Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 10/25/22: Midterm Updates, Ukraine War, Chinese Spies, Math Scores, MSNBC Cringe, Dying Neoliberalism & More

Episode Date: October 25, 2022

Krystal and Saagar cover midterm updates, the war in Ukraine, a major DOJ announcement on China, plummeting math scores in the US, a cringe MSNBC segment, the birth rate crisis, and welcome a special guest, Rana Faroohar.Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/763805856/1a987b82c4Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/Rana Faroohar Book: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/688161/homecoming-by-rana-foroohar/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. worthy mainstream by becoming a Breaking Points premium member today at BreakingPoints.com. Your hard-earned money is going to help us build for the midterms and the upcoming presidential election so we can provide unparalleled coverage of what is sure to be one of the most pivotal moments in American history. So what are you waiting for? Go to BreakingPoints.com to help us out. Good morning, everybody. Happy Tuesday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed, we do. We are going to start this morning uncharacteristically.

Lately, we've been leading with Ukraine, but we're going to do a deep dive into the midterms. Fetterman-Oz, big debate, much anticipated is tonight. We got some new polling out of that race and some other ones as well. And I guess their polls are kind of all over the map. I think people will see in them what they want to see in them, but we'll give you our analysis. Also, I'm going to have to rage in our Ukraine block because progressives, a few of them got together, wrote a letter that was actually fairly decent. I was like, oh, okay, this is encouraging. Like, you know, taking a bold stand in favor of not having nuclear war. And then immediately they got a little pushback and they

were like, no, no, we didn't mean it. We didn't mean it. Just total, complete, immediate capitulation at the same time that we continue to have all kinds of saber rattling from the Russians. And, you know, I'm still talking about the Ukraine is going to use a dirty bomb and all this nonsense. So we'll break all of that down for you. We also had a big announcement from the DOJ about Chinese spies that they are indicting. We also got some really dire and very depressing numbers out of how students across the country fared during the pandemic. A lot to deal, to dig into there. In particular, you know, it's not an easy narrative because even some of the states that didn't really close schools much had huge test score losses during the pandemic.

So we'll tell you about that. And also a focus group led by an MSNBC host. This is amazing. On January 6th. That was interesting. Two bubbles colliding, I guess is what you would say. We also are excited to have Rana Faroojar on. She has a new book about the end of globalism. So that is the plan for the day. We are going to start with the midterms. Let's go ahead and jump into CNN has a bunch of new polling here. Let's put this up on the screen. Now, this is CNN's battleground polling, and their numbers look a bit better for Democrats than in general Democratic numbers have been looking lately. So let me go through

this. They polled in Wisconsin, and they have the Democrat Mandela Barnes, basically even with the incumbent Republican Ron Johnson, 50 for Johnson, 49 for Barnes within the margin of error. In terms of Pennsylvania Senate, and we're going to dig into that one a little bit more in a moment, we've got Fetterman with a six-point lead over Oz, 51-45. Wisconsin governor, you've got Evers, the Democrat, up narrowly, 50-48. Pennsylvania governor, Shapiro, with a commanding lead there, 15 percentage points. Don't quite buy that one. Michigan Governor, you also have Whitmer with a fairly decent lead there of six points. So that's the CNN polling.

You know, Sagar, I'm pretty skeptical of these numbers at this point. And I do think I was trying to remember back to 2020. It was some of the CNN polls in the Midwest that were like wildly off. I remember, you know, they were one of the ones that was pulling like double digits in Wisconsin or something like that. So I think it's worth being skeptical here. Now, if you dig into the numbers, a couple of things that they point to here, they say in both Wisconsin and in Pennsylvania, the economy is a central focus. 47% in Wisconsin, 44% in Pennsylvania say the economy and inflation are their most important issues. Surprise, surprise. This should be no shock to anyone. That's more than double the

19% in each state who name abortion, which does rank second in both states as their top issue. And as we've seen, this has been a pattern that's playing out in all of these states. The voters who say economy, inflation, jobs, those sorts of things are my top issue. They're going for the Republicans. The voters who are saying abortion is their top issue, they're going overwhelmingly for Democrats. The question is if there are enough of those voters, and it's increasingly looking like the answer is no. Yeah. And, you know, I actually pulled up the average polling miss for 2020. And look, it is shocking because consider this, Wisconsin was actually polling at Biden plus 10. He won it by less than one point in 2020. So if there's a 10 point error just two years ago, you should

