a magnet. It's great for tech. And then these people sort of stay and bring their talents into the United States. And obviously there's room for some of that, but it is also disincentivizing the creation of, or it's disincentivizing Americans from going into the middle of those ladders too. And what really the middle, I'm talking about like the ladder of career work is

Now, let's put this, I'm about to share this Laura Loomer tweet since we mentioned her because she was sort of instrumental in making this a viral debate because, not surprisingly, it got very personal right away. Obviously, we mentioned Shuram Krishnan, who was appointed as the senior policy advisor for artificial intelligence at the White House.

And, well, I think in an AI position, it's natural that you'd have some oversight actually over the administration's policies on things like H-1B. So Loomer tweets, deeply disturbing to see his appointment as senior policy advisor. It's alarming to see the number of career leftists who are now being appointed to serve in Trump's admin when they share views that are in direct opposition to Trump's America First agenda. So that just adds.

absolutely kicks it off because she's quoting Krishnan saying anything to remove country caps for green cards slash unlocked skilled immigration would be huge in response to an Elon Musk tweet about Doge. So then I am now going to share Vivek Ramaswamy, who I mean, this is where things really get interesting. This is the gasoline on the fire.

So it's already a significant sort of internecine battle in Mago World. But then Vivek Ramaswamy comes in with this very interesting and very long post on X. If you're watching this, you can see that I'm just scrolling through it. I would estimate off the top of my head, it's like 250 words. This is the day after Christmas. Laura Loomer was like going after Rokana, whatever, like literally on Christmas, which we'll talk about. But the key part of this Vivek Ramaswamy article

tweet is where he says it's all goes back to the quote C word. Crystal, did you see that? He said that a key part of it comes down to the C word culture.

So that C word. Yeah, I don't know what you were thinking of, Crystal. But he says tough questions demand tough answers. And if we're really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the capital T truth. Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long. He then goes on to say a culture that venerates Corey from Boy Meets World or Zack and Slater over Screech and Saved by the Bell.

will not produce the best engineers. He's also talking about Urkel and Family Matters. He goes on to talk about Friends. He says more movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of Friends, which is incredibly offensive to me, but probably other people too, but mostly me. Then he says more books, less TV, more creating, less quote-unquote

chilling more extracurriculars less quote unquote hanging out at the mall he sounds like a parent in like 1995 like he sounds like the dad in Clueless actually I was gonna say like thinking of it

It was better. This is one of – I have many things to say about this, but one of the things that really triggered me here is like I have a teenager. They don't hang out at the mall. It was better when we had the 90s mall culture because at least kids were like together IRL and had –

some sort of something community. I mean, yes, it's based on this like, you know, gross consumerism, but at least there was some sort of community. Actually now the smartphone culture is, which is, I guess, you know, sort of closer to what Vivek wants here of being, you know, constantly on your device and being, you know, buried in buried in tech world is way worse than when they were watching these,

which had lots of like family and sort of like basic morality community values associated with them when they're watching those sitcoms and hanging out at the mall. That's one of many issues I take with this. Anyway, proceed, Emily. Yeah, and I know we're going to get in all of that because again, we have a soccer tweet, but it is, it echoes something that you actually heard from J.D. Vance in Hillbillyology that he's since kind of recanted this critique of American culture, this critique of the sort of white working class

It echoes a lot of the rhetoric that Donald Trump, again, was pretty instrumental in shifting the way Republicans at least talked, if not thought, about those issues. So let's share. This is Elon Musk. He says,

Fuck yourself in the face. I will go to war on this issue, the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend. He's channeling Tom Cruise and Tropic Thunder there, as a lot of people have pointed out. But take a big step back. He also he he also agreed with a post that called the MAGA people who were disagreeing with him retards.

And said that these people I mean, it's very Hillary Clinton deplorables like taken to the umpteenth level. And, you know, to go back to Vivek's tweet, which I think is really important to unpack for a variety of reasons. Not only does it echo so it echoes Mitt Romney 47 percent. Yes. It echoes makers and takers.

It echoes Hillary Clinton deplorables. That's the language you're talking about, which has been a shared view among Republican Democratic elites, especially with regards to the white working class in particular. And so, you know, to go out and again, this is like this is to me the core battle to say no.

If you're having a problem, like if you're struggling, it's your fault. It's because you watch too many sitcoms because you indulged in sleepovers and having friends when you should have been doing math tutoring. And by the way, you're screwing up your kids too because you don't have them in the like math Olympics every weekend. And your values, that's, this is the core part. Your values are the wrong values, right?

The only values that you should care about is having your kids in this extremely high stress rat race from birth where if every moment isn't spent developing their capabilities so that they can deliver shareholder value for the Elon Musks of the world, then you're failing.

So it's not only an attack on American culture, and I think specifically on white working class culture, which is extraordinary given you just had this massive like education realignment and non-college educated voters overwhelmingly going for Republicans. It's not only attack on that culture.

It's an attack on any value that's not just about delivering market share in a aggressive capitalist system. And that to me is what was extraordinary. Now, I mean, for me, I...

Like I have issues with the H-1B program as constructed. I obviously disagree with both of these sides because I think all of this, whether you're blaming people and their culture or whether you're blaming immigrants, I think the real problem is point up at the Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy and Donald Trump's of the world, the billionaire oligarchs who have rigged the system to screw you and to benefit themselves. I think that's where the bulk of the blame needs to go.

But the the reason this was so extraordinary is because it really was a direct attack on especially white non-college educated voters. And frankly, I mean, Emily, a lot many, many people pointed out that it's also the type of cultural critique that.

That has been consistently leveled from Republicans at black Americans are basically like, oh, you're struggling not because of historic racism, but because you're too lazy and pull up your pants, et cetera. And now it's being trained at white Americans. And that also precipitated quite a, you know, quite a backlash and quite a lot of sentiment around this whole conversation.

Yes, and it did elicit, I think, some genuine racism because you get this sense from some people who are out there defending Donald Trump that, like, who are you, the vague, to critique white culture? Like, only whites can be mad about friends. Like, how dare you as an outsider? But I think on an even more serious note, you just said something so important about how there's this idea of, like, we

So looking down paternalistically on the white working class, on the white middle class, even people who are going to college and saying, I mean, that's what's so insane about this is critiquing

the American culture while actually asking to import all of this foreign labor to compete with people who are going into that grind as they're demanding. So stop watching Friends, start doing STEM, as though you can't do both, but basically say less sleepovers, more homework, whatever it is. And think about that. I mean,

I mean, how much have you thought about like, look at teen like depression and suicide. Like if if anything, teenagers need to be hanging out more with friends and doing like the things that he is deriding here. Yep. And then and then after you do all of that, after you forsake all of the sleepovers and the hangouts, whatever, you're going to be competing with foreign ladies.

That is going to be paid less. So you're in an unfair competition. And that has been happening for decades. And you and I have seen it. People who get outside of the Beltway have seen it. That has depressed, psychologically depressed, the American working class because it feels like it is all for nothing when you are competing.

competing with people who came here and claimed asylum. And you and I may disagree on this, but it's a real thing and are being paid cash under the table for this landscaping job. And you're a landscaper and you cost them more money and it's unfair competition.

I mean, that's why I think we need more legal immigration, because when you do have undocumented workers, then, yeah, employers are going to skirt labor law. They're going to pay them under the table cash, not have to pay the additional benefits and protections. And yes, that creates unfair competition. That's why, you know, like, for example, with the just to stick on the H-1B example, you

it's not that I'm opposed to bringing in high skilled workers or immigrants. I'm not opposed to that at all, but you can't set up a program. Guest worker programs are inherently exploitative. Like if you are tied to your employer and if you get fired, then you're deported. Like, of course they can abuse you in any myriad of ways and pay you less and, you know, screw you over. And that yes, depresses wages across the board, but,

Um, so it's exploitative all the way around in that instance. So, um, you know, that's why most of the studies show is even in when you had like the Mariel boat lift and they had this huge influx of Cuban migrants into Florida, it actually didn't, um,

significantly impact the wages of the native born workforce. The problem is when you have programs that are set up such that they are inherently exploitative. And when you have so few legal pathways for people to come into the country that they're coming in in undocumented fashion and then, yeah, getting paid under the table and, you know, themselves getting screwed and undercutting the local workforce as well.

Let's roll this clip of Steve Bannon, because it just for a sense of where the battle lines have been drawn and I think how significant again this actually is. This is not like, this is not the media trying to create problems where there aren't problems and you can take it from Steve Bannon himself who weighed in on all this again like

It's not surprising. These battle lines are not surprising, by the way. What is surprising to me is how surprised Elon Musk and like the David Sachs people were by this. So let's listen to Bannon. Then nastier tweets he put up last night about MAGA being racist, which is the last refuge of a scoundrel in modern politics to to quote Andrew Breitbart via Johnson. Right.

