Latest / Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar / 7/22/26: Trump Imposes New Canada Tariffs, Jon Stewart Defends DSA, Whitmer Hot Mic

Transcript

7/22/26: Trump Imposes New Canada Tariffs, Jon Stewart Defends DSA, Whitmer Hot Mic · Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar

0:00
Speaker 1: Hey guys, Saga and Crystal here.
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0:33
Speaker 3: Well, we're going to be talking to a candidate in
0:36
Speaker 3: Michigan in just a bit. But some news on the
0:39
Speaker 3: Michigan front, but also the Canadian front here right now,
0:43
Speaker 3: breaking this morning. Canada has canceled a planned joint celebration
0:46
Speaker 3: with the United States to mark the opening of the
0:48
Speaker 3: Gordy Howe International Bridge between Windsor, Ontario and Detroit, citing
0:53
Speaker 3: trade threats from President Trump that was scheduled to open.
0:57
Speaker 3: It is scheduled to open a traffic on July twenty second,
1:00
Speaker 3: but the ribbon cutting ceremony that was planned for I
1:02
Speaker 3: believe Friday has been canceled.
1:05
Speaker 4: Now.
1:06
Speaker 3: Trump's fifty percent tariffs on imports from Canada was announced
1:11
Speaker 3: on Monday, all kinds of imports. We're talking cars, alcohol, dairy.
1:17
Speaker 3: That is scheduled to go in effect within the next
1:20
Speaker 3: thirty days. So there's room for negotiation, but is obviously
1:23
Speaker 3: royaling US Canada relations. We can go ahead right now
1:28
Speaker 3: and put up the first element here, This is D one.
1:34
Speaker 3: He is going to be asked if this is in
1:36
Speaker 3: response to the wildfires. You remember last week he said
1:39
Speaker 3: he was going to retaliate for Canadian wildfires. Were the
1:43
Speaker 3: tariffs in response to the wildfires? The timing was at
1:45
Speaker 3: least interesting. Here's what President Trump said yesterday in the
1:48
Speaker 3: Oval Office.
1:50
Speaker 5: The Canada terriffs.
1:51
Speaker 6: What are those of response to the wildfires?
1:53
Speaker 7: And you know that shepherd.
1:55
Speaker 8: We'll look in at that shepherd.
1:57
Speaker 6: And what is there anything?
1:58
Speaker 8: The only response to the way they've did our farmers
2:01
Speaker 8: and our people. Canada has been very, very tough on
2:05
Speaker 8: us over the years, for many years, and no other
2:08
Speaker 8: president's done anything it. I love Canada, I love the
2:12
Speaker 8: people of Canada. Many friends that live in Canada, but
2:15
Speaker 8: their leadership from Trudeau to the current leadership. I mean
2:20
Speaker 8: it all fairness to them. They need us to survive.
2:24
Speaker 8: Without us, there's no way they can survive. So but
2:28
Speaker 8: they've been very, very tough over a period of the
2:31
Speaker 8: last fifty years.
2:32
Speaker 6: Actually so.
2:34
Speaker 3: NPR reports that the administration is citing Section three three
2:37
Speaker 3: eight of the nineteen thirty Trade Act for the legal justification.
2:42
Speaker 3: Now it's going to include things that were under USMCA,
2:46
Speaker 3: which Trump obviously has not renewed. It's still good for
2:50
Speaker 3: or is it run like seven years? Yeah, until it
2:53
Speaker 3: actually comes up again.
2:54
Speaker 4: Negotiated it. By the way, Yes, that was.
2:56
Speaker 6: The Trump USMCA.
2:58
Speaker 3: Now it's going to exclude energy products, potash, fish, and
3:01
Speaker 3: critical minerals, but they would include those previously included goods
3:09
Speaker 3: that were you may remember as we were just talking
3:12
Speaker 3: about automobiles, dairy liquor those sorts of things. Jamison Greer
3:16
Speaker 3: was on CNBC. He is the US trade representative who
3:20
Speaker 3: has been overseeing the implementation of the tariffs. Here's what
3:24
Speaker 3: he had to say yesterday.
3:26
Speaker 9: First of all, one thing to remember is we have
3:28
Speaker 9: always had trade issues with Canada. It's always been the
3:31
Speaker 9: most contentious part of our relationship across the decades, whether
3:34
Speaker 9: it's with softwood lumber or you know, twenty thirty years
3:38
Speaker 9: ago with trade in grains and pork across the borders.
3:42
Speaker 9: So it's not new to have trade tensions with Canada.
3:46
Speaker 9: I would say going forward, I'm going to keep talking
3:49
Speaker 9: to my counterparts in Canada. The Prime Minister put out
3:51
Speaker 9: a letter yesterday responding to the present's action. His letter
3:55
Speaker 9: was firm but moderate in tone. So they haven't cut
3:58
Speaker 9: off talks. We're going to keep discussing with them. The
4:01
Speaker 9: reality is we want outcomes that are good for American
4:04
Speaker 9: workers in American businesses, and we're going to pursue those
4:07
Speaker 9: Sometimes you have to take trade action to incentivize those actions,
4:10
Speaker 9: and sometimes you take an action that leads to a
4:11
Speaker 9: better negotiation. In the end, we will see.
4:14
Speaker 4: Where it leads.
4:15
Speaker 3: So we're in pretty clear from that SoundBite from Jamison
4:18
Speaker 3: Greer that they see this as an opening salvo and
4:20
Speaker 3: that it's intended to bring Canada back to the table
4:24
Speaker 3: on this. But again i'm reading here from NPR's reporting.
4:30
Speaker 3: They say Trump claims and the proclamation that Canada discriminates
4:33
Speaker 3: against American autos, alcohol, and cheese relative to other nations.
4:36
Speaker 3: They're talking particularly about the EU, and actually I think
4:38
Speaker 3: they have a.
4:39
Speaker 6: Very good case to make on cheese with the EU.
4:42
Speaker 3: How Canada as it's deal with the EU on Darry
4:44
Speaker 3: versus how it has deals with the United States on Dary.
4:47
Speaker 3: But also remember that Canada, as the as the administration
4:50
Speaker 3: has been pointing out, was along with China, basically like
4:53
Speaker 3: the countries that were most retaliatory after Liberation Day. So
4:58
Speaker 3: USMCA on the rocks, to say the least, it's an
5:00
Speaker 3: agreement that goes into the future. But they're saying in
5:04
Speaker 3: this auto proclamation that Canada maintained, starting in April twenty
5:08
Speaker 3: twenty five, a twenty five percent tariff on the imports
5:10
Speaker 3: of US motor vehicles that did not qualify for preferential
5:13
Speaker 3: treatment under the USMCA. The White House has said that
5:16
Speaker 3: regarding alcohol, all but two Canadian provinces and territories halted
5:19
Speaker 3: the purchase and retailing of American alcoholic beverages beginning last year,
5:23
Speaker 3: which was a response to Trump's tariffs and taunts of
5:26
Speaker 3: making Canada the fifty first date. But Trump is long
5:29
Speaker 3: objected to Canada's treatment of US Chiese, saying is probably
5:32
Speaker 3: proclamation that Canada discriminates against the US compared to Europe
5:35
Speaker 3: on dairy products. One thing that strikes me is that
5:38
Speaker 3: any president who wanted to actually reset the table on
5:42
Speaker 3: trade relations would have an impossible political job politically, so
5:46
Speaker 3: that's in Trump's first term. It's not easy, and that's
5:50
Speaker 3: partially by design because people who want these free trade
5:53
Speaker 3: policies want to make it really hard for you to
5:55
Speaker 3: roll back their trade policies and to reset and rejrigger.
5:59
Speaker 3: But Trump has clearly not done himself any favorsoever. It's like,
6:03
Speaker 3: now that we're looking back on more than a year
6:04
Speaker 3: since Liberation Day, it's that he's trying to I think
6:07
Speaker 3: he was trying to add strategically culture war fights, like
6:10
Speaker 3: inject the culture war fights into the terrif fights to
6:14
Speaker 3: maybe give people something to cling to that feels a
6:17
Speaker 3: little bit more justified, like even just the wildfire which
6:22
Speaker 3: was affecting the daily lives of Americans in many places
6:26
Speaker 3: over the last week. It's like he wanted to cling
6:29
Speaker 3: to something tangible and say, We're going to retaliate Canada's mismanaging.
