Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 10/25/21: Biden Flailing, Bernie vs Manchin, Alec Baldwin, Stock Trading Rules, Rogan vs CNN, Dr. Fauci's Lies, Port Trucker Exploitation, VA Gov Forecast, and More!

Episode Date: October 25, 2021

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Good morning, everybody. Happy Monday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed we do. Lots of interesting stories to get to this morning. Lots of new Biden polling not looking so good on literally any front for him right now. We'll give you all the details there. Some movement on the reconciliation bill. Some insight into the back and forth with Manchin and Bernie. And he was in Delaware this weekend and they are now floating. Maybe we will do a billionaire attack so we'll tell you about all of that um horrific tragedy on the scene of um a movie set where alec baldwin was filming this movie called rust uh some horrific accident happened he ends up discharging what was supposed

to be a weapon without any ammunition. Of course, a round goes off, ends up killing a cinematographer, injuring another individual. There's some new details this morning that we'll bring you there. Interesting moves from the Fed on corruption, a story we've been following closely. They are actually changing their rules pretty significantly. We'll tell you about that. A new layer in the back and forth between CNN and Joe Rogan. Now, The Washington Post is getting in on the story. Kyle Kondik will join us as well to talk about why Obama was in Virginia trying to rescue Terry McAuliffe.

But we did want to start with those new Biden poll numbers. Yeah, some really interesting developments, which are very important in terms of conceiving of the Biden presidency. For pretty much the, what, last two years of American politics, it's been ruled by COVID. How are you handling COVID, the economy being a second? Well, we are now seeing basically a tie between the two. So let's put this up there on the screen from CNBC. And there's a lot to dig in here. As Josh Kroschauer points out, inflation now ties with coronavirus as the biggest concern for Americans, up 16 points from the prior survey. Now, overall, Biden actually saw his numbers drop to 41 percent of public approval and critically crossed the majority 52 percent disapproval number. The other important thing there is that you can see that economy and COVID are beginning to become intertwined. The president now at just 50% with his COVID-19 approval. And I think in general, what you're seeing is that things are just

beginning to feel stagnant across the entire country. Chris Arnott, somebody I really respect, he's resumed his kind of tour of the country. Oh, really? Yeah, so he's going across, talking to people. And what he pointed out, and we've seen this consistently in the data, is he's like, look, Biden at the end of the day, he was elected to bring stuff back to normal. And it's not normal. And there's a variety of reasons for that. Supply chain crisis, inflation, a price increase, COVID, the Delta variant. But in general, people say, hey, man, you said you were going to do something and you just haven't done enough.

And when the president comes out maybe like once a week and it's just not presenting any sort of real leadership, I think that in general, he's going to be getting the blame for something which is already baked in without any of the credit of seeming to actually do something. You kind of see this over and over again. And it was really evident, Crystal, in that town hall with Anderson Cooper,

a lot of bizarre moments, some of which we'll cover. But the important one was he didn't really seem to have a clue about what was actually going on as to now what is what the number one issue concerning Americans is, which is rising prices because of the supply chain. Let's take a listen. I was able to go to the private portion with 40 percent of all products coming into the United States of America on the West Coast, go through Los Angeles and and what am I doing here? The Long Beach, Long Beach. Thank you. And I know both the mayors. You probably know that.

Not an inspiring moment. In terms of the board of Los Angeles and, yeah, Long Beach, California. I mean, right now, Crystal, we are seeing more action on Twitter activism in terms of changing the supply chain crisis than the United States government. There was a Flexport CEO, somebody who I also look to for analysis, who rented a boat and tweeted about some of the backlogs. And he ended up getting the mayor of Long Beach in order to rescind like a container stacking thing, which was causing some backlog. So that is kind of stunning to me. I know you're doing your monologue on the port workers as well, but the government, the federal government is not doing all of what it can and should be doing. And Americans are taking notice and saying, hey, man, you need to be doing something here.

And it is it's just it's difficult to describe how well it is not going for him in terms of where he started at the beginning of his presidency. Yes, I think all of that is is true. And, you know, it's kind of the backfiring of the basement strategy. It's just a big backfiring. So when he was up against Trump, the best thing he could do was kind of sit back and let Trump hang himself. And that's exactly what happened, even though, you know, Trump did everything he could to lose and still barely lost. Right. Biden barely won the presidency by the skin of his, what did they say? Skin of your... Skin of your teeth.

Teeth. Skin of your teeth. That doesn't even make any sense. Anyway, so he wins the presidency by the skin of his teeth from this basement strategy. And he's sort of continued that strategy as president. And that is not really what people want right now when you have so much uncertainty. I mean, we're trying to recover from coronavirus. The pandemic is still ongoing. People are feeling unsafe. People are feeling there's, you know, these tensions around pandemic responses. All of that's going on. You have a lot of economic chaos. You have some things that are looking pretty good. Workers getting raises for the first time in a long time, a tight labor market. We've covered, of course, the, you know, the great resignation and the labor strikes that are ongoing across the country and workers moving to form unions. Some of that is good. But then on

the other hand, you have this supply chain collapse. You have prices rising. So even workers who are getting raises, they're not feeling it because inflation is going up. And one of the things that they pointed to in this poll, which I thought was really interesting, you now have a plurality of the public that believes there will be a recession in the next year. A plurality of the public. So 47% of the public thinks we are headed into a recession rather than when Biden came into office, people felt like, okay, things are going to get better. They're going to get back on track. We're going to come back to whatever normal even means. I think that's part of the issue is in some ways promising a return to normal was like a nothing promise.

And in some ways it was a gigantic, like unfulfillable promise, because what does that even mean to people to feel like they're back to normal pre-pandemic? I mean, that may not even really be possible given some of the dramatic changes that happen in this country and around the world as a result of the pandemic. But bottom line is people are looking for leadership from Biden. They're not really getting it. No. Even the things that they are doing, like the, you know, little moves they're trying to make at the ports to make things move more efficiently.

He is either unable or unwilling to really get out and sell these measures that are being taken. And then also in this poll, the one bright spot was that the reconciliation package, the Build Back Better plan, it actually pulls really well. They're just not getting it done. And I don't know how much juice they'll get from it anyway because at this point they've cut it back so much that people are unlikely to really feel it and really have a positive experience of it. So it just feels like another DC morass

that isn't going to really move the ball forward in a significant way. Yeah, I think it's long been in morass territory. And especially, I mean, look, some of the stuff in there, these new billionaire taxes, I think are good. And we can cover that and talk about extensively. But I think the important point is that this is not just some one-off. I mean, poll after poll after poll. It's about the law of averages. Let's put the next one up there. This is from Gallup. Once again, pretty row, respected pollster. And what do you see there? Which is that even in polls, which again, you should remember that these dramatically overstated Biden's performance whenever it came to the 2020 presidential election, are now finding him significantly

underwater with independent voters. And this has been the most critical drop for the president. So in the Gallup poll alone, Biden is down from 61% in February to 34% at the nine-month mark of his presidency, with an overall approval rating of 42%. That is, you know, an unequivocal disaster. And September really was a big turning point. And I think I've been getting to try and figure out why, which is that September was both the height of kind of Delta panic. That was where, you know, people, whether you agree or not, you know, vaccine mandate or no,

people were freaked out enough in order to get mobilized on both sides because of Delta. Afghanistan, obviously, the media coverage as well. That's when the reconciliation bill all got completely shot. It became very obvious by mid-September. You're like, oh, this thing's just not going to happen. This is not going well.

So you have all three of these things culminating. Oh, also, that is when we saw the single largest increase of people quitting, but also the single largest increase in price. So it's like, and gas prices, apparently out in California, like $5 a gallon now, which is horrible for a lot of people who are working class.

I think if you put all that together, you are making it so that it was the month alone which would sink him. And when you think about it too, it's not one thing you can just fix. There are a multitude of problems that have all had a confluence that have contributed to where they are right now.

And, you know, the most important one, we've mentioned it last time, but this is very important, was the Grinnell-Seltzer poll. Let's put that up there. Came out last week. Again, and it showed a massive loss of support amongst independents with concerns over economy, immigration and coronavirus. The poll showed just 37% of respondents approving of Biden's job. Are you beginning to see a pattern here in the 35% to 40% range, none of which you would really want to be when you're president of the United States? A bigger problem is that you can see that in 2020 exit polling, so again, on the day that Biden won the presidency, he won independent voters by a 54 to 41 percent margin. If the election were held today, our poll would show former President Trump winning that group 45 percent to 28.

