cover of episode 7/10/24: Dems Fracture Over Biden Drop Out, Jon Stewart Unloads On Dems, Neurologist Says Biden Clear Parkinson's, Kamala Surges Against Trump, Biden DOJ War On UAW Over Gaza

7/10/24: Dems Fracture Over Biden Drop Out, Jon Stewart Unloads On Dems, Neurologist Says Biden Clear Parkinson's, Kamala Surges Against Trump, Biden DOJ War On UAW Over Gaza

2024/7/10

Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar

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Hi, I'm Katie Lowe's and I'm Guillermo Diaz. And we're the hosts of Unpacking the Toolbox, the Scandal Rewatch podcast where we're talking about all the best moments of the show. Mesmerizing. But also we get to hang out with all of our old scandal friends like Bellamy Young, Scott Foley, Tony Goldwyn, Debbie Allen, Kerry Washington. Well, suit up, gladiators. Grab your big old glass of wine and prepare yourselves for even more behind the scenes stories with Unpacking the Toolbox podcast.

Listen to Unpacking the Toolbox on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Meet the real woman behind the tabloid headlines in a personal podcast that delves into the life of the notorious Tori Spelling as she takes us through the ups and downs of her sometimes glamorous, sometimes chaotic life in marriage. I just filed for divorce. Whoa. I said the words that I've said like in my head for like 16 years.

Listen to Misspelling on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Angie Martinez, and on my podcast, I like to talk to everyone from Hall of Fame athletes to iconic musicians about getting real on some of the complications and challenges of real life.

I had the best dad and I had the best memories and the greatest experience. And that's all I want for my kids as long as they can have that. Listen to Angie Martinez IRL on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey guys, Ready or Not 2024 is here and we here at Breaking Points are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that, let's get to the show.

- Good morning and welcome to CounterPoints. We have a huge show today. Before we get to that, I wanna say a big thank you to everybody who watches this show and signed up for DropSite News. It's been such a gratifying and exhilarating first couple of days. I was keeping Emily updated on the subscription totals last night. Last night we cleared 100,000 free subscribers, over 2,000 paid subscribers.

And for CounterPoints viewers, we have a discount code now to kind of boost it up to 3,000 by the end of the day. So if you go to DropSiteNews.com slash CounterPoints, just for CounterPoints, also Breaking Points viewers. Yeah, we'll share. But if you don't watch CounterPoints, do not use that code. It's an honor system. Yes. And you'll get 20% off.

Now, the journalism is free, so the 20% off is just kind of to make people feel better about what they're doing. But you also get to comment and do all the funny things. Yeah, Ryan, the fact that you're building a new news outlet I think is so cool, and it's been amazing to watch the response. I understand why so many people, I signed up, so many people are exhilarated along with you because-

what you guys are planning to do, what you've already done, some amazing stories coming out. And I know you guys are working on more. So very, very cool stuff. Congratulations. And the work that we do here will regularly be featured right here. Yeah. By here, I mean Dropside News. And then here, I mean CounterPoint. Yeah. It's a cool name and logo too, by the way. I think it looks good. I like it. Yeah. We can throw that logo up there with the...

with the discount code, dropsytenews.com slash counterpoints. And some of the reporting that we have from DropSite, we're going to be talking about later in this UAW segment that is called anti-Semitism under there. It's really going to blow your mind. I don't want to even tease it. It's one of the craziest things I think we've reported on in a long time. So we'll talk about that one when we get to it. First, of course, we're going to

talk about Joe Biden and the fact that he is still running for president, which is quite remarkable. Still alive, still running, still president. Still serving as president. We're going to talk about the polling collapse that he's seeing, which is, I think, the thing, the only thing,

That drives him out of there if it's not the 25th Amendment. Right. Kind of the gravity of the polls just pulling, just physically pulling him out of there. And then at the end of the show, we're going to talk to Brian Seltzer. Yes. Long time CNN media guy who's now at Vanity Fair. He has some thoughts on the way that the media has handled this. And as a kind of

Elder in the village think it's gonna be fun to hear his take on his fellow villagers Because we also have some thoughts on how the media has all of this we do And on our Friday show this week. Make sure you stay tuned for that. We have a hell of a debate coming up with Cenk Uygur and Ryan Demetri Melhorn This is a debate the likes of which

basically could never happen. It's a Democratic mega donor, one of the most influential behind the scenes mega donors and organizers in Democratic Party politics who is a steadfast supporter of Biden remaining in the race, debating Cenk Uygur, who to this audience needs no introduction. Both of them in the room is gonna be quite something, or both of them remotely actually is gonna be quite something. Emily and I are just gonna sit back and- Let it go. Popcorn gif. Yeah.

All right, well, let's start with the ongoing congressional reaction to Biden's debate, the fallout from the debate, Biden's response to the fallout from the debate, because more and more people are continuing to be forced to comment or to come out openly and comment on their own and say either, yes, we're still with Joe or, oh my gosh, this man needs to get out of the race. So let's roll the first clip mashup here. I am not going to comment on what I said in the private meeting.

-All I'll say is the president made very clear yesterday that he's running, and to me, that's dispositive. We have to support him. -The Democratic Party, without the president, his ability to serve on the Capitol, there might be a challenge at the convention, and if there is, is there the ability to throw out the virtual nomination?

As I said before, I'm with Joe. - So that's Jerry Nadler and of course then Chuck Schumer. Jerry Nadler had publicly said that he wanted Joe Biden to drop out of the race. He said that in a private meeting which was reported publicly.

what you're seeing is people now kind of backing off as Joe is going public. Michael Bennett, however, in a private meeting, this is a senator from Colorado, he said he wanted Joe to drop out. He did not back off that on cable last night. My colleague, Dana Bash, reported that you, Senator Jon Tester and Senator Sherrod Brown all said during that lunch that you don't think President Biden can win in 2024. Is that true? Well, it's true that I said that. And

I did say that behind closed doors and you guys and others asked whether I had said it and that is what I said. So I figured I should come here and say it publicly. Why do you think you can't win in November? I just think this race is on a trajectory that is very worrisome if you care about the future of this country.

Joe Biden was nine points up at this time the last time he was running. Hillary Clinton was five points up. This is the first time in more than 20 years that a Republican president has been up in this part of the campaign. Donald Trump is on track, I think, to win this election and maybe win it by a landslide and take with him the Senate and the House. So for me, this isn't a question about polling. It's not a question about politics.

It's a moral question about the future of our country. And I think it's critically important for us to come to grips with what we face if together we put this country on the path of electing Donald Trump again. - So there's a centrist Democratic senator going out on a limb. We've also got a progressive congresswoman going out, or two of them actually, going out on a different sort of limb. Let's roll this next one. - Has spoken to the president over the weekend. I have spoken with him extensively.

He made clear then and he has made clear since that he is in this race. The matter is closed. He had reiterated that this morning. He has reiterated that to the public. Joe Biden is our nominee. He is not leaving this race. He is in this race and I support him. Now, what I think is critically important right now is that we focus on what it takes to win in November because he is running against Donald Trump, who is a man with

34 felony convictions that has committed 34 felony crimes and not a single Republican has asked for Donald Trump to not be the nominee. I'm here to win on this democracy. I'm here to win in November. And what's critically important is what the president, I believe, that the president needs to do, and I have communicated this, what the president and the White House should do in order to make sure that we win in November.

And that is making sure that we pivot and working and increasingly commit to the issues that are critically important to working people across this country. How are we going to expand Medicare? How are we going to expand Social Security? How are we going to provide relief to people's rents?

and mortgages, and if we can do that and continue our work on student loans, secure a ceasefire and bring those dollars back into investing in public policy, then that's how we win in November. That's what I'm committed to, and that's what I want to make sure that we secure. So AOC made those comments roughly at the same time as you, and we can put up the next element here, A3. Fellow squad member Ilhan Omar said, this is coming out of the caucus meeting, outside a few outliers, I think everybody's supporting the president.

You saw a lot of people kind of stunned to see squad members coming out supportive of Biden staying in the race. For the last week or so, people have been observing that

They were silent on the question. And the thinking was, and the thinking from that camp was, them coming out and telling Biden to step down doesn't get him to step down. In fact, it only reinforces his willingness to stay in because now it's a squad or left versus kind of establishment thing. That doesn't require them to come out publicly. At the same time, if you're going to take the unpopular position with Trump

or the wrong position let's just call it the wrong position if you're going to take the wrong position like you might as well take it all the way and what people are forgetting is the context of the democratic primaries both ilhan omar and corey bush have democratic primaries right now and they are running ads linking themselves to the democratic party and to joe biden right because the way that jamal bowman was beaten for instance was

by going after him for his vote against the infrastructure bill, which was actually done in support of the broader Build Back Better agenda. But he voted against it. They would say he's not a good enough Democrat. They said that to Summer Lee. Like that's the hit that they do inside the Democratic Party, which is more partisan than Republicans, that you're not a good enough Democrat. And so the way that Cori Bush and Neil Honnemore counter that is with pictures of them with establishment Democrats. Hashtag I'm with him. I'm with him. So for them to then come out and say, well,

Actually, he should drop out even if they believe it Undercuts that even if a bunch of their supporters want him to drop out So I think it's just straight-up primary politics is what's going on there. Yeah, plus a final thing

It's a kind of no lose situation. Like if they call for him to drop out and he loses, doesn't drop out and he loses, then everybody says, oh, look what the left did, they undermined Biden. If they call for him to stay in and he drops out, nobody's gonna be mad at them, everybody forgets. If they call for him to stay in and he wins,

Now they're heroes. And so it's kind of cynical just posturing and calculating about their own kind of game theory, which is why I was saying the other day, we don't have a kind of party system. We have a politician system. All the politicians are just looking out for their own advantage within the system. It's a good way to put it. I mean, the contrast between members of the squad and the sort of young left, obviously there's a difference between the online left and the broader young left.

But, you know, in the kind of activist crowd, there has been, you can correct me on this if you think I'm misinterpreting it, but the coconut pill memeing that we talked about last week, I think is a real reflection of this ironic detachment, but disgust really with what's happened with Joe Biden and how he's been propped up by oligarchs essentially. And so to see that tension and contrast, I think

I don't know where that, I mean, depending on how this all plays out. Yeah, it does seem like a huge gap, especially for somebody like AOC. Yeah, it really is. It's basically AOC saying that she's making a play here that's just completely different than what that old base was. Call it an audible. I would put up the next element here. This is the kind of Washington media assessing what's going on here that Biden's winning.

so far. Right. That after years, as Zach Carter made this point on Twitter, after years of Democrats saying that Republican officials and senators and members of Congress are complete cowards for not standing up to Donald Trump, for saying privately...

