11/18/24: Trump Taps RFK For HHS, Matt Gaetz Senate Showdown, Elon At War With Trump Transition, UFO Hearing Highlights, NYC Voters Sound Off On Kamala

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Good morning, everybody. Happy Monday. Have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed, we do. Glad to have you back, sir. Very glad to be back. We missed you on Thursday. I had a great time down in Austin. The Lexar even podcast will come out soon. I believe that Matt and Shane's secret podcast will come out as well. So you guys can enjoy that. Can we reveal how long the Lexar even? It clocks in around five hours. So something like that. There are multiple bathroom breaks that we had to take for the Matt and Shane one. There are some great rants against marijuana and gambling. So I think people

I think I would lose my voice at five hours. I did actually lose my voice. And it's funny, I had to recharge it for the next day. But we made it through, and it was good. It was a great discussion. All right, well, there are a bunch of things that I'm interested to hear your take on in the show, since we haven't gotten you to weigh in on all of the different Trump cabinet picks. We've got some updates for you there, our page you're in as nominated for HHS Secretary. We also have some updates on the Gates and HEGSeth.

nominations as well. So we've got into that. We've got some Elon Musk news as we do pretty much every day at this point where he is now going on Twitter to bash tariffs. Interesting, since his guy is really in the tariffs and also trying to put out there his choice for Treasury Secretary Jeff Stein from the Washington Post has been doing fantastic reporting on all of these things. So he's going to break down for us what is going on there. Obviously, there's also a lot of battles going on within the Democratic Party. Rahm Emanuel,

Blast from the past, who's of course never really in the past, is being floated as a potential future DNC chair. So I've got a lot to say about that and a lot of interesting sort of battles that are unfolding there. Meanwhile, we don't want to lose sight of what's going on in terms of foreign policy, the Biden administration now authorizing the use of long range US missiles inside of Russia by Ukraine, obviously an extraordinary development. So huge implications there. We'll talk about that. Soccer's got a UFO update for me and everyone else.

I missed the hearing. I was so sad not to be there. So many good friends that were in town. But some interesting stuff happened. So I'll recap it. Yeah. And I'm taking a look at why working class New Yorkers voted for Trump in their own words. Actually, I was kind of surprised by some of the analysis that they offered for why they voted the way they did. So we'll break all of that down for you.

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to all of you for your support throughout this entire season. All right, let's get to the very latest RFK Jr. being tapped for HHS Secretary. Let's put this up on the screen. This is the official truth social from, or truth from Donald Trump on Truth Social.

Whatever. I'm thrilled to announce RK Jr. as the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services for too long. Americans have been crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies who have engaged in deception misinformation and disinformation when it comes to public health. The safety and health of all Americans is the most important role of any administration. HHS will play a big role in helping ensure that everybody will be protected from harmful chemicals, pollutants, pesticides, pharmaceutical products, and food additives that have contributed to the overwhelming health crisis in this country.

Mr. Kennedy will restore these agencies' traditions of gold standard scientific research and beacons of transparency to end the chronic disease epidemic and to make America great and healthy again. So, you know, obviously, it's been quite a journey for RFK Jr. Once, you know, solidly liberal, environmental activist was actually fought as a potential Obama administration cabinet.

But that got spiked and then has sort of been part of this realignment to the right. So initially, he runs as a Democrat in the Democratic primary. They shut him down as they shut out everybody. During that time, he'd already been kind of, you know, he'd go on with Steve Bannon. He was the right really liked him because at that point, he was a useful weapon for them to use against Joe Biden. Then he decides to drop out of the Democratic primary and starts running as an independent. The right does a complete 180.

switch in terms of their tune. There's all these great clips now of Sean Hannity, like just lambasting him for all of his quote unquote liberal positions and Trump saying he's a radical and he wants the green new deal, blah, blah, blah. And then again, once Trump and him strike a deal and he drops out and is then in the Trump camp, then the tune changes once again and he's the greatest thing ever again. So here we are with Trump basically baking good on what was probably pledged to RFK when he dropped down to the race and tapping him for some

We can't minimize RFK's endorsement and his role. You know, Don Trump only won the presidency by 254,000 votes in the blue wall states. I think it was determined, to be honest with you. Because if he stays in the race, you know, when he dropped down, it was quite clear that he was taking more from Trump. He was much more of a problem for Trump than he was for Biden and then ultimately for Kamala Harris. When you look at those three blue wall states and you see how narrow the margin is, I think if he stays in the race, I think Trump loses.

I agree with you. And especially if we look at Michigan where we saw a lot of Muslim voters go to Donald Trump and they voted as a protest vote, RFK Jr. I mean, look, it's not like Trump and RFK Jr. have particularly different stances on Israel. But if we're thinking of the Trump proxy vote as a protest for many of these Muslim voters and RFK Jr. almost certainly would have gotten some percentage of that same. If you look at the margin of victory in Michigan and Pennsylvania, remember that outside of Pennsylvania, the Democrats were able to win those Senate seats.

in those two states, so they had some margin of strength. So I do think RFK Jr. was incredibly determinative in the race, in Nevada as well, actually, when we're starting to look at the final margins. One of the things that, you know, always happens after a presidential election is we actually minimize how narrow the gap was. We talked, we tried to talk about a lot here on the show about what is a 30-something thousand votes that made Joe Biden the presidency. Here, we're talking about 254,000 votes in those states. It may sound like a lot, it's actually not.

of the overall tens of millions that were cast in the entire country. So it is something we should remember. And in that way, he did need to make an actual overture to RFK Jr. The question is about how much of this is gonna come into contention with the Trump coalition. And I've been thinking about this a lot. Let's go ahead and put, for example, how Donald Trump is normally able to twist people into his own purposes. Let's put the image, please, up there on the screen.

This is released yesterday, and this was RFK Jr. forced to basically sit for a hostage photo aboard Trump Force One. This is Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Donald Trump Jr. and Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson. The four of them, other than Mike Johnson, who are sitting down and eating McDonald's. You can actually see RFK Jr. there seated with McDonald's, a burger in his hand, and a full sugar, high fructose corn syrup, Coke sitting there next to him.

This comes 24 hours really after a clip went viral of recently of RFK Jr. talking about how the food on board Trump Force One is, quote, disgusting and how it is full of McDonald's. So you may speculate. I personally think that Trump was punishing him and forcing him to eat the food. And he was like, put the burger in your mouth, Robert. He's like, you have to do it if you want to serve as my HHS secretary. The other big question is, is the RFK Jr., despite

endorsing Donald Trump, he is a liberal on many issues, issues that may come into major contention with the Republican coalition. So let's think about a couple of them. Number one is abortion, we're going to spend a lot of time on that later. But I actually really think that the big tension will be in make America healthy again.

So there are really two parts of Maha, so-called Maha, as I can understand it. One is libertarian. I think this actually aligns quite well with the MAGA coalition. This is a bar stool coalition of people who delivered the White House for Donald Trump. So these are people who are distrustful of institutions. So they want to burn down the FDA.

Great. They want to burn down NIH and get transparency about the COVID lab leak, about the COVID vaccine, release the data, all of the trials. Fantastic. All that stuff. That's totally fine. But where I could see major tensions is really in like a Bloomberg nanny state style liberalism that comes from the European tradition of banning certain chemicals. Now, I'm not saying I don't even advocate for this.

But I'm saying if you look at the way that the American public has traditionally viewed efforts by Michelle Obama or Mike Bloomberg to ban what was at large sodas in the city of New York, I mean there is like a deep nanny state element to this that this actually happened on the Biden administration. The Biden administration under the guise of like black health wanted to ban menthol cigarettes.

and black groups were like, hey, you know, don't tell us what we can and can't smoke. They're like, we like menthol cigarettes, leave us the hell alone. And eventually they were able to win that. Now, there's no, it's obvious that quote unquote banning menthol cigarettes would be definitely beneficial like public health wise, but we do live in a country where people very much value their freedoms. So that's one of those where I could really see some elements like, for example, on

on Coca Cola, like banning high fructose corn syrup in favor of cane sugar or reducing food dyes and all these other things. I mean, the truth is, is that while yes, it would definitely be quote unquote healthier, I guess, in somewhat of a balance, is that it still would probably drive at the price. And so that's a

big question of whether Americans, A, want to be told what and what is not in their food, and then two, whether they would actually accept whatever the consequences are. And look, my own person, my bias is there on the table. I'm pro-tariff and I'm pro-master deportation. I am going to fully acknowledge you. That's going to increase our price. But I think it has an overall benefit. Now, you can make that argument. But for a lot of the libertarian coalition, and specifically,

I mean, if we think about it, households under $100,000 who have majority voted for Donald Trump, these are the people who do eat McDonald's and they eat McDonald's a lot. I mean, if you look at the statistics about the tens of millions of people in this country who fast food on an almost daily, weekly basis, you have to consider like what fundamentally changing their menu, their food additives and all of that would look like the attendant price increase. You can make an argument for why it's good. I do think it would probably be good, but I could see some major pushback on that. So I think there's like a big libertarian

uh, there's like a big libertarian, uh, kind of construct that they will come up against MAGA and that really, if it starts to, if you really think about it, you know, one of the reasons that Biden's sunk was inflation and every time somebody goes to order fat, I was a Taco Bell yesterday and I was like, well, when did it burrito cost seven dollars? I was like, what? I remember 99 cents. Well, imagine if it goes from seven to 10.

because of the changes in food regulations. Do I think that's good? Yes, I can afford it though. A lot of people, you know, that increased from what is it? $0.99 to $7, that's burned a lot. You know, it's made it so it's basically impossible to be able to eat out and be affordable. Yeah, I mean, how much did like the price of the value menu at McDonald's figure into a political conversation? A lot, right? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that was a huge part.

The greatest sensitivity, and this is if you ask voters, if you look at the polls, if you look at the dominant political conversation, like the biggest economic sensitivity they have right now is to prices. So if you're talking about, you know, Terrace is you're talking about stripping away agricultural supports that are the reason why corn is so cheap, which is the reason why you have high fructose corn syrup and all of these things. And if you go through like the middle aisles and the grocery store, everything is just basically like different ways of packaging corn.

If you get rid of those supports, yeah, in a lot of ways, prices are going to go up. I'm not sure that there is as much tension, though, because my sense from talking to RFK, and we interviewed him a number of times here, and we talked to him about health, and we talked about health care, and what his vision would be, et cetera.

is that he basically is more on the libertarian front. So, for example, on the left, I support Medicare for All. I think that would be an incredibly important development in terms of health and combating chronic disease, because then you're taking some of the profit motive out of the health care system. You're taking the health insurers out of the middle between you and getting the care that you need.

it would help incentivize preventive care. So it's not just people who, you know, only go to the doctor when they are absolutely desperate because they can't afford to before that. And so I asked him about that and he wasn't in support of it. He's more of a tradition that I've actually been reading about, which is it's this

Back to the land movement of the 1970s, where after the 60s are over, and, you know, RFK's father has been killed, and MLK has been killed, and Nixon is a send-in, and there's this retrenchment among the, like, left countercultural movement. And you had a lot of people who, rather than continuing to engage in, like, mass protests and trying to change the national conversation, they sort of retreated into these, like, communes and these different alternative lifestyles.

And the ethos there was very libertarian, and it was also very just rejectionist of anything that was mainstream. Good, bad, or indifferent. If it was mainstream, they didn't want it. Whether it was the nuclear family or modern medicine or using modern farming technology, they'd rather get out of a horse and buggy and try to figure it out. Because it was just anything that's associated with modern life, I'm just going to reject it.

