← The Majority Report with Sam Seder
The Majority Report with Sam Seder
3650 - DNC DOA Autopsy; Imperial Health Boomerang w/ David Weigel, Dr. MarkAlain Dery
01:26:33
Loading summary
Transcript183 lines
- [00:00]
A
Hey folks, today's episode brought to you by my favorite sponsor sunsetlakesabaday.com and usually you would notice I would do something like that. Use the code left is best. But not today. Why? Well, you can use that code but they have a special sale going on Memorial Day, unofficial start of summer just around the corner. Oh, it's Monday. And that means that summer travel season and for those of you who participate in such things, wedding season is also happening. Whether you rely on seven a day for sharper focus, when vacation planning better sleep on the road, or easing general travel anxieties or frankly anxieties about getting married, now is the time. Now is John Jr's wife to be Exactly. Now is a great time to stock up on Seba Day tinctures. Starting today you can save 35% on your favorite Saba Day oil tinctures with the coupon code memorial26. Do not miss out. They've got Goodnight oil which is my favorite tincture, but they've also got tinctures for dogs. They got all sorts of like concentrations of Sabadea tinctures. It's helpful like they say to relax. It's Sometimes I don't have to do this as much anymore because my kids are a little bit more manageable. But there was a time where I would hit the Saba Day pretty hard the tinctures to get through an evening. Sometimes with the kids they can be difficult and sunsetlakesebae.com, you're buying your Saba Day direct from the farmer. There's no middleman. They don't use pesticides. They use integrated pest management. They got great farming practices. They take care of the land. They're movement partners. They donated tens of thousands of dollars to things like strike relief funds and carceral reform and Planned Parenthood. Just an all around great company and a great product. And now you can get their tinctures for 35% less by using the coupon code memorial26 Head over to sunsetlakesebade.com as always, the code will be in the podcast and YouTube description and Majority FM. And now time for the show the Majority Report with Sam Cedar where every day's Casual Friday. That means Monday is casual Monday, Tuesday casual Tuesday, Wednesday casual Hump day, Thursday casual Thirs. That's what we call it. And Friday Casual Shabbat. The Majority Report with Sam Cedar. It is Friday, May 22, 2026. My name is Sam Cedar. This is the five time award winning Majority Report. We are broadcasting live still steps from the industrially ravaged Gowanus Canal in the heartland of America, downtown Brooklyn, usa. On the program today, Dave Weigel, journalist covering politics at Semaphore. Give us a little bit of a wrap up of the primaries and what he's seeing out there in terms of just how bad the midterms could be for Republicans. Also on the program today, Mark Allen Derry, infectious disease specialist and doctor whose work can be found at the Dr. Derry on substack. He's also got a YouTube show. We will be talking to him about Ebola, hunter virus, Covid, Medicaid. Also on the program today, the Republican Party of peace cancel a War Powers act vote in the House when they realize they're going to lose it. Trump Meanwhile, reverses, sends 5,000 troops from Poland, excuse me, to Poland. Iran now in negotiations with Oman over permanent war Hormuz toll system. David Sachs gets Trump to reverse his AI oversight executive order and a $5 million donation gets Trump FDA to open the door to new vaping and e cigarettes. Senate fails to move its reconciliation bill because Trump is now insisting his slush fund be added to it. Federal prosecutors forced to drop charges on Broadview 6's Chicago anti ice protesters. The Republican controlled EPA eases restrictions on super polluting hydrofluorocarbons. DOJ loses cases in Wisconsin and Maine will not get voter rolls. Supreme Court okays a lawsuit over US Assets seized by Cuba. This as the US Tees up some type of US Takeover or regime change in Cuba, all so those wealthy people can bring back the Batista economy. All this and more on today's Majority Report. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen. Thanks so much for joining us. It is Casual Friday. Oh, I gotta log into this thing. Bear with me, it's Casual Friday. Emma Vigland out, of course, today that's her new thing. Whenever it used to be, you know, like sporadic. And then it was when the Knicks win, she's obviously got to take off. And then it's just now when the Knicks play and it's moving into just
- [06:49]
B
like unfortunately for you and Brian, when the Knicks play, they win these days it's like nine straight victories for them to play.
- [06:55]
A
I'm not going to begrudge anybody their fun time with their team that will lose.
- [07:01]
B
Doesn't sound like it.
- [07:02]
C
No easiest path to the finals I've ever seen in my life. But yeah, that's fine.
- [07:06]
A
Yeah, I mean, listen, luck is part of it too. And that's fine. Everybody's nobody. Nobody succeeds in life without luck. But it's, we're already Seeing the finals right now being played out, huh?
- [07:25]
D
Yeah, I agree with that.
- [07:26]
A
All right.
- [07:26]
C
Yeah. Great.
- [07:29]
A
So we don't need to argue. Republican lawmakers. I mean, there's a fascinating dynamic and we're going to talk about this a little bit with Dave Weigel. But Donald Trump has solidified his control over the Republican Party in a way that we haven't seen up to now in the past. He would get involved in races and his people would lose. But he has the ability to now marshal so much money that you can take out a guy like Thomas Massie, you can take out a guy like Cassidy in the Senate who voted to impeach him in 2021. And Trump has just shown and is cracking the whip here. But the problem with that is it's two sided insofar as when incumbents realize that their incumbency is contingent upon this one guy who doesn't have to run again, they all realize like, there's a very good chance we're gonna lose the House and there's a, like increasingly better, you know, a better chance that they're gonna lose the Senate. And they're bumming out and they're starting to push back. And Trump, meanwhile, seems to have dialed up the level to 10 in the Senate. They're supposed to pass a reconciliation bill that was going to fund ICE and they needed to do so by June 1st. They're going on vacation today and not dealing with that bill because Trump is insisting that they put the $1.8 billion slush fund in there because there's a very good chance in the House. What's going to happen is that there's going to be a bill to fight that slush fund because as moderate or moderate as frontline Republicans are starting to freak out about their seats. Stuff like we're just going to get a slush fund and do whatever we want with it is is an increasing political liability in the House. You'll recall two days ago, I think it was two or three days ago, the Senate passed the War Powers act, which requires congressional approval from or Trump's war, puts him on notice, gives them, I think another 20 days that passed because Cassidy flipped his vote from the other four or five times it's been brought up in the Senate. That vote moved over to House last night. And Here is Jim McGovern from Worcester explaining what happened, what purpose the general Massachusetts seek recognition.
- [10:36]
E
Mr. Speaker, can you explain to the members of the chamber what is happening with the Iran War Powers Resolution that was scheduled to be voted on this evening?
- [10:46]
A
The gentleman have a parliamentary question.
- [10:48]
E
Well, that is my parliamentary inquiry. I just want to know what has happened with the Iran War Powers Resolution.
- [10:57]
A
The gentleman may consult with your leadership
- [10:59]
E
regarding scheduling, Mr. Speaker, for the parliamentary inquiry. Are we not voting on it because the American people are sick and tired of this illegal war that it's costing tens of billions of dollars. Gas prices are through the roof. People can't afford. People can't afford their groceries. Is that why you're pulling it? You guys don't have.
- [11:19]
A
The House will be in order. The House. This House will be in order. The chair is prepared to move on to the next question. You don't have the guts or the balls neither, neither the guts nor the balls to put that vote up in the House. And so there it is. This is incidentally, this is the party of peace. This is, this is the anti war party. I guess we just have to wait and see how it turns out with Iran. According to some folks.
- [11:59]
C
I heard some skepticism about a school.
- [12:01]
A
Yeah, I mean that's where we're at the House. They've all run away. They're not going to vote for the War Powers resolution. We'll see if it comes up. I think it's a privileged amendment. So maybe, you know, maybe they can't really do anything until they vote on that. And I don't know what they're hoping, but you know, the problem is, is that they've got like one rep for from New Jersey. He seems to be awol. Nobody knows where he is. They're unclear if he's passed away or he's in jail or who knows where he is. We'll talk to Dave, waggle about that more. So they're juggling their membership. We'll see what happens when they get back. The meantime, we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, Dave Weigel, journalist covering politics@semaphore it.