So let that sink in. 54 percent on election day to 28% today. So a near halving of the independent support, which is obviously the group that pushed him over the edge. Either people who came out to vote or people who switched, mostly married white men, from Trump to Biden. That is, once again, a disaster for the current president and not good for the midterm elections in particular. Yeah.

I mean, I think this is important because it's easy, obviously, to criticize and to compare to, like, a theoretical, non-existent politician who would do a good job. But here they're actually comparing to the dude that just left that we know did a terrible job. And people are like, you know, on second thought, I might go with that dude. That's really, really bad. It's a really bad sign. And as you point out, all of these polls, even the best among them, overstated Biden's support going into the election. So however bad it looks for Biden in these polls, it's likely a little bit worse than what the pollsters are able to gather just because they've been really unable to capture accurately the breadth of Republican sentiment and favorability in the country over the past number of years. There was one last piece here that I thought was kind of interesting that shows it's not just obviously Republicans are opposed to Biden. They're kind of locked in. Independence, dramatic shift away

from Biden. But you also see some real apathy among the Democratic base. Yes. And I thought that this quote that Sam Stein captured from a voter was pretty telling. Now, this is about the idea that within the reconciliation bill, which we're about to tell you a little bit more about, that they're thinking of cutting the child tax credit means, testing it, only expanding it for a year. And what this guy, Jake Wright, who's 40 years old, said, he says, I've been a Democrat my entire adult life, but letting a program expire or means testing it so that people who would generally benefit from it will lose out on much needed help infuriates me. It makes me wonder why I bother supporting these people.

So, again, as we think about moving into the midterms, as we think about what, you know, the future of power is going to look like here in Washington, D.C., one of the things that we told you consistently is it really, really matters who's energized, not just, you know, what's the overall approval rating and how do people feel about the country? Those numbers are already bad for Biden. But who's actually energized? And when you have a sentiment like this, where voters who are lifelong Democrats are like, why do I bother with these people? Like, you've literally been promising me

the prescription drug reform thing since 2006. You've had complete control of Washington several times during that period, and you still haven't gotten it done. Like, what are we doing here? Why am I bothering? That also is going to be a massive drag on them. Some analysts are saying,

I'm not sure I buy this analysis, but it's kind of interesting that the Virginia race that's coming up, the gubernatorial election that we're going to talk to Kyle Kondik about today, turns on Democrats being able to get something done in Washington to kind of fire up their side and get them to ultimately turn out. I'm not sure that I really believe that. I think it's much more about who's able to scare their base more. You know, does Terry McAuliffe's pitch that Glenn Youngkin is basically electing Trump with a mask on? Right. Or is Youngkin's pitch that Terry McAuliffe is some like, you know, race warrior who's going to force your kids to be segregated or whatever he's saying? Is that the thing that ultimately wins the day? I think it ultimately turns more on that. But overall, Democrats cannot continue to promise a bunch of things that they have no intention on ever delivering and then be surprised when people don't show up for them.

So that's the key point. You've got huge apathy amongst the Democratic base. No real reason to try and come out. I mean, look, it's 2010 all over again. It's the exact same thing. Obama comes in. There's a big economic crisis. They pass some middling stimulus package. That's the only thing. Then they do this horrific monster of whatever Obamacare actually turned out to be. Nobody really knew what it was. All the Republicans have to do is promise, I'm not Obama. Massive swing in support. Dems were like, yeah, this doesn't seem that great. My wages continue to go down. I still lost my job. The economy is still in mild recession. I did get a new job, but it pays me half of what it used to.

Oh, and all the factories are shipping overseas. And what happens? The 2010 red wave. I'm basically in this exact same scenario. And it just seems very difficult now for Biden to try and drag himself out of the hole. That being said, maybe Trump is stupid enough in order to make, maybe Trump is still so powerful of a motivator to Democrats that it'll be enough. It's very possible, you know, that you can avoid some massive void. The real test is going to be the Republican, sorry, the test here in Virginia, because we are going to see. Terry McAuliffe has said nothing else but Glenn

Youngkin is Trump. If he wins, that's a very powerful validator for the Trump strategy for Democrats. It could be enough in many of these independent places. Personally, I'm banking that it's not, not necessarily in Virginia, but overall on the national level. But who knows how many points it does count for whenever Trump is off the ballot, but still a boogeyman to a lot of Democrats. Joe Biden won Virginia by 10 points. Yeah. It's a blue state. Right. Okay. Democrats control everything. They have both Senate seats, governor's mansion, House of Delegates, state Senate. It should not be coming down to the wire at all. And yet here we are. And I think even if Terry McAuliffe is ultimately able to hang on and edge out Glenn Youngkin,

it's a very bad sign ultimately for where Democrats stand across the country. Let's talk about one of the things that is contributing to their woes here, which is that reconciliation bill, the Build Back Better plan. I really wish, I know I say it every time, but I really wish they'd come up with a better name. This is so terrible. Okay, so here's the very latest. Let's throw this tweet up on the screen that we have um so last week there was a bunch of commentary and visuals that came out there was this meeting between joe mansion and bernie sanders well now we're getting some of the

behind the uh scenes details of what went on in that meeting this is elena trean she said with axio she says scoop joe mansion and Manchin and Bernie Sanders squabbled behind closed doors Wednesday with Manchin using a raised fist goose egg to tell his colleagues he can live without any of President Biden's social spending plan. If you click through to that piece, they talk about they talked to another witness who was there, Senator Chris Coons, very close ally of Joe Biden, who said, quote, there was a vigorous 10-minute discussion. Bernie said $6 trillion. Manchin said we shouldn't do it at all. Coons recalled himself making that goose egg symbol as he recounted the conversation. He

said Manchin indicated it will contribute to inflation. We've already passed the American Rescue Plan. We should just pass the infrastructure bill and, you know, pause for six months. So even though there were a lot of sort of amicable noises that came out of this meeting, the reality is that behind closed doors, they were incredibly far apart. And I think I don't know that Manchin is bluffing here. I mean, yes, he and Sinema and some of the other bad actors in the Democratic Party, they do want the infrastructure bill to pass. It is something that their corporate donors would like to see. But I'm just not sure that it's as much of a deal breaker for them to not get that infrastructure bill as progressives were ultimately hoping. I don't think Manchin is totally bluffing here that he'd be comfortable with at the end of the day. I agree. Nothing getting through. So that's kind of where the impasse is. There's some more details coming out on the tax front. And this is interesting. So

Kyrsten Sinema said she didn't want to lift the marginal tax rate on high income individuals or on corporations. So it was kind of back to the drawing board for Democrats. What's a twist in the story is that those rates are a little bit irrelevant, especially for super high wealth individuals. So we covered last week that Cliff Asness piece talking about the working rates. Now, listen, I'm not going to cry any tears for people who are making half a million dollars a year and see their taxes go up. I'm perfectly fine with that. But it is true that up to this point, the tax plan that was offered from Biden really didn't hit billionaires or super high wealth individuals at all. It did not go after any of their pet loopholes that they use to avoid taxes over their entire lives. So now with Sinema ruling out the marginal rate increases,

they're actually thinking of doing a form of a billionaire tax. I'll give you a little bit of the details of that in a minute, but here's what Speaker Pelosi had to say to Jake Tapper on that topic. Senator Sinema, who was a key Arizona Democrat vote in the Senate, Senator Sinema has said she will not support raising the corporate tax rate, raising the tax on high wage earners. And President Biden has acknowledged that might mean you can't pay for the rest of the bill using those sources of revenue. Do you have an alternate way? Yeah, we do, because we were ready to pay for 3.5. Right. So we certainly can pay for one point, half of that. And what is that alternate way? Is it a billionaire's tax? Is it a minimum tax for corporations? Well, the billionaire's tax is, shall we say, has an appeal,