And that movement would have been in full effect when RFK Jr. was a young man. And I think a lot of his ethos seems to come out of the instincts of that era. Now, part of what happened to obviously this movement didn't last all that long, part of what happened is that when you have this purely libertarian like, oh, everybody do what everybody wants to do, next thing you know, you have people who aren't carrying their own weight, you have conflict between what are the values and the structure and the whole thing kind of crumbles, you also have outbreaks of preventable diseases.

like hepatitis and you have staff infections and all those sorts of things. So I'll just a long way of saying like as best as I can understand RFK's ideology based on what he said publicly and what he said in our discussions with him when we've pushed him on these things.

Like, I think he's much more of the direction of just burned down the FDA, not in my opinion, what really needs to happen is you actually need to strengthen the FDA. You do need to break the corruption in terms of the revolving door and the way that's been incredibly destructive. You need to take the profit motive out of health care, for sure, so that the primary impetus is people getting healthy and people being, you know, well, we have terrible, we do have a terrible chronic disease epidemic in this country. We have lifespan that is shortening. All these things are very real.

But just a strictly libertarian approach to that is not going to get the job done. And so, yeah, I think people will be like, you know, they'll probably push to like, okay, now you can drink raw milk, sure fine. That's all well and good. Is that going to really solve the problems that we have though? Ultimately, no. So I think you're right that there is an instinct on the right just to like burn all of these institutions down when actually all that burning the government institutions down

does is empower the corporate for-profit institutions, which are not really being attacked on the other side, and that's the danger of the libertarianism, not to mention, of course, like, you know, vaccines have been an incredibly important modern health development.

And the research that has been funded by the federal government, actually one thing we've talked about a bunch, is that the drug companies, by and large, are not developing new drugs. In fact, all of the new drug molecules that have been developed have been developed over the past 20-some years with federal government funding. That piece is actually really important.

So, I think it would be quite disastrous if there's a rollback of that type of funding, if there's a rollback of that type of research, if there's an actual dismantling destruction of those government agencies not just stripping out the corruption and putting people's health first and foremost. Before we play what he said, again, I actually talked with some people who were in line to be FDA people under Donald Trump.

last time. And there are multiple schools of thought. So there is what you just said, which is basically like ramp up the FDA, push out the corruption. I think there's also like a quasi libertarian almost capitalist element to this too. Yeah. Where the problem with the FDA is that it genuinely has been corporate captured.

So one of the things that RFK wants to do is to ban the pay for play model where the drug companies have to basically pay the bureaucrats to analyze their drugs. This actually keeps out new drug entrants and it keeps the big companies very, very large, which are able to basically push out and stifle all competitions. So if you look at Silicon Valley biotech startups, the FDA is the number one basically reason that many new drugs have not been able to be pushed.

from that way. Now you can say that there is corruption and all that and you would basically allow a new big pharma to arise, but the truth is we don't have competition in the pharma sector really at all. It's completely rolled up and it's actually weirdly controlled by these European conglomerates. So that's one and I actually do think that'd be correct. What are

the things we want to do is to change the drug development process and allow for more of less corporate capture that basically allows these big pharma companies to do the pay for play FDA revolving door. And I think I do support that in terms of what he's looking at because I've been hearing it from people who are like biotech founders now for quite some time. The interesting part also on the vaccine now is our and we're going to play some of his comments here.

As I understand it, and this is as reality, despite what R.K. has said many times in the past, including no vaccine, is, quote, unquote, safe and effective. He believes that you should have transparency on the safety and the efficacy of childhood vaccinations, of which they currently are not allowed to release that. They're not even to run the trials and that they are immune from what is it? They are immune from prosecution under the, I forget the exact piece of legislation. The change in the guidance would basically allow both the safety and the efficacy data to be released.

Now, after a while and looking at all of this, I think I have come down to his position simply because here's the truth. COVID-vax broke all institutional trust in the entire public health infrastructure, not just COVID-vax, masking, everything. The rise in vaccination and voluntary exemption has skyrocketed since COVID. People have legitimate questions because they genuinely don't trust the public health data and the infrastructure. At this point, and this is something that Emily Oster

who is a professor at the, I forget exactly which school, but she's written a couple of very interesting books about parenthood, et cetera. She's considered like the godmother of parenting. One of the things that she really did well is she's a health economist. And when you read her books, what you see inside of them is everything is based on big longitudinal studies. Some of these do exist for the vaccine.

However, eight vaccines, MMR and many of these other that are included. But a lot of the safety and the efficacy data has not been actually released in terms of the trials and actually many of them are not even allowed to be run. So what he, I think in practice, what it would look like is effectively allowing that and giving quote unquote choice to parents. Now, obviously, I understand that that is controversial because each state has to grapple with

religious exemption, personal exemption, health exemption, the idea of herd immunity, et cetera. But the thing is, is that it's already happening. The vast majority of people do not trust public health establishment after what happened under COVID. I personally include myself in them. I remember reading the approval process for the booster vaccine. And I said, this is bullshit. I can't believe that you're allowed to be able to do this. And the justification was, oh, well, we do it every year for the flu vaccine. And I was like, okay, well, then I've got some questions about the flu vaccine.

And, you know, I never thought about the flu vaccine. I was just like, yeah, it's fine. But I never considered the actual backstory and all that that went into it. And, you know, it's one of those where the questions around it are now so mainstream, I actually don't really think we have a choice to basically pursue his own agenda.

I am, I again, I think that his libertarian minded elements of wanting to break up the FDA cartel, how NIH works. Dr. J. Bhattacharya apparently isn't in line to leave the internet. I think he would be a fantastic choice. He was a good contrarian voice.

under COVID. Basically, vaccine transparency, safety and efficacy data, a lot of that stuff that could be released, I think it would be really good. But I again think that the big tension will come with any sort of European style liberalism where

this is again a big part of like banning food dies and these these things would increase the price or uh... you know everyone's like oh the mcdonald's tastes better in europe which by the way is not true but what they say is you know if you look at europe they have to explicitly cap the amount of sodium they are allowed to put into meat they have very different standards about the way things are now again i think that's great but you know and we're going to deny the grass fed in a grass fed beef and all that is not exorbitantly more

expensive. I buy it. I think it's definitely way healthier. But you know, you really need to think about what that would impact the consumer. That's why historically this has been a movement of like wealthy white liberals. Yes. Yeah. In California. These are aero on California shoppers. Which is why you also had, you know, it's been in like Hollywood where you've had people, you know, Oh, vaccines are natural. So I'm not going to get my kids vaccinated. And then lo and behold, you've got a measles outbreak. I mean, that's the thing is like,

You know, RFK is not. I know he likes to use a, oh, I'm not anti-vax, blah, blah, blah. He's anti-vax. Like, if you're gonna go out and say there is no vaccine that is safe and effective, I think, definitionally, you are anti-vax. Now, the...

The COVID piece that you're talking about, I think that the way that public health officials didn't think that the American people could be trusted with the actual nuances of what this vaccine could and couldn't do and what it was and all of that, I think you're absolutely correct that that broke a lot of public trust. There's no doubt about it.

You know, when we look at where RFK and his organization, the children, what's the name of it? Children's health. Health defense have been involved. Like they have left disasters in their wake. The most prominent of which is they played into these fears around the measles vaccine in Samoa.

and went in and basically misled people and fomented a whole panic that dropped measles vaccination rates down to something like 30%. You had a big outbreak and 80 people died, 80 plus people died, most of them children under the age of five.

So this stuff has real life or death consequences. And when people have trusted him in these critical arenas, it's been a disaster. So you know, RFK is like endlessly skeptical of anything that is like mainstream settled science.

And you know what? You should be skeptical of those things. You should ask questions. You should definitely look at like the monetary incentives and all I absolutely. But then he's endlessly like credulous about any sort of, you know, natural seeming crackpot theory, conspiracy, et cetera. And you should be even more skeptical of that end of the spectrum.

And so, you know, that's where I have a lot. Like, I think that the things that he did to stoke anti-vax sentiment and other health lies using his organization, I think they were devastating. And that example in Samoa is just one.

So, no, I don't feel comfortable putting him in charge of this, like, massive federal bureaucracy where you have lots of power. And this libertarian instinct, because libertarianism is all well and good until you've got a massive measles outbreak and, you know, your kid is in the hospital with a easily preventable disease that we eradicated long ago.

Um, you know, it's very likely. It's very possible that we have, there's already like an AV, some kind of avian flu that's spreading right now, monkeypox, but it's very possible that we have some sort of significant outbreak. And RFK does not really accept modern medical science, which has been a miracle in many ways. And then the other piece of this is like,

You know, the, to me, the corruption is really the core part of the problem, but if you actually wanted to get, like, end the chronic disease epidemic, first of all, it would take way more than the, you know, just making health food more natural and having fewer ingredients, blah, blah, blah, like the availability of highly dense caloric foods, the total sedentary lifestyle of Americans, like that plays all into it. But also, the other thing you would probably do is a lot more people would take those epic.

And he's anti-Ozempic. So I genuinely would love to see someone who has his instincts when it comes to being skeptical of the corruption of these companies and the impact they have throughout our health care system. But what I actually think he's likely to do is only to empower those forces more by undercutting the government agencies that are meant to regulate and serve as a check, a very imperfect check, admittedly right now, on those massive forces of corporate power.

I could understand that. I mean, the Samoa thing was bad. There's no getting around it. And this is again, though, where I have to put a little bit more trust in institutions and even just look at basically what in practice what he would say. It's like, OK, safety and efficacy of MMR vaccine and then allowing parents a choice. I mean, I don't see the issue. Broadly, if you're not banning the vaccine, if you're not underwriting it, people have a choice on what they can and can't do.

I think the most liberating thing of the RFK quote-unquote philosophy, or even the whole like just asking questions thing is, you do genuinely go, okay, so why do you give a child like four vaccines on the exact same day when they're two months old? When the Europeans do it differently, which is better? Should we compare this versus this? Why is the hepatitis, what does it be vaccine delivered on birth to an assault infant? But that's not what he does.

No, but no, but he raises those things to then just be like, that's why vaccines are bad and cause autism, which is a bunch of, which is like lies and bullshit. And it's not just on that. Like our friend Zagilani reported on a great piece about how his group also has backed this completely discredited

mode of trying to communicate with people who are nonverbal autistic that involves using like, you know, moderator who's supposedly helping them to be able to stabilize their hand so they can type out messages. And like I said, it's been like thoroughly debunked and discredited. His group pushed this as an actual model. And, you know, in some severe cases, there was an instance where, you know, a nonverbal autistic person was sexually assaulted because their facilitator claimed that they were in some romantic relationship. Like,

There are so many examples where whatever it is, he believes insane, like, crackpot things. And so, you know, puts me in a difficult position trying to defend this because I have my own problems with these institutions. And I think part of why Democrats lost is because they were seen as being like the defenders of the institutions when people are like, fuck these institutions, basically, and RFK is also like, fuck these institutions. But the specifics of how you do it matter.