This last night, if we can put it up on the screen, I'd appreciate it. This is for Elon Musk. The reason I'm in America, along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla, and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H-1B. Take a big step back and F yourself, all caps, in the face. F yourself in the face. I will go to war on this issue, the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.

Oh yeah, tough guy? You're going to go to war on the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend. You're a man-child. I hate to make it personal, but what you have done is try to trash individuals punching down. Remember the first rule of gladiator school, bro, don't punch down. Either punch up here or punch up. Bro.

I responded last night, someone please notify Child Protective Services need to do a wellness check on this toddler. I hate to be snarky, but I think the moment called for it. People come, oh, you got to take the temperature down. No, we're not going to take the temperature down. We're not going to take the temperature down. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. We do not. It's no backing down. It's doubling down. It's no retreat. It's fixed bayonets and it's advance. And it's not surrender. It's victory.

We're going to win this. Let me repeat. The H-1B visa program is a total and complete scam concocted by the lords of easy money on Wall Street and the oligarchs in Silicon Valley to both

Initially, to just increase profit margins. But there's a darker element to it today. A contempt of America and American citizens. And we're not going to tolerate it. Crystal, again, that's like a sample of what's been happening. And imagine what's been happening behind closed doors over the last few days. But this is a hugely important.

hugely significant divide, he invoked the term oligarchs. It was always going to be tense to have the oligarchs allegedly fixing the problem of oligarchy that Steve Bannon has his fixed bayonets on, uh, and has sort of rallied the mega coalition to take on. And Elon Musk's ex bio right now, it says, you know, the people voted for significant government reform. Uh,

Yes, they voted actually for significant government reform so that we no longer function as an oligarchy. But the oligarchs who understand that the public wants significant government reform are much less comfortable with...

significantly reforming what functions as an oligarchy when it serves them. Because for some reasons that are sinister and some that are just natural, they don't see themselves necessarily as oligarchs in a pejorative sense. They see themselves a way a lot of the leftist oligarchs see themselves as these sort of benevolent overlords who know what's best for

for the people out there watching Friends and eating bonbons or whatever it is. And it makes it really difficult, makes it very difficult to sort of actually go full MAGA when you are an oligarch. And again, that has always been clear. We have been very clear about that on this show, in our coverage. But again, behind closed doors, these tensions have simmered, but never, I think, bubbled over in the way we've seen.

Yeah, well, I don't really know why people thought they were voting against oligarchy when you have the most like this is by far the number of billionaires in Trump's administration. Now it's over a dozen. You knew coming in that Elon Musk was basically bankrolling, you know, a large chunk of the entire campaign in a way that is truly of an order of magnitude different than we've ever seen from either party ever in the in the past. You know, you probably have to go back to like like Trump.

pure Paul Morgan to, uh, to really see this level of just oligarch control over the country and over the, um, administration to see anything that is even approaches a parallel with Elon Musk. And it's not like this was hidden. This was clear. His ideology was clear, his influence, his whole of government mandate through Doge, all of this was really spelled out. And so, you know,

And now you've got Trump like, yeah, I'm with Elon. I'm with Elon. I made that I made the deal was made months ago and he's going to get what he wants. So since that has happened, since Trump has said, yeah, I'm on the side of the oligarchs, these are my guys and they're going to get their way. Do I see a hue and cry from the, you know, the MAGA base?

No, not really, because it's never Trump's fault. It's always, you know, oh, he was manipulated. Oh, this or that. Lots of there's lots of cope in the timeline. Maybe he didn't really mean it the way that the media portrayed it. The other cope from the David Sachs of the world is like, oh, well, you know, we're really not that far apart. And this is all just like a left wing psyop to drive a wedge between us. You can see that on the screen.

You know, in some ways, I think this cake is already baked. And I think Elon is going to get his way on anything that Elon really significantly wants, because that is the deal that was made here. Yeah. And since Crystal mentioned David Sachs, you can look at this post he put on Axe. Elon has said that H-1B should be overhauled, that it should focus on exceptional talent in high value areas, and that the scams and low pay jobs should end. This is not to say there aren't still differences, but less than it first appeared. Time to move forward as one team. Definitely cope, Crystal, because basically the Bannon position is still...

I think, mutually exclusive with opposition. And the question becomes what level priority it is. So let's go back to Sagar here, because as promised, we want to bring him in. This is sort of, again, it's a hobby horse of his. He says, I will split the difference with Vivek. The reason that Indians and other successful minorities in the U.S. succeed is by blending the culture of hard work and familial dedication with the American spirit of dynamism born from the founder's

and the frontier spirit. Pure Asian culture encourages rote memorization, conformity, etc., etc. He says, the culture I want to venerate is the American culture which beat the Axis powers in World War II. It's peak soccer. It had important institutional checks against hedonism, etc., etc. And he says, the best way to recreate that culture is an immigration moratorium, as we did in the early 1900s. And then he goes on to say, I'll end with a plea to Americans of

Indian descent reject the growing calls for Indian identity politics or DEI slash wokeness by another name. So, Crystal, I think there's a lot we could do two hours, a two hour segment basically on all of this drama and Sagar might still force you to at some point. But

It is genuinely fascinating because it's this critique of the culture and immigration at the same time as like a lot of it's coming very top down. And the sort of down up part is being stifled by the down up candidate president elect, I should say. Well, I don't want to go too hard on Sagar when he's not here. He and I can fight this out when he gets back. But I think a lot of this cultural talk is like.

mumbo jumbo, like invented mumbo jumbo. And policy, like to me, culture is largely downstream of policy. And usually when politicians are talking about culture, it's a way for them to escape accountability for their own policy decisions and their own corrupt dealings, which are the more proximate and certainly more controllable source of so much pain in the public.

So, you know, when you have Hillary Clinton to use someone that everyone watching the show will find to be villainous when she's talking about deplorables, it's like, screw you, lady. Like your husband's the one who did NAFTA and shift the jobs over overseas. You're the ones that supporting supported, you know, PNTR and supports the Trans-Pacific Trade Partnership. You were happy to sell out the entire industrial Midwest and

in order to boost the profits of giant multinational corporations. So how dare you look down your nose and say we're failing because of some inherent character flaw or cultural flaw? Screw you. You are the ones who crafted these policies that screwed the country, vast swaths of the country over in favor of American oligarchs. And Elon Musk is...

Well, he's not even... I mean, he's from South Africa, but he is one of those oligarchs. This is... He has one of the... He is one of the largest Pentagon...

There may be no one in history who has gotten richer off the American taxpayer than South African born Elon Musk, who now has been put in charge of the very government that is the only thing that could check his abuses, exploitation and ambitions.

So, you know, I obviously have been I've been trying to talk about this for four months now. I've been trying to sound the alarm about listen, even if you like Elon Musk, imagine it's Jeff Bezos. Imagine it's Mark Zuckerberg. Imagine it's Bill Gates. Like as a matter of principle, we have to reject oligarchs having full and complete control of government. And that's basically where we are now. And I think.

you know, Trump on this issue. He had already flipped on this issue, right? He already signaled this during the campaign. He flipped on carried interest. He flipped on crypto. He flipped on TikTok, which we're about to get into, which I actually support the new position. Yeah. All of these things were not out of principle. It's because that's where the money was. So that's where he went. He has already thrown his lot in with crypto.

this direction of American oligarchy for the country. And I think I don't care left, right, center. To me, it's not a partisan or ideological issue.

I think that is deeply dystopian and disturbing and pretends really a very dark direction for American democracy. And I'll just finally split the difference with Sager splitting the difference, which is that I think the public does have agency. And this is where J.D. Vance sort of flipped himself and that he was sort of pointing the finger at the white working class and saying this is

It's similar to what the critique Republicans have made for a long time of the inner city black working class, that you just aren't pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and you can. And again, I think people do have agency, but I also think that the problems in our culture have been stirred from the top down. So if you want to start saying that there's a problem with American culture, you should actually look at how the oligarchs...

would talk about this in terms of a lot of different things, like marriage is an example or child, right? Like we don't have to get into all of it, but like, let's not pretend that these TV shows aren't bankrolled by the way, by people like Steve Bannon who bankrolled Cyborg.

Maybe that's what this was actually all about. Crystal is very personally offended that Vivek invoked sitcom culture in America. But I mean, in all seriousness, like the culture is very, it's gotten a little bit more democratic because of things like TikTok, but it was very much dictated by like oligarchs. So on that note, Crystal, we have Congressman Ro Khanna here to help us break some of this down as well, because he was invoked, as we mentioned earlier, by Laura Loomer and has been wading into the debate.

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All right, guys. So we are very fortunate to be joined this morning by Congressman Ro Khanna, who actually represents Silicon Valley and was also catching quite a number of strays in this whole Elon Musk, Laura Loomer, MAGA versus the tech bro dispute. Great to have you, Congressman. Great to be on. Happy holidays to everyone watching.

Yeah, same to you. Let me go and put this up on the screen. This is from your friend, Laura Loomer, who had some choice words about you and this individual that Trump has named as his, I guess, quote unquote, AI czar.