- [13:22]
D
Sam. Back.
- [13:49]
A
We are back. Sam Cedar on the Majority Report is a pleasure and I should say Emma Viglin out today. It is a pleasure to welcome back to the program Dave Weigel, politics reporter over at the Semaphore. Dave, welcome back to the program.
- [14:10]
D
Oh, good to be back. Thank you.
- [14:12]
A
So let's start with the primaries this week, but then I want to like sort of expand into this dynamic that is taking place. And curious if you've seen in your travels what's happening there. Let's start with Chris. Rob, I know you were in Philadelphia. Chris Robb was of the blogosphere way back when. We had him on the program. And he reminded me that I had interviewed him 20 years ago, I think in the Air America days. This was a big win for DSA for all of the aligned sort of like progressive Democrats. And just I'm curious as to your sort of like broad strokes on this because there is a sense that there was like the, the, the establishment, if you were fumbled here. But even, even if you look at that fumble, I'm not convinced. He wouldn't have won anyways.
- [15:21]
D
No, he would have. He ran a great campaign. He would have won anyways. It took years of planning. So Philadelphia, you kind of set it up. Philadelphia was one of the early successful organizing grounds for dsa. They had the Chris rally I went to last week with AOC. He was introduced by the Philadelphia DSA legislators who got elected in 2018. And he had early help from Semmer Lee, who was elected in Pittsburgh. Same sort of movement being built there. Very successful. The wake of the Bernie campaign. Striking because Bernie didn't do that well in Pennsylvania. But then also he just. Talent is real. You talked to Rab. I interviewed Rab. He was by far the most talented candidate in the field. Saying what Democrats agree with, not like pandering to them. They just happen to be in a very Democratic district. The only one willing to say we're not censored. Right. He said fuck aipac. That's very popular in every Democratic primary, especially in Pennsylvania. But you could see that race. I'm gonna see how versions of it repeat around the country. Cuz you had the establishment that got in early behind Sharif street, who is the son of the former mayor of John street, state senator, ran the state party in a terrible cycle. He ran the party in 2024 when their registration was collapsing. They lost every statewide race, but he was this. I just gave his bio. They were loyal to him. So he locked up all this labor support. The governor, Josh Shapiro, who did not want Rabb to win, was in a bind because he was gonna go against all the labor unions. And then Dwight Evans, who retired to open the seat, got behind Ayla Stanford, this physician who turned out to be a bad candidate. Not a stupid person, but just a lot of stuff flew at her. And Chris Rabbit had spent a decade knowing the issues, knowing the contours, what a congressman can do. And she was just a doctor running in the first race, was collapsed. I'll bring up AIPAC again another way. Her endorsers were telling me the fact that apac. She had a bad Israel answer, kind of like a rambling answer on Gaza and then also she was supported by 314Action which in the past has got APEC money not for this race. But their polling showed that that was terrible for her. Her support collapsed if people got the idea that she was the AIPAC candidate, which she wasn't quite. And Rapp did really disputes people. They had different position on this. The candidates who could have stopped him just did not connect with voters and did not connect with their priorities. And so that was a huge opening for Chris Rapp. I can see Abdul Syeds and other candidates. Competitive races have a model to follow. They've been building their own, but they have a definite model in Pennsylvania.
- [18:01]
A
Yeah, we, we explain to me again Shapiro. So Shapiro definitely was against Chris Rob, but what was his dilemma again?
- [18:15]
D
So he, he, he. I mean he is popular in Philly. He's not popular with Democratic activists in Philly. Last week Larry Krasner him go back and forth. He is more conservative than the city. But he would have preferred. Holly Otterbein, who lives in Philly and works at Axios, wrote about this. He behind the scenes did not want Rab but was pushing some unions. Can you, can you slow down in this race? Can you do, can you not endorse.
- [18:47]
A
Rob was getting union endorsements?
- [18:49]
D
No. Well, not really. He was going to work his family's party and those sorts of things. It was that. It was more that he was like letting it be, letting it be known that. How do I put this? That the building trades should not help him. So most of the unions were going behind Curry street. The ones that were in the mix, the ones what Access reported is that Shapiro was pushing the building trades. Don't jump in and join the bandwagon and don't run ads that would hurt Stanford. Who was the candidate I was mentioning the first time candidate who ended up being kind of weak. That's what he's doing. So he didn't do a whole lot. He did enough that reporters heard about it and this ended up being a black eye for him because Rab has protested. Josh Shapiro. RAB protested a collaboration with ice. Not that Shapiro has done a lot with it, but he's done more than zero. And he protested. He led a protest. When Shapiro had his book tour, he led a protest there. But that was a good example to bind. Right. That the governor who has a lot of power in the Democratic Party. They did not for all their machinery. The left spent years getting ready for this race and the establishment didn't.
- [20:06]
A
Yeah, I mean it's a big, big win. I think for dsa and just the idea that the bluest, I think it's the bluest district in the country now represents sort of like the, has a, has a politics that should be associated with that. Right. I mean, like the bluest states and the bluest districts should represent the left edge of the Democratic Party. It seems quite obvious, you know, just even as a, as, as an afterthought, I mean, and, but I'm also sort of fascinated at the and we'll circle back to this about how big of a role Gaza is playing in all of these primaries, particularly in light of the DNC autopsy that came out. But let's also talk about, I mean, and while we're on Democrats, let's go to Georgia. The Democrats in Georgia came out in big, big numbers, right. But they failed to turn the state Supreme Court talk about that because we had this model. I mean, the biggest success and the first electoral sort of change that impacted the administration was Wisconsin and the Supreme Court race out there. And this is quite a contrast.
- [21:42]
D
Well, I'll set up a little bit by saying 10 years ago in Wisconsin, the primary was held the same day as the presidential election and people came out and voted between Bernie Sanders and Hillary. And Republicans voted for Ted Cruz over Donald Trump. And Democrats lost that Supreme Court race in Wisconsin. It took them again years to build this strategy. Ben Wickler, the former chair, gets a lot of credit for this, of just saying, look, we're Democrats. We love the idea. We all nod our heads at the idea that courts are nonpartisan, but they are partisan. This is a state that has judicial elections. We need to spend a lot of money early on to say this is our candidate. They'll come out and vote for the candidate who is like, we won't see Democrat. We'll say pro choice. We'll say anti has a record. They found a particular kind of candidate, right. Who had a local record that you could defend in front of voters, like putting criminals in jail, et cetera. But then was pro choice and they perfected that, but it took them a while to do it. And in Georgia, there is a weaker Democratic Party. It's been strong in presidential years. It's been pretty weak outside them, even though the Democratic vote around Atlanta is growing. And they did this really late. We're talking in May. The primary was Tuesday. And the push from Democrats and from kind of pro choice groups that were invested, the aclu, I think, was helping in the race that kind of started in February. And this is the sort of thing that you could see Democrats winning this race had they mobilized in a year ago and said, we have. And one of the candidates who lost, Jen Jordan, had run for attorney general and lost by five points. She lost this race by 18 points. Just go in and work with media on profiles of who these people are, introduce them as Democratic candidates. There's one thing that's a little bit weedsy where Georgia has a. I think unconstitutional, but nobody's struck it down yet, like judicial ethics board that will punish candidates if they suggest in any way how they might rule on things. It just. It helps incumbents. Incumbents appear on the ballot, says they're an incumbent and can't talk about their rulings. It's hard to campaign for this job. It's kind of built so that, as is the case, no appointed judge ever loses renomination. People just go out and vote for them. But look, Pennsylvania Democrats have done this pretty well. Josh Shapiro got credit for that last year. Wisconsin Democrats did it. Well, it required making an early decision to say, this is a partisan race. We need a strategy that's gonna hold up. And they just. They didn't have one. They weren't even that out of money to do it. Like, they ran the ads that you'd expect would convince people. Just Democrats showed up. And it's crazy if you look at the maps. Democrats showed up in Atlanta, voted in huge numbers, and then their vote for these Republican incumbents was higher than their vote for any other Republican in recent elections because they just showed up and said, who's this incumbent? Sure. And voted for him.