And so if you're just taking a sledgehammer to regulatory agencies, that just means that there are going to be more snake oil salesmen. That just means there are going to be more people hawking like supplements that claim to do X and Y and Z for you that are just completely fake and bogus. That just means you're going to have less regulation. That just means you're going to have actually less investment in the type of research that generally has developed, life-saving, new drug molecules and treatments.

which is what the federal government has done amazingly well, actually. I mean, again, the drug companies are basically just like, buy up the research that our taxpayers dollars fund and our distribution mechanism. And to me, what you would want is go in the exact opposite direction and have more of this actually owned by the government, having more government options and competition like they are doing in California with their own government produced insulin.

reducing those costs, but I just, you know, so I'm, yeah, I'm very like skeptical that RFK Jr. is going to do anything good that's actually going to improve public health whatsoever. I'll put it this way, uh, is that basically the reason why people like RFK or the reason why people vote

for Trump at a very base level is they're like, things are so bad under the current system that blowing shit up is the only thing that's possible. So for me, I'm excited about the possibility. I think that, you know, safety, efficacy, standards, choice, and being informed consent is actually very important. I don't trust the public health establishment.

In terms of blowing up the FDA and seeing with the new regulatory regime, yeah, I think honestly, what else could come from it? For them, and if you look at the way that he, Cali and Casey, means the way that they talk and the data that they have around autism, about childhood obesity, about cancer, the current trajectory is death. It is a dying in obese civilization where 75% of the population is currently overweight.

On Ozempic, one of the things that I actually like about RFK Jr. is that he's not a prescriber first. He's not a prescription drug person first. I have deep skepticism around sestatans, Ozempic, and all these other things in terms of their long-term overall effect and the general idea that you must rely for your entire life on a drug company to basically provide you with life because it's a very convenient economic relationship between you

and said think we don't know what the overall impact is going to be on children who are taking those epic I mean we're talking about literally slowing down someone's gut at age 13 years old at the same time we're learning a lot about the gut brain you know the what is it the gut brain barrier and the impact of the gut on mental health and depression

And all these other things he likes and you know advocates for natural natural quote unquote remedies I mean even the whole raw milk thing and this is where Actually where I think he is generally correct on the public health establishment There are some things like the public health people who are quote unquote banning raw milk and say it's right It's like look if you look at the data is it slightly more like unsafe. Yeah

But at the same time, like, there's so many other things that are out there which are not banned after 10,000 times worse people. If you want to drink raw milk, let them drink it. And go diarrhea, like, be my guest. No, but it's not, it's just that. It's like, look, if they believe in the, I mean, there are, like you just pointed out, under FDA does not look at any of these supplements. There are things you can buy over the counter, which are 10 to 15,000 times more dangerous. But that's kind of my point, Sagar, is that, so,

RFK and people with his mindset and a lot of his supporters are endlessly skeptical of like, you know, actually FDA approved drugs, which do have to go through a rigorous process. Is that process perfect? Is there of course?

But there is a rigorous process in place to prove efficacy, okay? And then they're endlessly credulous about like some bullshit supplement because it's got like a natural health, whatever, or some weird remedy that they read on the internet that has absolutely no efficacy and is just being sold by a literal snake oil salesman. That's my issue.

I mean, with regard to RFK, he has been skeptical over whether HIV actually causes AIDS. He thinks COVID was caused but created by Jewish people and Chinese people and doesn't affect them. He thinks Wi-Fi causes cancer. He thinks different chemicals are making kids trans. He's anti-vaxx. I mean, it's just like he thinks anti-depressants are the reason for mass shootings. There's just nothing. But that one, there's the most efficacy for that. No.

There's not. Probably most mass shooters are actually probably need to be on more mess, the real problem. No. Actually, most of them are addicted to weed and antidepressants, but that's a whole other story that people aren't ready for. But this- No, no, no. Honestly- But I- Honestly- But on antidepressants and access to our eyes, I think he's absent- But I was critical of this when it was inside of the Democratic Party, too. This complete rejection, like, belief that anything that's natural, like weed,

must inherently be less harmful and less bad for you. If nature provided it, it must be better for you. And that's just not true. And I think it can lead to very damaging outcomes, as we've seen. Like I said, when RFK Jr. has had impacts on people's health, you ended up with 80-some people in Samoa dying.

Right, but the thing is, is that when you're talking about damaging outcomes, look at the damage of the public health and infrastructure. But I think it's a million times worse. I think you have to ask yourself, though, why? If your goal is to improve people's health outcomes and improve life expectancy, all of these things, why universal health care isn't a part of that at all? When that is the major thing that sets us apart,

from, you know, the rest of the developed world who have not seen these massive declines in terms of their, you know, life expectancy. And is it the only thing? No, but is it a critical part? Any honest conversation has to say that is a critical part, but that would require going after the health insurance. That would require something other than libertarian, like you can drink your raw milk and whatever approach and just destroying the FDA and like destroying the NIH and just

burning it all down as you said and i do think there is a bit i think you're right that there's a big instinct among the public that just like screw all these institutions let's just burn them all to the ground and rfk channels a lot of that but if you don't that's i mean this is sort of like a core problem with libertarianism is that if you don't do the work to check corporate power and actually have a government that is strong enough

to act that is, you know, not corrupt to act as a check on those corporate influences, then you're going to end up in a very bad place. And I think that's what his ideology is. And certainly is what it's likely to be expressed as through, you know, a Trump administration. I mean, look possible in terms of corporate capture cronies and et cetera. He does also want

to end a lot of the pharma, you know, corruption. And look, I have my own issues with RFK Jr., okay, in terms of his California 1970s liberalism and the way that it's applied to nuclear power and just like the general way that he's like, you know, you just said in terms of he's very accepting of what Three Mile Island and the fact that it can't get a insurance policy. So I'm not saying he's a perfect person.

But in a world where people have deep distrust of the medical establishment and of the healthcare system, RK Jr. is the natural extension of this. Now, whether he gets confirmed or not, I don't know. But I have been thinking about it and I think America actually deserves to see what it voted for. I've been thinking about this a lot. America voted for a blow up the institution's option.

I think Matt Gaetz should be picked. I think, or should get confirmed, Pete Hagg Seth, R.K. Jr. and all of it. America should see what it's actually like. For years, we've actually wanted to blow shit up. Let's see what it looks like. If it's chaos and if it's terrible, you're welcome to vote the other ways. But there is like a grotesque, weird thing happening here.

where we don't, in some ways, the Republicans are like trying to protect Trump from himself. It's like, no, he's a grown ass man and he knows exactly what it is, but I also think people know what they voted for in a certain sense, and they want to see everything get burned to the ground. And I honestly, I'm excited to see it too. I wanna see it, but are my instincts correct? Or am I totally wrong? And even on the universal healthcare front, and this is the fundamental problem, when you have lack of trust in institutions, nobody, including me, is signing up for government healthcare.

I'm not signing up for a COVID vaccine, you know, oh, you can't go get your cold, you know, flu appointment because you didn't take the COVID vaccine. No, no, no. And then that's the issue is that after a world where public health and all these other people have tried to impose a regime on our lives and they failed dramatically

After their system has been created in one of the most obese countries in the entire world, so what is it? Were we second to Qatar? If we look at our childhood obesity and all these other things, our food system, why would we trust the government to take over it? So to solve that, you really do actually need the safety, the transparency, and a lot of the change in the system that I think to arrive at that,

would require actually a fundamental revolution in the americans people's trust in institutions right now that's rock bottom our fk mac gates all p hexa all these other people their choice to have one thing in common what they want to burn the bureaucracy to the ground and frankly america voted for that

Donald Trump himself, he doesn't care about anything except for that. So we should say it, like we should actually see what it's like in practice. And people can complain if you lose your, I don't know if no drug gets developed or whatever. It's like, okay, well, that is what you voted for.

Let's be honest, like that's actually we voted for. If the Department of Justice gets gutted and nothing, you know, whatever works for six years where we get the, uh, Russiagate and all that stuff out of there, frankly, I'd be fine with that. But the point is, is that that is what people voted for. So to a certain point, like we do have to respect the quote unquote, the will of the people and what they have been asking for.

under Donald Trump, but also over the last 20 years. And that is an erosion of trust to the point where these institutions don't work for them. They don't trust a word that they have to say. And whether it's good for them or not, I mean, in a certain sense, people have their destiny in their hands. That's what they decided to do at the ballot box. Donald Trump won the popular vote. I mean, at a certain point, we just have to say, okay,

You get what you want. And I really think that's where I'm at with RFK Jr. Look, like I said, I have my own problems with them. I have a very different vision of what the government would run like, not necessarily with RFK, but under what quote unquote, advanced administration. But I'm not the median voter. People voted for this. And that's what they seem to want.

I mean, I actually think that's fair. The only thing I would say, to read a ideologically consistent mandate into any election result, I think is a fool's errand. Because if you ask, people are overwhelmingly in favor of universal health care.

So, you know, to just say, you know, what they just voted for was to burn it down. That's certainly one element of it. But I also think that there's a lot of ideological inconsistencies among the American people to say the least. But the other thing that's funny to me, to your point, Sagar, is I think a lot of people, especially the sort of like more like billionaire Wall Street backers of Trump, I think they really convinced themselves that he didn't really mean

Yeah, no, they definitely did. And we're going to talk about it with Jeff. Yeah, we'll talk about it with Jeff. I mean, you even express, like, I don't think he's going to do it. No, I think the assumption should be at this point. He meant the things that he said on the trail. Like, he meant it. And there was a clip of what's his name, Howard Lutnik, who's one of the co-chairs of the transition on CNN, who was getting asked about RFK Jr. And Caitlin Collins is like,

Um, you know, isn't it going to be a problem if he's HHS secretary and he's like, there's no way that's going to happen. And she's like, really? Because that's what's being floated. And he's like, no, not a chance. And this is one of the co-chairs of the transition. And here's our arcade junior. And I also think all the speculation on soccer, I'm curious, your perspective on this of like, oh, the gates.

nomination is just like a distraction to try to really get HEGS set through whatever. Like, no, I think Trump wants these people. I think he wants all of them. And I think he plans to get them. And I think he probably will get almost all of them, whether it's through acting appointments or he's got to play and lay down.

where I don't want to get into all the technical minutiae right now, but where he can actually use the powers of the presidency to force the Senate into recess, and then get whatever appointment T1, and once and they don't have to face any sort of vote in a Senate. So yeah, you've got a bunch of people out there who are like,

RFK Jr. is not pro-life and that's kind of a big problem for the pro-life community because the FDA is very important in terms of the mythopristone regulation. Most abortions in this country at this point are medication abortions. Mythopristone, you know this, Sabra, is the number one way, like, abortions have actually gone up.

post the overturning of Roe versus Wade because of the availability of Mythopristone, the FDA could roll back that authorization. So, you know, the pro-life community is not going to be happy about the fact RFK junior at least seems to be more or less pro-choice and is unlikely to use those agencies as a cudgel, which is something that I'm happy about with regard to the choice of RFK junior is not likely to use those agencies as a cudgel against abortion rights.

They may not really have their say. I think Trump wants these people, and I think he's probably gonna get them. I think you are right, and that's another reason why I really just think they should all be confirmed. And I mean, I guess to wrap things up, I think in the big, big picture, there are institutions that will check Donald Trump.

but also he is going to be the president of the United States imbued with immense power. So the cabinet officials and the appointees and all that stuff, yeah. And just in general, for what the Republicans and all these other people are saying like, oh, maybe we'll vote against them. I'm like, listen, ironically, this is what America wanted. They don't want Bush 2.0. It's pretty clear. I think you're doing a whole monologue about why I've worked in class voters, not to give it away, but isn't it that a lot of them hate the system?