So she says Democrat Congressman Ro Khanna from the leftist Silicon Valley and migrant dominated hellhole known as California wants to gaslight anyone and everyone who opposes H-1B visas and tech bros who are infiltrating the Trump admin. Ro, why aren't you declaring

disclosing the fact that Suryam Krishnan is one of your donors. That's the new incoming AIs are. You're a Democrat with big tech donors who love mass migration. He gave your Democrat congressional campaign a donation of thirty three hundred dollars and twenty three thirty three hundred dollars and twenty four less than one month before the presidential election. Of course, you're defending the big tech bros who serve as your sugar daddies. You are corrupt. Here are the receipts. Congressman, your response to this attack?

Well, Laura Loomer had attacked Indian Americans when Kamala Harris was running, saying that we can't put an Indian American in the White House. I had suggested that she come to the White House when Kamala Harris would win and have masala chai with me. Unfortunately, Harris didn't win or I would have loved to have had her.

Masala Chai with Laura Loomer. But, you know, she tagged me for having contributions from Sriram and I replied saying, yes, he contributed to my campaign. And he has an extraordinary story. I mean, he's an immigrant who came to this country in 2007. He's become a citizen. He's contributed. He started

companies. And we should be proud of the fact that people from around the world, the best and brightest want to come to the United States. And when that comes to the H-1B visas, which obviously were the sort of policy niche that kicked off this huge internecine conflict that's

roiled, mago-rolled over the last couple of weeks, Congressman, the allegation is that they depress American wages because you're able to pay people on the H-1B visas less than you would pay Americans, and it becomes almost a system of indentured servitude. But this is something that a lot of people in your circles feel very strongly about. Elon Musk himself obviously came out swinging and said he will defend

these programs to his dying breath because he feels so strongly that they are examples of sort of what you were just talking about, the way this country is a magnet for talent from around the world and people who are then sort of become part of the American melting pot, et cetera. So where do you, you've talked about this a lot, but where do you fall on the H-1B visas amidst all of those allegations swirling in Trump world?

Well, I think that there has been abuse of the H-1B visas. There's no doubt that there has been abuse where people are paid below market wages and that undercuts Americans. And you basically have no freedom. If you're here on an H-1B visa and you leave your employer,

then you also are going to lose your status in this country. And there have been several companies, particularly IT outsourcing firms that have abused it significantly and they're getting a large chunk of the lotteries. The other thing is that while it's capped at $85,000, a lot of exemptions are granted. And so you really have $300,000, $400,000 being granted.

And so I have said that we need reform. And I'm actually, when I first got to Congress, my first year in Congress, 2017, got on Bill Presquerell, who unfortunately has passed away, bipartisan reform bill with Grassley and Durbin and Paul Gosar. Let's make sure that you're not underpaying H-1B visa folks. You're not manipulating things so that entry level positions are being granted H-1Bs. It's really supposed to be for exceptional talent.

And that's not the case. But that doesn't mean that we're not for immigrants coming to the United States. And really, immigrants who are contributing should be given a green card, a process of expediting green cards so that you don't have this situation of leverage. Wow.

What did you make, Congressman, of Vivek Ramaswamy's long post about American cultural mediocrity and how we need to have fewer sleepovers, more math tutoring, less hanging out at the mall, less Boy Meets World, more math Olympics?

less TV, more books, et cetera, et cetera. Do you think that Americans have, and I think this was aimed in particular at the American white working class. Do you think that they embrace a culture of mediocrity? Absolutely not. I don't, I don't, I'd love to talk to Vivek about his upbringing. I'll tell you about mine and council rock high school in Pennsylvania. Cause I was one of those nerds on, on the math, the math leads and,

I happen to be a valedictorian by local school, but I also played Little League and I was terrible at the plate. And people said, watch the bunt when I went up. But people said, everyone plays, you know, I mean, that was the spirit. And I had friends who played football for Council Rock and friends who went into acting and music and what happened.

It would have been such a boring experience if everyone in my school was interested in becoming a mathlete. That's part of the problem with some of the schooling in Silicon Valley now, where it's like everyone's parents work at Google and everyone wants to go and do well at STEM. And I think what makes America extraordinary is that, yes, we have people who are interested in math, but we have people who are interested in music and the arts and the humanities and

writing and sports, and that creates this vibrant culture, and that should be celebrated. And the results speak for themselves. I mean, look at all the Nobel laureates that we have in physics, in medicine, in chemistry. Look at all the innovation. I mean, I guess my question for Vivek would be, if there was something so fundamentally flawed with American culture, how is it that we

are continuing to produce incredible innovation. So it just seemed a little glib. Uh, it's something I disagree with and, uh, I'm quite fond of my, uh, upbringing and I, I don't, I don't think, uh, there was too much emphasis of, uh, on sports or music. Uh, I probably should have paid more attention to some of the music. It would have helped me in politics more. You know, it's funny you say that. Cause when I was reading, um,

Vivek's description of what he thought like the ideal childhood is, which is this like, you know, from the moment they're born, they got to get in the right preschool and they got to be, you know, trained in math and ready to take on their STEM career and deliver shareholder value for whether it's Elon Musk or someone else.

Actually, the people that I've seen raise their kids most like that was when I lived in Manhattan and like wealthy Manhattanites who would be the type of people who are engaged in like the varsity blues scandal or so obsessed with first it's they got to be in the right play group and then they got to be in the right preschool and we got to have Latin tutoring and they need to take up fencing because that's the place where you're most likely to get a scholarship or get an edge into an Ivy League institution. And I found it fascinating.

frankly, kind of terrible. Like, not because that there's any problem with wanting to create a lot of enrichment for your children, but it just seemed like the whole value of, first of all, it sort of erased any sort of just delight of childhood, right? And

Second of all, it really erased any values outside of what you can achieve as a market participant. Right. Friends, family, you know, like enjoying pop culture, contributing to your community. Those pieces were secondary to just like winning this high stakes rat race.

And, you know, I think part of what has been appealing about Trump to many people who, you know, obviously I disagree with his view of the world and certainly his attacks on immigrants, I find to totally miss the point of what the real problems are in America. But I think part of some of the language there has been about, you know, there's more to life and there's more to a society than just GDP growth. And Vivek's post to me was sort of a direct attack on

on, you know, on the idea that you could value something other than what your market value was and what you can contribute to overall GDP growth.

That's very well put, Chris. Actually, you know, a lot of my political sense, to the extent I have any sense, I think about what were the kids growing up on my street in Amsterdam Avenue, Bucks County thinking. There were kids who were kids of an electrician, of a nurse, of a teacher, of an HVAC technician. The guy who had the pool was the sort of big vice president at some company. But we all were on the same street and we all felt

We celebrated different holidays. We engaged and played together. I think that what we're very explicit is this sense of community. The kids of the HVAC technician and electrician were no less fulfilled or happy or contributing than the kids today or the kids of Google executives. If anything,

There was probably more happiness on the street where I was growing up. But so if his point is that America should make sure that we have a rigorous education and we should encourage education, of course, no one is going to deny that. He wants to get rid of the Department of Education. But that's –

But that's not what he's saying. And look, it's musicians often and artists where the ones are going to question income inequality or question social excesses. It's often athletes, athletics, where we have people, regardless of class, it's one of the few things, regardless of class, where, oh, you're a 49ers fan. It doesn't really matter whether you're the kid of a

billionaire or the kid of a janitor, your team is going to win. I mean, there's so few experiences in America that are classless. I guess even sports now you get, whether you're in the suites or whether you go and actually watch a game from the stands, there's class introduced to it. But it's not like, you know, you...

Flying has become totally about class. And you can live your life where you go to school, where your friends are totally with a certain group of folks in an economic class. And sports cuts through that. So I think Vivek's not looking at all of the incredible things that sports and music bring to American society.

You know, I think we can all agree there are good faith defenses of the H-1B program, that people make them in perfectly good faith, especially people with personal experience. But what the Steve Bannons of the world right now are saying is that the people in Silicon Valley, probably people in your district, congressmen, who defend H-1B visas so vigorously are

are coming to this with the perspective that is utterly cynical and self-interested. And it really is about profit. It is about undercutting American labor. It's about sort of their bottom lines. So again, as somebody who is sort of familiar with the people who are defending H-1B so vigorously, is there something to what Steve Bannon is saying, that this is something that is cynical and is about profit over the country itself?

Steve Bannon had some valid criticisms of the program. You know, I probably may be the headline of this, but, you know, he's right that there are companies who are underpaying people coming from overseas. And that's not good, by the way, for the people they're bringing over because they're often trapped in these jobs being underpaid. And it's undermining American wages. And the other point I saw,

Steve make, which is true, is some of these universities prioritize foreign students because they want to get the full pay for their tuition and we're not providing the same free public college to American students. And so they're getting paid. Often these students are coming, they're either having the foreign governments pay a full freight or they may have parents who are scrounging up and paying the

full money and then American students are being denied the opportunity in those universities. That's happening in California. So I think that anyone who's being fair about this should be calling for major reform on the H-1B program. You could be pro-immigrant and against exploitation, right? I mean, there's a...