6:33
Speaker 6: Canad is gonna be the fifty first state.
6:34
Speaker 3: And he's like stoking the culture war as a kind
6:36
Speaker 3: of gloss for trade policies that we're going to be
6:39
Speaker 3: tough to sell because they're obviously going to in the
6:41
Speaker 3: short term produce price hikes.
6:44
Speaker 4: And does he think that Canada is like setting fires
6:48
Speaker 4: on purpose? No, yeah, it's like what do you mean,
6:51
Speaker 4: punish them for having a fire? Like like the in
6:56
Speaker 4: a previous generation, like a country would say, how can
6:59
Speaker 4: we help, can we send assistance? What can we do? Like,
7:02
Speaker 4: we're sorry that you're going through this, and it does
7:05
Speaker 4: suck because like it's our entire like Northeast and mid
7:07
Speaker 4: Atlantic is even like feeling the effect of the smoke
7:11
Speaker 4: from this. So this is a collective problem. We've all
7:13
Speaker 4: produced it by well we don't even get in how
7:18
Speaker 4: we produced it many years, many years. So let's work
7:22
Speaker 4: together again. But we're going to like teariff you because
7:25
Speaker 4: we're mad at you. And you know Trump has just
7:28
Speaker 4: loved using tariffs as this political weapon. Yeah, like you,
7:34
Speaker 4: but you know Bolsonara, you know, let's say Lula criticizes
7:37
Speaker 4: Bolson Arrow, so he's going to do tariffs about that.
7:40
Speaker 4: Or the EU has a has an oil industry policy
7:43
Speaker 4: that he doesn't like. Well, extra twenty percent tariffs on
7:46
Speaker 4: them until they get rid of this policy. And so
7:50
Speaker 4: when a business leader is a CEO of a company
7:54
Speaker 4: is making decisions, the idea of the tariff is that
7:59
Speaker 4: it's going to incentivize kind of reshoring of manufacturing. But
8:03
Speaker 4: the CEO knows it has nothing to do with manufacturing.
8:06
Speaker 4: It's because he's angry about a forest fire, or he's
8:08
Speaker 4: angry about something Lula did, or he's angry about an
8:11
Speaker 4: oil policy that some country has, or God only knows what.
8:17
Speaker 4: And so you wouldn't then make a business decision assuming
8:21
Speaker 4: that that tariff is going to be in place a
8:23
Speaker 4: couple months from now. In fact, he went through this
8:26
Speaker 4: entire renegotiation of the US Mexico Canada trade agreement and
8:32
Speaker 4: then just said, forget it. I'm just doing all of
8:35
Speaker 4: these different things anyway. So all you kind of can
8:39
Speaker 4: do is just batten down the hatches. If you compare
8:43
Speaker 4: forget what you can look at Biden and like, by
8:46
Speaker 4: this point in Biden's term, I think he'd added something
8:48
Speaker 4: like six hundred thousand manufacturing jobs. But some of that
8:51
Speaker 4: was just rebound from COVID. Some of it was genuine,
8:55
Speaker 4: you know, reindustrialization and actual industrial policy. Set that aside.
9:01
Speaker 4: Look up how many jobs Trump has created in manufacturing
9:06
Speaker 4: and I think it's something like negative one hundred thousand.
9:08
Speaker 3: He slowed the decline is the number. Sure, he slowed
9:11
Speaker 3: the decline, but it's.
9:12
Speaker 4: Not a lot because it was actually booming under Biden.
9:15
Speaker 4: So he didn't slow the decline. He took a an
9:18
Speaker 4: increase and drove it downward. It maybe we will google
9:23
Speaker 4: it before the end of this segment. It's his record
9:26
Speaker 4: on what he'll say is, oh, we have trillions of
9:28
Speaker 4: dollars of investment that's going to eventually translate. But those
9:33
Speaker 4: are just promises made to him by corrupt people who
9:38
Speaker 4: know how to flatter him. That's not actual real money.
9:41
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's going to depend on how you count it
9:42
Speaker 6: and what count did you find?
9:43
Speaker 4: How many manufacturing jobs and Trump's term.
9:45
Speaker 3: Yeah, it does look like it's slowed. But the other thing,
9:50
Speaker 3: well you look that up. The Globe and Mail has
9:53
Speaker 3: a good write up of the dairy stuff today, obviously
9:55
Speaker 3: Canadian publication, and there's some like pretty serious conversation about
10:00
Speaker 3: treatment of the US versus the EU. But the question
10:05
Speaker 3: of other than Trump in the driver's seat of dealing
10:08
Speaker 3: with that serious issue is going to end in a
10:10
Speaker 3: better way for the United States obviously remains. So let
10:13
Speaker 3: me read a bit from this your number.
10:16
Speaker 4: We've lost seventy five thousand to one hundred and eight
10:19
Speaker 4: thousand jobs during Trump's first year in manufacturing.
10:21
Speaker 3: Manufacturing jobs lost them. And what was that compared to
10:24
Speaker 3: the last year Biden? Do we know the last couple
10:26
Speaker 3: of years of Biden, because this is just a claim
10:28
Speaker 3: that the White House does. Okay, so the Trump administration
10:32
Speaker 3: complaining that Canada gives European cheese producers better market access
10:36
Speaker 3: under the CETA.
10:37
Speaker 4: The Companiden Biden added over seven hundred thousand manufacturing jobs.
10:41
Speaker 6: There you go a little fact check here. So we'll so.
10:44
Speaker 4: Biden added seven hundred thousand. Trump has taken away one
10:48
Speaker 4: hundred thousand.
10:48
Speaker 3: It's pretty easy to peg that specifically then to tariffs
10:51
Speaker 3: that would be and.
10:52
Speaker 4: Biden gets he got a boost because of the Colvis thing.
10:55
Speaker 4: But yes, like Trump, you suck at this.
10:58
Speaker 3: Oh maybe that's the claim. We'll build dig into it.
11:01
Speaker 3: But anyway, under the USMCA, Ottawa only allows Canadian dairy
11:05
Speaker 3: processors and distributors access to import licenses, not retailers such
11:09
Speaker 3: as grocery stores. Under the CETA, Canadian retailers can import
11:13
Speaker 3: cheese directly from EU producers. The White House refers to
11:17
Speaker 3: that as discrimination basically in the US dairy industry. The
11:19
Speaker 3: Global Mail Rights argues that because Canadian retailers are not
11:22
Speaker 3: permitted to import their products, they are unable to make
11:25
Speaker 3: the most of the total tariff free quota granted to
11:27
Speaker 3: them in twenty eighteen when Ottawa and Washington negotiated the USMCA.
11:32
Speaker 3: So that's something to keep an eye on over the
11:33
Speaker 3: course of the next twenty nine I think days as
11:36
Speaker 3: the White House negotiates with Mark Carney and the Canadians
11:39
Speaker 3: will see if any deal. I mean again, we started
11:42
Speaker 3: off this segment with them canceling a ribbon cutting ceremony
11:46
Speaker 3: for the gordyow Bridge. So not looking great on the negotiation.
11:50
Speaker 6: Front right now.
11:52
Speaker 4: Yeah, this is embarrassing.
11:54
Speaker 3: All right, Well, Ryan, let's move on to John Stewart's
11:58
Speaker 3: thoughts on the DSA.
12:01
Speaker 4: John Stewart yesterday interviewed Ben Wickler, who is the chair
12:04
Speaker 4: of the Democratic Party in Wisconsin has a new book
12:06
Speaker 4: out called This Is the Plan, and they talked a
12:08
Speaker 4: little bit about the Dsay. I want to unpack some
12:10
Speaker 4: of this, let's roll this.
12:12
Speaker 10: We're in that same bullshit place now where all these
12:15
Speaker 10: new ideas suddenly the Democrats are these democratic socialists. They're
12:18
Speaker 10: crazy And you're like, well, but that generally they're crazy.
12:22
Speaker 10: Ideas aren't where the energy is. The energy isn't around
12:26
Speaker 10: like we shouldn't have prisons or borders.
12:29
Speaker 4: The energy is.
12:30
Speaker 10: Around a belief that they're economic populism. And when you
12:34
Speaker 10: call it socialism, I think it's a misnomer, Like in
12:38
Speaker 10: the same way that if you call social security socialism,
12:40
Speaker 10: that's kind of a misnomer. It's about strengthening a safety
12:44
Speaker 10: net for a country that has suffered too long overvaluing
12:49
Speaker 10: capital and money and undervaluing labor and work.