Well, yes, but actually a lot of it had to do with Gaza. It was like a surprising number that were like actually Gaza was important to me, which even I was surprised by the number who have said that. Got it. Well, I mean, look, of course, that's a big part of it. But I would say like in general, this feeling of this system is broken and we have to blow it up completely is the major through line between Tulsa. I mean, really think about it. You know, you asked me once. You're like, how can we put together

People who are warmongers and Tulsi Gabbard or whatever who are up there on the same stage. And I was like, it's about grievance. It's about blowing shit up. At the end of the day, MSG, that's what they wanted. That's what people actually voted for. So I say, that's what you should give them. And then see if they like the consequences or not. I'm curious too. I've always wanted to know like, what would it actually look like? It's exciting. And so I think in general, just like looking at all of this,

And look, the real reason you should also want all these people to come through is if it's a total disaster, then honestly, you can finally say it's been tried and it didn't work. And I think that's another reason why people in certain sense, like who are trying to continue the permanent bureaucracy, you're actually undermining any counter case you could ever give to why these things won't work. You'll finally get to see what it's actually like in practice. We saw a little bit last time, but this time for real, like in the actual mechanisms of the government.

Anyway, I know it's a long-winded way. We do have Jeff Stein standing by, so she won't do it. Yeah, yeah, let's go and jump to Jeff. Joining us now is friend of the show Jeff Stein from The Washington Post. Good to see you, my friend.

Thanks. Absolutely. All right. Let's go and put this up there on the screen. You've been doing some incredible reporting about inside the Trump transition team and some tension between Elon Musk and some of Trump's advisors, including Trump himself. So Elon apparently has not left Mar-a-Lago. Trump even name checked him in the speech and was like, I can't get him to get out of here. He won't leave me alone.

You saw a clip of Trump actually smacking Elon while he was using his phone at the UFC, so there's some stuff going on behind the scenes. But for our purposes, it appears that Elon has intervened directly in a fight around tariffs and specifically the Treasury Secretary. So what can you tell us about what's going on inside right now?

So just outside quickly, Elon Musk tweeted yesterday that he thinks that it's really good that Argentina massively slashed tariffs. And that was the first, like, what is going on? We have that, actually. Can we put that on the screen? Continue to talk, Jeff, so people can see it. He's going to be like the Trump coup president. You can't go around saying, actually, the number one domestic policy priority of the president is stupid. It seemed like an incredible thing for him to be saying.

And then a few hours later, he went on X again and said something that even more annoyed the people I talked to in the Trump orbit, which was that Trump should pick Howard Lutnik, one of the two candidates for Treasury Secretary up until really that point.

Um, mosque, you know, he is around Mar-a-Lago all the time. He's around Trump all the time. There's a sense, you know, it's hard to tell with Trump personally. Um, but certainly among Trump advisors that I've spoken to, they are already fed up with mosque. They think he doesn't really understand Washington. They think he doesn't, um, really know what he's doing. Maybe, you know, from the perspective of people who want, you know, massive changes that that is maybe an asset. That's what he's bringing sort of fresh eyes, fresh perspective, not, you know, burdened by, um,

by what has been. But so two moves by Musk in one day that said, you know, I have strong views that are not sort of just falling in line with what the leader of this train is saying, and it's still early, and I still think they're in the honeymoon romance period, but

how long that goes on for when Musk is sort of famous to sort of drop pet fascinations after a few months getting tired of them. It's true. We'll be a fascinating story. Trump also known for dropping those pet fascinations at least in the in when they're human beings. Tell us about these different potential treasury choices and you know how they differ ideologically and what some of the policy implications could be.

Yeah, it's a little tricky because I think some of this, you know, gets a little over determined where it's like, because a candidate is not as strong on one thing, it becomes that they're weak on this thing. And so you sort of get these like overdramatized in the press and frankly, some of my stories, versions of what each of the candidates represents when it's much more

sort of contingent and hard to tell. But she can't, as we were discussing, I feel like most people like go to sleep when I start talking about this. But Scott Bessens is this hedge fund executive who, despite working for George Soros, which is kind of an amazing thing, has become one of Trump's most trusted economic advisors. As Sagar and I were discussing before the show started,

He is not just quite a normal Wall Street guy. He is quite strong on a lot of the trade stuff that Trump people have long wanted. But I think it's fair to say that they also worry that he's not quite as into, let's say, universal tariffs, which would create huge import duties on every US trading partner. And that's since I think it's fair to say or fair to wonder about his commitment to that cause.

And then the second candidate is this guy, Howard Lutnik. He's been co-chair of the Trump transition team. Lutnik is also a Wall Street guy. So I think it's a little unfair to be like, he is the trade hawk in the race. But he has been, I think it's fair to say, more willing to embrace tariffs than bass and more, and more sort of forthright in that. But I think, possibly even more importantly,

Lutnik doesn't really have sort of the independent power base. Like if we're thinking of analogs to other Trump cabinet positions, I think Lutnik is much more similar to Matt Gaetz and that he is kind of with Trump or he's no one. Fessent is a mega billionaire who has clout abroad, who has constituencies on the hill, who has sort of

you know, people that he can turn you to back them up that aren't just Trump. And I think there's a sense that, well, while what Nick has the endorsement of mosque and some others, he is more of a sort of loyalist surrogate, you know, critics would say, lap dog crony type. And so that's how this race is broken down. And Trump seems to be just getting annoyed that these people just keep sniping at each other, taking potshots, criticizing each other. I heard we reported a broker from the weekend that

Bessin's people went to Trump when we're saying, hey, look, let me post it of Hillary Clinton fundraiser in 2016. A lot of people were coming back and saying, Bessin works for Soros. He's like friends with people in the deep state. He's not that serious about your trade stuff. And Trump seems to be like,

You know, screw both you guys. I'm going to look for a third candidate. The fundamental, like as Chris Lee were alluding to, the fundamental structural problem for Trump is that he wants massive tariffs to rebalance global trade, which I think is an expression of like a genuine popular sentiment in the country. But he also wants line to go up, like he loves stocks, like Trump is a Wall Street guy. And so those visions are fundamentally incompatible. Someone who is very strong on trade

will be someone who the markets forgot about and someone who the markets won't freak out about will be weak on trading. So how Trump reconciles both of those I think is going to be really hard to see. And getting to that, Jeff, what are the tensions already in the economic team? So Larry Cutt

low, it appears as back of National Economics Council. Larry could not be more anti-tariff in terms of all of his personal commentary and his background. Now we have two Treasury Secretary candidates that are talking here about tariffs. And then Bob Lighthizer, who is probably one of the most legitimate pro-tariff former U.S. trade representative, is allegedly in the mix either for trade representative or possibly for trade secretary. So is it basically a repeat of last time around? How do you think it will happen this time?

If Trump had come out and picked Bessent right away, I think you could see him have playing the same role essentially as Mnuchin, which was to kind of rein in Trump's impulses on tariffs and say, OK, let's basically preserve the global financial order without literally overturning the table. And the fact that Trump hasn't gone down that route, I think, based on my reporting, I mean, this reporting is really hard because

not you know you you talk to people who say Trump said this and then you know he likes this candidate and then you ask them like and then you know you call your editors and say oh this I got this great intel like this guy is supporting this candidate like Trump is looking at him closely and then you think about it more and then you're like wait who do you support and then not personal often be supporting the candidate that they're leaking is in the mix so right

It's this like weird delicate dance you have to do as a reporter. But my, I think the evidence that the evidence I've gathered suggests that Trump, Trump does not want a repeat of his first administration when they really just kind of tinkered around the edges of the global trade system. I think he wants to go big. And I think the Gates pick, I think other things he's done suggest that he like, as you guys were discussing before I came on, he's serious about

about this new world order, this very transformative moment, and wants to pursue that. Is he willing to do that at the expense of the Wall Street of the stock market? We're going to have to see, but he's definitely thinking about it. He's definitely touring with it.

Yeah, that was something I wanted to ask you about, Jeff, because you for a while have been saying the Wall Street backers of Trump or those even who just were sort of comfortable with another Trump term, they just didn't really take him seriously when he was like, no, guys, I want and across the board import tax on everything, 10%, 20%, maybe 200%, like I want to do this. And they're like, yeah, but Trump says a lot of things.

And to your point, I think we now have every indication that like, no, the things that he said, he genuinely is inclined to do. So do you think that there is, what is the sense on Wall Street now that that's becoming increasingly clear? And if there is, what are some of the mechanisms he could use to not have to go through Congress to have massive implementation of some sort of tariff program? And what do you think the impacts of that would likely be?

Yeah, there are people in Washington, as you guys know, who get paid, you know, two or three times when I get paid, and their job is like to gather corporate intelligence for their clients. And I talked to them, and I think they are totally wrong about this, because as you were alluding to,

Congressional Republicans and corporate leaders and donors have been very convinced that Trump is bluffing with all this terror stuff. They think it's a negotiating tactic to scare other foreign countries into doing what we want to do. They think that Trump is throwing red meat on the campaign trail to his voters.

The way, like, if you listen to him, if you listen to what Trump says, I mean, again, it could be wrong. But if you listen to the words coming out of his mouth, he says, tariffs are the greatest thing ever invented. He's called them the best word in the dictionary. He said that there are no downsides to them. He said that they could pay off the national debt, fund a national child care program, and allow us maybe to abolish the income tax.

This is not a guy who is looking at this tool in a, maybe it'll have some upside, maybe it'll have some downside way. If the reality proves to be that way, which I think it would, maybe he'll pull back from the brink, but the reality is every public, every evidence that he, every piece of evidence that he's giving us suggests that he's dead serious to me about this.

a lot of the business leaders and big donors, they see Trump as a vehicle for tax cuts and are hoping that this is just kind of overstated. And that has always seemed to me to be like an incredibly risky bet. I mean, I don't have millions of dollars to give away on the campaign, but it does seem like he's very serious. And to your legal question,

Trump has national security authority under IEPA, the law that governs sanctions, to declare a national security emergency and impose tariffs on whatever country he wants. And that is something that the courts could adjudicate, but it could take years by which point all of the trade measures that Trump wants would already be in effect.

Right. One more for you, Jeff from me, and I don't know if soccer has anything else, but another piece of analysis that I have questioned, and I think maybe you've questioned as well, is that the doge agency that was given to Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswami, which is kind of giving like, you know, blue ribbon commission, like, here's the thing for you to play with and go away.

that it may not be as meaningless as it has been portrayed at times, and that also this administration has explored ways that they could avoid having to go through a filibuster, etc., to institute massive government spending cuts. That's something that most of the Republican Party would also be on board with. So what is your reading of the import of Doge?

Yeah, this is another thing I spoke to someone who works for a military defense contractor last week who was saying, like, we're going to be fine, right? Like, Congress needs to approve whatever Elon and Vivek come up with. And I was like, how do you guys get paid so much to do this work?

This is not necessarily true. If you look at Trump's OMB chief, this is the person who oversees the budget. His name is Russ Vo in the first term. It's a little unclear because he was associated with Project 2025, whether he'll get that spot back. But assuming he does, which I think he will,

He has spent the last several years in the Biden administration working on legal theories related to something called impoundment. Impoundment is the president's ability to say, I don't want this spending program to continue because I think the original purpose that Congress authorized is no longer valid.

Russ vote and some of the lawyers close to him who are already on the Trump team have spent a lot of time thinking about how do we use this legal theory of impoundment to stop spending on federal programs we don't like. And that is a huge potential constitutional showdown here because what it means is that

the president could say, Congress approved this, but I don't want to do it. And so I'm going to stop this federal program. And that, that means that that can be ironic. If that's real, if they, if they either win in the courts or just want to try, that could change the entire complexion of a blue ribbon commission that puts up non-binding recommendations to the Hill that the Hill just says, like F off, like I already authorized these programs. And so

I think people are really sleeping on the possibility that Elon and Vivek do much more than, I think, the conventional wisdom even among, like, well-paid lobbyists in Washington. I think that's a really important point on both of those, which is that it's possible and it would require novel legal theories. I know, and I've heard very similar about the pursuit of this. That said, last time around Jeff, you know, he didn't say many things about tariffs. He did back down.