factor that in whenever they say that it's a tie. In Pennsylvania, they had Biden up by five. Of course, he barely won it by a single point. In Pennsylvania, they had Biden up by five. Of course, he barely won it by a single point. In Arizona, they had Biden up by three. Of course, he won it by, you know, tenths of a percentage point. So, and I look at this poll, it actually just confirms really to me the possible like Republican victories, except for Pennsylvania, given that it is six points. That one is seems a genuine toss-up, but that isn't fully captured in a 51-46. So anyway, I think that the people who are on the ground are much more clear-eyed. I've seen Mark Kelly been like, listen, we do not believe these polls. We believe this is a

genuine toss-up. We still need to have money. Fetterman campaign saying the same thing. Mandela Barnes as well. Shapiro in Pennsylvania, the gubernatorial race. All of them are not taking any of these for granted. It really is only Biden and a few others in the media who are like, no, no, no, it's going to be fine. Biden did an event yesterday. He said the Dems will come home at the end of the day. I'm like, well, maybe. And even if they do, as we found out, if people are even more energized on the other side, they can come home all they want. if people are even more energized on the other side, they can come home all they want. If people are even more enthusiastic against you, it doesn't entirely matter whenever it comes to the polling time. When you're trying to factor in potential polling bias, too, it's important to remember that not all states are created equal.

So in particular, I think you should be most skeptical of polls coming out of the industrial Midwest and any state that has a large white working class population. Those are the places where the polls have, for the past couple of election cycles, had the biggest misses. So when you're talking about a Wisconsin, when you're talking about a Pennsylvania, those are the types of states that would fall into that category, as would the next state. Let's go ahead and put Ohio up on the screen. Now, this has been very interesting. We have a new poll here. This is from Spectrum News and Siena College that has Tim Ryan, the Democrat, and thing that is really strange is, you know, my assumption here is that these numbers are not really correct. Ohio is one of the states that's had the biggest polling misses. Again, it's one of the states with a very large white working class population, and that seems to be where the biggest misses occur. The one thing that is strange is that the governor's race between DeWine and Whaley, the Republican

shows up in the polls as having a massive lead, which is what you would expect. And then on the Senate race, they sort of consistently show a very tight race. Now, I went and looked at the most recent polls from RealClearPolitics, which just lists all of the polls that are happening in a particular state. And most of them give Vance a little bit of an edge. So there was one from, I don't know what this group is, Signal. I think it's a Republican-aligned pollster. They have Vance up four. You have Marist, a tie. This one I just referenced, a tie. USA Today, Vance plus two. Trafalgar, Vance plus three. So even Trafalgar, which, you know, tends to have more of a Republican lean, was probably more accurate in these states than other places. Even they have this race close. So I do think it's probably closer than it should be.

But at the end of the day, do I think that Tim Ryan is going to be able to pull off the upset in a state that has really trended pretty hard to the right, actually has trended more hard to the right than almost any other state in the country. I can't see that really happening. And our friend of the show, Kyle Kondik, who is, by the way, an Ohio native and works at the University of Virginia, analyzes politics, we have him on the show whenever we can get him. He says, I think a lot of people, myself included, have thought that Tim Ryan has run a really credible race, but that ultimately you'd rather be Vance down the stretch here.

I still feel that way. And I guess that basically sums up my views on the state as well. I completely agree. And look, J.D. Vance, if they say it's tied, Trump was effectively tied with Joe Biden on the eve of the 2020 election. He won the state by eight points. And he actually increased his vote margin in some of the white working class counties. Well, and here's another thing to point out here as well, which is that in the same poll last month, Tim Ryan actually had a bit of a lead, had a three-point lead. So if anything, he's- So this is actually represents an erosion in Ryan's standing.

You know, the analysis here from the University of Akron political scientist, she says, closing the numbers a little bit might be Republicans coming home. And even if Vance is not their favorite, he's still a Republican and that might be it. I think we're seeing that dynamic play out in this race. I think we're seeing it play out in Pennsylvania, see it playing out in Georgia, where, you know, it continues to be the case that Fetterman has much better approval ratings than Dr. Oz, who was mostly not particularly well-liked. There were a lot of Republicans who really didn't want Dr. Oz to be the nominee, and it's taken a while for them to sort of swallow their distaste and actually admit that they're going to vote for

this guy. But at the end of the day, they're Republicans, and they care a lot more about who has control over the Senate than whatever issues they have with Oz, whatever issues they have with Herschel Walker, whatever issues they have with J.D. Vance. And I think that's what we're seeing in the stretch. We're reflecting a little bit this too in the gubernatorial poll in Michigan. Put this up there on the screen. It actually shows you, this is from Travolgar, but shows a very tight race between Gretchen Whitmer and Tudor Dixon with Gretchen Whitmer at 48% and Tudor Dixon at 47.9. Michigan also was one of the places with a tremendous polling miss in 2020, plus eight for Biden, and Biden ended up winning it by around three points. So

if you factor in that level of a miss, I would much rather be Tudor Dixon in a poll like this, but I don't know. This was Trafalgar though. That's true, but they had the most accurate, right? When I see Trafalgar even has Whitmer off, because they did miss a little bit in the other direction of underestimating Democratic performance. They were sort of, you know, unique in doing that. So when I see, like, oh, even Trafalgar has Whitmer up, in my view, the race is closer than what a lot of the mainstream polls are showing. But she probably does have a bit of an edge. That's the way that I interpret that. You might be right.