but it doesn't produce that much money. Okay. Because the bill is not written yet, we hope it will be written today and introduced tomorrow. Only then can the Joint Tax Committee evaluate what it brings in. We anticipate $200, $250 billion, but we need closer to $2 trillion. So where? So we have other things. Such as? Well, such as we have enforcement, and that's several hundred billion dollars. We have the overseas harmonization of taxes, and that's's several hundred billion dollars. We have the overseas harmonization

of taxes, and that's a few hundred billion dollars. We have an array. We have an array, and I'm not going to say what they are right here. So they've also talked about this sort of global minimum tax for corporations. A minimum tax that corporations have to pay regardless of all the exemptions, which frankly would be better than the current corporate tax rate. Correct. And that would be better than even lifting the top marginal tax rate because none of the big corporations pay that anyway. It's a farce. The specific proposal under consideration and why,

because she says like, well, ultimately it wouldn't raise that much revenue, which is a little bit of a head scratcher. Right, you're like, wait a second. So almost all the wealth is held by the top 1%, but a tax on the top 1% isn't going to raise that much. But the reason why... Maybe the tax is wrong. Right, well, and the reason why is because when she says a billionaire tax,

they literally mean it would only apply to billionaires, which is like 1,000 people. So the proposal under consideration comes from Ron Wyden. It would impose an annual tax on unrealized capital gains on liquid assets held by billionaires. I think that liquid assets part also probably is why it wouldn't ultimately raise that much money. That's right. But it's only supposed to affect people with a billion dollars in assets or $100 million in income for three consecutive years. So it would only apply to about 1,000 people.

And that liquid assets part, I have a feeling really limits what they're able to do with it too. Still, at least you're doing, thinking about doing something that would impact the billionaire class. I'm just trying to get my mind around how exactly you can tax, how are liquid assets already not being taxed, right? So like what type of asset would it be? Right, what's your definition of liquid? Because if it's cash, then you have realized the game. Then you've already had to pay a tax. Exactly. Right.

I'm just trying to figure out what a liquid asset, which is non-taxable, even looks like. But maybe that's why I'm not a billionaire. So there you go. I'm sure there is some sort of tax shelter or something. Yes. Yeah. Look, it clearly doesn't go far enough in terms of what it would actually look like. And even in terms, actually, legally, it also does get sketchy in terms of taxing unrealized capital gains in terms of stocks, equities, and more, because it's like, well, if you haven't realized it, does that mean then that they can write off all their losses? Which I think you can to a certain

extent, but it can get very sketchy. As I understand it legally, whenever you're trying to do that, given fluctuations, really what it is is that they're still not going after, Crystal, the carried interest loophole or the step-up basis. Those are the two most basic ones. Carried interest loophole alone is like $180 billion over 10 years. Easy. I've got your money, Nancy. It's right there. Oh, you just don't want to do it. Al Sharpton tells me that's going to hurt black business owners creating wealth. Exactly. Yeah, that's. Al Sharpton tells me that's going to hurt black business owners creating wealth. Yeah, that's what Al Sharpton tells us. Step-up basis is untold hundreds of billions if you wanted to go after that one. Once again, I mean, I just, they go after all of these convoluted schemes,

which are difficult to understand. I'm beginning to see people, you know, online pushback of like, wait, they can go after, you know, like my Bitcoin or whatever. It's like, no, we're not, unless you're a Bitcoin billionaire, I think you're probably going to be okay. Yeah. It's like, unless you made a hundred million dollars in assets for three consecutive years, or you're worth an entire 1 billion, you are not going to be affected by this. But regardless, they make it very difficult in order to understand how exactly it would work. How are people even supposed to know what that means? You're actually not even really going after the majority of the wealth whenever it comes to what's actually happening here.

And the easiest ways to do it, you've ruled out because you're corporate donors. Why are we playing all these kabuki theater games? Like, it's easy to figure out. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, did you mention that Mansion was in Delaware? Oh, yeah. So there

was a great summit, a meeting of the minds. I would love to be on that wall. Schumer, Manchin, and Biden in Delaware over the weekend. They're not sending their best, Sagar. Yeah, they certainly are not. Let's put their tear sheet up there. So Joe Manchin was down there in Delaware. But in terms of a statement that came out afterwards, it was basically just word salad. They were like, they've met, there was some developments. And that's pretty much it. Manchin appears agreeable in terms of the leaks that were put out from there on board with the White House proposal for that billionaire tax that you talked about. And certain corporations, I think certain being the key one, that were put out from there on board with the White House proposal for that billionaire tax

that you talked about and certain corporations, I think certain being the key one, I'm sure coal's probably getting a carve out there, to help pay for President Biden's new plan. But in general, nobody knows what's in this thing. Nobody knows whether it would affect them. The social spending ones in terms of mansion and the child tax credit and that have not been resolved whatsoever. We are again repeating the Obamacare playbook. The truth is, is that there's no way anything is actually going to happen, what, in the next couple of weeks? I highly doubt that in terms of the actual negotiations. Then it's Thanksgiving, right?

Everybody's gone for a week. Yeah. And then it's early December. Last time I checked, this town starts to go on holiday. The Christmas parties in D.C. start December 2nd, just so everybody knows. Well, so let me tell you what they're saying. I wouldn't put a lot of stock in this, but I'll just tell you what they're saying. They want to come

up with a top line number this week, Thursday. And they've sort of invented this deadline for themselves of like the highway transportation funding expires, something like that, expires at the end of the month. So they're saying, oh, no, we've got to figure this out before then. Not to get it passed, but at least get a top line number in the outlines. That's what they're saying.

The last piece that just emerged over the weekend is that, you know, we already covered last week how, what the paired back proposal looks like and it sucks, right? It already sucked. There's very little like about it. The one thing that you can really hang your hat on is universal pre-K. That would be good. But even the, the childcare provision with like massively raised costs for the middle class, they took the paid leave and they're like, instead of 12 weeks, how about four? Well, now they're thinking of getting rid of the paid leave altogether. And then the other thing that progressives were kind of hanging their hat on was, all right, well, we still got the money for the Medicare expansion,

so we'd get vision, hearing, and maybe dental. Well, now they're saying, eh, we may not do any of that. Apparently the dental is the most expensive and the most complicated to implement. So there were already some questions over whether that would get put in. And now they're saying, well, we may just strip out the hearing and the vision as well. So it's, I mean, what's left really is pretty pathetic. I mean, that's just the bottom line. It's pretty pathetic. We know the climate change provision, the central core of that was stripped out because Manchin was opposed to it. We know they ruled out the best ways of going after the ultra-wealthies, tax dodges.

We know community college, free community college, which Biden said was one of his top priorities. They stripped that out and they're like, we're going to give you some scholarships instead. And it was killed by the college industry. I want people to understand that. Yeah, that's really important. So, I mean, after corporate lobbyists and their paid apparatchiks like Heidi Heitkamp got their hands on this thing, it is a tattered mess if any of it even passes at all, which, as I said last week, if you are a progressive, you should be committed to making sure that in its present form, it does not pass because it is not worth it. No one will ever take you seriously again. All of your priorities have been gutted. And if you just roll over, I don't know what you're doing.

Well, unfortunately, that could be the reality. Hey, so remember how we told you how awesome premium membership was? Well, here we are again to remind you that becoming a premium member means you don't have to listen to our constant pleas for you to subscribe. So what are you waiting for?