That Donald Trump is an ogre and a threat to our republic, but then publicly supporting him. Like you constantly hear Democrats saying that. I hear from my Republican friends all the time. They hate Donald Trump, but publicly they say something completely different. Democrats doing the exact version of that right now. Privately saying one thing and then publicly saying, you know what?

I'm with Joe. And so that Axios story that was just up on the screen, sort of the clicky moment that came out of it is there were, according to sources, quote, actual tears at a meeting yesterday of small, it was a small meeting of swing district Democrats. And in the same article, there's an interesting description from Axios where they say that yesterday was Joe Biden's first day of, quote, sustained support.

support from people on Capitol Hill. And if this is what sustained support looks like, Michael Bennett, a senator, a Democratic senator from Colorado, going on primetime CNN and saying that he shouldn't run for president, we know the Ilhan Omar statement is wrong, that it's more than just a, quote, few outliers, as she put it. Maybe a handy line to get past those reporters who are absolutely like

peppering you with questions all day, every day. And also, let's put this next element up on the screen. As Ryan was just about to say, there was a Senate Democrat meeting. And Ryan, you may have some color to add to this. But if this is, again, the sustained support for Joe Biden, even Chuck Schumer, who's the

who we heard say, kind of if you were watching with a shrug, I'm with Joe yesterday. He didn't even make in that meeting an argument for or against Biden. According to this report, he merely acted as a neutral facilitator of the conversation where you had people who were going all in

on Biden. I can only imagine that was John Fetterman and people who were sort of stating the obvious about the problems with Joe Biden. Because now this is, as we'll talk about soon, starting to show up in polling and Senate Democrats have a really tough map this cycle. So they're very concerned about that.

Even Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, a longtime Biden friend and ally, was neutral. Right. And Schumer has been very quiet since the debate and has allowed it to be known around Washington that he doesn't think

Biden can win like that's that's the message that his that he's been he's been putting out but he hasn't said it publicly He's doing what all these other members of Congress are doing even with AOC You said I talked to him Biden is running like there's just positive statements that are like a declarative truth about a truth That is true in that moment. Like he is running and

And then they go from there on that presumption rather than endorsing it and saying, I want Biden to run. They just people people just say and Jerry Nadler said the same thing. He is our nominee. Technically not true. He is actually not the nominee yet. Right. But details.

If we can put up the Mikey Sherrill one. Yep. She says, I know President Biden cares deeply about the future of our country. That's why I'm asking that he declare that he won't run for election. My full statement. Sherrill is widely understood to be looking at statewide office in New Jersey. She's a swing district Democrat, one of the people who understands which way the politics of this are blowing. Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, did you see this?

There was a poll out, we'll talk about this later, that has something like a 12 point gap between her and Biden. Like she's up by five, six, he's down by five or six in Wisconsin.

And she is refusing to appear with him when he comes to Wisconsin. Interesting. Because he was just in Wisconsin. That's where he did the George Stephanopoulos interview. In fact, he was just in Madison, which is an area that Tammy Baldwin lived for a long time, represented for a long time. Yeah, she refused to be seen with him. Yeah. She's like, look, I'm trying to win an election. I don't know what you're doing over there. Right. It's not trying to win an election. Yeah, it's...

These aren't the same things. Yeah. Right, so again, I think yesterday was noteworthy because there was this momentum where you had some really staunch defenders of Biden come out and respond to these questions from reporters haunting the halls of Capitol Hill. At the same time, with people like Chuck Schumer, it's different than how they have been posturing themselves privately.

And there are plenty of people who are so openly, major people, big names, Michael Bennett, completely uncomfortable with the state of affairs. - And James Carville had a high profile New York Times column

where he endorsed what Ezra Klein and I have both written about. He said, basically what you need to do is he needs to drop out and he needs to free his delegates. Don't do this thing where you just coronate Kamala Harris. You have some version of a mini primary, whether it's a bunch of town halls, whether it's leading into the convention, whatever you have, and make it a spectacle.

Like make it legitimate in the sense that it is participatory. Just like reality TV is fake participatory. Your piece on that was so good. Yeah, it's just let, like the country, and what Jon Stewart talked about is the country is hungry

for something authentic, like some sign that our system can still respond to the needs, wants, and will of the people. And we're getting no signs of that whatsoever. Well, but Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that this is about saving democracy. And that's going to be- No time for voting. No time for participation. This is about saving democracy. It's going to be really difficult.

- That's a really difficult line, I think, for Biden defenders because on the one hand, that is the argument they're making. I wrote about this for UnHerd a couple weeks ago. It's like the Flight 93 election on the right that you had was this is such a, the other side is such an existential threat to the country that you have to support an imperfect vessel, a deeply flawed vessel. And it's that existential reaction. And so if you're defending lowercase democracy,

you're defending Biden in the name of lowercase democracy, it becomes a really untenable argument to make that the public is just like not interested in at this point at all. The final thing I wanted to say on this is you're starting to see conventional wisdom consolidate around the idea that

It's just, it's Biden. Democrats are saying, we just have to go with Biden. Everyone's getting more comfortable with it, easing back into the notion of just sticking with Biden, all of the other alternatives. We may have had fun with those for a few weeks, but now it's time to get serious. That's absolutely not what's going to happen. I mean, they're trying to make that happen. It's like trying to make fetch happen. They're trying to do it.

You're not gonna make fetch happen. Right and just as this show will march inexorably as you see at the bottom toward that thing called polling at the middle there like we have no choice. We're gonna get the polling. Yeah, we have to. So was Biden. So is Biden going to get to polling? Yeah. And that matters. The thing when he's down eight, nine, ten points in Pennsylvania as he's approaching a double digit gap in Pennsylvania at that point and it's and you haven't even had the convention

Then this whole, well, I guess it's just gonna be Biden, takes a real knock. Should we move to the cultural response here? Final point, just quickly, is Biden has his press conference at the NATO summit here in DC. He gave a speech last night where he didn't fall off the stage. Right, press reports said that the speech was excellent, that it didn't have the usual stumbles. So who knows why that is? You could hear him enunciate his words. It was a speech that you're like, all right, if this is actually who the guy is like 100% of the time,

And all he has to do is read a teleprompter great sure get him in and out. Yeah, give him the words But he's also doing a live press conference on Thursday meaning questions from reporters Which is something that he rarely does does not happen very often and hasn't done since the debate Unless it was you know going back and forth from a plane or anything He scheduled it like a week ago to buy time. Yeah to say well don't don't kick me out yet and

And so-- Oh, and the final thing, James Galbraith, who we, Jamie Galbraith, who we've had on this show, he has this famous saying that anybody who says four times that they will not resign will resign.

We have to count the number of times and after the fourth, that's when he's out. I don't even know if we could possibly. He did that in this George Stephanopoulos interview like 20 times. Well, I think that counts as one. Like four separate occasions of declaring that you will not resign means that you will resign. Interesting. Yeah. We'll call it the Galbraith rule. The Galbraith rule is undefeated. So we'll see.

Masmerizing.

Also, we get to hang out with all of our old Scandal friends like Bellamy Young, Scott Foley, Tony Goldwyn, Debbie Allen, Kerry Washington. So many people. Even more shocking assassinations from Papa and Mama Pope. And yes, Katie and I's famous teeth pulling scene that kicks off a romance. And it was peak TV. This is new Scandal KCBQ.

content for your eyes, for your ears, for your hearts, for your minds. Well, suit up gladiators, grab your big old glass of wine and prepare yourselves for even more behind the scenes. Listen to unpacking the toolbox on the I heart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Meet the real woman behind the tabloid headlines in a personal podcast that delves into the life of the notorious Tori Spelling as she takes us through the ups and downs of her sometimes glamorous, sometimes chaotic life and marriage. I don't think he knew how big it would be, how big the life I was given and live is.

I think he was like, oh, yeah, things come and go. But with me, it never came and went. Is she Donna Martin or a down-and-out divorcee? Is she living in Beverly Hills or a trailer park? In a town where the lines are blurred, Tori is finally going to clear the air in the podcast Misspelling. When a woman has nothing to lose, she has everything to gain. I just filed for divorce. Whoa, I said the words.

that I've said like in my head for like 16 years. Wild. Listen to Miss Spelling on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Angie Martinez. Check out my podcast where I talk to some of the biggest athletes, musicians, actors in the world. We go beyond the headlines and the soundbites to have real conversations about real life, death, love, and everything in between. This life right here, just finding myself, just relaxation, just not feeling stressed, just not feeling pressed. This is what I'm most proud of. I'm proud of Mary because I've been through hell and some horrible things.

That feeling that I had of inadequacy is gone. You're going to die being you. So you got to constantly work on who you are to make sure that the stars align correctly.

Life ain't easy and it's getting harder and harder. So if you have a story to tell, if you've come through some trials, you need to share it because you're going to inspire someone. You're going to give somebody the motivation to not give up, to not quit. Listen to Angie Martinez IRL on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Meanwhile, cultural reactions to Joe Biden are all in the same direction, which I think is pretty interesting. There's not much of the split screen that you're seeing on Capitol Hill reflected in the broader culture, which has been pretty friendly to Biden over the last several years. Let's start with this sot from Stephen Colbert this week.

The competing virtue here, there's another competing virtue, and that is self-sacrifice. And self-sacrifice takes a particular kind of courage. And that is a courage I believe Joe Biden is capable of. I believe he's a good enough man, he is a good enough president to put the needs of the country ahead of the needs of his ego. And however painful that might be, it is possible handing leadership to a younger generation is the right thing for the greater goodest.

Or good as. Either one. As good as versus good as. The good as. I was listening to it again just for fun. It's like the good as. If you haven't seen, by the way, the entire Jon Stewart monologue, it's so good. Like start to finish.

And it's like, how on earth did we even survive without Jon Stewart on the air for as long as we made it? And we didn't. Basically, the Republic fell apart. You're saying this is the most Gen X take that you have, is we desperately need Jon Stewart. There's a fine line between disaster and- Yes, and at least he makes me laugh. Let's roll this whole Jon Stewart. Get on board or shut the fuck up.

is not a particularly compelling pro-democracy bumper sticker. Nor is, what are you going to do? Do you understand the opportunity here? Do you have any idea how thirsty Americans are for any hint of inspiration or leadership and a release from this choice of a megalomaniac and a suffocating gerontocracy? It is crushing our...

Feel free to ignore any obvious weaknesses in your team's existential fight for freedom and democracy. And then just white-knuckle this thing till November. Or take the advice of your own candidate. Do you think there is any Democrat who could defeat Donald Trump other than you? Probably 50 of them. 50? 50?

And elsewhere in the clip, he says, look, I don't know, just spitballing here, but maybe you could have all the Democrats come together in one city, convene them, let's say in Chicago, hang around for four days. Yeah, it's an idea. People can give speeches, present their visions, and then you vote. And the winner is the nominee. The crazy idea. Maybe do it about six weeks or so. Just might work. It's just so crazy. It just might work. Yeah. But importantly, Charlemagne.