12:53
Speaker 11: That's a million a million, that's day.
12:55
Speaker 7: And it's so I don't get the whole hullabor.
12:59
Speaker 4: I've actually read book. It's I like it, recommend it.
13:03
Speaker 4: But on the point about the DSA, I agree with
13:06
Speaker 4: John Stewart. You're curious for your take on this, and
13:09
Speaker 4: I actually kind of see myself in it too, because
13:11
Speaker 4: if you know, if you roll back through this show,
13:15
Speaker 4: you can find me saying all sorts of crazy stuff.
13:18
Speaker 4: But if you right, but if you think about crazy
13:22
Speaker 4: to you, like to me, it makes perfect sense always.
13:26
Speaker 4: But if you think about what I actually focus on,
13:28
Speaker 4: it's what he said that we have spent way too
13:32
Speaker 4: long overvaluing money in capital and not enough time valuing
13:37
Speaker 4: work in labor. Like that, Like that's the essence of
13:40
Speaker 4: what we get to. So yeah, you can be like, oh,
13:42
Speaker 4: Ryan's crazy with the drugs and the open borders and
13:45
Speaker 4: all this, but like that's not that's not actually a
13:48
Speaker 4: thing that's like animating kind of the entire agenda. The
13:52
Speaker 4: thing that's animating the agenda is like people feel like
13:54
Speaker 4: the system's rigged against them and they want to collectively
13:57
Speaker 4: fight back against that.
13:58
Speaker 3: And the semantics battle is obviously important though, because it
14:02
Speaker 3: becomes and I think that's a good point that like
14:05
Speaker 3: it's the tug of war over what constitutes socialism just
14:10
Speaker 3: depends on who's doing the labeling. So meanwhile, let's take
14:14
Speaker 3: a listen to Steve Scalise talking about how he sees
14:20
Speaker 3: the takeover of the Democratic Party. This is him at
14:23
Speaker 3: a press conference on Capitol Hill yesterday, one of the
14:26
Speaker 3: top Republicans on the House side.
14:28
Speaker 12: You too, The Bolshevik takeover the Democrat Party is in
14:32
Speaker 12: full swing, and communism is on the ballot this November
14:36
Speaker 12: against freedom. Make no mistake about that. The lines have
14:40
Speaker 12: never been more clear in an election.
14:42
Speaker 8: You know.
14:43
Speaker 3: Crystal, I thought, did a good job of bringing this
14:45
Speaker 3: out in her interview with Adam Smith where he was
14:48
Speaker 3: pointing and I think reasonably pointing to dari Aliza Chabalier
14:51
Speaker 3: as somebody who was genuinely radical, and she was pretty
14:56
Speaker 3: obviously expecting expressing communists sympathies on her social media page,
15:02
Speaker 3: which frankly would be objective, objectionable to many voters and
15:05
Speaker 3: probably many democratic, normal Democrat.
15:07
Speaker 6: Voters around the country.
15:09
Speaker 3: But socialism, when people talk about it, often does to
15:12
Speaker 3: the point Stewart's making refer to maybe sewer socialist policies
15:17
Speaker 3: that are just a more robust government intervention in certain
15:20
Speaker 3: things like trash collection, right, or bus buses, those sorts
15:25
Speaker 3: of things. So the semantics battle for Republicans is to
15:29
Speaker 3: say this is the Bolshevik takeover, and the semantics do
15:33
Speaker 3: matter when it gets baked into law. I mean, we
15:35
Speaker 3: have a bunch of elements here from the State Department
15:38
Speaker 3: cracking down on leftists. We can skip ahead D four here.
15:41
Speaker 3: I read this entire report.
15:43
Speaker 4: From and think about it in the context of what
15:46
Speaker 4: he just said. It's communism versus freedom. So he claims
15:49
Speaker 4: to be standing up for freedom.
15:50
Speaker 6: That's a good way.
15:51
Speaker 4: Okay, So anyway he stands for freedom, Let's see what
15:54
Speaker 4: he's let's see how he's implementing his freedom agenda.
15:56
Speaker 3: And the State Department ruled out a new report work
16:00
Speaker 3: on Cuba, but they are also, as Ken Clippenstein pointed out,
16:04
Speaker 3: calling for a pre crime a poach approach to combat
16:08
Speaker 3: far left terrorists to prevent quote plots before they happen.
16:12
Speaker 6: Let's take a listen here.
16:13
Speaker 13: To ephour as outlined in the United States counter Terrorism Strategy,
16:18
Speaker 13: we currently are addressing three major types of terror groups
16:22
Speaker 13: Narco terrorists, Islamic or Jihati terrorists, and far left terrorists.
16:30
Speaker 13: For all three, we need to identify terror actors and
16:34
Speaker 13: plots before they happen.
16:37
Speaker 3: Okay, now we can put E five up on the screen.
16:39
Speaker 3: This is the State Department report itself, which is on
16:43
Speaker 3: Cuban subversion and Ryan.
16:45
Speaker 6: As you scroll through.
16:46
Speaker 3: It, I mean, I bet you probably wouldn't object to
16:50
Speaker 3: a lot of it.
16:50
Speaker 6: You'd be like, yeah, this is exactly what's this is? Right?
16:53
Speaker 3: Yes, these leftists do align themselves with these people in.
16:57
Speaker 6: Cuba or these these groups in Cuba.
16:59
Speaker 3: And the question, though, is whether you now have this
17:03
Speaker 3: on a government report, or what happens when you have
17:05
Speaker 3: this in a government report, how it combines with things
17:07
Speaker 3: like the NSPM seven to start becoming like real blacklists.
17:14
Speaker 3: I genuinely hate this stuff, so much so that when
17:17
Speaker 3: Zoron was in the Oval Office, I asked Trump if
17:19
Speaker 3: he thought he was a jaghatis like I hate hate
17:21
Speaker 3: the overlabeling of people.
17:22
Speaker 6: It drives me insane.
17:23
Speaker 3: I did not think the State Department report was quite
17:25
Speaker 3: as egregious as it was being considered or as it was.
17:28
Speaker 6: Being framed online.
17:29
Speaker 3: But I will say when you combine it with NSPM
17:31
Speaker 3: seven and the broader efforts of the administration to infiltrate
17:35
Speaker 3: some of these leftist groups use informants, which they MAGGA
17:38
Speaker 3: is still furious about happening on January sixth. If you're
17:41
Speaker 3: furious about that happening in principle, then you should be
17:44
Speaker 3: furious about it happening with some of these leftist groups.
17:46
Speaker 3: If we're fomenting terror, whether it's against Gretchen Witmer, against
17:50
Speaker 3: the capital, or against ice. That should be something you
17:54
Speaker 3: object to in principle and when you put the full
17:56
Speaker 3: picture together, Yes, this is your point about the bulship
18:01
Speaker 3: vix versus freedom is well taken.
18:03
Speaker 4: Yeah. And the silliest part maybe other report is they
18:06
Speaker 4: they argue that Cuba's long term strategy has been to
18:10
Speaker 4: conquer the United States. Like that is in a report
18:13
Speaker 4: put out by the United States, like that where they
18:16
Speaker 4: said with a straight face that Cuba is going to
18:19
Speaker 4: conquer the US. It's like at that point you're like, okay,
18:22
Speaker 4: like I want to be I want to elevate this
18:26
Speaker 4: report because it's so dangerous, but also it's so absurd.
18:30
Speaker 4: The idea that Cuba is going to do this is
18:34
Speaker 4: is laughable. The report then goes on from Okay, Cuba
18:40
Speaker 4: wants to conquer the United States. DSA, they say, has
18:45
Speaker 4: some ideological affinity with the Cuban government. Then there's a
18:50
Speaker 4: lot of disagreement within DSA. And then they go on
18:54
Speaker 4: to say and DSA has become a powerful electoral force
18:57
Speaker 4: that is winning elections inside the Democratic Prime Mary and
19:00
Speaker 4: you're you're reading this in this report about terrorism, You're like, so, what,
19:05
Speaker 4: like what's your point? Like, so is it it's terrorism
19:10
Speaker 4: to run a candidate who supports who's supported by the DSA,
19:15
Speaker 4: and that a majority of voters elect to Congress, Like,
19:18
Speaker 4: where where did the terrorism happen in that? And then
19:23
Speaker 4: it names uh, you know, Hassan Piker and Medea Benjamin
19:27
Speaker 4: and a bunch of other Americans who have gone to Cuba.