Become a premium member today by going to breakingpoints.com, which you can click on in the show notes. This is a really tragic story. And I know there's a lot of jokes. I was at a comedy show this weekend and there's a lot of jokes. I was at a comedy show this weekend and there were a lot of jokes to be had. But in terms of the actual details, it is very, very sad. So Alec Baldwin, we know the actor, he was on the set of a movie called

Rust that they were filming down in New Mexico. Now, during the course of that filming, Alec Baldwin, what we know as of this morning, was pointing a gun at the camera. He was rehearsing a scene in which the actor points a gun directly at the camera. Now, during the course of pointing, and we don't know if he fired it, if he had triggered discipline, whatever, we have no idea. The gun unsurprisingly went off during the course of that, and it killed the director of cinematography, Halnya Hutchins, and wounded another member of the crew. Now, there's been a lot, and there should be now,

scrutiny of what the hell was going on here. Yeah. And one of the key things that a lot of people are taking a look at is that the film set had previous accidental gun discharges. People on the crew expressed concerns, let's put this up from the New York Times, over gun mishaps and working conditions just days before the shooting. So there were at least two accidental gun discharges on that set days before that Alec Baldwin fatally shot

this cinematographer. The discharges occurred on October 16th, so like nine days ago, the former crew members said, prompting a complaint to a supervisor about the safety practices on the set right outside of Santa Fe. The crew members asked not to be named because of, you know, their future employment in the industry, and I can't believe that they're afraid about being retaliated against after they complained about, you know, gun discharges, which ended up killing somebody. But several workers quit just hours before the fatal shooting over complaints about unpaid work and working conditions on the production. Now, remember, this also comes during the midst of, there ended up not being a strike, but IATSE,

which represented many of the people who actually work in the film industry, they had been saying that given the backlog of production, they were working 12, 16-hour days, being treated like garbage, not even getting paid necessarily what they needed to by people with streaming and all of that. They renegotiated, I believe, some sort of interim deal, and that's what they're working towards. But this highlights the fact that on the movie industry sets themselves, working conditions have been very sparse. And whenever you have that and you make it really intense, then accidents can slip through the cracks. And clearly, this was just a confluence of a terrible series of events. Now, what we're really learning from most of this is from affidavits which are being filed in New Mexico in terms of search warrants. So let's put this up

there. And again, this is what we know. According to the people who were on the set and spoke under penalty of perjury to the sheriff's office there in Santa Fe, Alec Baldwin was told that the gun in the shooting was safe. Now, according to the affidavit, they shouted, cold gun, which is supposed to indicate that a gun does not have any live rounds in it. Now, when Baldwin fired the gun, what happened is that they did not know live rounds were inside the prop gun. But again, this also raises a lot of questions for people who I've spoken to who are gun safety experts and more, which is that if this is a gun which is firing blanks, now blanks have injured people in the past, but in general, guns that are used on set which can fire blanks are not supposed to be able to even fire

live ammunition. So how did this gun get there in the first place? And the second thing is that armors who work with movie productions, Crystal said, that there should never have even been a gun with live ammo there in the first place. And you would presume also there were three guns that are apparently kept outside on a table that the safety people were checking both the chamber and whether the gun had any ammo in the first place. Yeah, there should be, I mean, series of checks going on here with the guns. I don't know a lot about guns, but I've used it before. Especially after you had two accidental discharges already.

What is happening? So, right, and another red flag that they raised, because within the industry, the use of guns, the way you handle them, the safety protocols that you have to go through are very stringent. You all may recall back in the 90s, Brandon Lee was killed by, there was actually a live round that was stuck in the chamber on the film set of The Crow. And I think especially after that, they really beefed up their protocol to make sure that guns would be handled safely when they're used in a filming production like this.

And another red flag, this is from that New York Times piece, six experts in the use of firearms on film or television sets said it was very unusual and it was against protocol for an assistant director to hand the gun to an actor. And that's what they're saying happened, that the assistant producer handed the gun to Baldwin, said, cold gun. They say it should be the armorer who is on the set that should be handling the weapons and in charge of them from beginning to end. So even the fact that it was the assistant producer who handed the gun to Baldwin, they described as a red flag. But yeah, the fact that you had crew resigning, six crew members quitting on that day, tells you that this thing was

massively unfairly. A lot of the concerns that they raised are concerns that we heard about when IATSE was considering when they authorized that strike as part of their contract negotiations, things like incredibly long days, and then they're not being booked hotel rooms. They're having to drive after this long day, having to drive an hour back, I think, to Santa Fe. And so you're exhausted. You're falling asleep on the road. You're coming in tired. And guess what? When that is the case, horrific mistakes can ultimately happen. Horrific accidents can happen. So obviously we're still learning all the details here. One of the things that is complicated as well is that Baldwin is not only an actor, he's also a producer.

And so he's involved in a management and should have been aware of the safety issues. He claims that that's not the case. Yeah, and look, I don't know enough about the film industry to know when you have a high-level actor like that, you just get a producer credit, but you're not really involved

in the management. Because I think it has something to do with money distribution, too. And of course, the producers do say that, listen, we take safety very seriously, and we didn't know

about these issues, et cetera, et cetera, but clearly there was a lot going on there, oh, we take safety very seriously, and we didn't know about these issues, etc., etc. But clearly there was a lot going on there, and it was a low-budget film, and ended in absolute disaster. It's really hard to fathom how this ultimately occurred. Like you said, how did a gun with a live round, like, why was that ever on the set at all? How would that happen? Because there's no scenario on a film set where you would have a real gun with a live round. So why was that ever there in the first place?

It's just hard to wrap your head around. Yeah, it really is. And the other thing here is that the way they describe it is really unclear, which is that Alec Baldwin, again, this is per the New York Times in terms of what they're saying happened, was pointing the gun at the camera. Now, it doesn't say that he pulled the trigger, right? It just says, rehearsing a scene, pointing a revolver toward the camera lens when the gun suddenly went off. Now, again, you know, it could be, I mean, look, the most likely scenario is he did pull the trigger. But it also doesn't say that that's necessarily the case. And, you know,

things have happened. It's possible, like you said previously, it could be that there could have been, you know, live ammo that was like lodged inside the gun. But really what we're learning is with the people who walked off the set, six people had walked off the set, two accidental gun discharges already. The chain of custody of the gun itself should have been handed by the armorer instead of the assistant director. There clearly was something going on on the set. And in terms of who's really responsible

for what happened here, it seems to be that whoever was in charge of checking those guns and the safety protocols and more are ultimately the people responsible, which led to this terrible tragedy. Yeah. And, yeah, that's just the case here. One last chilling detail is that the movie is actually about an accidental killing, which is just, I mean, another horrible and, like I said, chilling detail. And with The Crow, when Brandon Lee was killed, that movie's also about a death and someone who's murdered and rises from the dead.

So very, very weird and horrible circumstances in terms of there's obviously an ongoing investigation. So far, no charges filed. But, you know, that's not definitive. You could imagine if there was some sort of reckless criminal negligence, you could imagine potentially a manslaughter charge, but we're a long way from that, and the investigation is ongoing. Of course, Alec Baldwin and everyone else says that they are cooperating with the authorities, so we'll keep you updated there. There you go. Another story we've been following closely, corruption in general and corruption at the Fed in particular.

So there were three individuals who during a time, you know, during the coronavirus pandemic, when the Fed was extraordinarily active, extraordinarily involved in what ultimately asset prices ended up being for any number of things. You had three members that were making big moves in their own stock portfolio. Two Fed presidents ended up resigning over those trades. You had a guy named Kaplan, another one named Rosengren. Rosengren says he resigned for health reasons, but both traded stocks. Kaplan, in millions of dollars in individual stocks. Rosengren traded in real estate-tied securities while he was warning about problems in that market. So they both resigned. Then you had the Fed's vice chair, Richard Clarida, who said he was rebalancing his profile. He shifted between $1 million and $5 million from a broad-based bond fund into a broad-based stock fund. And then lo and behold, the stock market went way up, which was very surprising because, you know, we're in the middle

of this like total economic collapse. But anyway, so this has led to a lot of, we'll just put it nicely, questions about whether individuals associated with the Fed in very important positions of power were using insider knowledge for their own personal profit. Jerome Powell had come under a lot of fire for this incredible, at least, appearance of corruption. And so now we actually have some movement here. They've announced some new rules for the Fed about what they can do, what type of stocks and bonds they can own. Let's go ahead and throw this tariff sheet up on the screen. So the Federal Reserve announced Thursday a wide-ranging ban on officials owning individual stocks and bonds and limits on other activities as well.