Let's roll him. All I hear is ego. And I hope they take him up on his offer. Every single Democrat who feels like, you know, the Democrats can't win if President Biden is the nominee needs to challenge him at the convention. Take him up on his offer. And I can't believe we're just having this conversation because I've been saying this for several months and asking the question, are Biden and Harris a winnable ticket? And if the answer is no, Biden should step aside and people shouldn't be upset when folks say that, especially if y'all want to win. Yeah. And Biden, you know,

You played the CBC car the Congressional Black Caucus card this week he still had the support public support at least of a lot of CBC members and and very and very angrily was saying like I have black support Yeah, he was straight morning Joe or wherever he was, you know yelling about that and and that did seem to back up

back Democrats off a little bit. Charlemagne coming out so forcefully certainly doesn't help with that case. Yeah, and this isn't going away. I mean, these are all positions that have been staked out very publicly by people on their own shows. And so for the Biden administration to, and Democrats actually, to think that there's a way that they can get through this press conference. Biden surprises everyone. He's really good. He has a great night. He has a great day, gets through it. They can

really tightly managed his public appearances for the next few weeks and into November. This isn't going away. I mean, it's not going to stop the drip drip of comedians, talk show hosts, other members of Congress who have publicly said now, taken a really difficult stance in the Democratic Party. It shouldn't be a difficult stance, but taken what is a difficult, turning out to be a difficult stance in the Democratic Party.

The spin is not going to work in the long term. And so if the Biden administration Democrats think they can get through this week, Biden has a good week. They'll be patient with the poll numbers. I really think that's what they're trying to do right now is just say, we're just gonna be patient with these poll numbers. We're gonna get them back out in front of the public. It's gonna do Stephanopoulos. He's going to do a press conference. People are gonna see he's okay. We can kind of put the genie back in the bottle.

They can't, and I think they're delusional to believe that they can sort of, like you said, white knuckle it out of this week, let the news cycle die down and move on. It's not gonna move on. The problem is reality is intervening here. And it's rare that the bar almost makes a sentence here. The bar at the bottom there says, Biden health polling. Those are the- Anti-Semitism, Brian Stelter. Those stop making sense, but Biden, because of his health, is polling so terribly.

Hi, I'm Katie Lowe's. And I'm Guillermo Diaz. And now we're back with another season of our podcast, Unpacking the Toolbox, where Guillermo and I will be rewatching the show. To officially unpack season three of Scandal. Unpredictable. You don't see it coming. It's a wild, wild ride. The twists and turns in season three. Mesmerizing. But also,

that I've said like in my head for like 16 years. Wild. Listen to Misspelling on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

That feeling that I had of inadequacy is gone. You're going to die being you. So you got to constantly work on who you are to make sure that the stars align correctly.

Let's move on to the latest discussion of the reality of the substance that we're talking about. We can play this first clip. This is a neurologist talking about the condition that is, you know, Biden's age, basically. Let's roll that.

You noticed anything that gives you a red flag as a doctor? Oh, yeah. I see him 20 times a day in clinic. I mean, it's ironic because he has just classic features of neurodegeneration. I mean, word finding difficulties, and that's not, oh, I couldn't find the word. That's from degeneration of the word retrieval area. He's also overcome stuttering, though. Could that be part of that?

No, this is not a palatal issue or a speech discrepancy, which is very different from a lemono dysfunction, actual word retrieval, where you pick a similar question or talk around the issue, plus the rigidity, monotone voice. Wait, go back to that, the rigidity. What do you mean? Rigidity, loss of arm swing, standing up lordotically. You notice when he turns, it's kind of end block turning. It's not a quick turn. So that's one of the hallmarks of Parkinson's is rigidity and bradykinesia, slow movement.

And he has that hallmark, especially with the low voice he said was a cold. Hypophonia, a small monotone voice like this over time, is a hallmark of Parkinsonism. I could have diagnosed him from across the mall. It's very hard to diagnose Parkinson's, isn't it? It's not simple. I mean, I've heard that it can be... It's one of the easier movement disorders to diagnose, actually. Right. But it's so clinic. There's very little other... And I'm a Democrat, I always say. Yeah. It's just like...

This guy is not a hard case. But I've had relatives who have gone through issues, neurological issues, and I've heard that sometimes Parkinson's is not very easy to nail. You have to take a lot of tests. There's like, I mean... Early on, if you're just presented with like hallucinations, that could be a variety of things, or just the cognitive problems, that could be Alzheimer's versus Parkinsonism, and that'd

becomes a little nebulous. But once you start manifesting the hallmark motor symptoms, slow movement, rigidity, mass faces, hypophonia. I mean, if a med student did not pick Parkinson's on the test,

They'd be remediated. Let me ask you're a Democrat. You're a doctor. You sound like you're frustrated with what the White House is saying. Yeah. Why? Well, because, you know, I'm an American before everything. And I look at it and say when I used to see Russia, Soviet Union, North Korea, when they just make outrageous things, you know, like when when North Korea can't keep the lights on and they say, oh, you know, it was some faulty power thing. I kind of hate that kind of stuff.

They had four years. My own party had four years to find, you know, this was a wreck in slow motion. And they had four years to find out of 350 Americans, one person that could take the place. And here we are the day before school trying to do the homework and replace a guy who's got a neurodegenerative disease. Pretty incredible when you look at that list of symptoms. Yeah. It's like, well, you know, it's really hard to diagnose. Like, no.

Like it's not. Yeah. And the NBC anchor sort of being like he overcame a stutter, right? Could that have anything to do with him saying we beat Medicare? Which and and I'm like push back. Oh, sure. Go ahead. But yes, it's like it's pretty clear at this point that it's he's got a neurodegenerative condition. I loved his line about if if a meds if if you showed somebody with these symptoms on this test.

And they did not identify this very common and famous condition that they would be remediated. Right, that it's actually not when you have all of this example of Biden, all these examples of Biden walking and talking and interacting with other people over the course of years, which we do because he was running for president and he is now the president of the United States.

It's not as though there's a dearth of available examples of his issues. I mean, we've seen it publicly. We saw two hours of it or an hour and a half of it in the debate itself. Just a 20-minute interview with George Stephanopoulos on Edited. You could see all of that there. And so his name is Dr. Tom Pitts. He's a neurologist. That was an interview on, I think, NBC News Now from Monday that started to really get traction yesterday. And I think one of the reasons it does is because he...

He's like relaxed and confident. He's taking a really difficult position again shouldn't be a difficult position But when you go out publicly and do that, it's not like when you had doctors left and right I don't mean that politically but coming out of the woodwork to diagnose Donald Trump with something during that 25th amendment conversation that was spawned by the anonymous letter and

Trump also easy to diagnose. He's just got so many different things. But do you remember how easily people were coming out and being like, oh, it's this, it's that. The Atlantic had like 30 different therapists or something on the cover of their thing, I think in like 2017 or something. Yeah, that was the big thing that the liberal press loved to do, is put Trump on the couch. And you know-

For doctors, people who run in circles of the affluent and the educated, coming out against Donald Trump is a badge of honor. That's socially a popular thing to do. For Biden, it's a little bit different. I mean, I think most of the country is with Dr. Pitts here, but it's still coming out against the sitting president of the United States,

who is clinging to power even in some corridors of his own party. Nancy Pelosi has said, "I'm not ready to make a statement," even though she said it's a fair question whether it's an episode or a broader condition. And Ryan, my biggest frustration in the last couple of weeks has been how political, how obsessively fixated on politics we are in the aftermath of that debate instead of saying, "This is the man who currently has the nuclear codes."

He's the president. It's not a conversation about whether he should be running for president. It's a conversation about whether he should be president and whether he should be president right now. And you hardly ever hear that come up. That's why we put polling third in the show because as important as it is to the question of who's the president two weeks from now, as these decisions are being made, it tells you what people really care about. What the oligarchy really cares about is having someone they can prop up actually like a Soviet leader

And they can sort of extract resources from, extract influence from, and continue on with their lives. And the other point to that, in that direction, is that it does seem like Biden is close to a zero percent chance of winning, but people really hate Trump. There is even a chance that like a comatose Biden could somehow snatch a victory. And then you've got

Four years of that concern like right now we have to get through January Yeah it's a crazy bet to make like the idea that you could that you're gonna just keep rolling those dice keep playing the game the by the way stiff arm line was really interesting to me because

So the moment where everything just completely broke for my wife was the Juneteenth dance thing where she would, I mean, I think she would kind of abandon him a while ago, but she doesn't watch it, so I can talk about it. Yeah.

Everybody would come over to her house. She'd show him this video. Like, did you see the Juneteenth thing? And it's crazy. It's like, what is going on here? And without a medical background, like, we don't know. We don't know how to diagnose something like that. But knowing that that is like a hallmark of kind of accelerated Parkinsonism or Parkinson's disease.

It's like oh, okay now that's starting to make sense because you could just tell that like there's something about the body movements. Yeah, it's off that

was just off. Yeah. And really powerful to look at clips of him from 2020. And I know we've talked about that. We showed it when we were on with Christian Sager Monday, the difference between Biden and 2020. Biden, I think, was still bad in 2020. He was saying things that made no sense occasionally. He was just losing words, all of those different things. And we know that this happens over time. But he is so incredibly diminished, physically diminished, mentally diminished, that

the fact that he is currently running to serve for president four more years is terrifying. But what's much more terrifying is that he is the current president of the United States. There are two hot wars. There's brewing conflict all over the world. And the American people

are just losing confidence in all of their institutions, rightfully so. I think I don't think we should have high institutional confidence right now. But this is the president of the United States who is, you know, again, I think of people whose kids are serving overseas, who are, you know, the family of people who were killed in Jordan. I mean, this is

- Immediate, it is not about an election. This is about something much deeper and this had happened, they had Dr. Pitts on in light of the story that Parkinson's expert had visited the White House some eight times, I believe since 2022, which we've talked about before, but this is now spiraling into a coverup story.

because the White House is saying they can't have that conversation about who he was there to visit because of medical privacy, which is actually a real thing. You can imagine, though, that they would be less concerned about medical privacy if it was someone other than the president. They would say it was a low-level staffer, et cetera. It was a family member, et cetera. So that's another huge, huge concern for Biden, for Kamala Harris, for the entire Democratic Party going forward, too. And because this is such a degenerative condition and because we are seeing him

decline in real time, there's actually a way out of that cover up story for Democrats that is a little bit less dishonest. It's still dishonest, but it's less dishonest, which would be to say, okay, look, he got a lot worse. Yeah, which we've heard some people say. And it does look like he got worse. Now, you can then argue, well, we think he was actually already bad enough, say, a year ago that you should have seen this coming.

