← Hold These Truths with Dan Crenshaw
Hold These Truths with Dan Crenshaw
SITREP 32: An Assassination Attempt, A Polymarket Scandal, & GOP Gains in the Redistricting War
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We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created. As a member of Congress, I get to have a lot of really interesting people in the office, experts on what they're talking about. This is the podcast for insights into the issues. China, bioterrorism, Medicare for all in depth discussions, breaking it down into simple terms. We hold. We hold. We hold these truths. We hold these truths. With Dan Crenshaw, the eagle has landed. Welcome back to CitRev32. Thanks for joining me as we cover the most interesting news from last week and arm you with the facts. So there was sure you've heard of this shooter at the White House Correspondent's Dinner. A gunman carrying multiple weapons attempted to break into the White House Correspondents association dinner that President Trump and several members of the cabinet, members of Congress and the press were attending. So this was Saturday evening. The guy named Cole Thomas Allen, he was armed with knives, a shotgun, a handgun. He ran through a security checkpoint at the Washington Hilton and opened fire on law enforcement officers before he was captured. One Secret Service officer officer was shot but survived. He had a bulletproof vest on and he's been released from the hospital. Dhs, dhs Secretary Mullen confirmed there's no other injuries, thank God. According to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche Allen had checked into the hotel a day or two earlier after actually traveling by train from Los Angeles to Chicago and then to Washington, D.C. i didn't even know you could do that. I didn't know you could just travel across the country by train. That's amazing. So authorities say he intended to target Trump administration officials and believe he acted alone. He a thousand page manifesto that outlines his grievances with the administration. It includes immigrant detention center conditions, attacking boats in the Caribbean and Pacific and bombing them of an elementary school in Iran. He calls himself a friendly federal assassin. A thousand pages. So he also has too much time on his hands. And Alan told law enforcement that he's a member of a group called the Wide Awakes, that's a network of artists and cultural workers, whatever that means, and activists dedicated to social and political change. So it might appear he acted alone. But you got to wonder what's happening on these online far left circles. You know, Alan in particular was apparently a churchgoing man. He had a degree in mechanical engineering. And he gets radicalized to this extent. It makes you wonder. In other news, one of our, one of our guys, one of our Delta soldiers who was on the Maduro raid is now facing charges because he bet $33,000 on that classified op winning $400,000 in effect. He's a US Army Special Forces master sergeant. Name is Gannon Van Dyke, and he's been indicted for using classified information about Operation Absolute Resolve. This is the raid that captured Nicolas Maduro, and he placed insider bets on polymarket. He turned $33,000 into $400,000. He pleaded not guilty. And this is also the first time that the Justice Department has filed insider trading charges involving a prediction market. I think that'll be an interesting part of this case. Now, he withdrew the profits right after the raid, succeeded, immediately deleted the polymarket account, and we'll see what happens again. I was certainly not aware that poly market betting would fall under the statute of insider trading, which is usually reserved for stocks and such. We'll see how this plays out. In any case, there's obvious problems with doing something like this. You're looking at a poly market. And did he jeopardize the mission because of it? Well, yeah, because these bets aren't very complex. They're simple and they're public. And, you know, they're hinging on a very, very particular event. And there's not a lot of people in them. You know, there's, there's, they're privately traded funds and there's, there's a, you know, you know, 50 leverage points. And every time an outsized bet is placed, it sends up a flag. Our, our adversaries might be monitoring those flags. Somebody could have figured out who place and looked at his account and made some inferences based off that. So, you know, one would argue the government certainly is, that by placing this bet, this operator could very well have compromised the mission and gotten his fellow operators killed. Moving on to another scandal, the Southern Poverty Law center. Or maybe it's called the Hate Center. Now, the. We covered this briefly last week, but here's some more updates and what we know now. The Southern Poverty Law center has been paying to create the racism it claims to fight. Remember, that's the headline here. So the indictment alleges that the SPLC paid out more than $3 million between 2014 and 2023 to a bunch of the organizations it purports to fight. Other SPLC grantees included the American Nazi Party, the Unite the Right Ku Klux Klan. Now, some may remember the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. This event was widely decried by the Democrats in power at the time that blamed President Trump for the resulting violence. And turns out Southern Poverty Law center allegedly paid a member of the organizing group more than $270,000 to