- [24:29]
E
Who?
- [24:30]
A
Is there an entity that exists to say, like, hey, Democratic Party of Georgia, we just want to put this on your radar and get a sense of what you're doing for this Supreme Court race in a year from now, because Georgia, of all places, is a particularly important state. You know, like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin. This is a state that is maybe trending blue in some way. Not quite, but, you know, trending purple, I guess I should say. And, you know, we may have some important stuff happen in Georgia down the road. It's been the site. Is there any entity like, is the DNC not in any way. Sort of, like, supposed to just sort of make sure that these state parties are. You know, I would love to see them fund the state parties more, but I would imagine that they've got a calendar. I mean, like, this is. We've got a calendar that here says, you know, this is going to be primaries in different states. We're not that big of an operation. But I would imagine and we have a bunch of different jobs to do. I would imagine for the dnc like making sure that, you know, parties are on top of this stuff is important.
- [25:47]
D
Yeah, I'll give them spot Democrats a little bit because Republicans who run Georgia have worked pretty hard to make it harder for Democrats to organize. If you know about Stacey Abrams's independent group, Republicans just sued and sued in order to destroy that, make it focus on legal fees. Not did it make mistakes. I'm sure it did in the process but it's not going to get any money from the weaponization fund. Republicans knew it was helpful to them long run to beat this independent organization. Now there are a lot DNC we can get to. There are a lot of Democratic groups around the country based in D.C. et cetera that after 2010 said gee, we Democrats have been asleep at the wheel on state elections. Give us money so we can help flip state legislatures. Give us money so we can flip Supreme Court raises. And they weren't very good at it in Georgia. Again they had a late strategy untangling that takes some reporting. But I was talking to people before this who were optimistic they would win and they were pointing to the work they did. They were convinced they were doing a good enough job and they just weren't. So the Dems role, the national Democrats, I should say is funding the state party. The state party was not saying we don't have enough money to compete in this. We need more money from Ken Martin. Why is Ken Martin doing such a bad job? They were counting on this outside help and they just both had been degraded by Republicans and it wasn't very focused on the race. It just like failure at several different levels. I don't, I've been struck that nobody has said oh Ken Martin blew this because they think that people throughout the Democratic universe blew this. They had money and they had resources and they had celebrities that they brought Barack, not Barack Obama to rally in person, but Obama helping message and introduce the candidates. And just, you know, voters showed up for a May primary with mostly the governor's race on the ballot and they just didn't know who these candidates were. Whose fault was that? Everybody's fault.
- [27:42]
A
Interesting. Let's talk about Massie and maybe Cassidy too because this, this is, this dynamic is already playing out. We saw it with the War Powers act resolution being pulled yesterday. We saw it with the War Powers act passing in the Senate last week because Cassidy is now out of the running to return as senator. The Massey thing was, you know, relatively straightforward, although I'M just starting to catch up on his sex. He had his, like a sex scandal.
- [28:21]
D
Yeah. Unclear if it was real, but he definitely had one. Yeah. It was like Laura Loomer pushing it first. Yeah.
- [28:28]
A
Yes. I mean, but nevertheless, like, what is your sense, what are you hearing from your Republican contacts as to, like, the implications of a. Of Trump doing this type of stuff? Like, because on one hand, it's keeping people in line, but it seems like it's. He's squeezing a little too tight.
- [28:54]
D
Yes. So one question is, what is his legislative agenda for the rest of the year? And this has been attention inside the Republican Party that they will do whatever he says to the point of changing the rules of the Senate to do it. And they've changed some rules. They changed Senate rules to allow block kind of confirmations. You don't need to take up a week of floor time to confirm an ambassador. There's 30ambassadors confirm them, but there's 53 Republican senators of whom most do not want to change the filibuster. And speaking of just bad organizing, watching Republican activists try to get. Do a whip count for getting rid of the filibuster has been. You can tell they've never done it before.
- [29:34]
A
Right.
- [29:35]
D
They'll celebrate. We got somebody on the record. They support the SAVE Act. Oh, great. Let me introduce all these Democrats who've endorsed legislation that they won't break the filibuster to pass. But there's been this really sloppy campaign that Trump believes in to get past this, the Save America act, this combination of election rules. And it's very complicated. I would say that's a terrible introduction to it. It's not that complicated. The sales pitch is complicated because he's arguing on one hand, we can't win the election without this. Because I, Donald Trump, do believe that Democrats steal elections with millions of ballots that are fake. At the same time, I, Donald Trump, am signing executive orders that will go get litigated, that are trying to stop this in other ways. I'm trying to reduce the post office capacity to transmit ballots after election Day. There's a lawsuit at the Supreme Court right now to stop counting ballots after election day, et cetera. So just the message to Republicans is, can we just ignore this? Do we need to actually get rid of the filibuster, or is he going to figure out his election stuff on his own? This is the classic cowardly Republican stance of I will just nod my head and not do anything, and maybe Trump will forget about this. But the rest of their agenda is various Pieces of funding that he just doesn't care about. He cares about the Safe America Act. And so does he care that Bill Cassidy will resist him? Well, he already was. Like, Bill Cassidy was already resisting him. Does he care that John Cornyn, this is the funniest story here because John Cornyn, a filibuster defender his entire career, as soon as he needed the Trump endorsement, he said, you know what, actually I thought about it. I'm okay with getting rid of the filibuster pass the Save America Act. And then Trump said, yeah, I see what you're doing. I'm endorsing Ken Paxton for what he wants. He both can get a lot of it through because discuss this. It's not just Republicans who were supine. It's the Supreme Court. As it turns out, the Supreme Court will like, hey, we made an argument in the fifth Circuit. Can you guys sign off on this? Sure, we'll sign off on this. Just he's very confident he can get his way. It's annoying that Republicans won't go along with it. So does he care if he loses a couple of Republicans on some of his priorities? Not especially. I mean, the point of having that giant omnibus last year, the one big beautiful bill act was getting most of their agenda through, but the rest of the agenda is like funding ice more after we've already funded it for the next four years. So I'm not trying to be a nihilist here to say like, the position for Republicans is really just, can we just wait this out and have him win enough lawsuit that we can't lose the House and then just stay in power. They're really just their legislate. Their lawmaking capacity is just like nil at this point. They just wait for Trump to make a lot of them wait for Trump to make decisions. And the guys who are adrift in this, like your swing seat members, I think honestly, Trump believes he can win the House without them. So for example, he, Brian Fitzpatrick, he wins his primary on Tuesday in Pennsylvania. Bucks County Democrats are targeting that seat. And Trump makes fun of him. He's talking to reporters on the tarmac on the way to something makes fun of the Fox News reporter Jackie Heinrich, president of the White House Correspondents association, who is married to Brian Fitzpatrick, just makes fun of her for being married to him and says he doesn't vote for him very well. And Fitzpatrick sees that and he's now against the ballroom funding. Now ballroom funding, classic example. Trump is finding ways to just say, hey, I move this money around and you can't do anything about it. Like, we'll probably find some way to fund it at some point. So does he care that they're rebelling against him? Not that much. And the final thing I'll say is, is there a logical part of Trump that the part that deals with Susan Collins. Right. The part that is not to have Trump criticizing Susan Collins every day, that's saying, yes, it's fine if some, if like three moderate Republicans talk to the media and are against me, if I'm going to get what I want. I think that's part of it. I think, I do think Trump understands some of these members can, can break with him strategically and he gets what he wants anyway.