19:30
Speaker 4: Did not name me. They're afraid of me.
19:33
Speaker 6: Dodge that.
19:34
Speaker 4: Yeah, uh, what do they like you? They must? Maybe
19:39
Speaker 4: it looks a little absurd, I don't know. So we
19:42
Speaker 4: put up E six to show, like the how seriously
19:46
Speaker 4: they take freedom. They are referring to blacklists and McCarthy
19:52
Speaker 4: era investigations and prosecutions as a model to be replicated.
19:58
Speaker 4: According to our current State Department, the thing that we
20:04
Speaker 4: were all raised to believe was a deviation from the
20:10
Speaker 4: principles of American freedom. Mcarthy era investigations and blacklists, the
20:17
Speaker 4: very thing that cut against the freedom that we fight
20:19
Speaker 4: for and that we stand for as a beacon around
20:22
Speaker 4: the world. That thing was actually good and it needs
20:26
Speaker 4: to be brought back. And so in that context, here
20:29
Speaker 4: are the blacklists that they're putting out. Hassan Pikers on
20:31
Speaker 4: a black list. But the old blacklists were more effective
20:35
Speaker 4: because it was or here's a person that nobody should hire,
20:39
Speaker 4: and you know they tried to do that with anybody
20:41
Speaker 4: who participated in like a Columbia encampment. Don't ever hire
20:44
Speaker 4: these people anywhere. I was putting Hassan Piker on a
20:47
Speaker 4: blacklist is that he works for himself, So how are
20:51
Speaker 4: you going to get him fired? The A Benjamin, how
20:53
Speaker 4: are you going to get the abne blacklisted from? What
20:56
Speaker 4: doesn't matter? Now they're going to prosecute and investigate. That's different.
20:59
Speaker 3: There's a much bigger problem, which is that we are
21:02
Speaker 3: not locked in an immediate post nuclear cold war with Cuba,
21:07
Speaker 3: China or the Soviet Union right now, which again the Cuba.
21:10
Speaker 4: Document, which can't keep it one would the.
21:13
Speaker 3: Cuba document would actually be much more logical to defend
21:17
Speaker 3: if this was nineteen fifty four or whatever, and we
21:20
Speaker 3: could object to that. I keep meaning to have like
21:23
Speaker 3: some form for United debate Joseph McCarthy's I think that's
21:27
Speaker 3: like if we put Ken's post up again, it notes
21:30
Speaker 3: how many communists were the we're in the United States,
21:33
Speaker 3: but it would be at the time I think it
21:35
Speaker 3: said like seventy five thousand but it would be even
21:38
Speaker 3: funnier to do that in the State Department because there.
21:41
Speaker 6: Were Communists in the State Department.
21:43
Speaker 3: The question is whether or not they were like secret
21:45
Speaker 3: sleeper cells of the Soviet Union, and that's a debate
21:48
Speaker 3: for another time, But the point remains, never justified. Abuses
21:52
Speaker 3: of civil liberties never justified, whether it's nineteen fifty four
21:55
Speaker 3: or twenty twenty six. And even if McCarthy was like
21:59
Speaker 3: direct actionally correct that there were more spies that had
22:04
Speaker 3: infiltrated major institutions in the United States that were actually
22:07
Speaker 3: tied to a foreign government's like military apparatus, that's different
22:11
Speaker 3: because right now we're not in the same situation at all.
22:15
Speaker 6: It's not comparable.
22:16
Speaker 3: And to treat it as though we are literally in
22:18
Speaker 3: nineteen fifty whatever, nineteen sixty, nineteen seventy, it's not the
22:22
Speaker 3: same situation. But they're literally trying out the exact same playbook,
22:25
Speaker 3: as Ken's tweet points out.
22:28
Speaker 4: And think about what that tweet says in nineteen forty seven,
22:30
Speaker 4: that it was a bad playbook anyway. In ninety forty seven,
22:33
Speaker 4: the CPUSA reportedly boasted well over seventy five thousand members.
22:36
Speaker 4: By nineteen fifty nine by one s but number had
22:38
Speaker 4: fallen to below five thousand. So basically the report is saying, look,
22:43
Speaker 4: this state repression of these ideas that were being put
22:47
Speaker 4: forward by Americans for Americans. The state repression worked. We
22:54
Speaker 4: smashed these ideas that is un American. Yeah, but what
23:00
Speaker 4: if by having a more robust Communist Party USA, the
23:06
Speaker 4: country fended off some of the de industrialization that happened
23:10
Speaker 4: in the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties. You know what
23:13
Speaker 4: if it created earlier pressure against the Vietnam War. Like
23:22
Speaker 4: the Vietnam War and the eighties and nineties de industrialization
23:26
Speaker 4: which kind of went hand in hand broke the back
23:29
Speaker 4: of the United States and sent tens of millions of
23:33
Speaker 4: people into poverty and misery. Communist Party USA would have
23:37
Speaker 4: been against all of those things. And so like, how
23:41
Speaker 4: is it so obvious that we're better off by having
23:45
Speaker 4: destroyed those democratic elements, non violent democratic elements of our
23:50
Speaker 4: civic infrastructure.
23:52
Speaker 3: You were allowed to have communists in the United States.
23:54
Speaker 3: You were allowed to be a communist units that you're
23:56
Speaker 3: allowed to be an anarchist if you were right. We
24:00
Speaker 3: came to a point of consensus, at least until now
24:04
Speaker 3: but what they're trying to do is say, no, you're
24:06
Speaker 3: allowed to be a communist, but if you are and
24:08
Speaker 3: you express sympathies with or end up with any indirect
24:12
Speaker 3: connections to foreign governments, sometimes direct connections to foreign governments,
24:17
Speaker 3: which are legal. There may be somethings to look at
24:21
Speaker 3: that are not, but for the most part, everything that's
24:23
Speaker 3: laid out in that State Department document appears to be legal,
24:26
Speaker 3: because if it weren't, there would be arrests happening right now, eagerly.
24:30
Speaker 4: Now.
24:30
Speaker 6: They may try to find some way to cook up
24:32
Speaker 6: like Rico cases style.
24:35
Speaker 3: Schemes, but that's not what's happening right now because they
24:39
Speaker 3: don't have it because a lot of these relationships are legal,
24:42
Speaker 3: free expression from Americans who are allowed to say I
24:46
Speaker 3: like China.
24:47
Speaker 6: You don't think it's dumb, but you're allowed to say it.
24:49
Speaker 3: And by the way, again, what's frustrating about this is
24:51
Speaker 3: the Arctic Frost split screen, which found recently, I mean,
24:54
Speaker 3: Chuck Grassley's releasing these documents that show Jack Smith totally
24:58
Speaker 3: abusing his power, knowingly abused his power, likely perjuring himself
25:02
Speaker 3: about how he abused his power to spy on Republican
25:05
Speaker 3: members of Congress. What's even worse than that, and it's
25:07
Speaker 3: gotten zero coverage in the corporate press, is that they
25:10
Speaker 3: were spying on the conservative movement apparatus, so things like
25:14
Speaker 3: Turning Point USA, love it or hate It, they were
25:17
Speaker 3: being like surveilled by Jack Smith and the FBI at
25:22
Speaker 3: that point in time, the DJ in that point of time,
25:24
Speaker 3: we're talking about dozens of conservative groups, we're talking about Republicans,
25:27
Speaker 3: conversations with the press, CBS News, part of the Smith dragnet,
25:33
Speaker 3: and there's no outrage about that.
25:35
Speaker 6: There is outrage about it on the right. But then you.
25:37
Speaker 3: See similar abuses of civil liberties starting to creep into
25:41
Speaker 3: the conversation, or potential for similar abuses of civil liberties
25:44
Speaker 3: creep into the conversation.
25:46
Speaker 6: And there's a.
25:47
Speaker 3: Really easy first principle to just apply across the board,
25:51
Speaker 3: to stop treating your domestic enemies, who are actually just
25:55
Speaker 3: domestic ideological opponents as enemies.