But then you're in a different debate. You can say, okay, he's stepping aside because his condition has degenerated so much. But either way, the media is just going to keep hammering at him. Here's Jake Tapper with a pretty brutal little segment. In reality, 72% of voters say that they believe President Biden is too old. That's according to CNN's most recent polling. Voters have been saying this for quite a long time.

The reality is that the Democratic elites are mostly late to acknowledge these age and ability issues compared to the rest of the public. The elites have been forced to reckon with it after the debate just 11 days ago. Look at my career. I've not had many of those nights. It was a terrible night.

And I really regret it happened. But the fact of the matter is, how can you assure you're going to be on, you know, faith that can intervene on your way to go to work tomorrow? Age age wasn't, you know, the idea. I'm too old. The fact of the matter is, how can you assure you're going to be out on, you know, on your way to go, you know, work tomorrow? Age age wasn't, you know, the idea that I'm too old.

Keep in mind, that soundbite is supposed to be reassuring to those Democratic supporters who have gone wobbly. Many Democratic officials with whom I've spoken are worried that President Biden and his family and his inner circle appear to be in complete denial, not just about whatever might be wrong with him, but the state of his candidacy right now. So credit where it's due. I always find it insufferable when Jake Tapper, you know, that quote from Joe Biden that he just read off from the Morning Joe interview is,

You could have done that one year ago. You could have done that with Biden quotes two years ago. In fact, we did, basically. We did. Absolutely, we did. And so the sanctimonious, the adaptation of this or the adoption of the sanctimonious posturing now is grating, I think. And that clip was circulating yesterday. Let's see what Stelter will say later about it.

Good point. The evolution here at his old network. It's a great point. He's a good friend. I'm sure they're buddies. I'm sure they are. I'm sure they had tensions too, though. I'm sure. I believe that. But the back padding on that was frustrating. It's been frustrating in the media more broadly, which we'll talk about later in the show.

Most importantly for as Biden is concerned though, this is not going away because that is a hard stance. That is a hard line for Jake Tapper, a CNN anchor to get out there with right now. He's not going to walk that back if Biden has a good week. Nobody is walking this back if Biden does a good press conference the next day. They'll say Biden did a good press conference, but they're not gonna be like, I was wrong again, throw it all away. This guy's clearly fine. It's not happening. Yeah. It's not happening.

Hi, I'm Katie Lowe's and I'm Guillermo Diaz. And now we're back with another season of our podcast, unpacking the toolbox where Guillermo and I will be rewatching the show to officially unpack season three of scandal. Unpredictable. You don't see it coming. It's a wild, wild ride. The twists and turns in season three mesmerizing, but

Also, we get to hang out with all of our old scandal friends like Bellamy Young, Scott Foley, Tony Goldwyn, Debbie Allen, Kerry Washington. So many people. Even more shocking assassinations from Papa and Mama Pope. And yes, Katie and I's famous teeth-pulling scene that kicks off a romance.

And it was Peak TV. This is new scandal content for your eyes, for your ears, for your hearts, for your minds. Well, suit up, gladiators. Grab your big old glass of wine and prepare yourselves for even more behind the scenes. Listen to Unpacking the Toolbox on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

that I've said like in my head for like 16 years. Wild. Listen to Misspelling on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

that feeling that I had of inadequacy is gone. You're going to die being you. So you got to constantly work on who you are to make sure that the stars align correctly.

All right, let's move on Ryan to the polling that we have been hyping up because it's so important here at Capitol Hill that now that everybody's returned, all anybody is talking about is they're reading the numbers, they're reading the tea leaves. So first up, this is new polling from a Democratic firm. We'll throw this element up on the screen. Ben Dixon and Amandi Inc., they did a poll.

that found Kamala Harris actually would edge out Donald Trump in a matchup 42 to 41%. Now, take that with a giant grain of salt because the margin of error is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points. So it's within the margin of error. That's a very close matchup, though. I think the undecided in the polling is pretty interesting there, actually, 12%. That's a big number. And 1.4% for a third-party candidate, potentially. That is...

going to be powerful. That is going to be a powerful argument. It's going to make the conversation about the Carville, uh, Jon Stewart, Ryan Grim proposal interesting if polling starts to find Kamala Harris doing really well, uh, which as, as silly and online as the coconut pill thing seems, um, what's online is obviously very real. Those memes are very real. And if there can be this like sort of pop cultural, uh,

embrace of Kamala Harris as the normal alternative to Joe Biden, somebody who can at least string sentences together, I won't be surprised if she starts polling better than she would have had this crisis not come out publicly. What makes me nervous for Democrats is that she will. I agree. And then they will use that to say, look, if you look at Gretchen Whitmer, J.B. Pritzker, Newsom, they're all within a couple of points. She's

She's the duly elected vice president. Let's not have an open convention. Let's just nominate her. But I think that that misunderstands the kind of flimsy nature of that and how soft

Those numbers are yep and Gretchen Whitmer had this poll as you just alluded to us Gretchen Gretchen Whitmer losing to Trump 36 to 48 Gavin Newsom losing to Trump 37 to 40 again the margin of errors plus or minus three percentage points So we don't know really where that stands to be honest, but

Gavin Newsom, you have 15% undecided in that Gavin Newsom matchup, so that's 12% with Kamala Harris. 17% undecided in the case of Gretchen Whitmer. And those are important numbers too, obviously, because even Trump's support there is only at 40%. 40% is not a high number. So,

So there's a lot of room for everybody in that potential matchup. Meanwhile, that question of what a primary should look like was put to polling as well by a welcome pack. And we can put this next element up on the screen.

Um, this is the preferences of democratic voters. Jon Favreau tweeted, our survey reveals, this is an excerpt, a clear preference among democratic primary voters. They favor allowing convention delegates to select a new nominee they believe to be electable over president Biden remaining on the ballot by a solid

55 to 40 margin. And that's just as of right now, 55 to 40 margin, which is pretty overwhelming. Yeah, and the next point there

Exactly incredible. So in the event that they step in the event that there is That he does step down they favor by an overwhelming majority like two to one 64 to 20 something that they want an open primary Yeah, and in Washington the idea, okay James Carville good for him stepping out but James Carville like he's willing to like say crazy stuff like that's his brand and the hat and he's kooky and

But in general in Washington, like the idea of an open convention is still considered something that is kind of

outside of the bounds of respectable discourse. Like that's just a little silly. It's cute. What are you talking about? It's neat that we would do that. But no, we're not actually doing a democratic process. We're going to just give it to Kamala Harris. That is the assumption inside Washington. But fewer than a quarter of Democrats want that to happen. So if you anoint a candidate,

who has not been blasted yet by Trump, who's calling her Laughing Kamala, by the way. Did you see that? That's his name for her now. Laughing Kamala. I couldn't stop laughing when I saw that. Nailed it. So this is before Trump has come at Laughing Kamala. And you're going to anoint her as the VP after you've suffered this massive legitimacy crisis because you've been covering up this degenerative condition that your presumptive nominee had. And you think that you have enough credit with the public

to then crown the next person when fewer than a quarter of your own voters say do not do that. And if she wins it in an open convention, great, fine, wonderful. She then is tested. Like she has shown that she earned it because we still believe in this country, in the meritocracy, whether or not it exists or not, we believe it. Like we want it to exist. Like we want our democracy

elites to have earned their place there. And to the extent that they haven't, we hate it. We resent it. Good for us. It's like the best thing about our culture. And so to go against that is just asking to get annihilated. I think people are also forgetting how dangerous it'll be for Kamala Harris that she was serving under Joe Biden, defending Joe Biden. She has been a staunch defender of Joe Biden since the debate, obviously. And

That's it's not gonna go away. No the last two months have just be about why did why were you willing to do that? Right and who knows what plausible and Trump will bring that up constantly and you know Who knows what plausible deniability she has on these questions of doctors visiting the White House? It's probably a lot like Veep as this election cycle has been basically ripped straight from the script of Veep and they were intentionally keeping her in the dark because the vice president

I don't take that office too seriously. That's what you should say. I was a vice president. Do you know what that means? I go and get ice cream with people on camera. That's my job. I can't even get in the White House. Like I've got my own. I don't have a pass. My office is across the street. She lives up on Massachusetts Avenue. So, yeah.

I'm totally clueless. Go with that. Yes. And so the RCP average, I think, is worth looking at here. I just pulled it up. Since the debate, Trump's

margin in both the five-way matchup and the two-way matchup. So five-way includes the third party candidates, Cornel West, Jill Stein, RFK Jr. His margin, Trump's margin, has basically doubled over Biden since the debate in both the two-way matchup and in the five-way matchup. So that's just since the debate. In the two-way matchup, Donald Trump's number is actually at 47%, which is

high for Donald Trump. In the five-way matchup, it goes down to 42% roughly, but his margin either way, the difference between where he is and where Biden is has basically doubled in both of those since the debate. But what has Biden hanging in is 538, basically. What's 538? 538 is still at a, like right now,

They're at a 52% for Trump and 48% like in the simulation, like they run 100 simulations 52 times. Trump wins and 48 times Biden wins. Like so 538 and Demetri Melhorn is going to make a big deal of this, I think, in his debate with Cenk that we're going to host later this week.

FiveThirtyEight is still talking about this race as a toss up, even as the approval rating is now at, according to FiveThirtyEight, 37.4%. There are, this is a Wall Street Journal poll, a New York Times poll. There's a CNN poll that were taken since the debate that have Donald Trump upset.

six points in a two-way matchup over Biden. There are some that just have them about two, some that have them three, but given those fairly reputable polling firms that have these six point margins, and honestly, I think it's only gotten worse since the George Stephanopoulos interview, that's debatable. But I think it'll probably bear out in the polling as we go forward. I mean, this is

untenable and you know, it's good for good for the American people for expressing, you know, even the Even I actually understand the argument a lot of people are making about lowercase Democracy because I saw it from the right I saw the flight 93 election argument from the right for a long time about this sort of existential nature of all of this But I think the more that there's exposure to plausible alternatives open convention what it would look like the more we can visualize it

I actually think that that doesn't help Biden in the numbers because people say well, it's not such a scramble There's something that we can do. Yeah, and speaking of George Stefanos he if people missed it he was

confronted on the street by somebody who happened to be recording and like holding their phone down and asked him about the interview and asked him if Biden could be president for four more years. And Stefan said, no, I don't think he could. And he confirmed that it was him that said it and said he regretted it. As a journalist, he should not have said that, but it's not exactly surprising. George Soros and James Carville. The people have spoken. The voice from the documentary of 1992. Yeah.