- [33:32]
A
All right, let's. We just got a couple of minutes here because I know you got this hard out the DNC autopsy.
- [33:40]
D
Oh, yeah.
- [33:42]
A
An astonishing sort of like, horrible leap done executed. Like I feel like any given day an intern could have developed something more sophisticated. Doesn't mention Gaza or Israel or. It's sort of shocking, particularly when we're seeing how much it is playing out in these primaries. And I think the fact that you don't mention it indicates that it's. That that's almost like more helpful than it had it. Like it just paid lip service to it on some level. What is your sense of, like, what's going on at the DNC or how people are thinking about this? I mean, this has just been a disaster. You had one job. It feels like really you have two jobs. If you can, Martin, raise money, figure out what we did wrong last time, try and do something different this time.
- [34:39]
D
Yes. Although the third job is be preside over election wins, which he mostly has done. Like this Georgia result this week is the one thing I'd say, really the one thing in the last year and a half that you could say, oh, Democrats screwed that up. Like every other week. They're winning a special election. They win these landslides in 2025, they're feeling pretty good about, about what the party's doing at the lower level. But it's a bit like the RNC in 2009 and 10. Right. Republicans are winning a lot of elections, actually fewer by this point than Democrats are now. But Michael Steele's chair and donors say, this guy stinks. Get, get rid of him. And after the mid they get rid of him. It reminds me quite a lot of that situation where you have the difference being their parties are just structured in very different ways at this point. The rnc, which has three members from each state, no matter what the population of the state is. It's just Trump people. It's just Trump people. They don't let the media into their meetings. They don't care if people criticize their donors. They just exist to raise money to help Republicans win elections. The DNC is this big, messy family of state parties and territory parties, number seven of them. They're D.C. or the territories that want resources from the DNC. And Ken Martin does that. So when I was talking to DNC members yesterday, I tend not to use blind quotes. I don't like it when. So one anonymous member. I hate that stuff. No, they were saying on the record. Yeah, this is a DC Distraction. DC Hates Ken. DC is full of these consultants who want to make money on their own. So they blew up this autopsy thing into a big deal. It's not a big deal for us. It's the members of Congress who have to run who are annoyed by this. And look, they were not counting on the DNC to come in and fuel their campaigns. But they are looking at the calendar, the electoral map, and they're saying, look, Trump has a super PAC that hasn't spent really anything yet they can spend against us. The RNC is probably going to win as we're kind of hinting at this judgment that allows their party to coordinate more with campaigns. So let's say I'm a Democrat running for Congress in a swing seat, and I've outraised my Republican opponent by $500,000. The RNC could swoop in and say, hey, we're now spending $3 million on behalf of this candidate. We're going to overwhelm what you have. It's the candidates and the electeds who say with the autopsy, they're not even care about the details that much. It's just they need the chair to raise money. And that's the kind of ouroboros here, right? Is the less confidence people have in anything about Ken Martin, the less they're going to give to the dnc. The less money the DNC has, the less ready it is for this post, probably in June. Supreme Court says, guess what party can spend this money and they can't work the same way. And this is Ben Wickler, who ran against Ken. Wisconsin's laws, which Scott Walker left in place, allow kind of endless fundraising by the state party committee. They have this model that has worked for them in one state, and they're not transposing it to the national party because of these issues. Now, the autopsy itself, like the optimistic Democratic side Of this is we all know that Joe Biden was too old and shouldn't have run again. We're not going to have another nominee who's 82. So not a problem. We all know that Gaza was a problem. People protested Kamala Duh. We know it was a problem. And also we're not running the White House. So that's not going to be an issue in the midterms or for us next time. So what is it we really need to know and it's pretty blase. They just every reporter you'll talk to like will say, yeah, there was a shoddy report. All of us did like more work on what didn't work at all. So the official position of the DNC is can said he would do this autopsy. He gave it to somebody who did a terrible job. They tried to just hide it because it was such a terrible job and it was unfinished. Once there was too much pressure, they released it and said this doesn't mean anything. And you're right. The Dehu story is why does it mention X and Y and Z from their position? It's like David Cross in the call in show sketch of Mr. Show. Just no, you don't get doesn't mention gossip because it's not finished. They just kind of want to move on after Memorial Day weekend and say this is no longer a distraction. Please keep giving to the DNC the Gaza discussion. It's going to keep happening. The DNC has a Gaza working group, Middle east working group, but it's about Gaza and they met again last week. There's an ongoing democratic discussion about these issues you're seeing from donors. They're just interested in giving to individual candidates and other committees and other groups because they think the DNC's weak. And that is the risk. The DNC is going to run into a position where the RNC can by multiples outspend it. And it's a question of whether the DNC members and this is state party chairs, but it's also the elected members for various positions, whether they're convinced, oh, we can't win the next election with this in place. We need a new vote on Ken Martin. Which of us is going to is going to issue some challenge that gets a new vote? They're not there yet at all. If he was elected by members of Congress, I think he'd be gone this weekend. He's not. That's, that's a saving grace.
- [39:36]
A
Interesting. Dave Weigel, always a pleasure. We'll link to your stuff over at semaphore You're a daily read for me. I mean, not daily. You don't put out that daily, but daily. Really appreciate it.
- [39:49]
D
Thank you. Always good to be here.
- [39:51]
A
All right, folks, we're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, Dr. Mark Allenderi, infectious disease specialists whose work can be found at the Dr. Derry on substack. And also, do we have the YouTube link?
- [40:09]
C
I'll grab that right now.
- [40:11]
A
He has a YouTube show. I'll ask him about that and then we'll post that link, too. Quick break. We'll be right back.
- [40:24]
D
It. Sam.
- [41:19]
A
We are back. Sam Cedar on the Majority Report. Emma Vigeland out today. Want to welcome back to the program Dr. Mark Allen, dairy infectious disease specialist whose work can be found at the Dr. Derry on substack. And you doing a lot of YouTube videos about. Well, I should just also say because we've spoken many times in the past, you have direct experience in dealing with Ebola outbreaks in was it in the Congo or was it Sierra Leone? In Sierra Leone. And you run or you did. I don't know if you're still doing this. One of the biggest Medicaid providers in New Orleans, Louisiana. In Louisiana. Sorry. And so we're talking about public health with a lot of communities that are underserved and also obviously work with infectious disease. And so it's been a busy decade for you or so.
- [42:28]
F
And also let me add the last time we were on or the last two times ago, we were talking about huntavirus. I also have experience with huntavirus when I lived on the Navajo reservation as well. So it's funny that these should all circle back, both Ebola and Huntavirus, you know, you know, in the news right now.
- [42:46]
A
Well, let's talk about, I mean this because you wrote a piece, I guess it was a little bit less than a month ago, talking about a term that you have coined, the imperial, I should not say the imperial, sorry, the medical boomerang. Is that it?
- [43:08]
F
Or the health, you were right, the imperial health boomerang.
- [43:11]
A
The imperial health boomerang. And this play off of somebody else's term on the imperial boomerang. What, what, what do you mean by that?
- [43:20]
F
So Amis Cesair, who is a African Francophone born in France, kind of coined the term the imperial boomerang. And it's this idea especially we're seeing something like that now, especially with this, this administration. But it typically discusses that what a col country does abroad, those authoritarian, oftentimes hyper military, militaristic Actions, oftentimes racist actions that will happen in a colonized country that, that imperialism kind of boomerangs back to the origin, the country of origin. So like what we saw in like Fallujah, let's say we see on the streets of Minneapolis, which is a kind of a very loose and notion of the imperial boomerang is the Jakarta Method
- [44:13]
A
is a great book that also outlines like how we would send trainers over there and they'd come back after having trained counter insurgency and communists and they come and they do that training here. We, like you say, we see it in terms of, particularly in the wake of Iraq, all of the military hardware come back and be sold to cops and to feds, et cetera, et cetera.