He did ultimately carry through some national security tariffs on soybeans, et cetera, and a few other things. But by and large, there was a huge war with Congressional Republicans, day one, as you said, about trying to divert funds. He tried to do that on the border wall. It was a colossal failure, got struck down by the court. So there are several systems in place which could seriously throw a wrench into his plans here now.

No, that's totally true. And it's hard to know how to weight these things. I think the impoundment thing, they got a shot with the conservative Supreme Court. My understanding is from people close to this, that they're looking at what is an example of an obviously wasteful program that is spending money that the White House clearly has an interest in stopping. Can they get the Supreme Court to approve

their theory in that case, and then go and implement all these other ones that are maybe like more edge cases. In terms of the tariffs, whether he does an automatic 20% tariff on every country, again, as you're saying, there is a lot of resistance among congressional Republicans to going down that route. My understanding from Trump transition officials is that they are working on proposals to do that.

If they back down on the rubber to throw, like, maybe they will and we'll hopefully, you know, talk about it then, but I think they're gonna try. Yeah, they certainly might. Jeff, we always appreciate your analysis, sir. Thank you for joining us. Great to see you, Jeff. Love being on. Thanks, guys. It's your pleasure.

All right, so let's get back to some of the nominations that have already been made and curious for Sagar's reaction to these as well. So we have Matt Gaetz, who has been nominated to serve as attorney general of the United States. Let's put this up on the screen. There are some questions.

over whether or not Mr. Gates would be confirmed as attorney general. He has been himself investigated by the Department of Justice for alleged sex trafficking. They dropped that investigation. He's also been investigated by a Republican led house ethics committee into similar allegations. And we can get into a little bit more of the specifics. But in any case, he's also just not really particularly well liked on Capitol Hill amongst anyone. I just hate him.

Yeah, it has nothing to do with policy. It has almost all to do with, well, the Kevin McCarthy thing and being a grandstander. He's a hard person to get along with. Yeah. In my personal experience, he is a difficult person to like as a human being. So anyway, according to NBC's report, and I've seen some other reporting to this effect as well, more than half of Senate Republicans, including some in senior leadership, privately say they do not see a path

for Matt Gaetz to be confirmed as attorney general would not support him to lead the Department of Justice. While Gaetz's ability to be confirmed there right appears on the rocks among Senate Republicans, President-elect Trump's team remains confident, he will eventually be confirmed even if it's after an ugly battle. NBC News spoke to more than 15 additional Republican sources who agreed there are not enough votes in the Senate to confirm Gaetz in some estimated that closer to 30 Republicans consider him unqualified with thoughts.

I, this relates to the RFK junior discussion. I think this is what America voted for. I think Donald Trump was serious whenever he said schedule F, fire everybody. The Department of Justice is going to, what did, what did JD say? He's like going to be the most important part of it. Yeah, that's what Gates is. Gates is a loyalist.

On policy, I mean, he's actually an interesting guy, right? I mean, I don't like that he's very pro-weed, but he is very consistently pro-weed. He's a lot more libertarian. He wants to pardon Julian Assange, to pardon Edward Snowden. He is genuinely anti-war, has been worked with Rokana previously in the past. So, I mean, if you were to ask me, like, relative to some of the other picks, I actually don't think he's bad.

Will he get through? That is an open question. But this is actually one, two, where we were talking about this on the phone. And I still, it really remains to be seen. If Trump wants somebody through, I do feel like he's going to get him. And the question around Gates is, was this all some jujitsu maneuver to avoid the house ethics committee? I mean, that's certainly possible. Kevin McCarthy has been insinuating from the very beginning that this entire

McCarthy coup was revenge against Kevin McCarthy because he's like, I've seen the text messages. I've seen the ethics report. I'm, you know, whether any of that's going to come to fruition. I mean, the charges against Gates, like the image of it is not great. I mean, I will say in his defense, the charges genuinely were dropped by the DOJ.

and all the allegations and stuff were leaked against him. That's that, even if what he was doing was legal. Like honestly, let's be honest, like it's skeevy and it's gross, right? And even terms of even the legality of like what he was up to at that time, will it be enough to sink him? Come on, you know, in the age where, first of all, you know, what did RFK tell me about skeletons in its closet? Like in the age where these people are knowingly put up

And especially in a backlash against Me Too and in the post-Kavana era, I don't see some sexual harassment allegation or whatever against somebody sinking any. I mean, I really don't. Well, there's a few things to say about that. First of all, the allegation we could put, let's put A7 up on the screen, which has some of the details here of the allegations. A woman told the House Ethics Committee that she saw Matt Gaetz.

have sex with a minor. That minor alleged to be 17 years old. You have both the minor herself and the client who allegedly witnessed this testifying to these events. It is something

that the Republican Party has been running around for years now, talking endlessly about the Democratic Party being filled with pedophiles and the whole QAnon conspiracy theory and obsessed with Epstein, et cetera, et cetera. And then your literal candidate for attorney general, chief law enforcement officer of the United States is credibly accused of sleeping with a minor.

So there's that. Okay, on this front, though, and I'm not diminishing the accusation, the DOJ investigated it, right? They dropped the allegations, they dropped the charges, like if it was true, wouldn't they have prosecuted? Look, nobody hates Matt Gaetz more than the permanent bureaucracy. It's very, I mean, it's very difficult to, it's very difficult to acquire enough evidence to say with beyond a reasonable doubt.

But you can, I don't think that you would deny that if you had a similar fact pattern about a Democrat, Republicans would be running wild with it. But the other point to be made here is, all of these men's, we're talking about Trump, RFK Jr. RFK Jr doesn't even really deny the sexual assault allegations against him in the interview with you. He did not really deny them.

There's a wild answer. So anyway, R.K. Jr., Trump himself, Gates, and Hegseth, all of them, at least somewhat credibly accused of sexual assault. And part of it is what you said, like the post-MeToo era, like that, is part of what makes this not an accident that these men would all be put up. But it's also, you know, with Trump, a lot of his picks are about

loyalty and his ability to dominate and control them and guarantee that no matter what he wants them to do or what bridge he wants them to cross that they're not going to, you know, they're going to maintain their loyalty and they're going to do whatever he ultimately wants them to do no matter what that is.

And having a lot of dirt on someone or having someone who is compromised so much that the rest of the mainstream world wouldn't accept them or who's burned their bridges as RFK Jr. and Tulsi did with the other political party where they're never going to be accepted back across that bridge.

Those are all insurance policies that those people are going to, even if you ask them to do something illegal, immoral, unconstitutional, whatever, that they're going to stay the course and stand by you. So in that way, I don't think it's an accident that you have all of these individuals who have, you know, who are kind of deeply compromised in different ways. Maybe that's part of it. Honestly, I think that, look, their own personal stuff and all that aside.

And by the way, on the Gates case, we did a lot of our stuff on the Gates stuff, but something Glenn Greenwald genuinely did convince me of is like, you know, when we are just talking about allegations or whatever that were leaked from the DOJ, and then they end up dropping the case, like that is kind of a miscarriage, at least of the way that the public

has to look at this stuff. He was accused of sex trafficking minors. I mean, these are heinous, horrible charges that will lock you up for a long time. And at the end of the day, they dropped it because of lack of evidence. And some people do deserve due process. And I think we should actually preserve that for a lot of people. And this is actually a big part of the backlash to the whole MeToo era and like what really constitutes a sexual harassment, cancellation, and all of that. So I'll just put that out there specifically on Gates. Whether this woman is lying or not, I have no idea.

But, you know, in general, when politicians are involved, like, I'm skeptical. And if the Department of Justice- There'll be multiple women that are lying, but- Okay, but if the Justice Department says, we don't have the evidence to prosecute you, I mean, I'm inclined to go with it and just say, well, clearly, there's not enough to back that up. So somebody says something so- You think we should see the House Ethics Committee report? Yes, I actually do.

Uh, and see, this will put me on the other side of MAGA and all those people. Let's see it. Look, I mean, is it going to be good for Gates? Probably not. And that's what I meant to them. I mean, that's what's very noteworthy is you did not, he did not have to resign his seat. He resigned two days before the report was set to be released. Yes, because it probably did the report from coming out. And so that, the fact that he resigned, then they canceled the meeting where they were supposed to deliver it, whether or not to release this report. So, okay, if there's a lack of evidence and there's no there there, then people should be able to see the report.

I agree with releasing the report. The reason they don't want the report released is because, like I just said, it's he even if what he was doing, this is like when we were talking about Dave Portnoy. It was like Dave Portnoy was, you know, he had the Me Too allegation or whatever against him. And it's like in his defense was that he was sleeping with girls who were 20 years younger than him who were DMing him on Instagram.

Legal, yeah, creepy, weird, you know, yeah. And so that's, the defense of Matt Gaetz is that he was knowingly engaged in like sex parties on boats with rich people while doing drugs and getting drunk, like straight up DJN behavior. And it's like, that's not something that a public official wants out of their butt.

with young women. People were like 18, 19 years old. So yeah, I mean, that's sketchy and gross, but it's like technically legal. So it's one of those in the ethics report. I get why he doesn't want it out there. You know, he's married now and all of it. No politician would want probably shouldn't be engaging that behavior. But I agree with you, actually. I think the report should be released. If you want to be the top law enforcement officer, first of all, I mean, you got to think about this in terms of blackmail and compromise. Exactly.

You know, what people used to talk about a lot during the Trump era, you kind of do want all of your skeletons out at this point. And to be honest, again, in the Trump era, like this stuff is not going to sink you. Will it be bad? But for Trump himself, will it really lead to him withdrawing his nomination? No, I don't say it all. And I do think, like,

I do think if he wants Gates, he's going to get Gates. And, you know, I mean, you made the point about like, he genuinely on economics is like, had said something like Selena Khan and whatever. But I also don't think we should fool ourselves that that's why he got picked. He got picked because he's a loyalist. He got picked because whoever Trump wants Gates to go after, Gates is going to go after.

And, you know, so that's why he's put in the position. And that is what Donald Trump talked about on the campaign trail. I disagree that that's really what people voted for. I think people voted more for like, hey, the economy was kind of good with him. More so than like, you know, I want Matt Gaetz to be attorney general of the United States. But you're right. It's not like he didn't

It's not like his statements on the campaign trail are inconsistent with this type of a choice for Attorney General United States. I do think his statements on the campaign trail are inconsistent with like Marco Rubio and other neocons being selected for key foreign policy positions, but no one should have been surprised about that either.

If you look at how inconsistent Trump himself has been, what his first term was like, et cetera, et cetera. So the other person we referenced here is Pete Hegstaff, who has his own allegations that have just emerged against him. Let's go and put this up on the screen. He's, of course, picked for Secretary of Defense. Again, very important to know these things in terms of potential blackmail. And so the allegations here are that, so we know that he did pay.

An accuser who said that he had sexually assaulted her. The story goes that he was at some conference in California. And there was a woman who was, she's a conservative Republican, who was staying at the hotel there with her small children and her husband, who was tasked with the unenviable task of trying to get Pete, a drunken Pete Haggseth back to his hotel room.

Apparently, a couple of other women that he was at the bar with were becoming kind of uncomfortable with him and his overtures that they were making to him. So this one was tasked with, okay, let's get Drunken Pete Haggseth back up to his room because he's got to make his flight tomorrow. And then according to her, at some point in the evening, she received these texts from the bar.