So anyway, up next, an incredible story about the weaponization of charges of anti-Semitism against labor unions. Stick around for that. Hi, I'm Katie Lowe's and I'm Guillermo Diaz. And now we're back with another season of our podcast, Unpacking the Toolbox, where Guillermo and I will be rewatching the show to officially unpack season three of Scandal. Unpredictable. You don't see it coming. It's a wild, wild ride. The twists and turns in season three mesmerizing, but

content for your eyes, for your ears, for your hearts, for your minds. Well, suit up, gladiators. Grab your big old glass of wine and prepare yourselves for even more behind the scenes. Listen to Unpacking the Toolbox on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

That I've said like in my head for like 16 years. Wild. Listen to Misspelling on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Cheaters and Backstabbers. I'm Shadi Diaz. And I'm Kate Robards. And we are New York City stand-up comedians and best friends. And we love a good cheating and backstabbing story. Oops.

So this is a series where our guests reveal their most shocking cheating stories. Join us as we learn how to avoid getting our hearts broken or our backs slashed. Listen to Cheaters and Backstabbers on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

All right, I'll have more reporting about this later at DropSiteNews.com. But for now, Republicans in the House yesterday convened a hearing with the headline, Confronting Union Antisemitism, Protecting Workers from Big Labor Abuses. Here's Chairman Bob Good at the top of it. Today's hearing will examine the ways in which unions put politics over people through the lens of rampant union antisemitism. All

All right, good topic. Let's hear the bill of particulars. What's the rampant anti-Semitism? Additionally, the response by union leaders to the October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel...

have exposed yet another way that unions are beholden to the radical left instead of to the workers they claim to represent. So yes, this hearing was actually about the war on Gaza. But it gets a lot crazier than just that. Now here's the background and some news too. On December 1st, the UAW officially called for a ceasefire in Israel, explaining, as one union leader put it,

From opposing fascism in World War II to mobilizing against apartheid South Africa and the Contra War, the UAW has consistently stood for justice across the globe. That's why I am proud that the UAW International is today officially calling for a ceasefire in Israel and Palestine.

The executive board also voted to form a "divestment and just transition" working group to study the history of Israel and Palestine, the union's economic ties to the conflict, and to explore how to achieve a just transition for U.S. workers from war to peace." Now that move did not sit well with supporters of the war.

The bad news for the UAW is that one of those war supporters happens to be Neil Borofsky, who, as bad luck would have it for those workers, is a federally appointed monitor overseeing a UAW consent decree reached with the Department of Justice. Borofsky has immense power over the UAW because of the fallout of previous corruption scandals which landed two UAW presidents in prison. Now recently,

We covered the surprising development that now Fein himself is under investigation by the Monitor, Borowski, who opened a wide probe and was demanding enormous amounts of documents all of a sudden. Now I noted at the time that it didn't make sense on its face, but more pieces of the puzzle are starting to come together.

Now this is going to sound crazy, but what I'm about to report is actually backed up by a trail of evidence. Here's what's happening. The DOJ's monitor overseeing the UAW is a fierce and outspoken supporter of Israel. And he is retaliating against UAW President Sean Fain after Fain refused to back off the call for a ceasefire. Told you it would sound crazy. But here's what we know for sure.

So after the ceasefire announcement, Borowski, the DOJ monitor, personally lobbied Fain to retract it. Then in February, he lobbied the entire executive board of the union. So this nugget was first reported last week by the Detroit News, buried in an article under the headline, UAW's court filing highlights tension with federal monitor. Indeed it did.

So the paper got a copy of an email sent on February 19th by Benjamin Dichter, an attorney for the union, to Neil Borowski, the monitor. I also reviewed a copy of that email. It reads in part, On November 30th, 2023, the IEB, the democratically elected governing body of the UAW, debated whether and what position the UAW should take on the crisis in Gaza.

This position statement, calling for a ceasefire, was announced the next day and released to the press. Soon thereafter, you called President Fein and introduced your conversation with President Fein as one that was, quote, strictly on a personal level, during which time you shared with President Fein your personal concerns about the Union's position on the crisis in Gaza."

Your call to President Fein on an issue so blatantly outside of the monitor's jurisdiction was inappropriate as your office holds disproportionate power over the UAW and even a quote, strictly personal sharing of opinion implicitly implicates such power dynamic.

Nonetheless, out of respect for you and the Office of the Monitor, President Fein discussed the conversation with only those in his inner circle and chose not to escalate the improper exchange any further. On February 11, 2024, your office received a communication from the Anti-Defamation League, ADL, that also complained about the union's demand for a ceasefire in Gaza and in particular the actions of Local 7902 in support of SAME.

Instead of doing what your office should have done, which is to simply have advised that the issue was outside of its jurisdiction and provide the communication to the UAW's compliance officer, your office took two inappropriate steps well outside its jurisdiction.

Now I have an extra detail to add to this. The call from Borowski came the night before Fain was scheduled to join a press conference the next morning of Thursday, December 14th on Capitol Hill, joining members of Congress in calling for a ceasefire.

that a federal court monitor would think it was remotely appropriate to try to stop that event from happening is totally extraordinary. That is absolutely nowhere within his court-appointed power. Now, as for the two inappropriate things Borowski did after getting that ADL letter,

The first wrong step was writing back to the ADL saying they had expressed, quote, very serious concerns that he would personally bring to the UAW board, even though he acknowledged at the time it was outside the scope of his power. The second inappropriate step was to personally write to the board pressuring them on the Gaza question. Borofsky wrote on February 15th,

Attached and below is a communication sent to the monitor's hotline by the ADL regarding a statement issued by Local 7902. Although this issue is outside of the monitor's jurisdiction, we

We thought it was important to forward the message to the IEB given the serious concerns raised here. For what it's worth, as I previously shared with Sean, similar concerns were raised directly to me shortly after the IEB issued its own ceasefire statement. I am also attaching the local 7902 president's response. The UAW lawyer responded to Borowski on Friday, February 23rd with the email I'm reading from now.

The monitor was appointed in 2021 by federal district court judge David M. Lawson. Now, I reached out to Lawson's chambers for comment after business hours yesterday, and we'll follow up today and we'll report back with anything we hear. So on February 29th, just a few days after the UAW sent its letter to Borowski complaining about his improper lobbying,

Borowski sent the UAW a sweeping demand for documents, saying he was opening an investigation into Fain over a dispute Fain had with the Secretary-Treasurer. That letter was made public in a court filing Borowski made on Tuesday. He also asked for, quote, and listen to this,

Any and all emails, text messages, and instant messages sent between any one or more of the following individuals or between any one of the individuals below and any other UAW personnel from the date range of February 12th, 2024 through February 23rd, 2024.

He included in the list, Fain, his top deputies and Fain's lawyers. That covers pretty much the exact time the UAW and Borowski were jockeying over the ADL complaint involving their call for a ceasefire. Borowski has only upped the attack on Fain since then. The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday, quote,

A federal watchdog appointed to monitor the United Auto Workers internal operations is probing new allegations against President Sean Fain including that he made demands to benefit his domestic partner and her sister according to a court filing Monday. Except that's not exactly accurate. The actual complaint was made by Rich Boyer, who Fain ousted from his job. It's included in an exhibit attached to the Borowski court filing.

So follow this closely. Boyer, in his complaint, says, quote, I submit that Brother Fain's May 29th, 2024 reassignment action, basically his firing, was void in that it was taken by Brother Fain in retaliation for my refusal to accede to demands by Brother Fain and his agents that I take actions involving this Stellantis assignment.

So that's from Boyer's complaint.

Now, the difference between "to benefit" as the journal described it and "would have benefited" is not just grammatical. The details of what happened aren't known yet. But if Fein pushed for a broad policy or negotiation tactic that would have benefited many people and among those are his partner and his sister,

That's different than Fain asking for specific favors for his partner and his sister. But hey, look, maybe Neil Borowski is really onto something here and he's got Fain on this one. But given that he has so flagrantly violated his mandate, it's hard to merely take his word for it.

And so, Emily, it's a pretty extraordinary series of events going on here. And there's kind of two things that we could talk about here. One is the question of whether the UAW should weigh in at all on the Israel-Palestine conflict. And that's a live debate that is had inside the union and outside the union. And the Republicans at the hearing had a very firm position on that. It's a hugely important question for the UAW. The other question is,

Should a court-appointed federal monitor be going in and telling the UAW what it can and can't do when it comes to political issues? And that is...

Quite clearly, no, it's not even a gray area. And I have thoughts on both of those just really quickly on the first one. It is true if you look at polling that one of the reasons, especially, you know, those kind of blue collar working class Obama Trump voter type demographic, why they resist organized labor right now.

And the UAW, obviously, this is significant for them because they're coming out of this massive years-long corruption scandal and Sean Fain was supposed to be the beacon of light. And so they're sensitive, as they should be, to this right now. But one of the big reasons is they don't want to contribute to basically political, overly political organizations. They just want to be represented publicly.

they want their interests as workers to be represented. That's what they want to pay dues for. They want better scheduling, better health care. Which clashes with the increasing membership from grad students and all of those sort of more white collar journalists, all those groups. But also there's always been tension between the ideological sort of Marxist, organized labor, internationalist perspective and people outside of that. So I think it's

It's an important and interesting question for the UAW. The Neil Borofsky part of this, I'm so curious to talk more about with you because we mentioned this when that Detroit news story first broke. Not a lot of coverage of it at the time because it's such a weird story, but Neil Borofsky is

He's sort of known in media circles for what he did in 2008. He's kind of a leftist, sort of adjacent almost, right, to leftist circles because of that. He was basically a strong ally of Elizabeth Warren during the Wall Street bailout. He was in a similar role to this.

where he was kind of the independent monitor of the Wall Street funds. Right, at Treasury, right? And the bankers actually, and how the Treasury was handling them. Right. And so basically the monitor of the bailout. And the banks hated him. Yeah. And I remember writing lots of great stories about Neil Borowski. This is not to say that Neil Borowski is like a bad dude or anything. It's just so interesting. It is very interesting, but it's just ridiculous.

wildly outside of his scope to be called. Also, there's no such thing, and we were talking with producer Mac about this before the show, there's no such thing as a personal call from your boss like that. It's weird. Like this is a guy who has,

Has it access to like the entire communications of the UAW and has this vast unchecked court appointed power over the UAW so when he calls the night before you're about to have a press conference with Cory Bush and and Ro Khanna and others calling for a ceasefire and he says, you know, I don't think you should do this just personally Just between friends. Yeah You know do what you want to do?

It's impossible to be on the receiving end of that call and not have the power dynamic Implicated as though as the lawyer said and he went ahead with it anyway, and then For him two months later to then forward on the ADL letter to the executive board Mentioned the call that he had so it confirms it so we don't have to take Fain's word for it and and say that it's raising very serious concerns and then

just weeks later, opened this fairly trivial investigation into what is the dispute between the president and the secretary treasurer over organizing tactics. And any dispute between Fein and others inside the union right now over organizing tactics, to me,

ought to be decided in fame's favor because fain is out there like delivering historic gains for workers like that's his job he's getting massive contracts just this week in the lehigh valley bmw workers um won a massive new contract like 33 raises like 11 instant raises like

He's delivering for workers in a way that no UAW president has before. So if he was beefing with somebody internally saying that they weren't doing a good enough job, he's the guy delivering. And why is Borowski, what is your explanation for why Borowski is carrying that torch?