- [44:38]
F
So yeah, and they want to use their new toys. Right. That's how they see them. Right. And we are the ones, we the people are the ones that suffer from that. So the Imperial boomerang. So what I did is I basically wrote this piece that was in Kevin MD Looking at what I refer to as the imperial health boomerang. And I wrote it right after kind of right around the times of Doge and then the so called Medicaid cuts that happened with the one big beautiful bill. So what happened last year, and I think we may have talked about it right around that time, is when USAID and PEPFAR basically got cut. And listen, the nice thing about public health is that it's easy to make the predictions. If you cut something here, you won't see something here.
- [45:26]
D
Right.
- [45:27]
F
You're going to see, you know, you're not going to see the positives, you're going to see the kind of, the negative impacts and just kind of flash forward. That's what we're seeing with Ebola right now. So it was easy from a person who runs HIV clinics here in New Orleans and through the state, it was easy to see that the Medicaid cuts that we are going to see after the midterms were not unlike the USAID cuts. And so that was what I'm trying to explain in the article. And what happened, as you know, with the USAID cuts and with that Lancet article that's modeling something like 14 million deaths by 2030. Right now, the best projections as a result of cuts to USAID and to PEPFAR is somewhere around 750,000 deaths, with a majority of them, two thirds of them likely being children. And, and what the Lancet article projects through modeling, because that's all we have. And modeling is a very good scientific method for us to Use to kind of. And it's probably under calling how many death we're going to see. But it's the best that we have to predict what the future is going to look like is that there is going to be somewhere about 14 million deaths by 2030. And again, two thirds of them are likely to be children. And so a lot of my colleagues, and in fact, I have a few that are working in my clinics that were working for USAID and pepfar who just basically woke up one day and they just lost their jobs, right? They didn't have jobs. I mean, they didn't have work anymore. Their programs immediately shut down. And of course, flash forward a year later, we have 750,000 deaths. And what I tried to do in this article was to get physicians ready to think about what is going to happen in the future. The future being right now, the future being 2026, that if our colleagues internationally saw these incredibly impactful cuts that happened to them and their clients and their pat and the communities that they are caring for, that they need to be ready to see those happen here. And I'm imploring my physician colleagues, my healthcare colleagues, whoever, that they need to start going through the grieving process now. And for me, I vacillate between anger and basically anger. I don't know when I'm gonna find a place of respite because I just. I don't see it. My frustration is quite high. And then, of course, now what we're seeing with Hunter, that was a small. And we can kind of dissect that. But what's happening with Ebola right now
- [48:18]
A
in the deal, I want to. I want to get to Ebola and Hunter and. And the implications of that cuts. And. And there were two things that I wanted to get to because, you know, as far as I can tell, you're basically saying, like, you know, somebody dropped a hammer from the 10th floor, and you're basically trying to make people aware on the ground, like this is going to hit. And you got to be prepared for it. If not structurally, but, like, emotionally.
- [48:49]
F
Yes, emotionally. Because we need to be ready for our communities when these cuts come.
- [48:54]
A
Because I want to talk more about that, about how. How what they can do. But let's just get to. I had, you know, we all make mistakes in our lives. And I decided to have a conversation with Gillian Michaels about USAID cuts. And I cited the Lancet study. Obviously, there's modeling. She said her AI can only come up with eight deaths as a function of USAID cuts. And she Kept making it clear that waivers were given to certain set of drugs through PEPFAR and through that reversed all of the most dangerous stuff. Walk me through. Obviously, when we say 750,000, we don't. Nobody's gone and collected birth certificates, or I should say death certificates from all of these places. It is an estimate based upon what we knew these programs were, who they were serving, and from like a series, I would imagine, of anecdotes, a doctor, an NGO working in one place tell us, like how despite the waivers, why we would get those kind of deaths.
- [50:18]
F
Well, the number one, and this is something that we do here as well in the US is look at X excess deaths. So essentially what you start doing, and during COVID that was something that was a mechanism that we utilized quite a bit, was to see what the excess deaths were. You know, on, you know, July 1st of any year, we would expect X amount of deaths to occur in the US Based on the past. But what we're seeing now, I'm just using Covid as an example, we're seeing 50,000 more deaths. And we could attribute those excess deaths to Covid. That was a tool that epidemiologists use. And so it's crude the way I'm explaining it, but you understand the basics of what I'm saying. So because it's hard to look at the impact of USAID in total, I mean, you talk to somebody like me who does this for a living, anybody in the global health arena will tell you how impactful it is. But when, and you see that impact in the greatest contrast is when that help is not there and you start to see these deaths accumulate. And so one of the things that they utilize are this tool of excess death. So they expect X amount of deaths at any one time. And when they start seeing deaths beyond that, that's when you can start to attribute those deaths potentially to the lack of fund, start seeing more cases of tb, more cases of malaria, more cases of hiv, more cases of other infections. Malnutrition is a big one. Of course, as we saw that paste was not reaching the places that it should have been. It wasn't able to make it to the last mile. And so when you start to see impacts like that, that's when you can start to attribute those deaths, those excess deaths to something like the cuts in usaid.
- [52:19]
A
And I would imagine too, like the thing that you would have a better sense of than I think most, is the way that these, the grant making process happens. The NGOs that rely on this, even though I probably would imagine some, like, local agencies and whatnot. This is not a situation where, like, they have a lot of extra cash in the bank and that if this thing is shut down even for two or three or four weeks, everybody goes away, right? I mean, like, it begins to corrode the entire. The like, you know, I just know people who do, like, other NGO work. And if one piece falls out, the entire sort of logistic supply line of providing care, whether it's like medicine, the deliverance of vaccines or specific medicines, but also the infrastructure of care breaks down and then it's like all bets are off. It's a fragile thing,
- [53:32]
F
right? So, Sam, so you cut off for the last second there, but I am going to give you a great example of that, and that is the Strait of Hormuz. Look at what's happening with the Strait of Hormuz, right? You are seeing just, even if, even if they, you know, the experts keep saying, even if it opens up tomorrow, there has already been such a backlog of things that it's going to take probably years for us to ever get back to kind of where we once were. So I use that as a solid example to, or analogy rather, to what it is that you're saying, because what you're saying is 100% correct. But let me add some numbers to it. And so that is the usaid, and this is going to lead into Ebola. USAID was giving about $1.4 billion a year to the DRC, $1.4 billion a year. They were acting as kind of like the fire alarm, the drc, the DRC to local villages.
- [54:31]
A
What is the DRC for people.
- [54:33]
F
Sorry, I'm sorry. Democratic Republic of the Congo. I'm sorry. The DRC is the Democratic Republic Congo, right. Which is where the outbreak is basically located right now, right? In Ituri Province, which butts up against South Sudan and Uganda. And so for the year of 2025, that went down to 400 million. And then for 2026, that went down to $20 million. Just to kind of give you an idea, the Uganda USAID was giving something like, I think it was like $20 million a year. And USAID retracted that and it went back to 1 point, minus 1.2 million. They clawed back monies that they had already given to Uganda. So when we start to see what's happening with the Ebola outbreak, you can see where there was once monies, monies to pay people in clinics for those leases, to pay the expertise, to pay for the transfer of blood samples from one place to another for that Ebola outbreak that we're seeing. And I'll explain that to you in a quick second. What we are seeing is once that money is retracted, you could see how all the systems that follow as a result of that get completely broken. And here we are with this Ebola outbreak. And if you want, I can kind of talk about what happened.
- [55:51]
A
Yeah, let's do. Because the former head of the CDC said that he thinks he is troubled by the potential for a pandemic in the region of Ebola and that, you know, I'm seeing increasingly reports that, like the early warning system where, you know, resources are thrown in, failed because of those cuts.