create racist postings and coordinate transportation for attendees. That's a lot. That's a lot of money. And then the SPLC turned around to fundraise. Of course they were fundraising on that. They fundraise and all that, quote, unquote, hate that they paid for. They paid for it to show up in Charlottesville. So this is nuts. I mean, this is like, you know, the doctor making their patients sick so they can, so they can, you know, give, give, provide medicine and get paid for it. It's like UNICEF paying bandits to steal food from starving kids and then taking pictures of the poor starving kids to raise money from donors. I mean, the, the SPLC says that they were paying for informants. That's, that's, that's a pretty bad defense, I got to say, because, you know, law enforcement pays for informants, by the way. They don't pay that much and they don't pay to literally organize the event. Okay, so this, this, is, this what's being alleged here is so far from what we might consider an informant. It's just a wild defense. And also, the SPLC is a charity. It's a tax exempt 501c3. So, you know, charities aren't supposed to have informants on retainer. That's just not part of what they do. All right, now let's talk gerrymandering here and redistricting. So Florida striking back after what we've seen in California and Virginia. And DeSantis has unveiled a new congressional map. So he released this potential Florida congressional map on Monday. Could give Republicans up to four additional U.S. house seats. And the U.S. or the Florida legislature has begun this special session to consider it. Now, this is coming on the heels of California. California's actions stripping the GOP of about five seats and Virginia potentially stripping another five. And we've covered both of those. So we'll go into a little more detail here. The, the proposed map in Florida would shift from 20 Republicans and seven Democrats to 24 Republicans and four Democrats. Targets four sitting Democrats. That's Kathy Castor, Darren Soto, Luis Frankel, Debbie Wasserman Schultz. And this Republican dominated state legislature is expected to pass it. Of course, there'll be lawsuits, and we'll see how it goes. Florida's constitution prohibits political gerrymandering, of course. What is political gerrymandering? All redistricting is political. So that's, that's a, that's tough to prove either way. So we'll see how that goes in the courts. And of course, Democrats are They've got a new term. It's called dummy mander. Okay, cool. Really creative. So, but here's the lay of the land as we lead up to the midterms. So in Texas, we basically got five seats for Republicans. My personal opinion should have done that in 2020 instead of playing it so safe. California responded by redistricting and taking away five Republican seats. In Virginia, same thing. Five more Republican seats gone. Now it's currently being litigated in the Supreme Court. There's still a chance it doesn't make it. And now Florida. So if all of, if all of it succeeds, it's basically a wash. Now, talking about redistricting, you know, everyone wants it to be fair and nonpartisan, but you know, once you dive into the subject, it's. Well, it's, you're going to disagree on what's actually fair. And the reality is Democrats have always decided that redistricting is a battlefield. There's so many blue states out there with sizable Republican populations, you know, 40% plus, and they have zero Republicans representing any districts. Now California was already wildly disproportionate and now even more so. So in the new California maps, I mean, we might see only four Republicans out of 52 seats. Four out of 52. And generally speaking, California is a 60, 40 state. So really, I mean, so these proportions just make no sense. Virginia, it'd be one out of ten. One out of ten would be Republicans. And that's a state where recently a Republican governor won. Now Republicans are finally playing on the same terms. Like I said, I think Texas should have already done this. And look, Civics 101 here. Guys, there's no perfect way to draw maps. It's inherently political. States all do it different. Some are negotiated right there in the legislature. Some create, you know, so called independent nonpartisan commissions, you know, but who chooses the commissions? Well, the party in power. So it's always going to be partisan no matter what. No matter people say, well, AI should do it, or they should just be boxes. Okay, well if you make them boxes, you can't possibly fit in an equal number of people into each one. That's why the shapes are so funny, because they all have to have the same number of people. Not everyone knows that. Now the founders knew there was never going to be a perfect way to do it, and so they allowed it to be part of the political process owned by the state legislatures. So it's worth questioning your own assumptions on the subject. I think a lot of people focus on the shape of a district and sometimes, yeah, the shape is inherently designed to be unfair. Okay. I can also show you shapes of my old district versus my new district and you tell me which one's more fair. My old district was competitive and had a very, had a very proportionally correct. I guess what I'll say correct. Proportions of different ethnicities like that really, truly reflected Texas. My new district looks like a better shape, but a Democrat has no chance of winning. So which one's better? It's an open question. And you know, I'll ask people all the time, should