I mean, Borowski has long been an outspoken supporter of Israel. It's just an ideological. I think it's just he was shocked and appalled that the UAW would weigh in like this. So at the hearing yesterday, it was largely focused on a UAW local. So this is now a coordinated attack. And to your point, it was more white collar. It's the public interest lawyers who had

You know, we're doing some organizing for the ceasefire resolution and the interesting The Union basically of public interest lawyers But at the same time as the lawyer reminded Borowski in that email and I'll publish the full email at drop site news.com later today As the lawyer reminded Borowski the UAW has a very very long tradition of engaging in this sort of political activity Oh, of course, not just apartheid. However, I

The march of Jobs for Justice, Martin Luther King's March on Washington, was completely financed, basically, by the UAW. And if you go back and look at photos from that March on Washington, you'll see UAW signs everywhere. And it's all about wages and freedom and the linking of those two things together.

And nobody would say that the UAW was wrong to do that because the civil rights movement was a boon to its members. Like even just from a narrow, discrete, if you don't even want to say it's the moral thing to do, from a narrow, discrete member benefit thing, it was better to pass the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act for its members.

And the Republicans in that hearing, so that was Bob Good, who actually his election results have been certified that his opponent won in the last just a couple of days. He had Trump support, right? But this was a big. The opponent had Trump support. The opponent had Trump support. But Good had endorsed DeSantis. Yeah, he's a Freedom Caucus guy. Yeah. I knew that he was caught up in that drama. And he had voted to oust McCarthy. So it was a McCarthy rip.

endorsement on the other side. But Republicans are increasingly aware that there's a divide they can exploit. And if they do it successfully, they can sort of on the one hand undercut organized labor while also bringing people over to Donald Trump. That's the calculation in their head or bring people over to the Republican Party. Now, whether people actually start voting Republican beyond Donald Trump is a huge open question because guess what? John Fetterman won the Pennsylvania

Senate seat. Tammy Baldwin doing great in Wisconsin. Whether that's durable beyond just Donald Trump is a huge open question. And that's why you see this interest, this peaked interest from Republicans. And I think, correct me if I'm wrong, that Republicans are walking a fine line with Sean Fain personally because he has delivered such huge gains and is so massively popular with workers right now. In that hearing yesterday,

All of their fire was trained at these public interest lawyers and not at Sean Fain. Now, Borofsky has a personal beef directly with Sean Fain, but Borofsky is not running for reelection. He's not trying to win the affection of workers. He's just this is he's joking with Sean Fain. Right. But Republicans do seem sensitive to the idea that.

That they're not really going to paint Sean Fain as like the woke problem. That the workers are strongly behind Fain. But maybe you can drive a wedge between like grad students and public interest lawyers and auto workers. Although...

I'm not so sure because if Fain is maybe long term, but Fain right now is extraordinarily popular. But with a drip drip of Wall Street Journal articles saying that he's under federal investigation for this federal investigation for that. And this one is like a classic example. You see the headline and you see the first paragraph and it says that he did things to benefit his partner and her sister. You're like what things?

Oh, you don't say and then you look at the actual complaint. It's like well, he did things that would have benefited them. Hmm What does that mean? It's like saying Trump Wanted a tax cut to benefit himself or to benefit his daughter and his son-in-law Well, they benefited from it, but no he did the tax cut to benefit all the rich people in the country. Not just them Hmm interesting interesting. This is a crazy story. Yeah, I

And we've got a separate crazy story that actually was in semaphore. Just to do this real quick. So yesterday, if you remember, Jeremy Scahill and I were on Breaking Points to talk about his reporting on a bunch of interviews that he did with Hamas officials. He was also on Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman. So Democracy Now! then clipped his interview

and posted it both to Instagram and to TikTok. Dropsite News also posted it to Instagram. Instagram took it down in both places. Semaphores got a comment from Instagram finally by the end of the day saying that it was a mistake. But Democracy Now! put it up several different times and each time it would get taken down until they finally, so they took out a little carrot

and they took this red carrot out and I think that's what got it to stay up. But so we're gonna just quickly play this element, which is, this is the exact clip

of Jeremy Scahill speaking to Amy Goodman which Instagram took off here it is on Tick Tock I've spent the past a couple of months talking with officials from Hamas some of them on background some of them on the record I also just returned from a reporting trip to the region and I'm going to be doing more reporting in the coming days on this but I think it's important to emphasize

that October 7th didn't happen in a vacuum. You know, often when American officials talk about what Hamas refers to as Operation Al-Aqsa flood, it's characterized as Hamas shattered the peace. The reality is that for 76 years, there has been no true peace for Iraq.

the Palestinian people in general and certainly not for the people of Gaza. The primary motivation, Hamas members told me, was to try to shatter the status quo on Gaza. While the fact remains that an enormous number of Palestinians have been slaughtered with U.S. weapons in this genocidal war, the insurgency, the armed groups, Islamic Jihad and Hamas, have waged a war of attrition against Israeli occupation forces. They've killed

a large number of Israeli troops. They've blown up tanks. Despite the fact that they're characterized as rats hiding in tunnels, they've proven very effective at delivering serious blows to the Israeli occupation forces. I don't think that there can really be any reasonable debate about whether or not the

Palestinians have a right to resist. This is a tactical question. Should Hamas have been able to predict that the response from Israel was going to be far beyond any of the other recent bombing campaigns? And I heard different answers from people within Hamas. Some said, look, we thought we knew that it was going to be a heavy response. We knew that a lot of people were going to die. This is the nature of how Israel responds to our legitimate resistance. But we did not imagine that it was going to be more than kind of what happened in 2014 or 2021.

but maybe on some steroids. But there were other officials that said no one within Hamas predicted that it was going to be this scale of a genocidal war. So there isn't necessarily a party line on this. I got the sense that this is a question also that Hamas itself is debating because there are going to be people that are going to confront them with these questions within Gaza itself.

what is clear right now is that this is the moment when the world needs to address in a definitive way the demands by Palestinians for decades to have an independent, unified Palestinian state. And so when that was taken down by Instagram, it was replaced by a note that said that it, quote, it goes against our community guidelines on dangerous individuals and organizations, unquote. Mm hmm.

You know the CIA director William Burns is heading to Cairo now to meet with official in Hamas to to negotiate a Tour de ceasefire. Mm-hmm. If US officials are able to meet with Hamas You would think that US journalists should be able to interview them. Yeah and post it now They did climb down

And said, oh, that was a mistake. So, good. Well, let's take them with that. So what did you mean by the red? You're talking about the red triangle? So if you noticed, there was one moment where... So there's this upside-down carrot, red carrot, that is used in basically all Hamas kind of combat videos. Which they'll pause the video. It'll be a carrot on, say, a tank. So that the viewer can focus on what's about to happen. And then you'll see an RPG. So basically what...

So that is my guess. The AI flagged that. That something automatically flagged. That's possible. And it's interesting. That would be news if it's true that Instagram...

Because that carrot has now become kind of symbolic with edgelord kind of supporters of Hamas rather than defenders of Palestinian rights generally, but people who are actively like, yeah, go Kassam Brigades. That carrot is becoming their kind of symbol. So that's my guess, but this is what we have to do with algorithms and big tech platforms is we just sit here and we paw around in the dark guessing

at what we're allowed to say, what we're not allowed to say in order to get the news out there. Yes, and our next guest has actually defended tech limiting the freedom of reach. Although he's here to talk about Joe Biden, that'd be Brian Stelter. So maybe we'll have time for some extra questions because he wrote an op-ed in Vox.

about how the media got the Biden story wrong, how the media got the Biden story right, actually. It's sort of a provocative argument. So we're going to chat with him about all of that next. Yeah, one of the most high-profile media reporters of our generation. Up next, Brian Stelter. That's right.

Hi, I'm Katie Lowes. And I'm Guillermo Diaz. And now we're back with another season of our podcast, Unpacking the Toolbox, where Guillermo and I will be rewatching the show. To officially unpack season three of Scandal. Unpredictable. You don't see it coming. It's a wild, wild ride. The twists and turns in season three. Mesmerizing. But also,

That I've said like in my head for like 16 years. Wild. Listen to Miss Spelling on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Cheaters and Backstabbers. I'm Shadi Diaz. And I'm Kate Robards. And we are New York City stand-up comedians and best friends. And we love a good cheating and backstabbing story.

We are joined now by Brian Stelter, special correspondent for Vanity Fair and also the author of a very provocative and interesting new op-ed for Vox. We can put this up on the screen. That was, again, a very provocative headline. It was just, did the media botch the Biden age story?

We're going to get into all of that with Brian in just a moment. But Brian, first of all, thanks for joining the show. Yeah, great to be here. Thanks. Yeah, so I just want to start off with a question that I will preface by saying is being asked in total good faith. It is maybe a little adversarial, but...

You know, you write in this, the national media wasn't dodging the story. You say there's this third option that the story should have been tougher, the volume should have been louder. You say, I was part of the problem. I appeared on MSNBC and said that Biden's age could decide the election, quote, if the media obsesses over it and ignores Trump's fault.

Back in the early Trump administration, there was this conversation raging about the 25th Amendment and the anonymous New York Times op-ed. And you platformed that conversation, gave it a decent bit of oxygen on your show, asked if Trump was well and all of that. So my question based on this is, the story should have been tougher, the volume should have been louder, the quote from the Vox op-ed. Why wasn't it? Why was the volume on the Trump stories much louder?

than the volume was on the Biden story, just given the obvious sort of mental diminishment that we'd been seeing from Joe Biden.

I think this has a lot to do with who the actors are in any given story or scenario. And right now in the Biden story, the main actors are not journalists. They are Democratic lawmakers, Democratic activists, Democratic partisan commentators, but people who are clearly on the Democratic side who are making this a major story. There's a crisis around Biden, not because of the media per se, but because of people in his own party who want him out.

I would say there were elements of that as well in the Trump years. There were Republicans, there were anonymous Trump officials, aides all raising questions about Trump's fitness. So I don't think that the media was driving either of those narratives, but obviously because all of this becomes, it's all mediated through the media, it's all covered by television networks and streamers and columnists, it always looks like a media creation when it's not. Does that make any sense?

Yeah, I see what you're saying. It's not a full answer, but I think that's part of the background here. But then to your broader point about the coverage of Biden, I say it wasn't ignored because The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post were doing really strong stories about how he was getting older, he was getting slower, aides were noticing he was slipping.