25:58
Speaker 4: Right, Yeah, exactly, it's wrong to do in principle, and
26:02
Speaker 4: then also in practice. The other thing that this McCarthyism
26:05
Speaker 4: did is it destroyed militant democratic organized labor, like actual
26:12
Speaker 4: democratic unions that represented the workers and replaced them with
26:17
Speaker 4: either boss run or mob run corrupt unions, which then
26:21
Speaker 4: were very quick kind of to sell out their workers,
26:25
Speaker 4: which fueled the the industrialization of the United States. So again,
26:29
Speaker 4: if you like what happened to the United States in
26:32
Speaker 4: the second half of the twentieth century and the destruction
26:35
Speaker 4: of our middle class, then you should cheer McCarthyism, and
26:39
Speaker 4: you should want it to come back. If you think
26:41
Speaker 4: that maybe you liked having a middle class, then you should.
26:44
Speaker 4: You should be a gast that they're looking back at
26:47
Speaker 4: this and celebrating, But you shouldn't be surprised because you know,
26:52
Speaker 4: these are the people that profited off of the smashing
26:56
Speaker 4: of the middle class, so of course they want to
26:58
Speaker 4: keep the boot on the neck of working people.
27:01
Speaker 3: It's also just going to backfire, as it's done in
27:04
Speaker 3: the past. I mean, maybe you have short term gains,
27:06
Speaker 3: but in the long term you end up with growing
27:09
Speaker 3: populism like you see exactly right now. And you have
27:13
Speaker 3: the CEO or the owner of Flock out there saying
27:16
Speaker 3: deflock activists are comparable to Antifa.
27:20
Speaker 6: Why is he doing that?
27:21
Speaker 3: Why is he making a distinction between the ACLU and
27:23
Speaker 3: the EEF. I'm sorry the eff. He's doing it because
27:28
Speaker 3: he's trying to send a signal to the Trump administration,
27:30
Speaker 3: which is putting things out like NSPN seven to say,
27:33
Speaker 3: people who are taking on flock cameras, even if they're
27:36
Speaker 3: just making maps of where the flock cameras are, are
27:39
Speaker 3: comparable to antifa.
27:41
Speaker 6: Take it seriously.
27:42
Speaker 3: This is abolish the police, this is Antifa, And so
27:46
Speaker 3: it becomes a really powerful sort of like incantation that's
27:52
Speaker 3: it's not going to end well for anyone.
27:54
Speaker 4: Yeah, a lot of that rage is bubbling up in
27:57
Speaker 4: the Upper Peninsula Michigan. To transition to are our guest
28:01
Speaker 4: Kyle Blomquist, who's going to talk about the Haley Stevens
28:04
Speaker 4: abdul l Side race and also his own race against
28:07
Speaker 4: Republican Jack Bergman, who apparently might even live in Louisiana.
28:11
Speaker 6: We got to dig into that one.
28:13
Speaker 4: Is the rumor. We're going to dig into that one.
28:14
Speaker 4: Yet he represents the Upper Peninsula in Michigan. All right,
28:19
Speaker 4: let's let's move over to Kyle. So the politics of Michigan,
28:25
Speaker 4: in a curious turn of events, seem to revolve now
28:27
Speaker 4: primarily around how supportive you are of the state of
28:30
Speaker 4: Israel and the state of the data center build out. Uh,
28:35
Speaker 4: Michigan Governor Meg Whitmer here in a clip that has
28:39
Speaker 4: circulated pretty wid pretty widely, is seen getting kind of
28:44
Speaker 4: to the heart of this question. When it comes to
28:46
Speaker 4: data centers, we're used to people saying f no and
28:54
Speaker 4: then doing it anyway. Is what is what she was
28:56
Speaker 4: caught on that hot mike saying, and F no is
29:00
Speaker 4: what people are saying around the state to the build
29:05
Speaker 4: out of data centers. And here is why we can
29:08
Speaker 4: we can. Let's put up F two just so you
29:10
Speaker 4: had a sense of what it sounds like to live
29:13
Speaker 4: near one of these things. So joining us now to
29:27
Speaker 4: discuss is Kyle Blomquist, who is a Democratic candidate for
29:30
Speaker 4: Congress in Michigan's first district, which is that Upper Peninsula
29:33
Speaker 4: part that for some reason stretches into it like another state,
29:37
Speaker 4: like part of it looks like it if you look
29:39
Speaker 4: at the map, it really should be Wisconsin, but it's not.
29:42
Speaker 4: It's and apparently it makes up almost fifty percent of
29:45
Speaker 4: the entire state this district. Kyle, thanks so much for
29:49
Speaker 4: being here to walk us through some of this.
29:51
Speaker 7: Thank you so much for having me.
29:53
Speaker 4: By the way, do you have any idea why that
29:56
Speaker 4: is part of Michigan and not Wisconsin. Like, if you
29:58
Speaker 4: look at them, do you know the history.
30:00
Speaker 11: It's actually a war with it was called the Toledo War.
30:03
Speaker 11: It was between Michigan and Ohio, and the consolation prize
30:07
Speaker 11: was the entirety of the Upper Peninsula.
30:09
Speaker 7: That's amazing. I think we made out pretty good.
30:11
Speaker 3: That's a great Yeah, it's a great price to go
30:14
Speaker 3: read war after this. I was telling Ryan before the
30:17
Speaker 3: segment he would absolutely love the up So maybe he'll
30:19
Speaker 3: get up there sometimes.
30:20
Speaker 4: Yeah, I've never been.
30:21
Speaker 7: We'd love to.
30:22
Speaker 4: Yeah, just describe it a little bit for us, Like
30:24
Speaker 4: what is this area of the country, like a little bit, you.
30:28
Speaker 11: Know, I think that, Uh, it's deeply rural. It's gorgeous.
30:32
Speaker 11: You know, we're the only congressional district that touches more
30:35
Speaker 11: than one great lake, and we touched three of them.
30:39
Speaker 7: It's forty four percent of Michigan.
30:40
Speaker 11: For a reason, it's deeply rural, It's got a lot
30:45
Speaker 11: of it's tapped potential in terms of its beauty. It's
30:49
Speaker 11: natural beauty. It's the reason why most u person North,
30:52
Speaker 11: the Michiganders live where they live. And I think that
30:57
Speaker 11: unfortunately it also opens us up to a lot of exploitation.
31:02
Speaker 7: And I think that's what being.
31:03
Speaker 11: With the data center issue is we have an abundance
31:07
Speaker 11: of land and and water, and a lot of these
31:11
Speaker 11: AI data center companies want to come here and exploit that.
31:15
Speaker 11: Uh And unfortunately the state of Michigan has kind of
31:18
Speaker 11: opened up the floodgates to that by providing tax breaks
31:21
Speaker 11: to these companies.
31:22
Speaker 4: Yeah, and you saw the comment from women there clearly
31:25
Speaker 4: kind of basically supportive of this. No matter what local
31:27
Speaker 4: local people are saying, what what has been? You know,
31:31
Speaker 4: how many data center fights are there in in your district?
31:35
Speaker 4: And where where is the where are your other Democratic opponents?
31:39
Speaker 4: Where the where's your Republican the incumbent opponent on it?
31:43
Speaker 4: And how have you seen it affect your race?
31:45
Speaker 11: You know, one thing about data centers is it's a
31:48
Speaker 11: unifying issue. When you see what happened in Seline Township,
31:51
Speaker 11: where Governor Whittner was saying, you know where used of
31:55
Speaker 11: people saying f no and doing it anyways, That's exactly
31:57
Speaker 11: what they did in Selene Township. Township was faced with
32:01
Speaker 11: the rezoning of around six hundred acres of farmland to
32:05
Speaker 11: industrial use, just so that they could put up one
32:07
Speaker 11: of these hyper scale data centers. And all the people
32:10
Speaker 11: of Saline Township, whether they voted a Democrat, Republican, Independent,
32:14
Speaker 11: or otherwise, they came out and they said f no,
32:18
Speaker 11: quite literally, and the township board said no.
32:21
Speaker 7: And that should have been the end of it.
32:23
Speaker 11: But instead these data center companies used their considerable means
32:27
Speaker 11: to threaten and exclusionary zoning lawsuit onto this this small township.
32:32
Speaker 7: The township with an operating budget I.
32:34
Speaker 11: Believe around one million dollars, and so they were faced
32:36
Speaker 11: with the option of either having all that money sitting
32:39
Speaker 11: on their chest and suffocating their community, or they were
32:42
Speaker 11: going to be given gift, which was I believe it
32:45
Speaker 11: was ten million dollars or so for a community center.