a district be, you know, close to 50, 50 of Democrat, Republican, should it be competitive? Should every district be competitive? Or should districts be hyper red or hyper blue? And most people will say, well, they should be competitive. And I say, okay, well just let's. I'm not even saying I know the answer to this. I just think it's an interesting thought experiment. That means, let's say it's 51% to 49%. That means 49 of the voters in that district will always be disenfranch because they like don't, they really don't get representation. So is that the right way to do it? It's an interesting question. It's an interesting civics 101 question that everyone should be asking themselves instead of just jumping to conclusions. Now, other than developing headlines, Supreme Court just moments ago, back to redistricting ruled on the Louisiana redistricting case that's focused on race based discrimination under the Voting Rights Act. So this is a 6, 3 decision with Justice Alito, the holding that the Louisiana's map creating a second minority majority district was unconstitutional racial gerrymandering. The opinion, however, states that the Section 2 of the VRA was not entirely struck down, including its mandate to ensure equal access to voting rights. So there's a lot of analysis on this that's coming out and I'm not even sure what I just said makes sense to you. Basically when we redistrict, there is this assumption out there, and it is an assumption based on legal precedent that, that there are some districts that have to be majority minority and that's part of the Voting Rights act, or at least the interpretation of it. This, this decision could, could throw that on its head and it might lead to a lot of redistricting in southern states where, and even in Texas where the redistricting has had to follow these rules, or at least perceived rules. It's complicated. More to follow on that. In other news, United Arab Emirates, the UAE is leaving opec and OPEC because it wants to expand its own oil output and secure export routes amid the war in Iran and the Straits of Hormuz blockade. So it's UAE has taken the brunt of Iran's attacks. And the departure from OPEC was gradual, I think most analysts would agree, not sudden. The war simply accelerated that process. The UAE can reroute over half of its oil exports through its territory to bypass that blockade. You know, because it built a pipeline back in the day to, to. To for these kind of anomalies. And some would say that they were, they were ridiculed for doing that. That didn't make any sense. Well, sure, obviously it made sense and it's part of the reason why we're able to keep more oil online even though the straits are closed. But so for a country like uae, leaving OPEC gives, just gives it greater independence if it wants to increase output and adapt to uncertainty. Now, it's not great for OPEC. It removes 13% of OPEC's capacity. And that of course, affects its power and the organization's market management and capabilities. It could shift global markets as well. Some of that could be good for the us some of it might not be. It really depends. I mean, one of the things OPEC does to US producers that we don't often like is they'll, they'll purposefully reduce or maybe increase output to keep prices lower, which really screws our producers because when we produce, we have a higher price point than say, the Saudis do. And so it's a way to put us out of business in some cases. So that's been a topic of discussion for decades now. Moving on to happier news, modern medicines power. There's a new drug that may help stroke survivors prevent repeat strokes. And it doesn't even raise the risk of other complications. It's called a Sundexian. Could be a breakthrough for stroke survivors. Reduces risk of repeated strokes by 26%. So that's pretty great. Also in good news for those of you following how things are approved in the health care space, CMS and the FDA are actually teaming up to speed up Medicare coverage for specific breakthrough medical devices. Called the Rapid Pathway allows two agencies and companies to collaborate during the review process. Right now it goes through fda, and then it's like you have to start all over and go through cms. CMS is, you know, think of that as like the government insurance. It's Medicaid, Medicare. And so, you know, FDA does the safety protocols, the clinical trials, and then the CMS basically asks for it all over again and it drives companies absolutely insane and makes everything more expensive because they have to keep asking investors to put more money into it, et cetera. So, like, combining this process makes a lot of sense. You know, you could you, I mean, it, it reduces the time that it takes and it'd be a huge win for, like, patients and everyone. Here's an interesting read in honor of King Charles III speaking before Congress yesterday to commemorate the 250, 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence from England. There's an interesting book. I haven't read it, but I've been told it's interesting. It's called the Last King of the Misunderstand Understood Reign of George III by Andrew Roberts. I guess interesting book. Challenges conventional narratives of King George's reign, how he's typically portrayed in American lore now. You know, while it looks like all had a wonderful time at last night's state dinner with the King and the President at the White House, it obviously pales in comparison to the Boston Tea Party. All right, that's all out.