- [56:17]
F
Yes. Okay, so let's talk about it. So basically, around April 25, April 24, April 25, somebody went into a rural hospital in the cytology Tory province of the drc. They had fevers, and basically they had Ebola. Right. So what does Ebola look like? As you know, I was an Ebola doctor for the WHO in Sierra Leone and Freetown during the height of the pandemic. And that was the epicenter of the pandemic as well in Freetown. And so you basically have profound fevers and fatigue, red eyes. And then hopefully you try to prevent the onset of bleeding or hemorrhaging. But there's a lot of GI distress, vomiting and diarrhea.
- [57:02]
A
Oh, it's frozen. Sorry. You're not sorry. Go ahead, continue. You froze for one second.
- [57:12]
F
We're good. Okay. It's all right. It's telling me I should. All right, okay. I'm gonna save that. So essentially what happened was the, the, the, the. They tested for all the things, you know, malaria and typhoid and cholera. And when they went to go test for Ebola, they had the wrong primer. Right. Because they were testing for the Zaire. It's. The Zaire strain is the one that. Is the common strain that we see all the time.
- [57:38]
A
Right.
- [57:39]
F
That's the one that's got the vaccine. That's the one that. That we're able to kind of manage really well because we've seen all these outbreaks. But what. What they didn't realize was that they had a new virus. It's a new species. It's not new. We've known about it. It's called the Bungju. Bungju strain of this Ebola. But they didn't have the right primer for it at the time, so they had to send it to Kinkasha, but it took weeks for it to get there. And when that sample got there, it got there. It had the, the cold chain had broken down. It took a long time for them to be able to identify that this virus was the Ebola virus. And so by the time that they had got that information, it was like May 15th. And just to give you an idea, by April 25th to May 15th, we're talking about almost three weeks. And this is a virus that if people don't realize that it's Ebola transmits very, very rapidly. And where we're at is somewhere like 600 cases with about 125 deaths. So this is a virus that has anywhere between a 25 to 40% mortality rate. So it's very, very dangerous. And I suspect that we are going to see this get worse. And one of the indications of this was that the WHO designated this a public health emergency of international containers concern. That usually takes weeks for them to do that. They did it overnight from the 15th to the 16th. And so that's the area that we're in right now, which is very concerning. All of this very, very likely could have been prevented had those monies been in place. But all that expertise that was in these areas, the people who had the experience of being there, who worked there, again, the clinics, the nurses, the doctors who work there, once that money got pulled, you know, think about it, $1.4 billion down to $20 million. They're going to have to make cuts. And those cuts essentially occurred at the level of the village. And those villages basically acted like fire alarms, right? So had they had everything in place, it's very likely that we wouldn't be seeing this outbreak.
- [60:01]
A
And those things in place would have been somebody who was better trained at getting that blood sample, or trained. They would have had better cold custody, as you say, where you're actually maintaining the sample in the proper way so that it gets there and they don't have to resend another sample, et cetera, et cetera. And maybe people were just more adept at, like, there's a possibility this could be a different strain. I mean, there's like probably a dozen different things that might have changed the speed in which we were informed that everybody was aware what they were dealing with, and probably a dozen of them were taken away. So, you know, you take away 100% of the funding, all of those backstops essentially are gone.
- [60:57]
F
Right? And when you look at the, you know, the kind of the America first approach that this administration is using, they would rather, rather than put the money into preventative things, into things that we know that works when good public health policy and fiscal policy is working, you don't really see the outcomes. Right. The outcomes are negative. Right. That's, that's one of the hard things about public health is that, you know, if we're doing our job, you're not, you're not really seeing anything. And this is why people who, when they start making decisions, you know, like the first thing that they did was they went after USAID because they couldn't really see the benefits. But now that you cut those, those, those monies, this is a very, very good example of, of what happens as a result of these cuts and kind of boomerang back to the Medicaid cuts, is that this gives you a very good idea. This is about as illustrative an example as you can get as to what happens if when cuts come down the line. We saw these very profound cuts that happened with usaid, with pepfar. We are going to pay the price. We are going to see deaths accumulate. Eight deaths. What was her name? Jillian Michaels? Is that her name? I can't remember. Like, I, as I was telling you off air, you know, a friend sent me the link, told me to watch it because it may come up, and 40 minutes was the most I could get through it. And I was like, you know, kind of gouging.
- [62:26]
A
It's yeoman's work.
- [62:27]
F
It was you, Were you. It was, as I said, it was an expert, kind of master class. And how to tell somebody, you were telling her she's dumb over and over again and she just wasn't seeing it, you know, and she was the dumb one. You know, the things that she was saying, it was just for somebody like myself who's a public health expert who does this all the time, how can you be so wrong? How can you be so off? And the only thing that you can just say is that they're in a cult. They're brainwashed. They will never see the truth. I mean, to see that a scientific journal like the Lancet, who has these expertise, expertise in doing this modeling and that modeling is predicting 14 million deaths, you just want to do this, you know, this and this and just not want to see what the results are going to be. Okay, that's fine. That's on you. But don't get in our way when we're trying to actually get the word out there to try to get this, you know, to make people aware. And I'll just say, sam, this is boomerang back here. We are going to see what is happening. With Ebola and to a very, very small degree, Hunter, but what's happening with Ebola right now. And also we didn't even talk about the fact that there's a World cup coming to the US as well. So that's a large group of people coming into one place as well, coming from the rest of the world. So hey, we got the World cup as well. So that's just something to think about where the whole world is going to be descending into the U.S. but the Medicaid cuts that are going to be coming after the in 2026, 2027, that are projected to be almost a trillion dollars over 10 years, we are going to be suffering with very similar pain that we're seeing abroad. We are going to see that here. And I'm just imploring my healthcare colleagues to start thinking about it and to be ready for it.
- [64:16]
A
I want to talk about that a little bit more, the Medicaid cuts. But before we move on, like, what do you think? How much of a danger is Ebony, Ebola or the hunt virus for that matter? Just for the sake of my daughter who gets a little concerned about these things in this country, like, you know, obviously very hard to predict, but
- [64:42]
F
so Hunta is low. I mean, when we were on this time last year, when we were talking about when Gene Hackman's wife died, right? Remember she had died a hunt. That is the seen normative virus. We talked about how that was on the Navajo reservation when I did my payback to the public health Service that I'd seen several cases of the seen normative virus that's associated with inhaling rodent droppings, urine, sweat, saliva, that sort of stuff. You're sweeping out an old barn, you're aerosolizing the droppings, you inhale it in the seen nomadovirus. That's a dead end host. So there's no other way of phrasing it. That's a dead end host. Then that goes on to have either a pulmonary syndrome, huntocardiopulmonary syndrome, or the hemorrhagic syndrome that has like a 30 to 40 to 50% mortality rate. Very, very, quite high. But that's here in the US what we saw on that Dutch cruise was a respiratory version of the so called Andes virus. This is the first time that we've really seen this. There was an article in the New England Journal that did document in 2019. The article came out, but it was reflecting something that happened in the 90s about a super spreading event in which one person was able to basically transmit it to about 34 people over four generations. That is a very, very rare thing. I think the Hunta virus thing is over, quite frankly. They're going to have the 42 days at the end of the month. The people that got sent to Nebraska, the people that got sent to Emory, I think they're going to be able to walk out. But I will say about Hunter, before we move to Ebola, is that one of the things that they did do was something that they eroded trust. And trust is the only thing that we have in public health that is our currency. If I come to you and I say, you need to be vaccinated for measles, or you need to be vaccinated for Covid, which I have on this show multiple times for Covid or influenza or whatever, people are gonna look at me. You're a doctor, you're an infectious disease doctor. You're a public health practitioner. I trust what you're saying. I'm gonna go get this vaccine. A lot of what they have done is that they have eroded that trust, that currency that we own. They have eroded that. Right? And one of the things that they did with this was a third of the CDC staff got fired. They got doged right away. Of those people who got doged were the experts who work on cruise ships. They are the CDC workers. So one of the reasons why we still don't really have a good story, the story is a little. I still don't know. Was the index case, did he get picked up in Argentina or was that an excursion? There are still details that we don't know, but large part of it was because the staff at the CDC who would have responded to that, were doged. Okay? And so what happened was we had about 12 to 13Americans flew on a commercial airline after they left the MV Hondias, right? And they just came back to the US and now they're isolating at home in various states. Texas, I think, California, Oregon, I think maybe New York.