That includes top policymakers, those who sit on the Fed Open Market Committee, along with senior staff. Future investments will have to be confined to diversified assets such as mutual funds, so very sort of like broad-based, boring funds. Under the new rules, officials will have to provide 45 days notice in advance of buying or selling any securities, even those ones that are still allowed. They're going to be required to hold the securities for at least a year, and they can't buy or sell funds during, quote, heightened financial market stress. They also are going, any current holdings they have are going to have to be divested, though no timetable has been announced. So those are the details here. So they're actually pretty stringent. This is a great policy. I 100% support this. They're actually pretty stringent. They're

going to have to get rid of what they have. There are going to be incredible disclosure rules, rules about, you know, very limited what you're going to be able to hold at all. And you're going to have to hold it for at least a year. There are going to be lockdown periods where you can't do anything with it. I mean, the obvious thing to say is, number one, what took you so long? Yeah. And number two, when is Congress going to do the same damn thing? I was going to say, okay, let's go. Let's do the whole government. Let's do, I know there are some regulations in terms of federal appointees, but the president,

the vice president, and Congress, they are all completely exempted from this rule. Remember, before the Stocks Act, they could do whatever they wanted. Now, they just have to tell us what they do a couple of months later, and they don't even have to really tell us exactly what's going on there. Now, what I have noticed is that what I'm really heartened by is there seems to be a growing pop culture awareness of how much the system is rigged. And when I saw this by Dave Portnoy, it was particularly important because I know he has a lot of connections to the retail traders, Robinhood, all that. He's a pretty famous guy. And what you can see there,

he said, quote, if you are an elected official, you and spouse and children shouldn't be allowed to own individual stocks, period. He adds, you also shouldn't be able to profit off your position during or after. No books, paid speaking gigs. We truly see who wants to help and who wants to use political office for personal gain. Hear, hear. Yeah, 100%. Right behind you, Dave. And I put that together with this story, which really disturbed me, even though I do think it is funny, from NPR. We brought it to you a couple of weeks ago.

Let's put it up there on the screen. Which is that there were TikTokers who were trading stocks just by copying what members of Congress do. And so what they're like, look, system's rigged. Shout out to Nancy Pelosi. He's like, we'll just do exactly what Nancy Pelosi is doing. She appears psychic. She's the queen of investing. And apparently they've actually been doing quite well, a lot of these TikTokers. But again, here you have two pieces of pop culture phenomena where there is an awareness that it is BS that people who are on the Federal Open Markets Committee, who literally drive markets and assets, the people who are able to buy and trade stocks, and even worse, are the people who are literally making the laws. I mean,

if you are the Speaker of the House and you actually know which way one way or the other, like elder care or something is going, you think maybe if you knew that an hour before and you sold stock even on the general S&P 500, you could make a killing. These are endless in terms of the conflicts of interest because we focus a lot on the speaker and we should. But look, every congressman has access to non-public information. They all sit on committees. If you sit on ag, you could buy or sell ag stock. Defense, I mean, who knows in terms of the contractors, in terms of all of that, whether you know a bill is even going to pass or not, or even a delay in funding is worth hundreds of billions of dollars on the open stock market. So it is just extraordinarily clear that the Fed rules should go into place for the entire elected, like all elected officials. That's the bare minimum. That's where we should start in terms of stamping out the appearance of corruption. But

we know Congress will never actually do it to itself. Yes, very, very true. This has been so successful that they say in that NPR piece, at least one financial services consultant is planning to set up a financial instrument that automatically tracks congressional stock picks. Like an ETF or something. Because in his view, lawmakers are probably privy to more information than just the general public. We know, because Unusual Whales has run the data, that they are, in fact, outpacing the market.

Significantly. They're, you know, some of the most brilliant traders, I guess, in the country, right here in Congress. Yeah, wow. Incredible, incredible minds. And the other thing that's interesting, though, is so you've got the corruption piece, but also because people just assume it's corrupt, there's some analysis to suggest that they actually move markets with their picks. Oh, I bet. Yes.

Because, you know, TikTokers aren't the only ones who are looking and saying, oh, what's Pelosi and her husband doing? I have a feeling those are probably going to end up working out pretty well.

So it distorts the whole thing. But of course, the biggest problem is the corruption. And so it is, in one sense, it is heartening

to see the pop culture understanding of this. In another sense, it's really dark. Oh, it's sad. You know, it is heartening to see the pop culture understanding of this. In another sense, it's really dark. Oh, it's sad. You know, it to the point that people are making significant financial decisions banking on the corruption of that system. Yeah, no, that's true. And that really kind of tells you where we are right now.

Yeah, and I think that's the problem, which is that when it becomes such an open secret and whenever it becomes, you know, a direct knowledge and people are like, okay, well, if it's just rigged, then I'm just going to follow the rigging. That's when you start to really have people who lose faith in, you know, the sanctity of government, the information people are being told, what exactly is going on. I applaud the Fed for actually doing this. It probably should not have taken that long, but we need to put this in place for everybody in government. And it actually could have a pretty significant impact. Absolutely. And I mean, my God, these people are rich already. Yeah, most of these people are millionaires anyway.

Nancy Pelosi is extraordinarily wealthy. I think she's like a third or fourth richest member of Congress. She says she has nothing to do with the stock pick. It's all her husband, and she doesn't tell him anything. That's her defense. But, listen, you look at the overall numbers, you see them outperforming the market, and you know what's going on. I mean, it doesn't take a genius to figure this out. So it's disgusting, and I honestly think it is one of the most corrosive aspects of Washington, D.C., the way that they just out and out seek every possible way to profit off of their positions of quote-unquote service.

And not just the stock trading, but also the cashing in after the fact. to profit off of their positions of quote-unquote service, and not just the stock trading, but also the cashing in after the fact. I mean, just look at what Kyrsten Sinema's doing right now. Yes. You know, look, I can't get inside her head and know 100% what she's thinking and why she's positioning herself the way she is. All I know is that she ran on lowering prescription drug prices and then pharma threw her a bunch of cash, and now she's on the other side of that issue. That's what I know. All I know is that people in her own state

overwhelmingly support provisions that she's now wildly opposed to. And it certainly seems like she has her eye not just on campaign cash in the present day, but on what she may cash in and do after the fact. And I am 100% certain that she is not the only one. This also, by the way, applies not just to elected officials, but you see the revolving door with these agencies and agency heads and prominently placed people who they walk right out from the regulatory agency into the industry that they were supposed to be regulating. Sometimes it goes back the other way too, where you'll place people from the industry in those agencies so that they've got an in so that they can get rules written that are favorable to them. I mean, it is incredibly destructive to our society and to just an underlying faith that anyone is out for the public good rather than out for their own payday.

And so kudos to the Fed. Got to give them credit for putting in what looked like some pretty stringent rules. We'll certainly be on the lookout for if there are any big loopholes that they left in for them to exploit. Yeah, that's right. Okay, let's move on. Our fun segment. I know it's not the most important story in the world, but there is a lot of interest. But when you dig down to it, there still remains a lot to be said around the fracas between Joe Rogan and CNN.

Of course, for those who are just catching up in terms of what all this means. So Joe Rogan obviously got sick, had COVID, took a variety of medicines. One of them was ivervectin. CNN consistently said that he was taking horse dewormer. Rogan then has CNN's Sanjay Gupta on. Sanjay Gupta says that they should not have said that. Then Don Lemon brings Sanjay Gupta on his air and publicly flogs him and says,

no, no, no, actually we did absolutely nothing wrong. Rogan responds, now we are at the point where CNN is issuing another statement in which they say they have done absolutely nothing wrong. Their statement is so clownish and dumb that the Washington Post is calling them out for it. So let's put this on the screen. Here's what CNN has said in its latest defense of its coverage. Quote,

The heart of this debate has been purposely confused and ultimately lost. It's never been about livestock versus human dosage of ivermectin. The issue is that a powerful voice in media who, by example and through his platform, sowed doubt in the proven and approved science of vaccines while promoting the use of an unproven treatment for COVID-19, a drug development to ward off parasites in farm animals. The only thing CNN did wrong here was bruise the ego of a popular podcaster who pushed dangerous conspiracy theories and risked the lives of millions of people in doing so. So this is important. After CNN's Sanjay Gupta said, the should not have said that, that network, in which he is the chief medical advisor and chief

medical person, this scientist, you know, in-house extraordinaire, has said openly, we should not have said that. We got it wrong. The network has now put out a statement saying, not only did we do nothing wrong, that Joe Rogan is full of it, and we stand by our original comments 100%. And they point to a number of their transcripts where they characterized it, and they say they did it completely fine. There is a pattern here in terms of how CNN operates. They make an open and blatant mistake.