The issue about do we believe that we should attract immigrants to America? Of course. Do we believe that we should exploit them to hurt American workers and laborers? No. And you can also be for education for all Americans and understand that when you have wealthy foreign students coming and paying full freight, that that's not fair sometimes for American students.

My last question for you, Congressman, is you've been sort of I don't want to mischaracterize. You can you can clarify if this isn't correct, but you've been open to certainly working with Elon Musk on Doge. You've been, I would say, friendlier towards him than I have been.

You know, one of the things that that came out of this conversation, too, is just the level of influence he's been able to buy with the Trump administration. Trump has now reversed his position on H-1Bs. Obviously, this was an issue that was really important to Elon. Elon's been given this entire whole of government mandate. He is one of the government's largest contractors. He has massive conflicts of interest. You know, what are your thoughts about rising oligarchy in America vis-a-vis Elon Musk?

Well, first of all, I don't like it that billionaires can pay the kind of money they can and spend the kind of money they can to influence elections. But, Crystal, we've got to be honest. It was both sides. I mean, we had 150 billionaires on our side. We had more billionaires on our side than their side. So, you know, it's billionaires. I agree. I agree with that, Ro. But I will say that there is a fundamental, like,

qualitative difference when you're talking about a quarter of a billion dollars, which is something we haven't seen before, and the whole-of-government mandate that he's been granted. So there's no doubt that both sides have completely embraced big money in politics. Kamala had plenty of billionaires backing her. That is certainly the case.

I do think that the Elon Musk influence, the richest man on the planet, is of a character that we haven't seen before. That's fair. And I, you know, I mean, we had probably people giving $50 billion or $100 billion and not $250 billion. And I am opposed to all of it. I don't have a super PAC. I don't take a dime a PAC in lobbyist money. I have said...

We need to, as a Democratic Party, say no super PAC money in Democratic primaries. And we should be doing what Maine did, is regulating at the very least the amount a person can contribute to a super PAC, just like they regulated what they can contribute to an individual. They can only give me $3,300. Why should Elon Musk be able to give $250 million to a super PAC? He should be able to give $3,300 to it.

Before you overturn Citizens United, let's at least regulate these super PACs. Maine, it passed by 70%. The DNC chair should be saying we're going to run that initiative in every state in this country. By the way, I'll just float. Jonathan Jackson is being talked about in Congress that we want him to get in the race for DNC chair. So, yeah.

I'm hoping he will do that. And I'm hoping he'll make some news in the next couple of weeks. But you're also right about the conflicts of interest. And I've said that there needs to be regulations on conflicts of interest with both Vivek and Elon. They shouldn't be able to avoid these conflicts of interest. But you know why Trump hangs on to Elon? Because Trump is fundamentally 80s wealth, right? His whole shtick is 1980s.

Hulk Hogan. I mean, until Trump mentioned him, I hadn't thought of that guy since I was in high school. It's all about make America great again, Ronald Reagan. And where did Trump make his quote unquote money to the extent he did? It was all the 1980s. And he knows that Americans are always about the future. And so he's trying to glob on to Elon because Elon's about the future in terms of the technology. And I think what the Democrats have to say is we get the future. We understand what the future holds.

economic prosperity and stability looks like, it's not just giving tax cuts and deregulation where the wealth's going to pile up in Silicon Valley. We've got to actually make this technology economy work for small towns, for deindustrialized communities, for the working class that's been left out. We've got to have a tax on billionaires. We've got to tax the uber wealthy to provide health care and education. And that's how we're going to go into the future. But my view is

that instead of just reflexively criticizing everything about these tech guys, what we need to say is we're the party of the future and we want technology to work for everyone, not just for these billionaires.

Well, Congressman, thank you so much for taking a little time out of your holiday schedule and letting us in your home there where your adorable kids are. And we're always grateful for your time and your insights, especially on those issues. Thank you so much. Appreciate you. It's our pleasure. Happy New Year. Bye. Happy New Year. This is it.

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Donald Trump has actually asked the Supreme Court to delay the TikTok sale deadline. I'm going to share a tear sheet so that everyone can just see a little bit more about what's going on here. This is very significant. We've covered, obviously, Donald Trump and TikTok a lot on the show because there's a lot going on with it, meaning Donald Trump

seems to have been persuaded by one of his biggest donors, Jeffrey Yass, who has a significant stake in TikTok. I believe he has a majority stake in TikTok to sort of change the hawkish anti-China position that a lot of Republicans, if not most Republicans, took on TikTok. And now Donald Trump has actually, they're set to hear arguments on January 10th

The ban was set to go into place on January 19th, still is set to go into place on January 19th, but has actually the Trump administration

Trump's nominee to be solicitor general essentially filed an amicus brief that asked for a stay that would delay the deadline so that Donald Trump could come in and, quote, work out a negotiated resolution, as you can see in the ABC News article there. So, again, it's not a huge surprise, Crystal, but another significant issue.

a significant, I would say, obstacle potentially being removed with the help of Donald Trump for TikTok. TikTok is desperate for this not to happen. They badly do not want to sell ByteDance, obviously the Beijing-based parent company of TikTok, does not want to sell the company, even though it seems like there would be monetarily a deal that would work out

pretty well for ByteDance given that isn't to say TikTok is a huge property. Obviously, I don't need to explain that to everybody. But in terms of investment and future value, I can understand why ByteDance would want to sell cultural questions of control aside. So this is, again, Donald Trump putting his finger on the scale of it, Crystal, which sets up an interesting realignment question because we share this next tab.

You now also have the TikTok Gaza discourse that has been going on. But this is Theo Vaughn wading into that. I mean, he's talked about this before, actually, as well. But here's Theo Vaughn talking about that. They don't want people sharing the truth about the genocide in Palestine. And that's why that they're doing it. I believe that that's what it is. And TikTok is one of those places where people can still do that.

And they want to own it. They want to own it, dude. Suppressing. Yes, suppressing. Thank you so much. Yes, and I think, yeah. I mean, and people say, thank you. And people say like, well, we don't want China to have our information. All these, they all have our, what are they? I don't understand sometimes what that means, you know? Like, what do you have my information? I have like six pieces of information. There's no way you don't have them.

So, Crystal, what he's getting at is something also that is important to understand about Donald Trump. And we'll get to ultimately what may happen to TikTok. This is a New York Times article, how Donald Trump went from backing a TikTok ban to backing off. Well, one of the reasons a lot of people in Trump circles still want

TikTok ban, in fact, is as Theovan, I think, was just getting at, they've seen the surveys of TikTok content and the breakdowns of it being much more pro-Gaza sentiment than pro-Israel sentiment. And there's a sense that control is being lost or that China is manipulating young people

rather than, hey, there are some organic sentiments in this direction. It's actually the same thing with the Osama bin Laden letter when it didn't actually go viral on TikTok. And Yashar Ali had a decent breakdown. And The Washington Post had a great report on how it didn't actually go viral. But

The point remains that there are sort of organic, there is a deeply organic pessimism about American imperialism and American power. And TikTok is a place where people hash that out. Yeah, no, that's really true. I think the point that Ryan has been making is the correct one, which is like,

Israel has gotten away with it. Like we're going to cover that they just destroyed the last hospital in Gaza. Donald Trump has won the election. You know, one of the other oligarchs who backed him massively is Miriam, Miriam Adelson, the widow of Sheldon Adelson, to the tune of some hundred million dollars plus. She's basically bought the foreign policy. Israel is going to get whatever they want, whether people on TikTok are upset or not. So that risk has sort of

faded. Meanwhile, Donald Trump himself personally has gotten very popular on TikTok. And, you know, with him, it's all about his ego and like he feels like this platform is nice to him now. So that also changes his view. And then you couple to that the Jeff Yass

the amount of money that Jeff Yass gave into his campaign. And it's very clear where Donald Trump has decided that his interests lie. I happen to agree with him. I think it'd be preposterous to ban TikTok. I think it'd be incredibly, you know, damaging to many creators who, you know, created entire careers off of the platform. The many young people who love TikTok and got to get a lot out of it and find it to be a fantastic creative outlet. And, you know,

to me, the arguments were always kind of silly because it's like, number one, all right, you're, oh, we're worried about the data. I mean, Theo Vaughn talked about this too. It's like what you think Mark Zuckerberg and, and,

all these other tech oligarchs don't already have your data, like everything that China would want to know about you, if they want to find it out, they already can. So that was always a little bit silly to me. And now the, you know, the self-interest has lined up in a very different direction for Trump. So I doubt that the TikTok ban is going to go into effect. They, in the, in the brief,

They didn't actually weigh in on the core of the legal challenge, which are on the First Amendment. They just said, like, Donald Trump's a fantastic negotiator and he's going to work this out when he gets into office. So just don't you worry about it. Just push this off a little bit. But I think that's also reasonable to say, you know, he was democratically elected and, you know,

He's got a view on the issue and he's going to have control of both the House and the Senate. And so it seems reasonable to imagine that he could potentially work out a deal here and not have to go through the Supreme Court process. But, you know, Emily, I'm curious for your thoughts on this. Going back to the conversation we were having previously about Elon is like, come on.

kind of buried in the whole, uh, pre holiday fuss over the government funding bill that Elon ultimately tanks. And then they, you know, strike this new deal, et cetera. One of the things that got pulled from the original deal was some restrictions on, um, tech investment in China, which was a,

major priority for Elon because he wants to do this like AI Tesla investment, you know, Chinese investment thing. And so this was important for him. Lo and behold, that gets pulled out. And when that gets pulled out of the deal, suddenly he's a okay with it.