- [68:02]
D
I forget.
- [68:03]
F
They're scattered. But then what they did was they took a number of.
- [68:12]
A
Here, this happened before. We got a little bit of. Oh, here, he's back.
- [68:21]
D
Sorry.
- [68:21]
F
Got it. I don't know where it was.
- [68:24]
A
They were scattered. And then. And then what they did after they had been scattered around.
- [68:31]
F
Right. So we're talking about the broken trust. What I was saying was that some of the Americans. Americans got sent home to their homes. They flew on commercial airlines, and they got sent to their homes where the other half of them got special. They Got Lear jets, you know, special medical Lear jets. And they got sent to those biocontainment centers. And an American is going to look at that. They're like, why is one person doing this and another person is doing that? They were both exposed the same way, but that's the way that they break down trust. And so I'm just using that as an example. But the Ebola thing, I still think that the risk is low for it to come to the US or whatever, but it's not zero. And we are having the World cup now, I would imagine given this administration, they're going to probably, if not, they've already done it already, they're going to close the borders to anybody coming from the DRC or Uganda or South Sudan or wherever.
- [69:33]
A
Those.
- [69:34]
F
That's mostly public health theater. That doesn't necessarily work. But I will say this. There was a 21 day ish lag in diagnosis. And as a result of that, that is particularly problematic. And I think that there's a bunch of public health, global health people like myself who are definitely holding our breath, you know, and just to see, you know, what's.
- [69:58]
A
Because this thing works exponentially. You're basically, it's a race against time because you, if you keep, if you keep, it's just containment, right? I mean, it's like almost like you spill a glass of something on your counter and if it gets to the edge of the counter, it's going to start to spread all over the place. So you want to get that very quickly. And that's basically what's going on.
- [70:22]
F
And, and not only that, but. Oh, go ahead, Sam, go ahead.
- [70:25]
A
Well, I wanted to just turn to the Medicaid thing and like, because you've used this metaphor of, of, of, of what happened with the usaid, we don't know. It's not just a matter of X number of people are going to lose their health insurance. And we know just from modeling in the past that when X number of people don't have health insurance, and particularly those people who are, you know, they, they, they tend to have less resources in general, et cetera, et cetera, that, and tend to have more medical problems that we're going to have, you know, why number of people die, but also we don't know what other strains it's going to create on the healthcare system, particularly one that has been completely undermined by the lack of Medicaid patients because hospitals are closing as a function. So we could be dealing with an exponential implications of those cuts.
- [71:37]
F
Yeah, I mean, I'll use the analogy of dropping a rock in a pond, right? And then you start to see those ripples kind of come out. You know, you got your first circle, your second circle, and pretty soon, you know, and that's the way that I would describe that. It is. I mean, the one thing I mean, yes, we hear the numbers. 18 million people are going to lose their Medicaid. It's largely going to be done as a result of work kind of requirements. We know that these work requirements are just nothing but red tape. It's nothing but paperwork. People are going to fall off Medicaid because they're going to have a very difficult time.
- [72:14]
A
Lost them again. Bear with us, folks. We're dealing with tough Internet situation on our guests, and. It's a great shot you guys got there of the art there. Oh, we're back. Okay, hold on. We'll just. We'll bring you back on. Here we go. Sorry. Go ahead.
- [72:38]
F
All right. Did I get the music too, by the way?
- [72:40]
A
No, we didn't do the music.
- [72:41]
D
Okay. Sorry about that.
- [72:44]
F
No, what I was saying was that they're going to be doing it through Medicaid cuts, so. Or through work requirements, rather. So we know that work requirements are nothing but just red tape. We know that work requirements, people are going to be able to work. Studies show that people are working their 80 hours a month, but because they have to keep up with the burden of paperwork over and over and over again, that that's how they're going to lose their Medicaid. And so that's 18 million people are going to do that. But the one thing that I often point out, especially Sam, to people like you and I, who are kind of Gen Xers, you know, people who are in their 40s, 50s, and early 60s, that we're kind of in the sandwich generation, where we have parents who are older, right. And then we have, you know, children. And so we're taking care of our elderly parents. We're also taking care of children and our elderly parents. You know, if they need. If they fall and break a hip, oftentimes they would go into, you know, the hospital, they get it fixed, and then they would have a skilled nursing facility or some sort of rehab. All of those entities, or even if they go into a nursing home, that all is Medicaid funded, those are going to go away. And so now the burden of. And this is assuming you could take care of your parent or they. You live in the same city with them or whatever. And this is something that I see here in the hospital all the time, which is what. What do we do with somebody who is in this position where they can't get a skilled nursing facility? In fact, I have one person right now, their daughter lives on the East Coast. They're not able to come back. His living situation is very unsafe. We can't get him into inpatient rehab. We can't get him anywhere. And we're kind of stuck with him right now. And all he's begging me to do is to go back to his, his. His home, which is very, very unsafe. He'll end up coming back to the hospital. That just gives you a small example of what we are going to see. But that is a much larger thing because once these Medicaid cuts hit, these nursing homes are going to close, these skilled nursing facilities are going to close. And that's nothing to say about the rural hospitals that we're seeing all over the country as well. We're starting to see ers close, but we're gonna start to see those rural hospitals close as well. And just. I'm not a political commentator, I leave that to you. But just speaking purely politically, the people who are gonna get hurt here likely the most are the people who voted for this administration. These red states, these red counties. We have already seen studies, and I think I talked about it here, in fact, I think I showed a slide about this maybe through three or four years ago, that the people who died the most in Covid were in red counties. They basically took the entire country and they said, did you vote for Biden or did you vote for Trump? You know, that's. They did that crude kind of thing. And if it was a county that voted for Biden, they called it blue. If they voted for Trump, they voted red, they were red. And then they basically looked at the number of deaths that occurred over a couple years, which with COVID and it was very, very stark. The lines were very, very stark. This is blue, this was red. These were number of deaths. And it was largely due to the fact that they didn't get vaccinated. And so we again, are going to see policies that are likely going to disproportionately affect people who voted for this administration. And not only that, we're gonna just see people suffer. And I think it's the suffering. It's the suffering we're seeing as a result of usaid, the cuts at usaid, it's the suffering we're seeing from Ebola, it's the suffering that we're going to see with these Medicaid cuts. And I think we just need to be ready because we are going to see some significant suffering. And it just even breaks my heart to even talk about it, to be honest.
- [76:31]
A
And in addition to two thirds of nursing homes, residents are being paid for by Medicaid. We should also say, like recently, and I think it was AOC questioned Kennedy about this. The Trump administration is allowing waivers for a lot of these nursing homes to cut back staff to the bone because they're not getting those money. And of course, you know, that is what we're going to see is overmedicating these patients so that they literally are trying to medicate the these patients to the point where they do not require any attention because they're just sitting there in a literally in a vegetative state. I mean, this is a dynamic that happens in some nursing homes as it is today, but it's only going to get more and they're getting allowed to have lower staffing numbers to sort of hide the implications of these cuts in Medicaid. Mark Allen Dairy, we're going to put a link to your substack. There's a lot of very informative videos there and you're doing these on a regular basis. A huge help. We should have you back on, too, because I think we're now starting to get to see the outlines of the implications of what Covid has done in secondary health. The secondary health implications of COVID having spread this wildly and still, obviously still is people need to get their boosters to the extent that they can, that they're available to people or accessible. But really appreciate your time today.