32:48
Speaker 11: And what everybody saw as part of that was how
32:51
Speaker 11: rapacious those data centers were being in terms of the
32:54
Speaker 11: entering communities, overriding the bind will of the population to
33:00
Speaker 11: do whatever the hell they wanted with our communities in
33:03
Speaker 11: our environment. And then when you see Governor Whitmer there
33:07
Speaker 11: digging a hole alongside Sam Altman, you know, effectively digging
33:11
Speaker 11: the grave of local control. I think that that's becoming
33:14
Speaker 11: a unifying issue, and unfortunately, it's a unifying issue that
33:18
Speaker 11: neither of the other candidates on the Democratic Party side
33:23
Speaker 11: or the Republican incumbent or his competition wants to take
33:27
Speaker 11: on as forcefully as we need to. Right now, in America,
33:31
Speaker 11: we have something like twelve times the number of data
33:33
Speaker 11: centers that China has, and we're supposed to believe that
33:35
Speaker 11: we're in some kind of AI race with China, and
33:38
Speaker 11: if that's somehow physically contained by its infrastructure, I have
33:42
Speaker 11: to imagine we're doing pretty good and that we don't
33:44
Speaker 11: need to be invading communities against their will.
33:47
Speaker 3: Yeah, I wanted to ask how this is affecting the
33:49
Speaker 3: politics because obviously Gretchen Whitmer is a Democrat, and you
33:53
Speaker 3: were just laying out some of these dynamics that both
33:55
Speaker 3: major parties seem unresponsive to the concerns of people on
33:58
Speaker 3: the ground. So as you are talking to people on
34:02
Speaker 3: the ground, rank and file voters, normal people, how are
34:06
Speaker 3: they seeing this through a political lens or not through
34:08
Speaker 3: a political lens, And how is it affecting some of
34:11
Speaker 3: these elections like the one that you're running in for
34:15
Speaker 3: Democrats and just again like for voters who are trying
34:18
Speaker 3: to decide who they want to cast about for November.
34:22
Speaker 11: We'll tell you what, when you're running as a Democratic,
34:24
Speaker 11: you know, when you're running as a Democrat in Northern Michigan,
34:27
Speaker 11: you're always going to be at somewhat of a disadvantage
34:29
Speaker 11: because of the partisan identity. You know, we don't speak
34:31
Speaker 11: through party, you know, in our race, our campaign speaks
34:36
Speaker 11: through class, and it is the working class that's unified
34:39
Speaker 11: against these data centers. And I have absolutely no hesitations
34:44
Speaker 11: to calling out vs on either side and calling out
34:48
Speaker 11: Gretchen Whitmer and the way that she's operating against our
34:51
Speaker 11: best interest. She does the same thing when her administration
34:55
Speaker 11: is now issued permits for the Line five pipeline tunnel
35:00
Speaker 11: through the straits of Mackinaw.
35:01
Speaker 7: That is an infringement on.
35:04
Speaker 11: A lot of people's wishes here in Northern Michigan, but
35:07
Speaker 11: also our treaty obligations to our native brothers and sisters.
35:10
Speaker 11: So it's interesting because the dynamic, as I see it
35:14
Speaker 11: as this is it's tough to be a Democrat while
35:16
Speaker 11: one of the most prominent Democrats in the state is
35:20
Speaker 11: doing what she's doing on behalf of big tech. But
35:25
Speaker 11: at the same time, it gives me an opening to
35:27
Speaker 11: people who vote differently than me, or are independent, or
35:31
Speaker 11: are looking for thing different because they see that I
35:35
Speaker 11: am absolutely willing to call that BS out on the subs.
35:41
Speaker 11: It's a bridge issue in that way, because I think
35:43
Speaker 11: really what people are tired of is party loyalty at
35:47
Speaker 11: a time when both parties seem to be primarily loyal
35:50
Speaker 11: to their donors.
35:52
Speaker 4: There's a bit of a catch point two when it
35:54
Speaker 4: comes to running as an independent in this country, Like
35:55
Speaker 4: if you run as an independent but there's also a
35:58
Speaker 4: somewhat credible Democrat on the ballot and they cleave off like,
36:02
Speaker 4: you know, fifteen to twenty percent of the vote, then
36:05
Speaker 4: it's going to be enough for the other major party
36:07
Speaker 4: candidate to you know, move first past the post the
36:10
Speaker 4: way that Bernie Sanders handled that in Vermont. So what
36:13
Speaker 4: he does is he runs in the Democratic primary, he
36:16
Speaker 4: wins it, and then he rejects the nomination and so
36:19
Speaker 4: then the Democrats can't put somebody on the ballot. I
36:23
Speaker 4: wonder what have you looked into what Michigan's law is
36:26
Speaker 4: around this question, Like would you be able to win
36:28
Speaker 4: the nomination and then reject it and say, you know what,
36:30
Speaker 4: I'm actually going to run as an independent because I imagine,
36:33
Speaker 4: and you're in the Upper Peninsula there there are a
36:36
Speaker 4: lot of people who would agree with your politics are
36:39
Speaker 4: but the brand of the Democratic Party is just so
36:41
Speaker 4: toxic that it's going to be hard for them to
36:43
Speaker 4: overcome it.
36:45
Speaker 11: Really, the election lock here in Michigan is such that
36:49
Speaker 11: you have to have more petition signatures if you're running
36:53
Speaker 11: on an independent line compared to one of the two
36:55
Speaker 11: major parties. You have to go through that process. I
36:58
Speaker 11: believe that that that deadline. I believe it was July fourteenth,
37:02
Speaker 11: So I don't believe it's possible to go the route
37:05
Speaker 11: that Bernie Sanders has gone. But you know, as the
37:09
Speaker 11: DSA candidate, I'm running through the Democratic Party like most
37:14
Speaker 11: candidates do. And it's funny because most of the things
37:17
Speaker 11: I get when people are saying, well, aren't you afraid
37:20
Speaker 11: that people are going to colleague a socialists?
37:21
Speaker 7: One hope, I have no problem with that label.
37:25
Speaker 11: But two, there's something far worse that you just tapped
37:27
Speaker 11: into being called a socialists here in northern Michigan.
37:31
Speaker 7: That's becoming being called a Democrats.
37:33
Speaker 11: It's because we've seen so many places in this country
37:37
Speaker 11: where the Democratic Party has basically thrown up their hands
37:40
Speaker 11: and they say we're not going to participate in those districts, and.
37:42
Speaker 7: We feel absolutely forgotten.
37:45
Speaker 11: It's the reason why we were Our material conditions continue
37:47
Speaker 11: to deteriorate because they have just decided that these districts
37:51
Speaker 11: are not worth running in. But I can tell you what,
37:54
Speaker 11: it's a lot cheaper to run and win a race
37:57
Speaker 11: in a weekend Democratic Party in a place like Northern
38:00
Speaker 11: Agan than it is to try to compete a deep
38:02
Speaker 11: blue district like down in Illinois or Oat California, where
38:06
Speaker 11: you have thirty million dollars flying around.
38:08
Speaker 6: Yeah.
38:08
Speaker 3: And so do you anticipate I mean you're talking to people,
38:12
Speaker 3: so what's your Do you anticipate serious challenges with the
38:15
Speaker 3: DSA affiliation? I mean AFC said something interesting over the
38:18
Speaker 3: last couple of days that she wasn't like raised in
38:21
Speaker 3: a family that was steeped in leftist politics. Something like that,
38:24
Speaker 3: basically a nudge to talk more like regular people and
38:29
Speaker 3: perhaps less like some of the old tweets that get
38:32
Speaker 3: thrown front and center that some of the candidates have
38:34
Speaker 3: had to bat away in their successful races, like dar A,
38:38
Speaker 3: Liza Chpalier in cases.
38:40
Speaker 6: Like those, So is that sticking?
38:42
Speaker 3: I mean, your point is really important about how it's
38:45
Speaker 3: worse to be called like a democrat, I call the socialist.
38:49
Speaker 3: But in a place that you just mentioned is pretty
38:52
Speaker 3: independent minded. What's your you know you said you don't
38:56
Speaker 3: mind the label. What's your experience with people maybe asking
38:59
Speaker 3: you about the lake if they do it all and
39:01
Speaker 3: then you're kind of talking.
39:02
Speaker 11: Through it, Well, you know, the label is something that's there.