You also have Trump's previous hawkishness towards China is what led him to be in favor of a TikTok ban. Obviously, he's changed his mind there. And, you know, for Elon, much of his fortune is tied up in China.

I mean, his investments in China. So the fact that he has so much influence in this administration leads me to believe you probably are going to get a very different orientation vis-a-vis China in this Trump administration than you did in the last Trump administration. But there's also a possibility with Trump, like he's old, you know, he's old, he's tired. He wants to play golf, that he's kind of happy to just hand off a lot of his money to China.

a lot of the heavy lifting and policymaking decisions to his like band of oligarchs that funded his election. He gets to stay out of prison. He gets out of his legal jeopardy. He gets to have the public circumstance of being in the White House and, you know, do the things that he wants to do. But also he gets to just kind of, you know, whatever pieces he doesn't really care about anymore and not having to run for reelection, he can just hand off to his team of oligarchs.

This is another one of those fascinating topics because it brings together so many of the different threads of the Trump era in that you have, again, Trump's own oligarchs being pitted against one another. So the Miriam Adelson versus the Jeff Yass. You have the China hawks versus the sort of new right foreign policy, which is actually often very hawkish on China. But in a weird way, this could be good if it sort of is a counterbalance between

to some hawks in the incoming Trump administration. Somebody, for example, like Secretary of State, incoming Secretary of State nominee Marco Rubio, who's extremely hawkish on China in a weird way. If you have like Elon, who wants to be more protective of his own business interests, Tesla is a good example in China.

As a counterbalance to like being hawkish enough that we end up in a war because of escalating rhetoric or whatever. Maybe that's a good thing or remains to be seen. But it's just it's very hard to know what Trump policy will look like, because we've seen on things like TikTok, for example, him just be.

so open. The most charitable way to put it is like open-minded and open to different arguments. But I think what happened with Yas was openly transactional in an unusually brazen sense, to get back to what we were kind of talking about earlier, Crystal, with Jimmy Carter. So let's listen to Donald Trump, the way that he's talked about TikTok more recently, which is

very different than how he had obviously talked about it before. This is Trump actually before the election talking about how if you want to save TikTok, you have to vote Donald Trump. For all of those that want to save TikTok in America, vote for Trump. TikTok. TikTok. Closing it up. But I'm now a big star on TikTok. We even have TikTok Jack and we're setting records. We're not doing anything with TikTok.

The other side's going to close it up. So if you like TikTok, go out and vote for Trump. If you don't care about TikTok and other things like safety, security, and prosperity, then you can vote for a Marxist who's going to destroy our country. There you go. That's the pitch. It's pretty clear. It's pretty clear.

It's so funny on so many different levels there. But you can see, Crystal, that as soon as he realized that he could have some control over the platform, it's not just about Jeff. Yes, it's about people liking Donald Trump on the platform and Donald Trump's campaign itself being able to find success on the platform.

on the platform. I've actually always disagreed on this. I've always been in favor of a TikTok ban, and I think that's different. I don't support this ban. I think the way that all of the legislation to ban TikTok was written is insane. Not surprising, but insane. In not a narrow way, obviously, a sort of power grab. They were all written to be power grabs rather than actually deal with the problem. So that was always suspect. But

in a sense, then Donald Trump coming in and saying, hey, I'm doing great on TikTok. Let's save it. I mean, that pitch might have worked. He did well with young people. It might have. I don't know that the brief is going to be successful that they filed because we're talking about a piece of legislation that was democratically that was passed through our system to the extent that it is democratic. It was passed through Congress and by the president. So I don't know that they'll have much room here with the Supreme Court. But

Even how the Supreme Court, the sort of Trump era Supreme Court is going to decide on this is an interesting question because you have sort of more libertarian leaners like a Neil Gorsuch or an Amy Coney Barrett. And then you have people like Clarence Thomas and I would say potentially Sam Alito who will go probably in a different direction, but we don't know. Yeah. I mean, to me, it's reasonable to say, hey, I'm just coming into office, like just delay. Yeah.

about this delay, weighing this decision and let me see if I can work something out. I could see them being amenable to that ultimately. And I haven't dug deeply or at least not for a while into what the legal case is, but I think it's effectively TikTok is saying that

the bill is a violation of free speech rights. And that's the case that they're making, which, yeah, I would think that the more libertarian-oriented parts of the court may be amenable to, and also the more like pro-corporate sides of the court, but

I personally, I can't imagine TikTok actually being banned at this point. Like, it's hard for me to imagine. So whether, you know, one way or another, I feel like it's kind of likely the Supreme Court is going to say, oh, all right, we'll just delay it and let you work it out. And then Trump will figure something out because this is an important priority for one of his donors. So there you go.

And also Trump-friendly, uh, oligarchs have been lining up to buy TikTok and, like, have been, uh, lining up investors, obviously, to make a deal that's sort of too good for ByteDance to turn down if it ends up that they are not successful at the Supreme Court. So, um...

whether you still have the sort of Beijing-based algorithmic magic that they feel they have with TikTok right now. If it is sold is a totally open question. I think ByteDance doesn't do itself many favors by saying, you know, on the one hand, we absolutely need to be owned by, TikTok needs to be owned by ByteDance in order to be as good as it is, which means like, okay, I guess I'm curious what you're doing with all of that data over there. But on the other hand,

You know, what does that look like in terms of significant disruptions to the platform that everybody knows? I kind of doubt it would be as significant as the people who want to maintain control of TikTok with ByteDance say that it will be, again, because it's a very successful product and it's amazing.

I mean, if you buy TikTok, you're going to have a huge interest in keeping it successful, making it more successful. Making it more addictive is what it means, basically. Yeah, well, that's the truth of the matter. To bring it back to Vivek and Elon and that whole fight is we need – what we really need is less TikTok and more sleepovers and more hanging out. Less X. Less social media. I mean, it's just such an insane argument from the people who literally own the social media platforms. Very true. Very true.

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So we didn't want to lose sight of the latest in terms of the IDF onslaught in Gaza. They have now officially raided and evacuated and detained many patients from the last functioning hospital in northern Gaza. It's called Kamal Adwan. Reports are some 240 Palestinians, including dozens of medical staff,

were detained from the hospital. And that's to include the director of the hospital, Dr. Hassam Abu Safia, who some have said are being held and tortured by the IDF. His family is deeply concerned. And this comes as, you know, they've instituted this plan where they've effectively sealed off northern Gaza and are just, you know, stifling.

starving and obliterating everything in sight. And we have some images we can share with you here just to give you a sense of the level of devastation. This is that hospital director, Dr. Assam Abu Safiya, who, you know, exited the hospital and is approaching these tanks. And I believe this is the last that he had been seen. You can see just the incredible amount of

of rubble and also incredible amount of courage. People were commenting on him walking through this landscape and approaching these tanks outside of the hospital. I can show you a little bit of the imagery of the, the patients being expelled from the hospital here. This is doctors and patients. You can see on the screen,

Many of the men were ultimately forced to strip down. The weather is, you know, quite chilly now. In fact, we've had reports of a number of infants who have died at this point because of hypothermia and the freezing temperatures who are already dying.

likely malnourished because their mothers are unable to get sufficient caloric intake while they're pregnant. And then they're unable to breastfeed, you know, sufficiently if at all because of the lack of lack of nutrition and situation is the most dire in Northern Gaza. This is an image of that hospital on

And again, this was really the last functioning hospital in northern Gaza. I saw that these patients were moved to another hospital, but that hospital has been condemned because it also had been so severely damaged. So no telling where they're going to head to next.

And then let me just show you this next one. These are a number of additional photos from the people who were removed and many of them detained. You can see them exiting the hospital. Also, just I mean, just look at this landscape like there is just.

nothing left. You can see them here crowded together and forced. This is the men forced to strip down to their underwear and their hands bound in here. You see them kneeling and blindfolded on the ground. So, you know, just really horrific images and horrific situation that is coming out there and, you know, for

It's easy to forget, Emily, that just over a year ago when the attack plans were being made for Al-Shifa to raid Al-Shifa Hospital.