- [78:22]
F
Thank you so much for having me.
- [78:24]
A
All right, folks, we're gonna take a quick break and head into the fun half of the program, wherein we will have fun. Wrap this week up. Just a reminder, it's your support that makes this show possible. You can become a member@jointhemajorityreport.com when you do not only get the free show free of commercials, but you also get the fun half and you get to IMs. For instance, ostentatious just IM'd us and said the Wall Street Journal. Tulsi Gabbard, preparing to resign as intelligence chief.
- [79:00]
C
You can't fire me. I quit.
- [79:02]
A
Exactly. I do wonder, like, what that is specifically about other than her being a woman. I wonder if there was something that she didn't go along with or just there was some reason she was in the doghouse. I can't remember. It was maybe they came out with like accidentally. Iran is not a threat. Oh, I'm sorry, were we not supposed to say that?
- [79:30]
C
Right. Well, I remember they were leaving her out of all the meetings to the build up to Iran.
- [79:34]
B
Yeah, I mean she was literally selling no war with Iran merch on the campaign trail.
- [79:40]
C
Yeah, but hypocrisy has never been a grounds for firing in the Trump administration.
- [79:44]
B
Right, Right.
- [79:45]
C
Yeah. Ben, he scared me with the World cup stuff. I just can't imagine how many countries are going to come home infected by Emma.
- [79:52]
B
I'm not leaving the apartment during the World Cup.
- [79:54]
C
Emma's going to get them all sick.
- [79:58]
A
The whole world after this week.
- [80:00]
B
I am, I am not leaving bubble boy.
- [80:06]
C
Literally.
- [80:07]
A
Also, folks, join the majority report and also just coffee co op, fair trade coffee, hot chocolate. Use the coupon code. Majority get 10% off. Check out our discord majoritydiscord.com you can buy our merch@shop. Majorityreportradio.com or I think it's underneath in the YouTube here. Also am quickie the amquickie.com get a quick summary of the day's news in your email box every morning at 9am Three days a week. Totally free. Matt, what's happening in the media universe?
- [80:53]
B
New Jackobin show, 3:00pm Eastern Time. Right after the show today, Ben Burgess saw the program talking about Marjorie Taylor Greene and should we align with this former lawmaker in our coalition and other questions like that. So check that out patreon.com or well patreon.com left reckoning for the other show we do. But yeah, check out Jacobin show at 3 o'clock today.
- [81:19]
C
You gotta remember, brown turn green. Turns brown real fast.
- [81:23]
B
Good one, Brian.
- [81:24]
C
No, that's Donald Trump.
- [81:27]
B
Wow.
- [81:27]
C
Remember he called her Marjorie Taylor Brown.
- [81:29]
B
Oh, yeah.
- [81:29]
C
He would always write in parentheses, green goes brown. Always a good nickname.
- [81:35]
A
Would you have to explain it?
- [81:36]
B
Little bit of flashes in his, you know, degeneracy right now.
- [81:40]
C
That is not one of them.
- [81:41]
A
I just want to drop a little poggers for the Twitch folks and Hype Train Caboose says shout out to Sam's biggest fan in the Twitch chat. Cherry Ghost and Parasmart asks is that, is that a fake?
- [82:02]
B
No, it's, it's, it's real. It's just a little bit. No, keep going.
- [82:06]
A
All right. Hype Train Caboose says shout out Sam's biggest fan in the. No, we already did that one. I meant has Sam been intolerable since being in the best episode of Bob's Burgers? I bet he's gonna bring that Emmy into work.
- [82:22]
C
That implies he wasn't intolerable before, right?
- [82:25]
B
Yeah, exactly.
- [82:26]
A
Well, it's gotten worse. And you were talking about it when
- [82:30]
B
I came into the office, maybe yesterday or. No, two days ago.
- [82:35]
A
I think a lot of people. A lot of people have been talking about it.
- [82:39]
C
He just took his sunglasses off right
- [82:41]
A
when we went live as about as being possibly the best Bob's Burgers episode of the season. I mean, I think if people want to say that to the Bob's Burgers Instagram account, like, hey, that was an amazing episode. Sam should. Should Hugo pretend like you don't know my name? Yeah, don't say Sam. Yeah, don't say Sam. Write Sam.
- [83:02]
C
I mean, Hugo, write it all out.
- [83:05]
A
Hugo should get an Emmy. That's the way I would do it anyways. I mean, that's the way I did it. Spin off with my finsta. All right, take a quick break.
- [83:18]
D
You are in for it.
- [83:20]
A
All right, folks. Six, four, six two five seven three, nine two zero. See you in the fourth.
- [83:23]
D
Fun.
- [83:28]
A
Are you ready? Who sent us this?
- [83:39]
G
Alpha males are back, back, back, back, back and the alpha males are back,
- [83:45]
A
back Just as delicious as you could
- [83:48]
G
imagine the alpha males, males are back, back, back, back, back and the alpha males are back, back, back, back Just
- [83:56]
A
wanna degrade the white man.
- [83:58]
G
Alpha males are back, back.
- [84:00]
A
I take all of it to my throat.
- [84:03]
G
Alpha males are back, back, back, back.
- [84:06]
A
Snowflake says what?
- [84:08]
G
The alpha males are back.
- [84:10]
A
You are a madman.
- [84:12]
G
And the alpha males are back, back.
- [84:15]
E
Oh, no.
- [84:16]
D
Sam Cedar. What a. Well, what a nightmare.
- [84:21]
A
Yeah, or a couple of them. Just put them in rotation.
- [84:23]
D
DJ, dinner.
- [84:24]
A
Well, the problem with those is they're like 45 seconds long, so I don't
- [84:27]
C
know if they're enough.
- [84:29]
D
That's nonsense.
- [84:31]
A
See, white people doing drugs that look worse than normal white people. And all white people look disgusting.
- [84:36]
G
And the alpha males psych them.
- [84:43]
A
Oh, Snowflake says, what? What? What?
- [84:46]
B
What?
- [84:46]
A
What? What?
- [84:47]
D
What?
- [84:47]
A
What?
- [84:47]
B
What?
- [84:48]
A
What? What? What? What?
- [84:49]
B
What?
- [84:49]
A
What?
- [84:50]
C
What? A hell of a lot of banks. Hell of a lot of bank.
- [85:00]
A
A hell of a lot of banks.
- [85:02]
C
Okay, I'm making stupid money. Hell of a hell of a lot of people bank.
- [85:09]
A
A hell of a lot of bank. All lives matter. Have you tried doing an impression on a college campus? I. I think that there's no reason
- [85:23]
D
why reasonable people across the divide can't all agree with this.
- [85:28]
A
Psych.
- [85:29]
G
And the alpha males are back, back, back, back, back, back, back and the Africans are black, black, black, black, black, African. And the alpha males are black, black, black, black, black, black? And the Africans are back, back, back, back.
- [85:46]
A
When you see Donald Trump out there, doesn't a little part of you think that America deserves to be taken over by jihadists?
- [85:51]
E
Keeping it at 100.
- [85:53]
C
Can't knock the hustle.
- [85:54]
A
Come on. Fuck them things I do. The bigger game plan. By the way, it's my birthday. My birthday.
- [86:04]
E
Happy birthday to me, Jew boy.
- [86:06]
A
I have a thought experiment for you.
- [86:08]
G
And the alpha males are back, back. Africa Are black, black? Alpha males are black, black Africans are back, back.
- [86:17]
A
Come on, come on, come on. Someone needs to pay the price of blasphemy around here. I am a total pussy. Question.