Um, she says that she sensed Higgseth was irritated. What happened next is in dispute. They're right. According to the memo, Jane Doe did not remember anything until she was in his hotel room and stumbling to find her hotel room. Her memory of six to nine hours is very hazy. Her husband was searching for her and was relieved when she finally showed up.

The following day, the woman returned home, had a moment of hazy memory of being raped the night before, had a panic attack, went to the emergency room, received a rape kit examination that was positive for semen. The woman gave county authorities a statement about what happened according to the memo sent to the transition team. HEGSET says this is all a lie that she concocted to try to save her marriage.

and that the encounter was consensual. Obviously, her version of events is very different from that. We do know that he paid her some undisclosed settlement amount to keep this whole thing quiet. And then the other thing that we know we can put A9 up on the screen is that apparently the Trump team was caught off guard by this. They didn't know about this particular allegation. There is a police record of the, that was recorded at the time of the alleged incident.

And so they were kind of caught off guard and had some meetings about this and how serious it was blah, blah, blah, but like they seem to be standing by him and that doesn't surprise me. No, look, I mean, again, with Pete Exhath, it's his own personal life. It's not exactly like he was an angel.

Yeah, and this is the guy that runs around with all kind of, you know, ultra Christian tattoos, whatever. But you've been seeing even on that. It's like, you know, everyone, what is a douse vault that everyone's making? It's like, guys, in the 2010s, that was huge in military culture. It has nothing to do with... It's got like a crusaders cross on his chest.

Yeah, which he got in Israel. That's actually a little weird if you ask. But that's a separate conversation. The same thing about Pete Hagg Seth that I think about RFK and Tulsi and all these people. These people want to blow shit up. Pete Hagg Seth is an anti-DEI

warrior. People should go and listen to him on the Sean Ryan podcast, which he gave. It was a couple of weeks ago where he talked about his book. He's made it pretty clear, like what he wants to do. And that's why Trump picked him. I would also say there's a huge part of revenge. And I was texting you guys whenever I was on the plane, whenever he got picked, because I was like, people forget he, they tried to pick him for VA secretary last time in 2018. The Pentagon and the bureaucracy hate

Pete, they specifically, the Pentagon hates him because he circumvented the UCMJ or whatever and got Eddie Gallagher and those people out of prison and to get Trump to pardon them while he was in the military. So the brass despises him more than anything. Those are the war criminals that he got part of. Allegedly. Well, he pardoned them. So look, and actually the case is complicated. There's a book called Alpha. They were going read about it.

No, I'm saying the book itself. It's not a legend. No, I'm saying the book basically it's questionable, at least in Eddie's case. It's a weird case. You should go and read about it. Alpha platoon by a New York Times reporter. He, by the way, thinks Eddie is guilty, but at least he goes into the details. My point is, is that on HEGSAD specifically, the bureaucracy hates his guts.

He himself though, is I think he will be very popular with the rank and file. But really what it is is if you combine this with the quote unquote, like anti woke, anti four star agenda and people who are genuinely loyal to Trump, Hagg Seth is the correct choice.

Hegsat is a former Fox News contributor. For being honest on ideology, this dude is all over the damn map. He's pro-Israel, he was pro-Iraq War, then he was against the Iraq War, he was pro-Russia. Well, you wanted to just pro-Iraq War. He was led an organization that was like pushing the Iraq War. I'm not gonna sit here. I mean, he was a cheerleader. And defend Pete Hegsat's like pro-Iraq. The best case I can give for you is Pete is a MAGA dude. And for people who know him, including some people I've spoken to,

He fundamentally changed his mind when Donald Trump became the person who was in charge. He became a major Trump booster when he was on Fox and Friends. On Ukraine, he has had a complete 180 vermin interview that I saw that he gave just a few months ago. So I can at least tell you on that front, he's good to go. But really what it is is that I actually don't think he's ideological on foreign policy as much as he is just a Trump yes.

And I mean, to be honest, frankly, best case scenario, whenever you're thinking about somebody like Marco Rubio or Mike Waltz, who are for real ideologues, who really do have an agenda, who have people, an entire national security generation of people who are committed neocons, who they will bring in under their team.

A key part that I talked about on the Lex Freeman podcast, so give away some of it here for free, is I was like Trump misunderstands bureaucracy and also his own role. So like Trump on Rogan, very interesting part of it, where he was like, oh, I hired John Bolton because he makes people afraid. And people were like, oh, see, he hires the Hawks.

strategically. And it's like, well, first of all, what you don't understand is that when Trump is not paying attention and watching Fox and friends in the Oval Office, is that John Bolton's in the situation room and he's running all that shit. So Bolton, there's a million things that are all happening that Donald Trump never ever touches, right? His desk, the interagency process, that ideology that spreads through the government.

Government is not one person, it's 5,000 people. And you want all 5,000 of those people to be united on an agenda. So when you intentionally pick people who don't agree with you, or even maybe they do agree with you, whatever the scary part of that is, but who have a real ideological agenda, you will have consequences for your actions that you may not even knowingly sign up for. So Marco Rubio, will Trump really give a shit about South America policy? Almost certainly not, right? Zero in terms of its

importance. You think Marco Rubio, the guy who literally wanted like a push in Venezuela for Juan Guaido and wants like like returned a 1980 style South American revolutionary, whatever stuff under Ronald Reagan? Yeah, I think he will care under the State Department.

And he will install people under his term, you know, in his office who Donald Trump never even thinks about but could have tremendous consequence for policy. So that is with a big problem with a lot of Trump's big ideological picks is he does not understand government at a fundamental level because he thinks that it's all about him.

which of course like serves his role. But the interagency process of the people that you hire and others, when they are really ideological, it's a big problem. And they will, they will, they can cause colossal damage on the inside.

I just think Trump doesn't really, isn't really making these choices for primarily ideological reasons outside of I know that they'll be loyal to me and when push comes to shove, they're gonna do what I want them to do. And I'm not talking about like trade policy or whatever. I think that when he wanted to overturn the last election and he met resistance from the Department of Justice,

that resistance from military, that resistance from the Senate, and his own vice president, he made sure he wanted to make sure that that would never happen again. So you put in, you know, Gates at the Department of Justice, like Gates is going to do whatever Donald Trump wants him to do. You get JD Vance for vice president instead of Mike Pence. And part of that audition process for JD was making sure like you're going to backstop the steal and you're going to say you would have done what Mike Pence wouldn't do period end of story.

um, Pete Hackseth at Department of Defense, like very similar vibe. Like I'm going to make sure that these major institutions that stood in my way last time are not going to stand in my way this time. And same thing with the Senate. Like in some ways, all of these confirmations are a test of let me put up like in Matt Gates specifically, let me put up the person that you all literally hate like the most, like that you find to be like the most odious.

And I'm going to force it through. And whether it's you all voting for it or me just doing it anyway, you're going to see you will not resist me this time. And this was also important with the power play that he pulled with the advising consent process, right?

because this is an important part of the Senate powers. They're very proud of their role in this. Like, this is a big deal for them, right? And you got John Thru now in there who is going to be the Senate Majority Leader who is not the pick of MAGA, not who Donald Trump wanted. He's like a Mitch McConnell-type acolyte. But even with him, when Trump was like, we're going to do recess appointments and I'm going to get my picks, John Thune was right away like, yes, OK, we will do that. So a lot of these moves

Yes, there are different ideologies that he likes and in this way or likes this piece or whatever. The consistent through line to me is any institution that was an obstacle to my ambitions on not again, not really policy, but on like overturning the election. If you are an obstacle then I'm going to make sure.

that those institutions are bent to my will this time. And that's what I see primarily in these picks, because there isn't an ideological consistency between Marco Rubio and Tulsi Yabber, right? It literally makes no sense. Yeah, that is the, you know, that is the, even between like a Pete Hex up in an RFK junior, there's not ideological consistency, you know?

It's about who is going to be there in these institutions that were previously an obstacle to me being able to, you know, do everything I wanted to do.

How am I gonna make sure that that doesn't stand in my way this time around? And you've already got the Supreme Court in a lot of ways, not fully, but in many ways, it's shaped by his choices that are on the court. He's likely to get at least one war Supreme Court pick. The Supreme Court has already said that he's immune for any quote-unquote official acts. What exactly that means is yet to be adjudicated, but wide bandwidth there for his own personal immunity.

So I think there's going to be very little that stands in his way in terms of getting what he wants and when he wants it.

I think yes and no in terms of the, for example, it gets down to what are we actually talking about here. So for, let's say the DEI like woke thing, right? That's an area where Pete Haggseth is going to have the total backing of the president. Let's see also in terms of, I think it really is just going to depend on a case by case basis because even for what you said about recess appointments, it may be true that John Thune said, yeah, let's do recess appointments. Guess what Mitch McConnell said today?

We're not doing any research appointments. And John Thune was like, we don't have the support in the conference to do any research appointments. Basically, they don't want a cave to the precedent because in the future, they don't want Democrats when they have power to do research appointments still, which is funny, but it's, you know, I'll show you that they still have some authority.

But the Trump people have worked out this provision that they think that they could use, where there's this technicality, if the House and the Center are in dispute about whether or not they're adjourned in a recess, then the President can come in and say, we're in a recess. And so that's the power that they plan to use to basically have this led from the White House, where it's like, we don't really care, Don Thune and Mitch McConnell, whether you have the votes to go into recess, we're gonna do it.

And maybe, ultimately, through the courts and blah, blah, blah, maybe there's some pushback, but who knows? Trump's got a lot of his own judges on the bench at this point, and a Supreme Court that's quite amenable to him as well. But they have plans in place to get even someone like a Matt Gaetz or an RFK junior who have, Tulsi, whoever, you think is the most difficult to confirm to get them through, which is why I just think that I think that there is a

I think there is a concerted plan to make sure that there is no institutional obstacle to Trump doing whatever Trump wants to do. What does that mean? I don't think we really know, because it's not like we could have predicted stop the stealing advance. It's not like we could have predicted, you know, the Black Lives Matter protests and Trump saying, hey, let's just go and shoot the protesters in the legs. Like, I don't know that we know what that's ultimately going to mean in terms of how he uses

the um you know the powers of the government and the military and whatever but that to me getting all of those roadblocks that previously irked him out of the way is the primary thrust of both the sort of policy thinking that's going into the transition and certainly into these personnel choices. I don't think there's any policy.

You know, but I'm talking about like for example the thing about the how that how we could use this policy to get into recess Yes, you know those sorts of things how Jeff talked about you know actually there's you can use a National security emergency to institute all of your tariffs like there is there is thinking about how they can basically bypass any sort of thing that was a check previously and Get done whatever the hell it is that they want to get done

I don't think that's an incorrect view of it. I think it will really come down. But first of all, Trump is a deeply capricious person who changes his mind literally constantly and depending on the last person that he spoke to. So anybody who thinks he has some concerted grand plan or any of that, I don't think any of that.

is true. I do think it's correct that the picks that he has gone with are based upon personal loyalty and basically nothing else. I think that could have a lot of pluses and minuses. In some cases, when he wants to do good things, it'll be fantastic. In some cases, whenever he wants to follow through on stop the steal or some other bullshit like that, it can be very detrimental to the American system. The question really will come down to

what the institutional pushback within the permanent bureaucracy will look like, what Congress and its immense powers will be able to flex. And then, of course, the Supreme Court. I do think people overestimate the loyalty that the Supreme Court will give Donald Trump. Don't forget, while they did give him immunity, under the last Roberts term, they shot down numerous attempts by him to bypass the interagency process from the census, the so-called travel like Muslim ban.