However, it feels to me like those dots weren't always connected, like they were treated as. And honestly, that was my mistake. That was my mistake. And I'm just a freelancer now who just watches TV and chats with people like you. But what I made the mistake of thinking these were all isolated episodes and not connecting the dots. I think a lot of people, myself included, gave the benefit of the doubt to the White House when maybe we shouldn't have. And I guess it's

Sign of what we kind of already knew that like the take the New York Times for instance And I'm curious for your take as a watcher and somebody who's covered the New York Times for decades now They have like a switch has flipped like it seems like inside the New York Times. They're like we're getting this guy out and

Like, and it seems like all hands on deck, you know, the news side is, you know, calling donors and, and calling politicians and writing and elevating comments from Democrats who are

calling for him to step aside. And the opinion side, both the editorializing directly from the New York Times, the unnamed editorial board, whatever that is, is very, very strong. And then also the columns that they're elevating, like James Carville. Same time, James Carville calling for him to drop out and have an opening convention. That's all newsworthy. You've had some kind of blue MAGA Democrats who've said, well, why won't the New York Times call for Trump to drop out?

It's like, well, because it just kind of...

Elevate something we all understand that nobody nobody on the Republican side would care if the New York Times does that but on the Democratic side they do it kind of solidifies our understanding that it's part of the kind it's become really part of the Democratic Ecosystem has in it in a way that maybe it wasn't 10 20 years ago Like if the New York Times would have called on a Republican to drop out 20 years ago That would have actually mattered in a way that I think it wouldn't matter today. Is that is that right? I

I mean, look, I worked for The New York Times from 2007 to 2013. I always knew back then, and I still know today, that the newsroom is so separate from the editorial pages. They work on different floors in the building. There is no coordination. You know, all of that is, you know, true.

So 20 years ago, if the editorial pages had called for Republicans to step down, I don't think it would have registered that much, to be honest. It depends on the race, depends on the context. Also, we lived in a completely different political environment. I mean, completely different. We were not ruled by an American gerontocracy, these elderly men that run the government that most people are tired of. I mean, that's one of the themes, I think, of your program that I really appreciate.

People of all ages, but especially people under 65, are desperate for younger leadership. And that's to me the bigger story of Biden's age right now. It's not really about Biden. Well, it is about Biden, obviously, whether he's fit for office. But it's much bigger than Biden. This is about Trump and the Supreme Court and elderly members of Congress that won't give up their posts. This is a big story. And so when you say the New York Times seems to be flipped a switch,

I understand why it feels that way about Biden, but I don't think that's actually how it works inside the New York Times newsroom. I think the way it works is they see there's a big story developing. People that were in denial about Biden's age are no longer in denial. The Democratic Party, many leaders want him out. This is an emergency. And a lot of people are pretending like it's not in public, but they're saying it's an emergency in private. So I view the New York Times as just trying to cover a massive story in front of itself.

One of the things you wrote about in the Vox op-ed is that people in the White House press corps, for example, were recalling stories of being harassed and harangued by the Biden White House, the Biden campaign for reporting of Peter Baker, Ezra Klein. And I'm sure, Brian, you've encountered some of this just over the course of the last couple of weeks.

just in having some of these conversations openly. Does that mean that the media in some way was overly responsive? Because they were still publishing stories. I think that's true. But were they sort of responding to that bullying by being bullied by the White House? What's your sense of how they responded to that?

I think it's complex. I think it varies. I do think there are probably some occasions where the White House was able to water down stories dramatically. They were able to dilute stories by, for example, providing half a dozen aides on the phone, on the record, all to attest to Biden's fitness.

I mean, this is typical journalism 101 and PR 101. If you're up against a journalist writing a tough story, you might try to change the narrative or weaken the narrative by providing, well, we say counterpoints, right? And so the Biden administration was providing counterpoints. They were putting administration officials on the record to say he's sharp as a tack, he's stronger than all of us. To the point where it became kind of a joke among the reporters, this idea that all the

Biden aides, all the younger aides insist that Biden is faster and better than them. People see through this to some degree, especially now. But I do think that the bullying or the really aggressive press efforts, we'd be ridiculous not to think it had some impact. And by the way, there's a connection there to the Trump years, right?

How did the Trump administration begin? By lying about crowd size. It created antagonism between the press corps and the president right away, right on the very first weekend. The Biden relationship with the press has been different. He's kept the press at a distance, but has been more outwardly respectful. And do I think that makes a difference in how he's been treated or covered? Yes, probably, right? I don't want to pretend otherwise, right, Emily?

Yeah. There's also been a relationship between the White House, some kind of blue MAGA, you could call them blue MAGA White House influencers, and then a kind of blue MAGA base that is out there on social media that is going after- We have to call it blue MAGA. What should we call it? Is it Blue Anon? Is that what it is? Blue Anon? Yeah, that's what people call it. That's even worse. Blue Anon's even worse.

But it is wild out there, Ryan. It is, right? You've been probably on the receiving end. As a public figure, you're, of course, like it's nothing new to get criticism, et cetera. But what's it been like? How has it been different? Or has it been different? It has been different, yes. Describe the difference because I've noticed it too.

So number one, let's go back to the night of the debate. Let's actually let's go back a little bit further. Remember the State of the Union address? Remember how charged and energetic and defiant Biden was that night? He outperformed almost every expectation. My personal theory is that he read his own reviews and he became maybe even too confident in his abilities going forward because he had a breakthrough night.

And for a lot of people who might have been worried about his age or his health, they might have relaxed a little bit. Thankfully, reporters at The Wall Street Journal didn't. They found some great information and published it in early June. But my point is, there were moments earlier this year that might have lulled people into a sense of complacency when it comes to Biden's ability to do the job and to campaign, more importantly, to campaign for presidents.

Then the debate happens. And I was on a Canadian television network right afterward. And I said, this is an emergency. I didn't use the word emergency, but I said, there are many Democrats who now want to replace him. This is an unprecedented moment. And the anchor literally says to me, Brian, I've watched you for years. I've never heard you talk this way. And I came off the air and I wondered, was I too strong? Did I go too far? Is this really that bad for Biden?

But then I go watch CNN and MSNBC and Fox and everybody, you know, there was a consensus immediately. And we should not pretend otherwise. Like this was a very clear, this was a nonpartisan conclusion, right? That there was something really troubling about Biden's behavior on stage. So with that in mind, the response from pro-Biden social media followers just seems as if it comes from a different planet.

It just seems as if it's happening from Earth 2. And as you know, I've talked a lot about Earth 2 in relation to Trump fans. You know, nobody who's ever heard of... I mean, look, if you know one thing about my career at CNN...

it was that I was very tough and critical of President Trump and the pro-Trump media. That's basically my brand. I think it's more complicated, but if you had to summarize me in a sentence, you'd say, yeah, Stelter, the guy that was always calling out Trump. And so to have all of these deep blue,

liberal social media fans pretending as if I am some MAGA diehard, some Trump back up. It is just, it has been a weird time, Ryan. I mean, you've seen it online too. It's a weird moment. And so I think we should go a little deeper. What's causing that behavior? Where is that coming from, right?

I think it's coming out of fear. I think it's mostly out of fear that Trump is going to return, that Biden's going to lose and Trump's going to return. And so you have a lot of these Biden diehards who are desperate to shut down the conversation about their candidate.

And do you, looking back, feel like maybe that fear ever influenced the way that you covered the Trump administration? Cuz I'm fascinated by this question of the benefit of the doubt that you mentioned. That maybe it was giving the benefit of the doubt to the Biden administration when they talked about his health. He had some good moments, he looked okay. But then, for example, your response to the Hunter Biden laptop story. This is a classic example of the right wing media machine, that's a quote.

quote from maybe 2020, there's still a lot we don't know about the president's time ties with Russia, period. And we could get into all this. We don't need to get into all of this. But I genuinely am interested in that question, the benefit of the doubt, because I do feel like that's the rub between a lot of media critics like myself and people in the media. And I know you even in the Vox op-ed sort of take issue in an interesting way with what we describe as the media, what we define as the media, because we're all in our bubbles right now.

Yeah, yeah. But personally, as you think about it, why do you think it is that you gave the benefit of the doubt there, but not to, and maybe to the Biden campaign with the Hunter Biden laptop story too, and took that claim of disinformation very seriously? Well, I

Well, I think number one, the State of the Union is an example of why some people were inclined to give Biden the benefit of the doubt. That on the moments where there was a lot of scrutiny about how he was going to perform, was he up for the task, he then outperformed. And I think in a

There is a narrative now in the right-wing media that says, "Ha ha, we told you so. We told you Biden was senile," that conveniently forgets all the moments where he did outperform, all the moments where he was energetic, where he did, you know, stick it to the Republicans, achieved bipartisanship, et cetera.

But I do think the benefit of the doubt thing is real. It's just a theory of mine. I hope maybe others disagree. I want to hear it. I would also differentiate between individual members of the media and the media writ large as a blob, right? Because big newsrooms exist in order to make sure a benefit of the doubt doesn't happen, make sure that neutrality and independence is achieved, make sure that there isn't bias in the coverage. I know you think they often come up short, and maybe they do. But newsrooms are structured in order to push all of that stuff out and ensure that the

people in power are being held accountable. I just think on a more personal individual level, when you think about certain columnists and commentators and talking heads, Biden, he's been respected. And to some extent, every president should be respected. I feel like I respected President Trump in certain points, for example, when he had COVID and there was a real concern about the American president's health, right?

Well, that's where we are again now. Real deep, profound concern about the American president's health. And these Biden diehards who think the media is out to get him, they're totally missing what's actually happening, which is that journalists are trying to scratch, scratch, scratch as hard as we can to figure out what's really going on in this White House, which increasingly, you know, there's increasing questions about whether there was a cover-up. And we say that not to, uh,

to say officially there was a cover up, but it's a question that has to be asked. It's a question that has to be addressed. And is there much, so the reporters that you spoke with doing the reporting here, what is the reflection? What do they think they could have done differently so that this wouldn't have happened? Or do they think that this was just structurally, they were just bound, this was just overdetermined?