39:06
Speaker 11: You know what I explained to people is there's nothing
39:07
Speaker 11: dogmatic behind it. You know, when I was a kid,
39:10
Speaker 11: I was baptized Catholic, and they told me, all right,
39:13
Speaker 11: you're a Catholic. You're going to go to Catechism every Wednesday,
39:17
Speaker 11: and you're going to learn what that means, and you're
39:19
Speaker 11: going to be kind of you're going to backfill that
39:21
Speaker 11: label with the belief.
39:23
Speaker 7: Same thing when I left high school.
39:24
Speaker 11: I left high school in two thousand and four in
39:26
Speaker 11: a rural you know, conventionally read district.
39:29
Speaker 7: Most of my friends and family who were Republicans. So
39:32
Speaker 7: what was I was the public did? Right? When you gain.
39:34
Speaker 11: Distance and you start to divorce your political clear your
39:39
Speaker 11: personal ideology from whatever political label you have, it it's
39:43
Speaker 11: very quickly that you become rightfully distrustful of busines party
39:48
Speaker 11: system and the way that we label people, all the
39:50
Speaker 11: way that we take three dimensional individuals and we placed
39:52
Speaker 11: them first on one.
39:53
Speaker 7: Dimension, which is or supposedly as a.
39:55
Speaker 11: Left right spectrum, and then worse yet, we put them
39:58
Speaker 11: into a binary between their Publican Party and the Democratic
40:01
Speaker 11: Party and not you know, the Republican Party seems to
40:04
Speaker 11: be moving consistently further to the right, where the Democratic
40:08
Speaker 11: Party is consistently inconsistent, that it has an incoherent platform
40:12
Speaker 11: for the most part. What I'm finding is I don't
40:15
Speaker 11: walk into rooms and that's pound my chest and you know,
40:18
Speaker 11: you know, wave around the red book or nothing like that.
40:20
Speaker 11: What I'm doing is I'm walking into those rooms and
40:23
Speaker 11: I'm using class language to talk about all the things
40:25
Speaker 11: that we have in commons, talk about all the ways
40:28
Speaker 11: that our system is abusing all of us, regardless of
40:30
Speaker 11: how we vote, that once it dust settles on our elections,
40:34
Speaker 11: we're all on the menu and we need to start
40:36
Speaker 11: working together that if you sell something your finite time
40:39
Speaker 11: on this earth for a dollar, and any point you stop,
40:41
Speaker 11: the system abuses you, jails you, and forgets you, then congratulations,
40:44
Speaker 11: you're in the American working class. And by that definition,
40:47
Speaker 11: it's ninety percent of us. And we have a tremendous
40:49
Speaker 11: amount of agency and power so long as we start
40:52
Speaker 11: looking at our neighbors like allies rather than adversaries. And
40:56
Speaker 11: I'll tell you what this partisan shit like this this
40:59
Speaker 11: stuff is fake.
41:01
Speaker 7: This stuff is there's.
41:02
Speaker 11: Nothing real behind it. What's real is when there's an
41:05
Speaker 11: ice storm or there's an erosion events here which are
41:09
Speaker 11: happening more and more because of our man made climate change,
41:13
Speaker 11: or death in the family, Like that's what's real. When
41:15
Speaker 11: somebody comes out and they already have their chainsaw clear
41:18
Speaker 11: in your road before you get out there, even though
41:20
Speaker 11: you vote differently, it's when there's a meal train for
41:23
Speaker 11: the death in the family and doing those sorts of things.
41:25
Speaker 11: That's what we've that's how we are as human beings naturally,
41:28
Speaker 11: and all this other stuff is pumped into us to
41:30
Speaker 11: keep us divided and keep us from pulling the cart
41:33
Speaker 11: in the same direction.
41:34
Speaker 4: And speaking of ignoring different parts of the state, Haley Stevens,
41:37
Speaker 4: the Senate candidate, has gotten a lot of criticism up
41:39
Speaker 4: in the up and elsewhere for focusing her campaign almost
41:44
Speaker 4: exclusively on the Detroit kind of metro area and not
41:48
Speaker 4: leaving that part of Detroit. I wanted to play a
41:50
Speaker 4: little clip of her talking about, well, just roll this
41:54
Speaker 4: and ask you about it. Let's play F three.
41:57
Speaker 3: Of course, we do have this rally tomorrow with Sander
42:00
Speaker 3: as an AOC for your opponent.
42:01
Speaker 11: There are a lot of people in the Democratic Party
42:03
Speaker 11: that are looking for that progressive kind of movement.
42:07
Speaker 6: How would you try to bring those people in?
42:10
Speaker 5: I'm just curious if you know mister Sanders is willing
42:14
Speaker 5: to acknowledge the great work that I did alongside President
42:17
Speaker 5: Obama on the auto rescue. You know, he had just
42:19
Speaker 5: himself gotten into the United States Senate, and I don't
42:24
Speaker 5: remember him being around for the auto rescue, but I
42:26
Speaker 5: certainly remember our sleeves being rolled up to save the
42:30
Speaker 5: two hundred thousand Michigan jobs, to stand up for working
42:34
Speaker 5: people and to do the right thing. And I'm also
42:38
Speaker 5: really proud of the record that I have.
42:40
Speaker 4: Interestingly, I think it's kind of a low bar being
42:42
Speaker 4: set for That clip has gotten a lot of praise
42:45
Speaker 4: as it's been circulated, but if you listen to his closes,
42:49
Speaker 4: he just kind of a swipe a Bernie Sanders from
42:51
Speaker 4: not being in the room on the auto rescue in
42:53
Speaker 4: two thousand and eight, two thousand and nine. But I'm
42:56
Speaker 4: curious how Hally Steep, how you think Haley Stevens is
43:01
Speaker 4: playing up in the Upper Peninsula versus her opponent Abdul Alsaiad.
43:06
Speaker 11: Well, I can tell you this much, and this might
43:08
Speaker 11: be it might be the worst kept secret in the world.
43:11
Speaker 11: But before I was ever a candidate in this race,
43:13
Speaker 11: I was a believer in Duel Alsaiah, you know. And
43:17
Speaker 11: I met a duel in I think it was may
43:19
Speaker 11: or June of twenty twenty five.
43:22
Speaker 7: He had come up to the Upper Peninsula. He had
43:24
Speaker 7: come up to Asknaba.
43:25
Speaker 11: He was making the rounds even then, to the deeper,
43:28
Speaker 11: darker places of our state, the places that are often forgotten,
43:33
Speaker 11: and he was having these conversations, same conversations that I'm having,
43:36
Speaker 11: telling people that they deserve more from their government. And
43:39
Speaker 11: he's willing to go to those contended places and have
43:42
Speaker 11: those difficult conversations, even in rooms that might not be
43:46
Speaker 11: predisposed to agreeing with him, because that's what the work is.
43:49
Speaker 11: That duel seems to understand that that's what the work
43:52
Speaker 11: is and again telling you this much is I have
43:55
Speaker 11: never seen a Hailey stephen Yard sign in all my
43:59
Speaker 11: travels here in northern Michigan painted this district with three coats.
44:03
Speaker 7: By now, I see a lot of Abdual science.
44:06
Speaker 11: I talk to a lot of people, and you know,
44:09
Speaker 11: whether there are volunteers or people that are coming to
44:12
Speaker 11: our events, it's abdual buttons all the way.
44:15
Speaker 7: I can tell you that every single time I see.
44:17
Speaker 11: A poll and they have the splits out and they're
44:19
Speaker 11: looking at various different regions, the North seems like it's
44:22
Speaker 11: solid for Abdul. I think that the way that Abdul
44:26
Speaker 11: has been running his race is honest, it's authentic. I
44:29
Speaker 11: think everybody can see that, and I think it's playing well.
44:32
Speaker 11: And then the question, the outlying question, is only whether
44:35
Speaker 11: or not the amount of money that is being pumped
44:38
Speaker 11: out into this race from outside sources is going to
44:41
Speaker 11: have the desired impact to mislead people into believing that
44:45
Speaker 11: Miss Stevens is the better candidate.
44:48
Speaker 4: And finally, as we talked about the very top here at,
44:51
Speaker 4: Israel's playing a huge role in the in the Stephens
44:54
Speaker 4: Abdul Sayat race, morle F four is This is a
44:57
Speaker 4: little bit of an interview between Abdul Elsaia and Alex Wagner.
45:02
Speaker 5: So no funding to ensure the survival or future of
45:06
Speaker 5: the Jewish States.