Everybody knows it. Not even mistake. They make an open and blatant propagandistic effort. Then everybody knows what they did was wrong. Their own person says what they did was wrong. And then after it gets turned up, they say, no, not we didn't did was wrong. Their own person says what they did was wrong. And then after it gets turned up, they say, no, not we didn't do anything wrong. We stand by it 100%. And what I love here is that even the Washington Post's Eric Wemple, who is like by no means a conservative or

whatever, here's what he says. CNN statement sounds more like the work of an advocacy group than a journalism outfit. The issue actually begins and ends with the integrity of CNN's content. Yes. If we take Rogan's prescription claim at face value, and CNN has not challenged it, then the network's coverage was slanted in some cases and straight up incorrect in others. So in this instance, you don't have to endorse Rogan

to abhor CNN's coverage of the topic. Here's a network, after all, that prides itself on impeccable factual hygiene, a place where there's no conceptual hair to find to split, no political statement to sprawling to flyspeck. Flyspeck, great word. I'm going to steal it. It's tough living by your own standards. If CNN wants to describe ivermectin in a way that doesn't slime the people who take it, The Guardian provides a fine template. A drug used against parasites in humans and livestock. Thank you.

That's all they ever had to say. Even that I take a little bit of issue with. Right. Because, like, lots of drugs that humans consume. Right, are dual use. Also have a veterinarian use. My dog was just prescribed Valium after she had a surgery. Are you going to describe Valium as a drug that humans use but also dogs?

My dog's hardware medicine is actually ivermectin. Ivermectin. So, I mean, even that. But, yes, Wemple does, obviously, he sorts through these issues in a much more clear headed way than CNN ultimately does. Because what is he getting at here? Ultimately, Joe Rogan is a podcaster. OK, he is a very popular podcast host. Y'all are pretending to be straight, fact based journalists. You are holding Joe Rogan to a much higher standard than you are holding yourselves. You are expecting absolutely no accountability and accuracy and like sticking to the facts with your own journalists.

And what Wemple does is he went through any number of instances. Everybody from Anderson Cooper saying that ivermectin is more often used to deworm horses. Don Lemon, of course, saying that he's taking, that Rogan is taking a drug meant for deworming livestock. Bakari Sellers is a commentator saying something similar. Jim Acosta. I mean, time after time after time, they frame it in the same incorrect way. And let me say again, at best, ivermectin is unproven to treat COVID. At worst, it doesn't work at all. And of course, there are people who, because there's a shortage of ivermectin, have been buying it from the livestock store. That is really dangerous and you should not do that. That is not what Joe Rogan did.

And if you aren't saying that, then you are lying. It is really that simple. It's not a hard one to figure out. The fact that they were so unequivocal and so feisty. That's what gets me. In their statement is really something. And if you're Sanjay Gupta, what's he saying about this? They basically just had to say, hey, Sanjay, screw you.

What you spoke out of turn. Completely cut him off on the head. Completely cut him off at the knees. Right. Demanded he come on and, you know, have his little, like you call it a struggle session with Don Lemon. Then put out this statement saying, no, no, what our chief medical correspondent, the guy who we look to. To provide medical advice. To provide medical advice. That guy's wrong. Listen to us in provide medical advice. That guy's wrong.

Listen to us in our PR department. That's really something. Oh, it's stunning. And again, why are we even covering this? And there's a lot of discussion around, oh, you know,

this is just media beef. It's actually not because Joe got to the very core of it whenever he was talking with Sanjay. He was like, do you understand

how when you lie about, you know, what he calls some shithead comedian got to the very core of it whenever he was talking with Sanjay. He was like, do you understand how when you lie about, you know, what he calls like some shithead comedian and some medicine that he takes that people aren't going to say and say, hey, I don't trust your reporting now on Syria, or I don't trust your reporting now on Hunter Biden. And you shouldn't actually on either of those subjects. But it's a good point as to whenever you see them lie about something, then defend the lie, and now go through this whole public process of it and continue to stick by it, how can you have confidence in the other facts that they are telling you? You know, I'm about to cover the lab leak in my monologue, but CNN's Brianna Keillor, who is now their in-house cringe bot, recently put out a

whole thread on why she wasn't wrong whenever she made fun of Rand Paul, because she's like, scientists should face questions, but Rand Paul is not the person to ask those questions. I'm like, yeah, you're right. You are. And yet, how many times has Fauci been on your network or even on your show? Have you ever asked him one question about gain-of-function research? Will you ever ask them one question about gain-of-function research? We all know that she never will. So it's just a complete farce

in terms of the way that they conduct themselves and the stuff that they say that they'll try to get to the bottom of. That CNN Bernie thing that we covered this weekend, that's the same thing. It's over and over again, right? It's like they can do absolutely no wrong. It's actually the job.

It's the fault of everybody else involved. Screw you, actually. We're perfect. We're absolutely perfect. And also, our declining ratings have nothing to do with it. Her tweet to Bernie Sanders. It's blame the media o'clock, and Bernie Sanders is right on time. And then, of course, when you actually go through the data, Bernie was 100% correct and they were 100% incorrect,

just as they are in this instance. You might be noticing a consistent pattern here. In-house cringe bot. Let's get that trending. Wow. You guys must really like listening to our voices. Well, I know this is annoying. Instead of making you listen to a Viagra commercial, when you're done, check out the other podcast I do with Marshall Kosloff called The Realignment. We talk a lot about the deeper issues that are changing, realigning in American society. You always need more Crystal and Sagar in your daily lives. Take care, guys. All right, Sagar, what are you looking at? not just to relive the horror, but to remind you of how the media, the intelligence community, the government, all elite networks of power tasked with protecting us and informing us actually sold us out instead for a terrible war. Now, most importantly, we discuss it because the mechanisms through which that war was sold keep repeating in our elite culture again and again and again. The worst part is not that it was an accident, but that it appears now by

design. That the media and the people in power latch onto the stories of near-complete fantasy and use their relative monopoly on cultural power in America to gaslight tens of millions of people from the truth. We saw Iraq WMD-level screw-ups in Russiagate. I didn't think I'd be lucky enough to see two of those in my lifetime, now let alone three, because it only took two years after Russiagate for the next one to arrive, and that is the lab leak hypothesis. In many ways, the lab leak developments are worse than Iraq on a purely media failure level. At least two years after the Iraq war, even the most warmongering journalists had to admit Saddam did not have weapons of mass destruction. Two years into Russiagate, the Mueller report came out and we knew all

of what was what. But right now, it's been over two years since the Wuhan Institute of Virology took its database of samples offline indicating a possible accident. It is actually almost two years to the day, right now, since the first likely coronavirus cases began spreading from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and today the public and the media still will not accept their failure. Perhaps unlike Iraq WMD, in this case, the media literally needs this to be true, that the lab leak hypothesis didn't happen because that would have validated a single thing that Donald Trump once said. And in their stupidity, they elevated Dr. Anthony Fauci to prominence. Fauci and his connections to the Wuhan lab at this point are very well known. He worked for nearly two years to cover up his complicity in funding gain-of-function research at that facility. He has done so much with such absolute impunity now to this day because he knows

that the mainstream media and the Dems will give him a free pass. There was no better evidence of that than one of his most recent trips to Capitol Hill, where he was confronted directly by Senator Rand Paul, who sneered back at him and told him a lie. Let's relive that for those who might have missed it. Dr. Fauci, knowing that it is a crime to lie to Congress, do you wish to retract your statement of May 11th where you claimed that the NIH never funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan? Senator Paul, I have never lied before the Congress, and I do not retract that statement. This paper that you are referring to was judged by qualified staff up and down the chain as not being gain of function. What was, let me finish.

You take an animal virus and you increase its transmittability to humans, you're saying that's not gain of function? Yeah, that is correct and Senator Paul, you do not know what you are talking about, quite frankly. And I want to say that officially. You do not know what you are talking about. Okay, you get one person. Let's read from the NIH definition of gain of function. This is your definition that you guys wrote. It says that scientific research that increases the transmissibility among animals is gain of function. They took animal viruses that only occur in animals and they increased their transmissibility to humans. How you can say that is not gain of function?