And I can go on forever. I mean, the Obamacare thing, even before that. So there are many examples of Trump trying to, you know, use this new legal authority where this is where I think Jeff is also underestimating, you know, what the legal, the legal system and the Ninth Circuit and the way our entire appellate courts work.

and the rents that they can throw in. You can, you know, theorize all day long. Joe Biden tried to do a lot of things under executive order, like the, you know, the student loan and all that other stuff is shit gets struck down constantly. You know, the appellate courts can come in and they can change things. So I wouldn't underestimate on the other side what the institutional checks are, although it will be a much more of a loyal administration. But I think we knew that going in. I think we also knew that going in. We did it. Certainly. But I think I knew that going in. I don't, like, I don't know if that's what, like,

I do think that there is a significant

frustration with democracy in the public, where the idea of like, he's just gonna be a strong man and come in and, you know, his like, I'm gonna be a dictator on day one. Like for some people, for some people, that was something they had to overcome to vote for him. And for some people, that was a feature, not a bug. That was an affirmative part of the pitch of like, hey, democracy, like this doesn't seem so great. Let's just get someone in there who's gonna like, you know, do whatever he wants to do.

So yeah, in that sense, I think there is a chunk of the public that basically voted for authoritarian power taking. And I think that's the plan and what we're seeing, effectuated here, which, yeah, it doesn't, I mean, it's entirely consistent with what he was saying and with the way he wanted to operate in the first term. And the other thing is, and then we'll

You can respond if you want. We'll move on because we've been talking about this for a while. But you also see a number of previously bastions of quote-unquote resistance that have really, out of fear or necessity or whatever, have really capitulated to Trump. So even before the election, you saw Bezos.

being like, you know, Washington Post, we're not going to do an endorsement. You saw Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, Tim Cook, Tim Apples, Trump, all of them calling Trump, hey, big guy, just calling to check in. Really?

excited for the next administration trying to make nice with him. Because they know that the way that he was going to get his oils in place, and he was going to use the federal government to go after, whether it's like Amazon, which has tons of government contracts or cracked on on Facebook for any sort of like politics, political speech on there that he doesn't like, et cetera, et cetera, like the powers of the federal government are vast, and he's not afraid to weaponize them. So there was a lot of already capitulation to that.

one funny and annoying indicator of this as well. You heard Morning Joe, Joe and Mika. We're going to cover it tomorrow. I think we have. But just to tease it for now, Joe and Mika making the trek down to Mar-a-Lago to bend the knee and kiss the ring. And Steve Bann is out there saying, hey, Matt Gaetz is, he literally said Matt Gaetz is going to prosecute MSNBC host, like Ari Melbourne, he named specifically. Don't get my

So you think Joe and Mika are thinking like, hey, you know, maybe we need to get on the other side of this just to be sure and hedge our bets. So I also think that some of the previous bastions of resistance in 2016, we already know, are not going to be there this time around as well. And you know, I think the courts could also be part of

It's certainly possible. I would see the thing is, is that this time around, the grounds for resistance are just not there. Trump is not a one-off. Is the democratically elected twice elected? Well, there's always grounds for resistance. No, but I'm saying like the Russiagate shock, the lack of the popular vote, all that stuff last time around is gone. And I mean, it should be gone. Trump has been literally elected with a popular vote, with a mandate to govern, not for the first time the Republicans in 2004. So you have to adjust your priors, just like dramatically.

And a lot of liberals have the view basically that you express on her of like, hey, you people voted for this? You are gonna get what you deserve is the attitude. It's not like I think that- I would reframe it, not deserve it. I think that's outrageous. But that is what, there's like, okay.

Latinos, you voted for mass deportation. Okay, this is what Joy Reid said. Now, you're responsible for your mixed status family getting deported. Okay, Muslim Americans, you voted for Trump. Enjoy as your family members are slaughtered in Gaza and the West Bank is permanently annexed, et cetera, et cetera. I think that that's personally, from the liberal perspective,

come at this from a different angle. From the liberal perspective, I think that that is disgusting, to just like, you know, okay, you deserve what you get, et cetera, et cetera. But that's part of the capitulation to this view, is like, we're not gonna fight it. Like, enjoy, you know, enjoy your new Muslim and enjoy your mass deportation. If you all voted for this, you get what you deserve. Yeah, well, mine is more of an affirmation. I'm like, look, I think they actually want it, and I think they should get it.

And I also think that people for so long have been wondering like, what's it like to actually blow stuff up? And it's like, let's find out. Let's see what happens. You know, it's not like the current system is working all that well. And look, here's the craziest and most dangerous thing. What if it works? What if America likes it? I mean, you were talking about our authoritarian tendencies. I wouldn't put it that way. I think people like a strong executive. People have wanted that for a long time. You know, America does like a monarch in name,

But only they liked it under FDR. They liked it under LBJ. They liked it under Nixon. The crazy thing in America is we just get to change, you know, who are immensely powerful person is. And I think people genuinely do, you know, want to see us like a serious version of what they actually voted for in practice. The other side of this, and I could be totally wrong too, is that there are all these swing voters out there who believe in like checks and balances, right? Yeah. I'm a Democratic senator and whatever, Republican

President, I'm like, well, that's fucking stupid if you ask me because it's like that means that you're just going to get nothing done and you're actually voting for the status quo. But you know, you do what you want. So I do think, though, that there are a large percentage of people dramatic amount of percentages.

of people who did swing, especially these swing coalitions who voted for Donald Trump, who want to like light the match and put it on the fire and just see what happens. And so in this respect like this, you know, you would, you may call it authoritarian. I think he's like the vehicle. I mean, what did he say in his 2016 inauguration? I'm forgetting the exact, I am your retribution, right? I am your retribution.

I think that's a real reason why a lot of people voted for Trump and how it will manifest itself. I mean, that's still a big and an open question.

All right, everybody, we had to skip ahead to UFO. We just talked way too much. So the DNC and the Ukraine sections will be pushed to tomorrow. So Tuesday, don't worry, we'll have a nice full show already. That's stuff that we're going to discuss. But I did want to get into the show a little bit of a recap of the UFO hearing. There were some very interesting moments that happened there. So we've collated a few of them for you. The first that we want to start with is a testimony

and questioning from Lou Elizondo, who was a part of the Pentagon and one of the people chiefly responsible for bringing to light the public to the public the existence of a lot of these UFO videos that existed inside of the Pentagon and for some of the transparency movement behind it. So he gave some really shocking testimony under questioning from Anna Paulina Luna. Let's take a listen. Would you agree that it's likely that they are being piloted by some mind-body connection?

I think it is safe to presume here that they are being intelligently controlled because some cases seem to anticipate our maneuvers. And in other cases, they seem to, and I came across an email where the word stalked was used in a very secure email between Navy officers discussing their ships being pursued by UAP.

In our previous panel, we had Grash and he had testified to say that some of these were interdimensional beings. Can you speak on that at all?

Ma'am, I'm not qualified, certainly as a scientist or otherwise, to speculate points of origin. I looked at everything from a scientific perspective, so if you look at, for example, instantaneous acceleration, which was one of the observables of the program that I belonged to, A-Tip, the human body can withstand about nine G-forces for a short period of time before you suffer negative biological consequences, blackouts and ultimately redouts and even death.

In comparison, our best technology, the F-16, which is older platform, but one of our most highly maneuverable aircraft, manned aircraft, made by General Dynamics, can perform about 17 or 18 G-forces before you start having structural failure, meaning that the airframe begins to disintegrate while you're flying. The vehicles we're talking about are performing in excess of 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 Gs.

I guess would it be safe to infer that they're living craft?

You know, I'm not prepared at this point to state for the record is something alive or not, because even that definition is right. There was a time in science we thought that life required oxygen. And we now know that's not true. There are anaerobic bacteria that thrive in an oxygen environment that lack oxygen. And also same with photosynthesis. When I was in college, it was told everything is derived from photosynthesis as a form of energy. In reality, that's not true.

there are things that live off of chemosynthesis. So we're constantly having to reevaluate our understanding of what the definition of life is.

3,000 Gs, let that one sink in there. And there's been some discussion previously, especially in regards to the tic-tac incident. Let's also go to the next one here, because this is a really critical part of it. This is specifically about the GOP oversight and about some of the previous allegations that were happening in terms of budgeting and how previous ways that the Department of Defense can get around transparency in others is by piloting and positioning them through military contractors to avoid transparency.

to avoid disclosure. It's also part of the reason the Pentagon literally cannot pass an audit. Let's take a listen to that section. To your knowledge, any communication with a non-human life form.

So the term communication is a bit of a trick word because there's verbal communication like we're having now. The problem is you also have non-verbal communication. And so I would say definitively yes, but from a non-verbal meaning when a Russian reconnaissance aircraft comes into US airspace, we surrender to F-22s and we are certainly communicating intent and capability.

I think the same goes with this. We have these things that are being observed over controlled US airspace. And they're not really doing a good job hiding themselves. They're making it pretty obvious they have the ability to even interfere with our nuclear equities and our nuclear readiness. So too, pretty interesting allegations there. So there's, look, in terms of the hearing, it was a lot about getting stuff on the record. There were some issues, as I was told, in terms of the Immaculate Constellation document, the 12-page document that was put,

into the congressional record. I won't go into all of that just yet because we're about to play a video. But overall, this was about getting Lou Elizondo in questioning, getting some of the things on the record, going into the Trump administration. And that's one thing where, look, Trump and RFK actually, Gates, as well, have all said

that they are at least in favor of UFO transparency of disclosure. There is like some sort of horseshoe MAGA crossover currently with UFOs and Trump. So the question is, is that are we going to get

some of this to be released, you know, considering that Tulsi Gabbard's now going up for the ODNI position is certainly possible in some sort of transparency laden effort to actually declassify a lot of these documents and actually just give it out to the general public. The other option is the permanent bureaucracy only burrows even further in and you're not going to get anything. But nonetheless, it was very interesting to see some of this go on the record. Was there enough for during the first Trump administration to get him to release this documents and why has he said that he didn't?

This, this you, so he said he did it at the request of Mike Pompeo, just like with the JFK. So let's, you know, first with that. Also, look, Trump doesn't care about the issue. And this is unfortunate. He's not somebody who has ever expressed a deep interest. The whole UFO thing has taken years to enter the public consciousness.

Lou Elizondo is one of those people who's chiefly responsible for getting these videos out to the public. He was there and name checked in the 2017 New York Times article that started this whole thing. That's when people were like, holy shit, are UFOs actually real? In those videos, I can say that for myself. The problem with the legitimization is people kind of just saw it and then just moved past. Lou Elizondo himself was out of the government. Then what happened in the interim period of years is people like David Fraver came out and gave interviews. You had people now like David Grash who have come forward.

You've had almost eight years of the public reconciling himself to both the lies and the transparency and people like Christopher Miller and others who have come forward and have spoken about this program. So I would say it is more primed, I think, both for the public, for the military bureaucracy,

and also even members of Congress. You know, these people thought it was all a joke. Also, you have got you. Rubio is a UFO guy. That's very true. Well, okay, I'll put it this way. I don't know if he's a UFO guy in terms of he's a believer, but he was the head of the intelligence committee in the Senate and his staff and others were always consistent that they were very concerned about the reports they would get. Notice, and I think this is intentional, is they always talk about readiness.

because the one-way angle you can always get Congress and others to care about is like, hey, we literally have things that are flying around up there, and we have no idea what they are, including being able to disable nuclear missile silos and submarines, and people have no clue what's actually happening. So I think that's how I would contextualize this hearing. I will end with this part, but again, I have to note that there were some issues with the enter of this into the record. So let's go ahead and get to Nancy Mase's questioning about the Immaculate Constellation Program

entered in the congressional record. Let's take a listen. There is a document that will be entered into the congressional record today. Mr. Tim Burchett from Tennessee has this document, and we just distributed it to every member up here on the dais of this document. But this is going to be the original document from the Pentagon about immaculate constellation that Michael Schellenberger delivered to Congress today.