45:07
Speaker 14: Well, I turned that background on you, Alex and say,
45:08
Speaker 14: why is it our responsibility to ensure that?
45:10
Speaker 6: I'm just asking because I think, but why is it?
45:13
Speaker 7: Why is it understanding?
45:15
Speaker 14: But hear me out, hear me out, here, me out.
45:16
Speaker 14: Why is that the essential frame from which we work?
45:18
Speaker 14: Like why is it assumed that the United States ought
45:21
Speaker 14: to be in the business of backstopping a foreign government?
45:24
Speaker 14: Like I'm just saying, like, I don't want ill will
45:26
Speaker 14: for Jewish Israeli people at all, I really don't. I
45:30
Speaker 14: just want equal rights to peace, dignive your self determination
45:32
Speaker 14: for all people. But the notion that somehow our tax
45:34
Speaker 14: dollars ought to secure the interests of a foreign government,
45:38
Speaker 14: Like this is the United States and our own kids
45:40
Speaker 14: don't have good schools, and you're telling me that should
45:43
Speaker 14: be a primary concern over there.
45:44
Speaker 4: How is this argument kind of playing out in the
45:46
Speaker 4: Upper Peninsula.
45:48
Speaker 11: Well, like, I'm telling you this much, I think that
45:49
Speaker 11: what we've seen is the entanglement between the United States
45:54
Speaker 11: government and the government of Israel, not only at a
45:57
Speaker 11: time what they're committing a genocide and gazillin.
46:00
Speaker 7: You have legal annexation and.
46:01
Speaker 11: Programs in the West Bank, when we have incursions into Lebanon,
46:04
Speaker 11: when we're getting ourselves in technical to do a broader
46:07
Speaker 11: regional conflict now in Iran that's starting to hit our pocketbooks.
46:11
Speaker 11: There's not a single person that I've talked to, Democrat, Republican, Independent,
46:15
Speaker 11: or otherwise who believes that we should be sending our
46:18
Speaker 11: tax dollars to a foreign government like a duple said,
46:23
Speaker 11: to be able to backstop their ability to perpetrate violence
46:26
Speaker 11: against their neighbors, to be able to starve and brutalize
46:30
Speaker 11: a community that is mostly children. And I can tell
46:34
Speaker 11: you this much is personally, I want my community's needs met.
46:39
Speaker 11: I believe in Medicare for all. I believe in guaranteeing healthcare,
46:42
Speaker 11: and as an architects, I believe in guaranteeing housing. I
46:45
Speaker 11: believe that we should have housing first policy in this country.
46:48
Speaker 11: But if there's one thing that physically compelled me to
46:50
Speaker 11: run in this race is I was sitting up in
46:52
Speaker 11: the Upper Peninsula, halfway between some of it and the
46:55
Speaker 11: rest of it, and I was watching on my phone
46:57
Speaker 11: as my tax dollars murdered ton that looked like my children.
47:01
Speaker 11: And that's that's not a not something I say lightly,
47:06
Speaker 11: I quite literally, with the tired mind one night, looked
47:09
Speaker 11: at my phone and in an instant that will lasts
47:11
Speaker 11: the rest of my life, I saw my own son's
47:13
Speaker 11: face on a child in Goslin, and by an accident
47:16
Speaker 11: of their birth, that child was dead, and my child
47:19
Speaker 11: was sleeping soundly in the next room.
47:21
Speaker 7: And I found it.
47:23
Speaker 11: Impossible to believe that on either side of the aisle
47:26
Speaker 11: that there was a consensus that we should continue to
47:29
Speaker 11: fund that right wing Israeli government during a time when
47:32
Speaker 11: they're committing those sorts of atrocities in the name of
47:36
Speaker 11: the beautiful Jewish people. And this idea that we can't separate,
47:39
Speaker 11: that we can't detach the Israeli government from the Jewish
47:43
Speaker 11: people at large, is bizarre and I reject it.
47:46
Speaker 7: Moule heartedly well.
47:48
Speaker 4: Kyle Blonquist, candidate for Michigan's first congressional district. The primary
47:53
Speaker 4: is on August fourth. Thanks so much for joining us.
47:56
Speaker 7: Thanks a lot, take care, talk to you later.
47:58
Speaker 4: Are those Kyle Blanquists that's our show. But of course
48:01
Speaker 4: we can't leave without getting Emily's review of Sunday Night
48:05
Speaker 4: Fish Concert Meriweather Post Pavilion. We throw this up. This
48:10
Speaker 4: is This is us at the show's that's actually my
48:14
Speaker 4: uncle Archie in the background.
48:15
Speaker 3: He was awesome, but he's a great Oh my gosh,
48:18
Speaker 3: he was telling me the best stories.
48:20
Speaker 6: I bet he's from outside Allentown.
48:22
Speaker 4: Yeah, Kutztown, Pennsylvania.
48:23
Speaker 6: Good stuff.
48:24
Speaker 4: Yeah, he ran for state rep in two thousand and
48:27
Speaker 4: six in a heavily Republican area, lost by like one
48:30
Speaker 4: hundred and ten votes or something like.
48:32
Speaker 6: You think we didn't talk about this at length, amazing.
48:35
Speaker 4: Of course we did, hopefully not while the music was playing.
48:38
Speaker 4: They call that chomping.
48:39
Speaker 6: Yeah, we were chomping.
48:40
Speaker 4: Oh anyway, So what'd you think of the what'd you
48:42
Speaker 4: think of the show?
48:44
Speaker 3: Smells were bad, vibes were good.
48:47
Speaker 6: Based area.
48:49
Speaker 3: You know, I'm not a jam bam person, but I
48:51
Speaker 3: can concede that Jampins are usually great musicians, and it's
48:58
Speaker 3: just genuinely good music, like objectively fun music to listen to.
49:01
Speaker 6: It was a beautiful night, so awesome. Guy came up
49:04
Speaker 6: to us said he loved the show. There that was fun.
49:07
Speaker 6: Definitely a lot of breaking points.
49:09
Speaker 4: Viewers, I would think, so open minded people there.
49:11
Speaker 6: Yeah, it was it was chill.
49:12
Speaker 3: It was a beautiful night with like the sun setting
49:15
Speaker 3: to the side of the stage.
49:16
Speaker 6: So it was lots of nice people.
49:18
Speaker 4: Emily and field State for the first set and then
49:21
Speaker 4: you left to separate, did you But did you catch
49:24
Speaker 4: any of the second set with this light show or anything?
49:26
Speaker 6: No, we didn't. There was a light show. I didn't
49:28
Speaker 6: even realize there.
49:29
Speaker 3: Was gonna be a light show, and nobody told me
49:31
Speaker 3: there was a light show.
49:32
Speaker 6: I'm just hearing of this.
49:33
Speaker 4: Well, yeah, catch the light show.
49:35
Speaker 6: You probably wanted to get up.
49:36
Speaker 4: You missed a The second set started with a forty
49:39
Speaker 4: minute karini.
49:41
Speaker 6: Okay, we probably made theirs.
49:44
Speaker 4: You don't want to miss the forty minute.
49:46
Speaker 6: Uh, we went and got mcflury's to be honest.
49:50
Speaker 4: All right, Well, so next time, let's they'll maybe they'll
49:53
Speaker 4: be in Hampton Fall Tour.
49:55
Speaker 3: I mean again, if the weather's nice, it's like just
49:57
Speaker 3: a great time.
49:59
Speaker 4: It's you can't have a bad time.
50:00
Speaker 6: No, yeah, you.
50:01
Speaker 3: Actually couldn't have a bad time, especially if you're not
50:03
Speaker 3: like in the middle of the throngs. Although they kind
50:05
Speaker 3: of we kind of were in the middle of the throng.
50:06
Speaker 3: So see, you know, people are getting up to different
50:08
Speaker 3: stuff at the people certainly are beach balls bopping around
50:13
Speaker 3: because lots of kids. We pointed that out, lots of families,
50:16
Speaker 3: lots of kids.
50:18
Speaker 6: It was a fun time.
50:18
Speaker 3: I get it, I get it. I'll say that thanks
50:21
Speaker 3: for the invited. It really was fun and your family's fun.
50:25
Speaker 3: So it's always cool to be.
50:27
Speaker 6: With the Grims.
50:28
Speaker 4: Indeed, indeed, all right until next time. We'll see you
50:31
Speaker 4: guys soon.