It is not. It's a dance and you're dancing around this because you're trying to obscure responsibility for 4 million people dying around the world from a pandemic. Now, since early September, we have had definitive proof that Fauci lied in the exchange after the Intercept published documents revealing that Fauci funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab from 2014 to 2019, that they knew they were doing so as defined by the federal policies in effect from 2014 to 2017. That means even with his congressional word salad and obvious games, he could not get out of the fact that he lied. Now, I, like most of you, did not actually expect anything to happen. It's Washington, after all. People lie all the time before Congress, and they don't get prosecuted. And there's no way that the Democrats in power were actually going to do anything to him. But lucky for us, the National Institute of Health, after reviewing

the records, was forced to put out a letter in which is explosive in its revelations. The NIH, in their most jargony way possible, corrected the record and by noting that Fauci did fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab. And even more explosively, they said that EcoHealth Alliance, the nonprofit who was the conduit for their funding, violated the terms of the grant at the time by funding research that enhanced bat coronaviruses in humans at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This is where things get tricky.

Both of the groups here are liars. They have a lot to lose by the slow dribble of evidence that coronavirus very likely leaked from the Wuhan lab. And they both have actively covered up information in the past, tying them to gain-of-function research. But in this case, EcoHealth Alliance also has some receipts. EcoHealth Alliance released this video right before you from their organization uploading gain-of-function data to the National Institute of Health all the way back in 2018, claiming the NIH knew what they were doing the entire time. So, who's telling the truth? It's hard to tell. But things do not stop here, because that video raises a lot of questions. If the U.S. government has been in possession of data that the NIH was funding gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab since 2018, then every single instance in

which Fauci, the man who literally reviews the data and continues these grants, has denied this most basic fact has been a lie. It means that the information as to the key question of U.S. government ties to the lab could have been answered since the beginning of the pandemic. And it raises the ultimate question. How much more is there? This is where the media comes into play. We need overwhelming pressure right now to draw out more of these people. We need journalists digging.

And instead, here's what we have. Look at how CNN covered the Fauci-Rand Paul exchange at the time. Fauci excoriates Rand Paul. MSNBC played that clip on loop, saying, Senator Paul, you do not know what you are talking about. They even called Rand Paul's attack slander on July 21st. As I just laid out, who was actually telling the truth in that exchange? Will you see a single one of these networks correct the record or even cover the explosive release I just discussed? No, you will not. That's the problem. The media, Fauci, the Democrats, they really need this one

to go away. They need the mounting evidence to just ignored to cover up their own lies of the last two years. All we can do is keep pushing as hopeless as it may seem though. It took us two years to get this much. Maybe two years from now, we'll finally have the smoking gun. I mean, I don't know what else we need, Crystal. You got the report. They're like, oh yeah, actually we're funding gain of function the entire time. One more thing I promise. Just wanted to make sure you knew about my podcast with Kyle Kalinsky. It's called Crystal Kyle and Friends, where we do long-form interviews with people like Noam Chomsky, Cornel West, and Glenn Greenwald.

You can listen on any podcast platform, or you can subscribe over on Substack to get the video a day early. We're going to stop bugging you now. Enjoy. Crystal, what are you taking a look at? Well, folks, the glue and scotch tape holding our nation's supply chain together has come apart with catastrophic backups at every point along the way, leading, as you guys know, to shortages of goods ranging from everything from diapers to lumber. And if you dig into the problems for each one of these goods, you're going to find a similar theme.

A nation made fragile by an obsession with short-term profits above everything else. Just check out our interview with Matt Stoller for a broad-ranging discussion on how we've allowed Monopolis to cheat, price gouge, and hollow out our domestic capacity. But I really wanted today to focus in on one very specific element of the overall supply chain picture. That would be the human beings. In particular, the truckers who keep goods moving from ports to warehouses and rail yards so that the many, many, many items that we import from overseas might end up on a store shelf in your town. You might say that these workers are essential, and yet, do we treat them as such? Of course not. There are not enough of these truckers, as it turns out, and there is a

very, very simple reason why. Because they've been forced to work for free. Joe Weisenthal pointed this out in a viral thread on Twitter. Port truckers must wait in long lines to pick up cargo, and they only get paid when they actually move the goods. So the longer the lineup at the ports, the more hours truckers have to work for free. According to one expert that's quoted by Bloomberg News, quote, the poor truck driver for decades now has basically been the slack adjuster in the whole system. The entire system is built around free labor from truck drivers as they wait for containers. That's right, ladies and gentlemen, a critical part of our supply chain was premised on the idea that some workers would be so desperate that they would continue to work under conditions of

literal indentured servitude. This is not a stretch. It is not an exaggeration. In fact, port trucking has been compared to modern-day sharecropping, an arrangement that is less a job choice and more a crushing weight from which you can never escape. It's actually an issue that I've been following for a long time now. USA Today did an incredible series on the conditions that these workers, who are often poor immigrants, actually face. In it, they document how workers are forced to lease trucks and they're put into debt by rapacious companies with the idea that, oh, one day you'll be able to own that truck and you'll have an asset that you can use to build

solid middle-class prosperity. That debt instead ends up hanging over them, forcing them to work for pennies. The promise of owning that truck never actually realized. In many instances, the terms are so abusive that after a long week of endless hours, we're talking sleeping in their truck, truckers have been informed that they actually owe the company money. Here's the lead to that story from the USA Today. Samuel Talavera Jr. did everything his bosses asked. Most days, the trucker would drive more than 16 hours straight hauling LG dishwashers

and Camo tires to warehouses around LA on their way to retail stores nationwide. He rarely went home to his family. At night, he crawled into the back of his cab and slept in the company parking lot. For all of that, he took home as little as 67 cents a week. Then, in October 2013, the truck he leased from his employer, QTS, broke down. When Talavera could not afford repairs, the company fired him and seized the truck, along with $78,000 he had paid towards owning it. Now, that story is not a one-off. It is typical. The abuses of these trucking companies are too numerous to recount here. Everything from locking the gates so that truckers are forced to continue driving to forcing them to falsify records showing they were driving

way more hours than is permitted by law. And if at any step along the way, the driver refuses, they're fired, and all that money they've paid in towards owning their truck is completely lost with no recourse. The company then leases that truck to a new driver, who will be abused, exploited, and robbed in a similar fashion. It is a widespread and systemic problem. But by the way, it's not just no-name trucking companies who are guilty here. Our nation's largest and most iconic retailers, they are all complicit in this illegal system of indentured servitude. Target, Walmart, other Fortune 500 retailers, they use shipping and logistics

contractors who hire out to the lowest bidder, rewarding the companies that cut the most corners and have the most predatory practices. That's not all, though. They've also spent millions on lobbyists to keep drivers from having basic labor rights, including a minimum wage. In other words, folks, your low prices at the store come at a very high cost. The big companies pressure the logistics companies, the logistics companies pressure the trucking companies, and as usual, the ones who actually bear the cost are the human beings who are doing the work, desperately grasping for a modicum of stability and a toehold into the vaunted American dream. Now, there are some signs of hope. Some drivers have been able to

unionize under the Teamsters, winning better contracts and better conditions. In fact, those unionized drivers went on strike back in April to protest unfair labor practices and hazardous conditions during COVID. Also, workers have been fighting back collectively in court, and they've been winning. In the most recent case, a huge trucking company, XPO Logistics, they settled a class action lawsuit alleging wage theft for $30 million. It also, guys, it wasn't always this way. The trucking industry was famously deregulated by Ronald Reagan in 1980, transforming what was previously a largely unionized workforce with power and basic rights into the system of literal indentured servitude that we have today. The promise of

deregulation was efficiency. The actual result was fragility and extreme exploitation of the most vulnerable workers. But instead of realizing the error of our ways and nationally re-regulating trucking, lifting the minimum wage, bolstering unions, we're more likely to get solutions like this one. Just look at this. Expanding child labor to deal with labor shortages that were actually caused by wage theft. In Wisconsin, 14-year-olds will be able to work until 11 p.m. to help plug that labor shortage. Hooray, our problems are solved. Look, guys, in reality, the solutions here are very simple. Make things in America, pay workers well, enforce the law so that exploitation is rare instead of standard operating procedure. It is not complicated, even if our corrupt elite makes these obvious answers impossible to achieve. And Sagar, the conditions that these truckers have faced are