There was a whole propaganda effort to convince the world that this was legitimate, that they said there was this Hamas lair underground, and they created this whole 3D imagery around what they would find there. Of course, they didn't find any of that there. They claimed to find some tunnels, and I think there was some alleged cache of weapons that they found or claimed to find, but nothing close to what they had purported

to say existed underneath of this hospital complex. Now, here we are more than a year later, and this barely gets a mention in the news. The entire healthcare system has basically been destroyed in Northern Gaza. The entire healthcare system has been destroyed. And, um,

I feel like there's kind of no going back, not just with regard to Israel, but with regard to the world when you watch all of this unfold and it's just allowed to happen. I think as these atrocities and the worldwide consensus has basically arrived at that this is a genocide, this is unimaginable.

Right.

I think all the shackles are off. I think that there's going to be sort of unchecked barbarism in the future based on what Israel has been able to get away with here with very little repercussions. And I imagine you read the New York Times report. Just what was this? It was right before Christmas, wasn't it? Like the day before Christmas about how this was

based on conversations with internal IDF sources about how the standards were consciously lowered about civilian casualties, like basically the ratio of likely civilian casualties.

to combatant casualties and how this was a conscious decision that was made internally, formally by particular military leaders at different times that changed what we have sort of been told over and over again were the very high standards in previous conflicts that the IDF

as their defenders say, held to. And so, Crystal, I think that does raise an interesting question of precedent about the sort of justification. Because I was curious when I was reading that article about how it would

be defended by the people who have said over and over again that the other ratios were the defensible ratios and were the sort of best in the world. And so, I mean, it's also if Donald Trump comes in and if right now what is happening with Netanyahu and Biden is that, you know, there's

We don't have a president with the mental faculties to even be negotiating something like a ceasefire, given that we are the backer of this conflict, the primary foreign backer of this conflict, that as Israel has said, that this conflict couldn't be waged without American military support. So if that is the case, and we're in this interim period between Netanyahu maybe hoping to have a ceasefire deal with the backing of Donald Trump that looks differently than it would under Biden, then

it also sheds light on how those delays have enormous human costs, right? It's, it's, if you're delaying it for the sake of politics, what happens in the interim is real and people die and it ends people's lives. And that's something that I've been thinking about as I've seen these images come in as well. Yeah, no, there's no doubt about it. And, you know, the,

It has rendered human life so cheap, too. You know, the number of people killed and just the amount of pain and suffering and destruction of every sort of civilian infrastructure. Like, it just...

it has rendered human life really cheap. And that has implications that go far beyond Gaza and spillover effects that will impact the level of barbarism that people tolerate, that people think is normal, that nations think that they can get away with. And at this point,

Previously, there was some possibility that because most of the upset over the Israeli genocide in Gaza was coming from the left, which is part of the Democratic coalition, that there could be enough political pressure brought to bear on the Biden-Harris administration to force some sort of change in policy. That was an ongoing question. You saw at times he would sort of bend to pressure, he would help

withhold this weapon shipment. Kamala Harris would make some comments that seemed to at least value Palestinian life, etc. So it was like an ongoing possibility. And, you know, with Kamala losing and with Trump being totally like committed to whatever Miriam Edelson and Israel wants him to do based on his first term in office and based on also how he's positioned himself this time around,

That's over. Trump doesn't care what lefties on TikTok have to say about any of this. Trump doesn't care what students camped down on a college campus have to say about any of this. So...

I hate to be so pessimistic, but when you look at that landscape of just nothing but rubble, death, and destruction, it's over. Israel gets to do what Israel wants to do. No one is going to check them. There are stories coming out that the dogs in Gaza, which at one point were starving to death, are now fat and bloated from the number of corpses, human corpses, that they've been feasting on. Like,

That's where we are. And we all watched as it happened. And our government actively was like, yes, we support this. We're going to ship bombs for it. Both parties effectively agreed with very few dissenters. To your point about the New York Times article, Emily, so that reporting is

That the New York Times now finally has gotten around to doing. 972 Magazine, which is an Israeli publication, we, it was probably right about a year ago, broke down their report that revealed all of these things.

Thanks from the AI targeting system to the fact that, you know, they decided, oh, we can target low level Hamas operatives even when they're at home with their families, which is something that, you know, most like no other Western developed society would be willing to do. Like, imagine if, you know, imagine if a foreign power was targeting our like low level soldiers when they're just like at home with their kids, right?

And think about how that would be received or think about how it would be received if Hamas was attacking, you know, not that they would be morally above this, but if they attacked IDF soldiers when they were at home just with their kids and their wife, how that would be viewed. And they made that official policy.

We always saw that on October 7th, right? Yeah, that's true. And in addition to increasing the number of acceptable civilian deaths, and even that number, they would push up to like, well, actually, it's okay if 200 civilians are killed in this attack for someone that we particularly want. All of this reporting had been done already. It's just that the mainstream press didn't

find it like convenient at the moment to admit it. And actually, and I can, can show you this. One of the authors, one of the journalists who was on this byline had previously gotten asked about that nine seven two reporting.

And Ryan shared this. So he says, Bergman is on the byline confirming that reporting on the IDF using AI to target entire families. Yet here he is when it mattered, dismissing the reporting as mere fantasy. The New York Times is an international embarrassment. So this is the journalist who's, you know, is on the byline now confirming this reporting that at one point he mocked and compared it to a Netflix show. Just take a listen to this. You know, Peter,

Sometimes people come to be an offer sources and stories. And I think about the stories that they are too bad to be true. They sound more like a Netflix episode.

More like a Netflix episode than something that happens in reality. That's what he was saying about the 972 reporting that he has now confirmed. And Ryan's point that, you know, it doesn't really matter anymore at this point. Like it's it's over. It's done is a really important one. So now The New York Times feels comfortable reporting the reality of the situation when there's no possibility of any pressure changing and when so many lives and so much destruction has already been wrought.

You know, we're true of every conflict, but we're going to keep learning more and more about what's transpired over the course of the last year in Gaza for years to come. And to your point, yeah.

It's there are tick tocks. There's organic evidence of a lot of this that it doesn't quite get get picked up. And so that's where there's kind of a disconnect between media and the public.

So I want to be fair here to the Israeli side. You know, of course, they claim this was some sort of a Hamas stronghold. And this is the, you know, cache of quote unquote weapons that they claim they found in Kamal Adwan, the hospital that they just attacked. We've got two pistols.

A monocular, a compass, a dagger, some money and a fanny pack. So that's what they even by their own by their own statements. That's what they're using to justify this. So there you go. This is it.

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Reaction and response continues to roll in in the wake of the murder of healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. And the latest to offer a take is Tim Dillon, who as part of a Netflix roast actually dressed up as the ghost of Brian Thompson and had quite a bit that he leaned into here. Let me go ahead and show you a little bit of what he had to say.

Socialist Pete! Is this what you want? Clap it up! Here's the free medicine. There you go. That's fentanyl. Have as much as you want. It's fentanyl laced with more fentanyl. I'm Brian Thompson. I'm going to hell for this. You might as well laugh. I...

Going to hell for this. You might as well laugh. Here were some other of the things that he said. Emily, I'm just pull up the New York Post comedian. Tim Dillon appeared as the ghost of slain UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Netflix's Torching 2024, a roast of the year on Friday, less than a month after the executive was gunned down. They talk about how he's dressed similar to the way that Thompson was dressed.

Donned ghoulish gray makeup was met with a mixture of nervous laughter and cheers. He introduced himself and had a sign that read United Healthcare CEO addressed the elephant in the room saying as Thompson that he's been in hell reading the tweets that a lot of people are happy he's dead. Quote, your reaction to my murder makes me sick and not the type of sick I would immediately deny for not having the proper paperwork.

The comedian said, taking a jab at UnitedHealthcare's track record of denying its policies members. So there you go. Tim Dillon weighing in with his take. Emily, did you see a lot of pearl clutching over this or people just sort of like accepted it at this point?

No, I actually looked because as we were prepping the show, I assumed that this would have elicited some of the pearl clutching that we saw earlier. And I'm not saying all of that is unreasonable, but there really wasn't any. I don't know if it was because of the holiday break, or if it's actually because of the poll that we're going to talk about. And it's becoming sort of increasingly clear that to the Tim Dylans of the world sort of do have their fingers more firmly on the polls of

The public is that there was an effort to make it seem like this reaction to Brian Thompson's murder was just some like far left, you know, ghoulish reaction. But polls like this tell you that was pretty, pretty widespread. Sixty nine percent of Americans said.

say that health insurance claim denials had a great deal or a moderate amount of responsibility for the killing of CEO Brian Thompson, according to a new poll. If you go down the list here, too, you've got 67 percent saying that profits made by health insurance companies had a great deal or a moderate amount to do with it. Wealth or income in general, you have a majority view. And then this was kind of crazy to me. If you look at the

this bottom number? So they say, okay, but how about the dude who actually killed him? And obviously 78% of people are like, yeah, I mean, that probably had something to do with it. Like this actual man who was a murderer. But it was astonishing to me that you had 20% of people who said that the literal guy who killed him had only a little or nothing at all to do with the murder. Like that part is actually, that is actually crazy to me.