I genuinely don't know. She's only leading by, you know, half a percentage point in this poll, which, I mean, that's effectively a toss-up, right? And toss-up in an unfavorable environment with the fundamentals where they are, I think I'd probably be the Republican candidate. Tudor Dixon has not done herself any favors with the abortion messaging, you know, allying with Mike Pence. But Whitmer is going all in on abortion in a state, obviously, where the economics matter and which Trump won in 2016. So if you just focus on economy and inflation, I believe gas there was actually quite expensive for a while, too, combined with, you know, longstanding issues, deindustrialization. I think she probably has the wins at her back. But again, I don't know. You know, we're, what, two weeks or so till election day. So really is not,

I think people should know, not everybody's like us, which is that most people, a lot of political science data shows us that even in a presidential race, people don't really care about it at all until three weeks before. That's when they're like, okay, let me tune in if they're genuinely undecided of which there are a lot less people in the midterms. It's more like two weeks, maybe even one and a half. So it's really only now that people care a lot about who they might vote for. Yeah. So I generally think, you know, Republicans are surging. Democrats, you know, peak too early. This is slipping out of their hands. I think that they have been foolish to completely cede the economic argument to the Republicans. I think it's like really political malpractice

to have essentially no economic message when, as we've been pointing out, voters have been telling you for months that's the number one issue. It is not a freaking surprise. And even if, look, you're the party in power, it's a difficult thing to overcome. But given the strength of the numbers on abortion,

if they just had eaten into the Republican margin on the economy by a little bit, that could have ultimately made the difference. But if I want to play devil's advocate here and make the case for the Democrats, you would say, look at these turnout numbers. They are through the roof. Democrats are outnumbering Republicans in the early vote. You have some of our core constituencies, including African-Americans, turning out in droves in key races, in Georgia in particular. You have a number of open seats where we had special elections where, you know, Democrats outperformed how they were doing. So we're actually, we believe the polls are actually

not capturing the enthusiasm on our side. That would be the Democratic case. Do I really buy that at this point, just given the overwhelming economic numbers and how people are feeling about the country, where Biden's approval rating is? His approval rating is basically the same place as where Obama and Trump's were going into their first midterms when they suffered significant losses. So do I really buy the Democratic hopeful case? No, not really. And guess what? I heard all of that in 2020, and then they almost lost the election by 40,000 votes. So, like, look, I remember, you know, whenever House Democrats said that they were going to have a massive wave, and then what, their margin was slanted to three seats, you know, as a review to Nancy Pelosi,

and actually Republicans held on decently in the Senate. And, you know, remember Jamie Harrison supposedly was tied with Lindsey Graham, and then Graham beat him by like 18 points. Look, I remember. I'm going to factor that in. Maybe it's recency bias. Certainly could be. It could be a totally different environment.

Yeah. But in the Trump age, 2016 onwards, polling has been irrevocably broken. There is no reason to believe that that isn't the exact same case today. Yeah. I'd be happy to update my priors if it is. Well, here's the other thing, too. It's not even just a U.S. trend. Like, we see these big polling misses

in favor of the Liberal Party around the world. Yeah, Brazil just happened. Exactly. I mean, that was the one that I was really thinking of, but we've seen it in other places as well. So there is something going on where the polling industry admits that they haven't fixed or even figured out whatever went

wrong the last time around. So that's sort of how I'm viewing all of these polls. All right, let's dig into Pennsylvania because this is obviously one of the marquee races. Fetterman early on had a huge lead according to the polls that has tightened significantly. Here is the latest from Rasmussen, which has Fetterman at 45 and Oz at 43. So Fetterman with a narrow plus two lead. They also have the race for governor very close. Shapiro 43, Mastriano at 40. Very different picture than the picture we showed you before with CNN.