so abhorrent. Yeah, I had no idea until recently. Join us now. We have Kyle Kondik. He is managing editor for Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball. No relation to me. Great to see you, sir. Great to have you on the program. Good to see you, Kyle. Thanks for having me. Of course. So we wanted to bring you on specifically to talk about this Virginia gubernatorial election. Terry McAuliffe is the Democrat. He served one term as governor before, and then he was term limited out because Virginia is weird. They only let you serve one consecutive turn. He is running again against businessman Glenn Youngkin. The polls seem to indicate that the race is quite close. Just give us a little bit of a lay of the land. You know, the Virginia governor's race is one of

the first big state level elections that happens after a presidential election. You know, the Virginia governor's race is one of the first big state-level elections that happens after a presidential election. You know, most of the governor's races and Senate races and House races obviously happen in the midterm in even-numbered years. But there are a handful of races in these odd-numbered years. Virginia and New Jersey specifically have gubernatorial and state legislative races. New Jersey doesn't seem as competitive as Virginia is. And Virginia is often sort of looked at as kind of a barometer as to where things are at, you know, basically at the halfway point between the presidential election and the midterm election. The Virginia governor's race often ends up going to the party that doesn't hold the White House since the 1970s. Only once

has a presidential party candidate won the Virginia governor's race, and that happened to be Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic nominee this time. He won in 2013 by two and a half points, even though Barack Obama was in the White House and was relatively unpopular at that time, kind of similar to how Joe Biden is now. Also, what you see is usually the, however well or not well the presidential party did in Virginia

in the presidential year, they do worse in the next gubernatorial election. And so at the very least, Biden won the state by 10. You wouldn't expect McAuliffe to win by 10. And there's a lot of question whether he's going to win at all. See, this is where I'm really interested, Kyle. It's a 10-point Biden state. And yet Terry McAuliffe is making this all about Trump. Every ad I've seen is about Trump. It's basically saying Glenn Youngkin is Trump with the mask on or something

like that to that effect. How effective is that strategy likely to be? How do Virginians right now feel about Trump, even though he's gone right now? Well, I don't think Trump is popular in Virginia. And I think that the Youngkin campaign is sort of telling us what they think about this by trying to keep Trump at arm's length. Youngkin is trying to kind of give little nods to the Trump folks, but also just hope that those folks are going to turn out for him anyway, because they're energized and that he can sort of focus his message more on the suburbs. And so Youngkin has gone really heavy on education, for instance, as an issue down the stretch here and sort of trying to capitalize on something that McAuliffe said about parental involvement in schools during one of the debates. But also, you know, governor's races are just different than federal races.

And so, you know, while I think every race is kind of federalized to some degree these days, You do have Republican governors in Massachusetts and Vermont and Maryland. You do have Democratic governors in places like Kansas, Kentucky, and Louisiana. And so for Virginia to elect a Republican governor would not be that crazy. And again, the state is blue-ish, but it's not California, it's not New York, it's not Illinois. So again, I think it's trending Democratic. I don't think even if Youngkin wins, that necessarily changes the long term trajectory. But the state's competitive enough that Youngkin could win under the right circumstances. Yeah. And what are those right circumstances look like?

I mean, a lot of it looks like what's happening right now. You know, Biden's numbers are bad. He's his approval rating nationally is in the low to mid 40s, depending on whatever poll you look at. You know, that's better than Trump was at this time of his presidency. But, you know, Biden is still relatively weak and has been since mid to late August. And, you know, so I think that McAuliffe,

at one time saw Biden as an asset and now maybe sees him as a hindrance. McAuliffe has said as much, although Biden is also gonna be campaigning with McAuliffe in Arlington. at one time saw Biden as an asset and now maybe sees him as a hindrance. McAuliffe has said as much, although Biden is also going to be campaigning with McAuliffe in Arlington on Tuesday evening. So Biden, you know, Biden is still showing up. But, you know, fundamentally, McAuliffe is really trying to nationalize this race and Youngkin is trying to kind of localize it, it's sort of a turnaround from what you might have expected in a race like this during the Obama years, where Republicans are the ones nationalizing everything and Democrats are trying to localize. It's an interesting reversal, but I think it tells us something about where Virginia is. And sometimes that strategy works and sometimes it doesn't. Tells us a lot. So Kyle, who is the critical constituency of the Virginia gubernatorial

race? Glenn Youngkin going hardcore after suburban parents, women in particular, who swung hard for Biden. Is that where Terry McAuliffe is laser focused? What's their turnout strategy if it works? I mean, look, I think that for McAuliffe, you know, part of I think you can look at Virginia as sort of a base mobilization state these days. And, you know, there's always questions for Democrats about, you know, turning out young voters, turning out people of color, specifically black voters. And so, you know, Barack Obama was in Richmond over the weekend. You know, that's an appearance targeted at making black voters aware of the race and getting them to vote. McCaul's brought in a number of other surrogates. But yeah, I do think that, you know, Yunkin's strategy, I think, to win the state

is to get, you know, big turnout and big margins in kind of the outstate areas, you know, the western part of the state that aren't as populous, but a lot of those places are really Republican outside of, you know, college towns like Charlottesville and western Virginia. But I also think that Yunkin, you know,

base mobilization is not enough for Yunkin because Virginia has become a bluish state. And so I think those kind of swing voters in the suburbs are also important, not in kind of exurban Northern Virginia that isn't quite as blue as sort of the closer to Washington, D.C. core. Places like Virginia Beach, which is a big swing constituency that I think basically has to vote Republican for Republican and win statewide, and also some of the suburban places around Richmond, which used to be Republican, but then sort of have trended Democratic. But there can always end up being some sort of reversion back to Republicans. You see that, and that's something to watch for.

Yeah, absolutely. And are there any interesting telltale signs of whose turnout operation is working working out well because of the pandemic, which you only had maybe five to 10 percent of the Virginia vote being cast early in absentee by mail because you need an excuse to vote that way. Well, the legislature that Democrats took in 2019, they made it so you didn't have to have an excuse. And so about 60 percent of all the votes were cast early or absentee in 2020. That's not going to be the case here in 2021. I'd say maybe about 20, maybe about a quarter of the vote has already been cast so far. Early voting continues this week. So in some ways you say, oh, well, early voting is way down from 2020, but it's also way up from any other previous Virginia election. And Virginia voters are not necessarily, you know, you don't have a long tradition of voting early and by mail like you do in states like Florida and California.

So it's not, it's hard to know exactly what kind of like the normal level of early voting in Virginia is because it's so, it's a relatively new state. I think it's an excellent point there. Kyle, can you make a prediction? What do you think is going to happen? I mean, I guess I'd rather still be McAuliffe than Youngkin just because of the way Virginia is now. But, you know, I do think it's really close. All the indicators are really close. And let me also tell you this. If you want to try to interpret this broader nationally, the difference between a one-point Youngkin win and a one-point McAuliffe

win shouldn't change your analysis all that much. Great point. That's a fantastic point. Whatever, whatever, you know, now again, you know, maybe McAuliffe wins by five and then that's a different story. But if it is really, really close, you know, if you're looking at the, obviously it matters a lot for people living in Virginia, but if you're looking at it from a national perspective, it's still a significant drop off for Democrats, even if McAuliffe were to eke it out. That's a fantastic

point. Kyle, that's why we bring you on. Thank you so much, man. We really appreciate it. Great to see you. Thank you. Thank you. Absolutely. Thank you guys so much for watching. We really appreciate it. It's been fun ride here. Met some premium subscribers over the weekend, always fun. Some of them on a plane. Can't escape, but it's a cool thing. Listen, we really appreciate your guys' so much support. I mean, we have some great developments here in the works. Technologically wise, I think you guys are going to be really excited. We're really beefing up our operation here. But to do that, we need your support.

We can't rely on YouTube. We just simply can't. That is the truth. If we tried to, we literally wouldn't be able to pay our bills, given the weird and mass swings on demonetization or copyright or whatever. Our focus is 100% bringing you the best show possible, ramp up the production, make the show as big as it can be for everybody, not just for the sake of us. So we really appreciate your support, and link is down there in the description.

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