So thank you, Mr. Schellenberger, for this information. We are all reading it in real time now, and Mr. Burchette will enter it into the record. But 12 pages about this unacknowledged special access program that your government says does not exist.

like I said in terms of that pro basically it's entered in the congressional record but as I understand it like I said there were some issues regarding the enter of that into the record and this is part of the controversy and you know things that have come out of it my point just being that on the program itself in terms of getting things

into the congressional effort. This was an effort to try and to enter Michael Schellenberger's original report, you know, in there so that people can read for itself. And because you want to get this stuff into the record, it allows for investigation, public transparency, which is the ultimate goal of the project. Overall, I would not call it hearing like a tremendous successor

anything like that because nothing other than actual disclosure is, I think it was just pushing the ball forward and setting things up for the next Trump administration. All right. And what that will look like. It's going to be interesting. I know it's complicated. Listen, if I'm going to get Trump, at least I can get like JFK files and alien files. JFK and aliens? That's right. I mean, think about it. You know, if you ever wanted someone to meet an alien, wouldn't it be Donald Trump?

in terms of the precedent. Who would you want? Which command or achievement have definitely not been? I'm sure this is something that I've really thought that I'm prepared to find out. I haven't really thought it through. If you want to go eat, there is a theory that Dwight Eisenhower once had a conference with aliens, but we won't get to that today.

A socialist candidate for Mayor of New York City took a unique approach to finding out why non-white working class voters in the Bronx and in Queens decided to vote how they did. He actually went and asked them. Did you get a chance to vote on Tuesday? I didn't vote. And why did you not vote? Because I don't believe in the system anymore. And did you get a chance to vote on Tuesday? Yes! And who did you vote for? The million dollar question.

Hellside Avenue in Queens and Fortum Road in the Bronx are two areas that saw the biggest shift towards Trump in last week's election. Even more residents didn't vote at all.

They like Trump because they don't want the Palestinian, the brothers, the killed. The war in Ukraine, the Democrats giving all the money and the war. It's no good. The swing is because people want lower prices. They probably believe that Trump will give them that. Energy, gas, la comida. Most of these people are working families. They're working one to two, three jobs. And rent is expensive. Foods are going up. Utility bills are up. And that's your hope to see a little bit more of an affordable life.

Absolutely. What Trump did in the first four years, Fordham Road, saw something where Kamala couldn't do that. There were young voters who didn't vote for her because of the genocide, and I wouldn't have voted for her if I did, but I did vote for her, obviously, because I have comments on it. Can you tell me a little bit more about why you didn't vote? Since you're out here, you know, Kazza, who should I vote? Either side. We'll go ahead, send bombs from here to kill my brothers and sisters. Palestine issue and then other issue is like Russia and then Ukraine. He has stopped that war. That's why I bought him.

You can't say you're a Democrat and stand for the genocide that's going on in Gaza.

period. Practically, I like don't think. I like don't look at what is there. I don't look like this because I would look a lot like people that die. Have you voted for Democrats in the past? I have. And what would it take for you to vote for a Democrat in the future? Being able to pay attention to the regular Americans and their economic needs. They should make economics the forefront of their campaign. People were not really feeling it in their pocket. I voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. I voted against Trump also in the 2018 midterms.

insulting us, playing on our emotions. All they do is shame you, and they just want to use, like, let's see campaigns, and they get celebrities. It's like, if you're speaking to things that people want to hear about, I don't care what color you are. I'll vote for you. So, obviously, quite a number of voters there expressing concerns about prices, the economy, etc. But I was actually genuinely surprised by how many brought up the issue of Gaza. Quote, the Democrats are giving all the money in the war.

Quote, either side, we'll go ahead and send bombs from here to kill my brothers and sisters. Quote, you can't say you're a Democrat and stand for the genocide that's going on in Gaza, period. This actually echoes what AOC heard from her own constituents who had backed her and Trump on the same ballot. Number of these AOC Trump voters said they felt she and Trump were both authentic or anti-establishment. But again, Gaza came up a number of times in these responses.

quote, voted for Trump and you not genocide Harris. Democrats became the party that supports war and simply because of Gaza. None of this is scientific, of course, but there are some other indications that Gaza really was a significant part of Kamala Harris' loss. Remember,

Black and brown voters have always had more sympathy towards Palestine and supported a ceasefire by larger numbers than white voters in general. It's plausible to think some of Trump's gains with these groups had to do with disgust with war in general and Gaza in particular. The other demographic group, of course, most disgusted with the Biden-Harris genocidal policy was young people.

And sure enough, this election saw a turnout collapse among the youngest group of voters. A lot of the post-election conversation has been understandably centered around how much Trump improved his margins among young voters, all true young men in particular. But the more significant phenomenon may actually be how many of these young voters just simply decided to stay home. As Eric Blanc points out, when you look at the total number of 18 to 29 years old who are eligible to vote,

Trump ever so slightly improved his standing from 2020. In 2020, he received 18% of the total eligible population. This time he edged that number up by a single percentage point to about 19%. On the other side of the ledger, however, Democrats collapsed. They went from receiving about 30% of the eligible youth vote in 2020 to only about 22% this time around. So Trump held on to his young voters and marginally even improved while the Democratic share plummeted.

Was this a Gaza effect? When you consider the youth activism around the issue and Kamala's absolute unwillingness to take a moral stand against genocide, you gotta think that disgust with her approach was a significant factor in this drop in turnout. Her choice of Liz Cheney over Rashida Tlaib spoke volumes about her moral commitments of note on that choice, by the way. The Palestinian-American who was blocked from speaking at the DNC actually improved her winning margin

In her Georgia Statehouse District, as she wrote on Twitter, quote, maybe, just maybe, voters appreciate when you speak out for the things you truly believe in. Perhaps discussed over Gaza really was a significant and perhaps determinant of factor in this election. Something even I didn't anticipate. And it wasn't just Rua, who was rejected. On a podcast with Rani Akalik, Congressman Jamal Bowman revealed that his offer to campaign for Kamala in Michigan was also rejected. Listen to what they chose to do instead.

I then told them, I could share text with you so you have evidence of this. I am ready to be dispatched to any parts of the country. Let me know. I want to go to Michigan in particular, right? I told them this. They never get back to me. Even worse, they send Richie Torres, Bill Clinton, and Liz Cheney to Michigan.

So again, and not only that, Bill Clinton is scolding Arab Americans. Like, yo, they were there first. Pretty much they were there first. Y'all got to just deal with it or leave.

This is what their campaign decided to do. Let's not send Jamal Bowman there, who again, I have, thank God, you know, a Hamdulah, right? Like so much support in Michigan, where like my opponent attacked me for it.

Like he literally was like, you don't represent your district. You represent California and Dearborn, Michigan. My opponent sent this shit in a debate. Wow. Okay. So that is how, and he said that, cause he knows that's an Arab American community. Yeah, dad. That's like when it goes there. Yeah. Right? Y'all don't, y'all ignore me, which tells me who you have around you in your campaign, but you send Bill Clinton, Richie Torres.

So that was the choice, basically, Bill Clinton, Liz Cheney, Richie Doras, and not Jamal Bowman or anyone else who might have been able to help with the Muslim American or Arab American community. The results of course speak to this being an utter political catastrophe, not to mention a moral one.

What's the counter-argument here? Well, if you look at exit polls, very few voters say that foreign policy actually drove their decision. Even among young voters, only 4 percent attributed their vote to foreign policy concerns. As with all voters, the top concern, by far, was the economy. But I've always suspected this was kind of the wrong way to think about the electoral consequences of the genocide in Gaza. There's a way in which Gaza undermines literally every argument that Kamala and the Democrats were attempting to make against Donald Trump.

How can you posture? As a clear, moral alternative to Trump and Trumpism, when you are backing a war in which 70% of those killed are women and children. With starvation is being deployed systematically as a weapon of war. When we saw things this year like a child having their leg amputated with no anesthetic on a kitchen table, a body crushed like a bag of tomatoes under a bulldozer, an endless, ever-expanding churn of death, carnage, disease, rubble,

But you want people to believe Trump's the unique evil? At the very least, his evil? It's not looking so unique. How can you position yourself as the big tent party building a large unified coalition when your tent wasn't big enough for a single Palestinian-American speaker at the DNC?

When you couldn't do the basics of outreach to a Muslim community that was horror-struck and utterly disgusted, that the Big Ten has room for Liz Cheney, but not young people protesting a genocide or Arab Americans, some of whom had family members who were slaughtered in Gaza, doesn't exactly send the open arms everyone's welcome that you think that you're sending. The party is open to you so long as you agree not to breathe a word about these taxpayer-funded horrors.

And how can people trust that you're going to pay attention to their economic needs? You're at home. When you seem way more eager, way more interested in sending money abroad for wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and the entire Middle East. I heard something similar to that sentiment from any number of voters this cycle. Basically, why are you focused on all these global conflicts rather than our needs right here at home?

Biden really leaned into this dynamic in a bad way, in particular, with all his obsession with NATO in August and inability to talk about the actually decent things that his administration did accomplish on antitrust labor and industrial policy. Kamala was, of course, saddled with this legacy and did nothing to break it. Even Trump's infamous they-them-add plays into this sentiment that Kamala and the Democrats are not really paying attention to what you care about. AOC herself made a version of this point. Take a listen.

All of this debate that people are talking about with this woke thing, right? Oh my gosh, it's because we care about trans people and that's why. And that's the only Donald Trump cared about trans people because he was the one running under $30 million of ads. The hair campaign said nothing about this issue. That's right. That's right. And listen, the ads, it's not to even deny the fact that these ads were effective in certain areas.

What I think people are paying too much attention to is the first half of that ad, which says Kamala Harris is that said Kamala Harris is for they them. Everyone's focusing on that. They're not focusing on the second half of that ad where he said Donald Trump is for you.

Yeah. Yeah. And Democrats very often, in their messaging, they speak in terms and in concepts and not in the second person. I care about you.

And political races are not about one candidate versus another candidate. Too often it gets pigeonholed like that. It is a race to convince a person about who cares about you more. In a lot of ways, Gaza is emblematic of democratic hypocrisy, moral collapse, and working-class disengagement.

Is it possible that Gaza alone cost the Democrats the election? I mean, if you think about it, Trump won Wisconsin by about 30,000 votes, Michigan by only about 80,000 votes, and Pennsylvania by about 120,000 votes. In the grand scheme of things, that's really not a lot. How many young people stayed home? How many Muslims switched to Trump in a vain hope that he'd make good on his pandering? How many working class voters could not shake the nagging sense that these wars were more important to Democrats than the price of eggs?

Trump didn't deserve to win and has already nominated a bunch of Neocon, Warhawk, Israel for psychos to key foreign policy positions. But for this and many other reasons, the Democrats, they absolutely deserved to lose. And Sagar, I was initially- And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at breakingpoints.com. All right, guys, thank you so much for watching. We appreciate you. Sorry that we talked so much. We're going to talk even more tomorrow. We'll see you guys.