Granted, you can get 20% of Americans to say just about anything, but only 63% when we were looking at that said that he is bearing the full responsibility, which means people have very mixed opinions. That 63% number to me is even more significant. It's a majority, yes, but it's not like a commanding majority. People have pretty mixed emotions about what happened. And so I think, Chris, you might be right that the immediate response

freak out over sort of the dirt bag left, right? Like this is just the dirt bag left and they're just such dirt bags. They're such losers and they're just, they're trolling and we're going to have this moral panic over how awful it is that they're trolling.

really, I think, has become clear was missing the boat, was not the right argument to be making. If you want to actually convince people or persuade people to have a different approach to what happened to Brian Thompson, if you want to actually say, you know, this was... You can't be ironically worshipping Luigi with the prayer candles and the memes, right?

Probably there's a different argument, line of argument that you want to be making than you're all disgusting idiots because it's a lot of people. It's a lot of people. Yeah.

No, that's exactly right. And, you know, just to like a lot of these polls, it depends a lot on how you ask the question, blah, blah, blah. And to say that the claim denial rate had something to do with the murder is different than saying like the murder was good and I'm glad that he was murdered. Right.

sickness, death, bankruptcy that results from our healthcare system, then you're basically celebrating murder. I think there's been a real effort to conflate those two sentiments of like, yeah, this is a disgusting system. This was a person who was, you know, at the head of one of the most notoriously like evil organizations

healthcare companies. And we think that that is wrong in addition to thinking that murdering someone, you know, on the street in New York is wrong. That is the piece that has been sort of willfully ignored. And Ken Klippenstein has been doing a really fantastic job reporting on- Speaking of the dirtbag left. I mean, Ken just is-

he has the biggest balls of anyone I think I've ever seen. Like I'm sure the local FBI agent where he is in him are on like a first name basis. But in any case, Ken's done really good reporting too on what's going on internally at United Health Group. He's been doing great reporting about the security state's response to this murder. And there's a lot of very troubling indications that they're going to use things like, you know, maybe people posting the St. Luigi candle memes online.

to label them as extremists, domestic extremists who should be, you know, tracked and surveilled, et cetera, et cetera. Very similar trajectory to, you know, we saw after 9-11, the use of our deep states like security state agencies against American citizens, against people who were here legally, attempts to entrap them, et cetera. We've seen that targeting right-wing extremists

in the Trump era, you know, the Gretchen Whitmer plot, et cetera. And it is very plausible to me that this will be another excuse for further security state expansion to go against, quote unquote, anti-capital extremists or anti-capitalism extremists who may have expressed some like untoward sentiments about this murder and about Luigi Mangione as well.

Yeah, it'll definitely be interesting to see how if Kash Patel is confirmed as director of the FBI, the incoming Trump administration handles this question as the Luigi stuff really isn't going away. Obviously, there's going to be a trial and it'll be in the news. So I'll be watching that closely for sure, given all of the sort of realignment issues

on Intel world conservatives now being more critical of Intel overreach. And you know I'm skeptical of this because I don't think they care about Intel overreach. I think they don't want their political side targeted. All right, so we've got some incredible Joe Biden news here, Emily. Apparently, he thinks...

He would have beat Donald Trump. So the Biden delusions have never stopped. This is amazing. So this, I think, was from a Washington Post profile, but The Guardian wrote it up. Biden reportedly regrets ending his reelection campaign, says he would have defeated Trump.

This is according to White House sources. They say that he still thinks he would have won even though there were negative poll indications. He also reportedly said he made a mistake in choosing Merrick Garland as attorney general because Garland was so slow to prosecute Donald Trump. That part is actually kind of true. But, you know, we had talked about.

Jon Favreau revealed that Biden's own pollsters had him losing 400 electoral college votes to Donald Trump. And, um,

Yet he still thinks he would have been able to pull it off. Like, I just I don't even know what to say to that. That is an incredible level of delusion that I cannot even wrap my head around. Although not surprising because he clung to the he clung to the nomination for weeks after he said we beat Medicare in a debate, among other gaffes that were just beyond embarrassing over the course of that night. So, yeah, I have a.

unpopular opinion on this, which is that I think there's something to this. I think he's ultimately wrong. But what I do think is true, and this is one of the things I ended up getting wrong in the election overall, but one of the things I do think is true is that the polarization is such that you can run generic R, generic D, even if they are literally the host of Celebrity Apprentice or completely...

completely just out of their mind at this point. Joe Biden, not in control of his own mental faculties. And you can still have a close election. So I don't think he could have won, but I think it would be closer than people realize. And

But one of the things I got wrong in the election was I expected that we would still be very polarized over the question of Trump. And we are, to be fair. It was a close election. But I do think some of the Trump stigma was gone. And that's what ultimately kind of pushed him over the edge. And that's what... It's hilarious that...

Biden is still like, hey, we could have had it if it weren't for Kamala. We just we could have we could have had it. So I think it's two things like one. I think it actually would have been surprisingly close, even with Biden on the ticket and even with him thinking that he beat Medicare in some way. Disagree. Disagree. I think people were like.

You cannot be president for another four years. You cannot be just on a human level. Because to be honest with you, my lesson has been somewhat the opposite over the past decade of politics, eight years of politics, which is that people do change their minds. These coalitions have shifted a lot over the past number of years. And they're not just like the partisan automatons that sometimes the pundits kind of paint them as.

So, you know, when you see young people shifting, you see Latinos shifting and you see college educated people shifting in the Democrats, whatever, you know, people are evaluating the situation as it exists. And I think there were quite a lot who didn't.

would have looked at because it wouldn't have been it wouldn't have stopped with the debate. And, you know, we beat Medicare like there would have been 18 more Joe Biden's brain is melting out of his ear moments during the campaign. And I think

Many more people would have just been like, we just we just can't do that. So we were seeing those polls that were like, oh, New Jersey's in play. Oh, New Mexico's in play. Oh, like Virginia. I think I think Trump would have probably won Virginia if it was Joe Biden still on the ticket. Not to mention that even though obviously Kamala Harris was.

of the Biden-Harris administration. Like it was really Joe Biden who was the face of supporting the Israeli genocide. And so I think you would have seen even more erosion among young voters because of their just horror at unethical

at what he had actively, the policy he had actively pursued. Although if you are Joe Biden, you look at the exit polls and see her underperforming him with all of these, like in almost every demographic, except for with the wealthy. And so I see where he's coming from that like, he's, I don't know if this is actually where he's coming from because I don't know how much he's able to actually significantly analyze all this. Yeah, exactly. But there also would have been, it's kind of a weird kind of factual, there also would have been like,

media overdrive, trying to, again, take down Trump and whatever. But one of the things that I want to agree with in your point is I think

it's more polarization. It's not R&D polarization so much as it is like, I don't care if this man is the host of Celebrity Apprentice. I do not want Hillary Clinton to be president. And so I will vote for this guy who's out there telling Robert Pattinson to break up with Kristen Stewart on Twitter because I don't want Hillary Clinton to be president. And what I underestimated

or what I overestimated was the extent to there was still that level of polarization against Donald Trump. And so it's still there. Obviously, a lot of people are like, I will vote for anybody but Donald Trump. But it's not as significant as it was in 2016 or whatever. And I think that's one of the things that media is grappling with right now. And what we learned from the big Wall Street Journal profile of Joe Biden that came out right before Christmas also is that he is...

is being coddled from any negative media, that his aides are not passing any negative media onto him, which, you know, there has been some. There has been as much as there should, but there has been some. And it probably speaks to this as well, Crystal, that he's looking at where Kamala Harris underperformed, her level of popularity.

and her talents as a politician. And it all seems so obvious now. This is one of the things that Ryan said before the election that has stuck with me. He said it on election night. I don't know if you remember this. It was like, as we were looking at everything, he was like, we're going to look back on this and it was going to be one of those elections where it seems so obvious once we know what actually happened. Yeah.

I feel like there's probably some of that in Dem circles right now. Yeah, no, very, very true. It's also so that Wall Street Journal piece, which really was the first attempt to detail the cover up, which has to be one of the gravest political scandals of our time, just of Joe Biden's clear decline. You know, they have anecdotes there from the spring of 2021. So this like this man had just been elected.

And they're like, well, he has good days and bad days. And today's a bad day. So we can't have the meeting. Like what? This is the president of the United States. I'm sorry. You're on 24 seven. That's what the job is. And from the very beginning,

His aides knew he was not up to the job. And that decline only accelerated over the course of his administration. And, you know, if you're someone who wanted like me wanted to defeat Donald Trump, the fact that the people around him covered all this up allowed for there to be, you know, the cancellation of the Democratic primary.

no ability for Democratic voters to get to weigh in on my cat has just arrived to get to weigh in on who they would like to see and who they thought would be the strongest contender. And, you know, for them to have a chance to to separate themselves from someone who ended up being a very unpopular president like this was a.