- What do you mean over determined? What do you mean? - Like that the media is what it is. And if the White House is going to kind of cover up the situation and snow them with a bunch of on the record people saying that, you know, Joe Biden can outrun every 20 year old intern in the White House. They don't have interns anymore for reasons that we know, they renamed them.

you know, that, that facing those, those structures of like on the, and you know, the wall street journal article is an excellent example. Like after that story came out, you had the entire democratic apparatus pushing back on them saying this was flawed and faulty reporting. You had a bunch of democratic electeds who came out and said, I gave them an on the record quote and we didn't, and they use it. This is outrageous. Patty Murray, who now wants him to drop out. Uh,

it's outrageous that they didn't use these on the record quotes and then you'd have all the rachel vindmans of the world regurgitating that saying that this is flawed journalism how on earth could they not quote on the record it's clear that they're biased and the reporters are like because they were lying and because and also we included extensive quotes from the white house

you know, making their case. But we don't have room for every lying Democrat who's going to go on the record and say that, yeah, he can he can outrun me. So given given those structural problems that the individual reporters face, do they feel like they they screwed up and they could have done this differently and they regret it? Or do they feel like they're just up against a

a force that they can't overcome. - Well, I think there's a lot of points of view. I'm really interested in the point of view that several reporters shared with me that the coverage should have become more aggressive when Biden decided to run for reelection. Because all of a sudden it wasn't about his performance for one more year, it was about five more years.

And I think that there's a lot of merit to that argument. And then again, you know, look at the Wall Street Journal story in June. That is an example of more aggressive coverage once he was running for reelection. I also think we're talking about a story that's inherently complex and uncomfortable. It's about someone getting older. Many of us have experiences with a parent or a grandparent. We all have lived experience here, which does, you know, it's a relevant part of the story.

People don't want to live in a gerontocracy. And I think that came through in the news coverage in the last couple of years. The polls have been clear all along that Americans believed Biden was too old to serve for another four years, and Trump as well, for that matter. Americans don't want these two choices. I think that has come through in the coverage. We've heard about double haters. But I think here's the challenge with covering aging.

It's not an immediate flood. And news outlets are really good at covering floods. Like, I helped cover floods for CNN. You know, it's an emergency. It's happening immediately. You can see it happening in real time. It's a lot harder to cover a drip, drip, drip, drip, drip. And isn't this a drip, drip story where Biden is, you know, gradually declining? That's at least what it appears from, you know, many people's eyes. I don't know.

I went and saw him in Philadelphia two years ago, two summers ago, that democracy speech. People now remember it as the one with the blood red background that looked really eerie. But it was this fantastic speech at Independence Hall.

He's a very different person than he was two years ago when he delivered that speech. But it's been drip, drip, drip. And I think drip, drip, drip is hard. It's inherently harder for journalists to cover. I say that not to let them off the hook, but just to recognize this is a tough story. It's a lot harder than pointing out when President Trump was lying on Twitter, which, as you know, Emily, I loved to do that.

Or calling out his typos. It's really easy to call out the typos. Yeah, there were many of them and there continue to be many of them. The cheap fake sort of trend is one thing I also wanna ask about because there is genuinely an interesting question here. You tweeted a Washington Post article about, it was like cheap fake video

Biden videos in Rapture, right-wing media, but deeply mislead. That's the Post headline. And I think this is a Glenn Kessler, yeah, it's a Glenn Kessler, Adriano Ocero analysis of the videos from the G7 summit. And there was some deceptive editing of those. But what's interesting is it gets back into this sort of subjective question of was the, so many people

in the media really did take that cheap fake line almost straight from the White House, it was the White House response, and say, use it to kind of define that line of attack from the right as almost entirely one of cheap fakes. It was all bad faith.

rather than there was something real there, which you have since said you think there are real problems in these videos. So do you think the media was overly credulous, was overly willing, again, to give the benefit of the doubt to the White House with the cheap fake line instead of, like, for me,

The main story there as a journalist is that Joe Biden often looks like he's zoning out and that he's having trouble. There are people at the G7 telling media outlets, the New York Post had a story about this, that he didn't seem well. That's the headline story for me. Not that the RNC is doing partisan hackery and putting out potentially cheap fake videos. That's a totally secondary story to me. But the media elevated it to be ahead of the story at the time about Biden's health itself.

Well, yes, except I think it depends on who and what we mean by media, right? As always. I think if you were listening to Fox's coverage of Biden in recent months, you might feel better informed right now than if you were reading liberal blogs. And that's a problem, right? At the same time, I think some of the videos Fox was showing were misleading. Not all of them, some of them. And so it's complicated.

Some were cheap fakes and some were legitimate. And they were all, and yes, it is true, the White House, I think, tried to claim all of them were BS, right? I was texting with the White House eight at the time. I was hearing that storyline, that this is BS.

When I think Glenn Kessler does a fact check, he's doing something narrow, but it does then create this broader perception that you should just ignore. I mean, what you're hitting at is really interesting. It's like the implication then is just don't pay attention to this because it's all just noise. And that attitude benefited Biden for a while, right?

Right, and why not fact check the White House when they say this other video is just a cheap fake when it's not a cheap fake? Why not do a fact check of that instead of the fact check of the RNC? The focus to me just seemed to be more of that kind of benefit of the doubt before the debate and then the debate threw that all out the window.

I think it depends on the constituency as well, though. I now see a whole lot of progressives who want the media to be Democratic activists, who are demanding that the media perform the role of Democratic lawmakers. And I think there's oftentimes this mix-up about what the role of the journalist should be versus an activist, versus a partisan commentator, versus a lawmaker. The media's not coming to the rescue, right? Not against Biden and not against Trump. And I think there's a lot of

distortion of that happening right now among desperate Democrats who are freaking out about Trump possibly, probably winning. Although some people would argue the media is intentionally coming to the rescue now that they've seen the polling numbers. I know, but doesn't that imply conspiracy? Doesn't that? Or we played for your former colleague Don Lemon when he was on the show, this clip of Noam Chomsky actually. It was a

Brilliant. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. He was asking a journalist and he's saying, you know, essentially they don't need to. There doesn't have to be a conspiracy. It's more just that you're from the same sort of social places, economic socioeconomic status. And you sort of run in the same circles and share a lot of the worldview. So there doesn't have to be a conspiracy so much as, you know, it's just most people live in Manhattan, D.C. and think alike, live similar lives and come out on these things with a similar perspective.

I understand that critique. I think it's important to unpack that critique

It's also, what's the phrase? There's some phrase in political science for this, or like it's self-sealing or it's, you can't, how do you unprove? How do you disprove it, right? Because if I try to talk against that talking point, then I sound like I must just, I don't see it in front of myself. I mean, here's what I know about myself, right? I was a kid from a lower middle-class background in Maryland who went to a state school, joined the New York Times, got to CNN. Like probably not a typical parent

into CNN. But it is true that once you're inside a giant national news organization, you are aware that lots of people are watching, that there's a certain vibe that comes from the news coverage, certain stories are considered breaking news. That's true, but I don't think that...

Within that reality, though, I think you do have incredible diversity at these news organizations, and that's how it should be. And you need that diversity. But, you know, I don't know. I'm not as smart as Noam. None of us are. Well, now I'm curious. That was my path, too, though. We were kind of looking up maybe at lower middle. From Maryland. But also Maryland. And also state school in Maryland. Where in Maryland? Just curious. I grew up in Damascus in Northern Montgomery County, and then I went to Towson University.

And what I appreciate about that, the story that I, we all tell a story about ourselves, right? What our own narrative is.

What I like about my narrative, if I have one, is that I went through side doors. I didn't go through the front door. I didn't submit a resume. I was able to get to The New York Times by blogging, and I got to CNN through my work at The Times. And so I like that those paths exist in a way they didn't exist 30 years ago before the internet, because I think it does bring in different kinds of people into newsrooms, and that can be hopefully advantageous to the media coverage.

Well, cool. I mean, it's been good to talk with you. You got anything else, Emily? Just appreciate the conversation. Thanks, Brian.

Cool, thanks guys. All right, well, that'll do it for us for CounterPoints today. For our Friday show, we're gonna have Cenk Uygur versus Demetri Melhorn talking about whether or not Biden should stay in the race. Demetri Melhorn is a kind of a Democratic mega donor and organizer. Cenk Uygur, obviously the co-founder or founder of TYT and president

presidential candidate ran against Joe Biden. And his theory was that somebody was going to start getting like 30% and that in like in 1968 would show LBJ slash Biden that he needed to drop out and show other more serious candidates

who could actually win that they should step in. And that's when, you know, RFK's senior and others jumped in and LBJ dropped out. That didn't play out. But Cenk's theory was never that he was going to be the nominee. It was that he would like light a spark.

Mm-hmm, but that didn't play out. Mm-hmm Democrats were like now and in bunch of he they barely let him on the ballot actually didn't I don't think he got on a single ballot Yeah, well, it's gonna be interesting and Ryan like you said It's a debate that basically wouldn't happen anywhere else and I think we can say the same thing for our last segment with Brian Stelter you know, I can think of few places that have been as critical Brian Stelter as Breaking points and frankly Federalist where I worked during the Trump administration so that was

in a good way and interesting. The other thing I want to add is that I will be at the RNC next week. I think you won't be there. I know, it's crazy. I don't think I'm going to be able to make it, yeah. But yeah, I'll hopefully be doing the show from there back to my home state of Wisconsin. So if you are

in the area and you want to, if you have like something interesting, story, tip, anything like that, get in touch with Breaking Points. Just send an email and they'll forward them on to me. And, you know, we're eager to cover what's going on in the ground and

Wisconsin in general is an important state, and to have some eyes on the RNC. There's been a lot of interesting stuff coming out of there, and obviously the team will be at the DNC as well, so stay tuned for more coverage on that. Subscribe to PremiumBreakingPoints.com to get CounterPoints Friday early in your inbox, and to get this whole show early in your inbox as well. Yep, we'll see you guys soon.

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7/10/24: Dems Fracture Over Biden Drop Out, Jon Stewart Unloads On Dems, Neurologist Says Biden Clear Parkinson's, Kamala Surges Against Trump, Biden DOJ War On UAW Over Gaza

Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar

Chapters

Should Joe Biden Drop Out of the Race?

The Fractured Democratic Party Over Biden

Media and Public Reactions to Biden's Condition

The Neurologist's Diagnosis of Biden's Health

Polling and Political Implications of Biden's Health

The UAW's Stance on Gaza and Federal Monitor's Response

Media Coverage and Brian Stelter's Perspective

Shownotes Transcript

7/10/24: Dems Fracture Over Biden Drop Out, Jon Stewart Unloads On Dems, Neurologist Says Biden Clear Parkinson's, Kamala Surges Against Trump, Biden DOJ War On UAW Over Gaza 01:40:47 Share

Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar

Chapters

Should Joe Biden Drop Out of the Race?

The Fractured Democratic Party Over Biden

Media and Public Reactions to Biden's Condition

The Neurologist's Diagnosis of Biden's Health

Polling and Political Implications of Biden's Health

The UAW's Stance on Gaza and Federal Monitor's Response

Media Coverage and Brian Stelter's Perspective

Shownotes Transcript

7/10/24: Dems Fracture Over Biden Drop Out, Jon Stewart Unloads On Dems, Neurologist Says Biden Clear Parkinson's, Kamala Surges Against Trump, Biden DOJ War On UAW Over Gaza