This was a devastating decision that they made. And look, there are no guarantees whoever would have come out of that process would have had a tough battle on their hands against Donald Trump, but would have had a much better shot than just last minute putting in Kamala Harris, who was not a good politician and who, you know, hadn't had to earn the votes to secure that nomination. And so didn't have like a bought in established base candidate.

All of those things. It really is extraordinary. And then, you know, so this was kind of interesting. Wanted to play this for everybody. There was a there's a little bit of reflection of this happening in the news media where you have a journalist who says, you know, the biggest mistake, the most undercovered story was Joe Biden's decline. And the media really failed in not pushing on that. Let's take a listen. One of the things we also do in the year end correspondence roundtable is dig into what was undercovered or underreported. Jan?

Undercovered, underreported. That would be, to me, Joe Biden's obvious cognitive decline that became undeniable in the televised debate. At the presidential debate with Donald Trump. Unquestioned. And, you know, it's starting to emerge now that his advisers kind of

managed his limitations, which has been reported in the Wall Street Journal, for four years. And yet he insisted that he could still run for president. We should have much more forcefully questioned whether he was fit for office for another four years, which could have led to a primary for the Democrats. It could have changed the scope of the entire election.

But still, incredibly, we read in The Washington Post that his advisers are saying that he regrets that he dropped out of the race, you know, that he thinks he could have beaten Trump. And I think that is either delusional or they're gaslighting. President Biden has said repeatedly he was sick during the debate June 27th in Atlanta, and he's always been fine, and he leaves fine. That is his position, the position of many of his top aides as well. Thanks, Bob.

And I love the coming in of, well, he was sick of the debate. Like, I don't know if he was just saying that to give their side of the story. He was. He was actually trying to uncover for them, but it didn't come off well. But, you know, again, another instance of now that it's too late to matter, the media is like, oh, gee, maybe we should have actually covered this. But they read all of the questions about Biden's age and decline. They read this as just like an unfair right wing smear. Cheap fakes.

Until it was at that debate, completely undeniable, completely undeniable. And, you know, people like me and Sagar and I'm sure you and Ryan, like all of us, even going back to the 2020 primary. 2019. Yeah. Like, look at him now versus look at him in the past.

This is an old man. Like he is declining. He is not the same person he used to be. And that conversation was not allowed at all at that point. Oh, he had a stutter. It's just his stutter. He's just recovering from this. Don't be ableist, et cetera, et cetera.

And now here we are. Now that it doesn't matter, they're like, yeah, I guess that was true. I guess we should have looked into that a little bit. Whoops. What are you going to do? I think this played a critical role in the reckoning that changed what we were talking about in terms of polarization against Donald Trump in the last couple of years. Like just like the way that we talk about cancel culture and wokeness, like there's this weird thing happening in the culture. And I think what the Biden cover up became a really big part of this because there were

there were obvious signs of senility going back to 2019. And a lot of people still said, I am voting for Joe Biden because I cannot deal with Donald Trump. This is not a vote for Joe Biden so much as it is a vote against Donald Trump. And then by the time 2024 rolls around,

There's this, you know, the trusted media goes back to the record low that it hit in 2017 according to Gallup's polling. And I think a huge part of that is because cover-up implies

the media allowed something to be covered up, right? The people who are supposed to prevent something from being covered up are journalists. And that is necessarily, even though she doesn't frame it this way, necessarily a concession of complicity, of saying that we were a part of this. And what we're not seeing in media is grappling with that. We're saying, oh, the Biden administration was so cynical and dastardly, and they told us he was fine. It's like, who

You knew he wasn't. I know you knew he wasn't because you saw all of the same videos and you actually had more access than the average American who knew that he wasn't. So what shattered public trust? This may have been like the straw that broke the camel's back. There are many things that shattered public trust, but this was a huge part of it. Yeah, no doubt about it. And, you know, I think this is part of the story of why I think

liberals have now broken a lot of trust with like, they are also not trusting mainstream press as much as they used to. I mean, that's what allowed Biden to be able to succeed to succeed in that 2020 primary was because the media was like, this is the guy you have no choice but to vote for him. He's the only one that can be Trump. And liberals were like, okay, I guess he's the only one that could be Trump. I'm not going to ask questions. I'm just going to pull the lever for Joe Biden. And it is what it is. And, you know, obviously that,

strategy was ultimately a failure. Donald Trump was headed back to the White House. The resistance strategy offered by the media was ultimately a failure. Many of the media figures that were kind of lionized in the resistance era, Joe and Mika being the most, you know, visible totems of this have now basically been like, well, Trump's here. I'm sure it'll be OK. We'll go make nice with him after having such incredibly, you know,

heated rhetoric around who he was and what he was going to do and what it meant and what the stakes were, et cetera. And so it really has exposed them as being frauds, as

as not really meaning the things that they were saying and also as being failures in terms of the political program that they offered in order to try to defeat Trumpism. So, I mean, that's ultimately what it comes down to is like you said this was the way to succeed and it didn't succeed. Here we are with Donald Trump coming back into the White House and you don't even seem all that upset about it. So how what are we supposed to make of that? But but yeah, it's

An extraordinary, you can't even just call it a media failure because I think you're right, Emily. I think there's too much complicity. It's not like they were hoodwinked. Right. Right. Right. Some of them were, some of them were, they're really dumb. Not all of them though. Some of them are truly stupid people, but some of them are. All of the videos that we were watching, you were also seeing and you were buying into, what was the term that Kareem jumped here? Cheap fakes. Cheap fakes. Oh, it's taken out of context. Yeah.

Come on. And as soon as Karine Jean-Pierre and the White House started dropping that term cheap fakes, the media and legacy media, major institutions like The New York Times took it like a press release and reported it back, regurgitated it like they were literally taking the Biden administration's press release. It was disgusting. And if you go back and look at some of the covers from May, June, middle of June, the Juneteenth freeze up.

The Obama fundraiser. I mean, it's despicable in retrospect. So it's it's most of them aren't that dumb. Some of them are. And I think it's always fun to make note of that. Some of them are just like truly stupid individuals, but easily manipulated. Yes. Low IQ individuals. Yeah.

Well, Emily, thank you so much for hosting with me today. We are going to do in light of the New Year's holiday, we are going to not do a show tomorrow, but we will do a show on Thursday and it will be me and Emily back again. So Emily, are you a New Year's resolution person? You got anything you're...

planning for in the new year? Is there excited about in the new year? Is there anything you want to share? Absolutely not, Crystal. I don't believe in resolutions and I don't believe in optimism. So I'm expecting another mediocre year. What about you? Mediocre is probably the height of my ambitions for the year. That's generous. Of the world and the country. So I was telling you, I've decided I need to learn more about AI. You should ask AI. I

Well, I have been in part. What do I need to know about you? Should I be scared, chat GPT? Yeah, because I do – I want to have a more textured understanding of if I should be as scared as I think I probably should be. And this is – we talked a lot about Elon and the H-1B workers and whatever, and that's sort of a sideshow.

To the main event, which is the real reason he would put so much money in and David Sachs and all these people get involved is they really want a free hand to be able to do whatever they want in terms of AI development. And, you know, that has the potential to be successful.

I mean, some would say world ending, right? Like species ending potential, like in the most dystopian scenarios, but even in the least dystopian scenarios, you could have massive disruptions of the labor force and, you know, changes to the way we all live.

think about each other, think about work, think about society, et cetera. And so one of my goals in the new year is to try to like have a more textured understanding of that, to know if this is just like hyperbole and if there's, you know, everything will be fine and they've got it and it's okay. Or if there are, you know, some, some deeper things to really be concerned about, because I think that's going to be probably the most important fight that we watch unfold

throughout the coming years. It actually splits Trump world in a similar way to the H-1B visas as well. So the incoming administration, I think, is... And it does the same thing in Democrats, but it's a pretty... There's not a clear populist position and there's not a clear tech position. There's a lot of big tech that's trying to control AI and there's a lot of big tech that's trying to... Like the Marc Andreessens that are trying to democratize AI. So...

Much to be said. Yes, indeed. Well, in any case, happy new year to you, Emily, and happy new year to all of you guys out there. I am not mentally prepared for it to be 2025 personally, so I'll be spending the next few days wrapping my head around that. And if you aren't a subscriber, if you can become a premium subscriber, obviously that's going to help us a lot in the new year to be able to cover these stories in the way that

we want to and provide you guys with the best possible content. If you're not able to become a premium subscriber, totally cool. If you can help us out by liking and sharing on YouTube, leaving comments, like leaving a review in the podcast also helps out a lot. So in any case, so grateful for you guys sticking with us this year. We've seen a lot. I guess I'll just say that we've seen a lot.

seen a lot. It's been a wild ride and, uh, looking forward to covering all of the wild events of 2025 with you all soon. See you on Thursday.

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