We do have, just as a reminder, go ahead and put the CNN polling there up on the screen. The next piece, which has Fetterman plus five and Mastriano, I mean, Shapiro over Mastriano plus 15. One thing that I did note here is Fetterman continues to be above water in terms of his approval rating, which for a modern politician is really quite an accomplishment. Oz significantly, almost 20 points underwater on his approval rating. And you see an even wider disparity among Shapiro and Mastroianno. Shapiro has a huge positive favorability rating. I'm not going to embarrass myself by trying to do that math live because I'm just not that smart. Mastroianno significantly underwater on his approval rating. So I think there's a battle playing out, as I was

alluding to before, of like, do I care more about how I feel about this candidate or do I care more about who I want to control the Senate in Washington? You know, even a lot of swing voters have this sort of instinct of like, oh, I want divided government to serve as a check on one party or the other, which I think is part of why you see this historical phenomenon of the party in power doing poorly in the midterms or ultimately. So kind of no matter what poll you look at, this race has definitely tightened. I think that two things have been effective for Oz. First of all, I honestly think that the biggest thing that they've done effectively is the crime messaging. And that seems to be working in a lot of states across the board right now. And then, you know, Fetterman did a really good job early on defining the Oz campaign. Now they've been kind of on their back foot trying to defend his just ability to be able to do the

job. You see that going into the debate tonight. We have Dave Weigel, who is now with that new Semaphore. He left the Post. That's a whole other story we can talk about there. But anyway, Weigel over at Semaphore now noted that Fetterman's team, we can put this up on the screen, is messaging in advance of the debate that they're kind of trying to the Herschel Walker method of downplaying expectations. They're warning that we should anticipate viral videos of him, quote, missing some words, etc. They acknowledge he was never a great debater. That was an issue in the primary where Lam Kenyatta knocked him for skipping some debates. Let me just read you a little bit more of the campaign statement. They're saying we're prepared for Oz's allies and right-wing media to circulate malicious viral videos after the debate that try to paint John in a negative light because of awkward pauses, missing some words, mushing other words together.

The captioning process might lead to time delays and errors in the exchanges between the moderators and the candidates. In fact, because the captions are going to be typed out by human beings in real time on live TV, some amount of human error in the transcription is inevitable, might cause temporary miscommunication at times. It's impossible to control and unavoidable. That's okay. What matters is that people get to see and hear John's values. So they're referring there to the fact that, you know, he has continued auditory processing issues. It's fine if he can read the text, but has trouble just like in real time hearing what people are saying and really processing that and comprehending it. So they're going to be using closed captions like we saw him use in a number of interviews, which, you know, is undoubtedly going to lead to a kind of like awkward experience.

I mean, it's jarring to watch, right? And look, more what I would say is in general, I don't think any of these things matter. We've said that over and over again. Now, look, I actually think debates are important in terms of putting candidates on the record in the future. They're really useful whenever you're looking at them years later and said, well, you said this. But in general, we have reams of political science data to show us that debates have almost no impact on the general election. And it's almost entirely like a media driven phenomenon. Now, does that mean that we won't pay attention? Sure, we'll pay attention. But again, only to look at noteworthy things, not necessarily to say that this is going to move the direction in one way or the other.

Fetterman's help is priced in at this point. You really have to have some kind of crazy, off-the-wall moment for it to penetrate really at all. I mean, we haven't seen any, there have been a number of Senate debates at this point with a bunch of clips circulating around, but they haven't really moved any of it. Ron DeSantis debated last night. Does anybody care?

There was like one or two clips where I was like, oh, it doesn't look that great. Yeah. No, it doesn't matter. It's not going to do anything. I just think that, again, I think it's sad, but people are driven much more by the national environment and frankly, the positions that these people take, as long as they hold their ground within like a median 25th to 75th percentile or whatever. Right. I mean, Fetterman, I think they're smart to downplay expectations here. And like I said, it worked out for Herschel Walker. Overall, as I watch these polls close and Republicans close the gap, it really does validate my view that candidate quality really just doesn't matter that much. I agree with you. I agree with you 100%.

Because even in the Fetterman-Oz race or in the Shapiro-Mastriano race in Pennsylvania, like you look at the approval ratings, there's these huge disparities. I think there was a time when that would dictate like, oh, this guy is going to run away with it. Now, because partisan affiliation and because politics are so national and because partisan affiliation is so strong, I just don't think it really matters that much anymore. So we have all these debates about like, how should you run and what should you be saying, you know, and like, should you align yourself more on the left or more in the center? And what's your affect be and all these things and these scandals that come out with Herschel Walker and whatever. And ultimately, even something like that, where you have a kind of extreme case of a really bad candidate who just like routinely lies and it's hypocritical in his personal life and all of that, it might make a little bit of a difference. I think Walker would probably be clearly leading that race

if he hadn't had all of these scandals. But it is not the like clear determinative factor that it ultimately once was. The last thing to note here in Pennsylvania, which is an interesting conversation in and of itself, is that Biden and Obama are planning on going to Pennsylvania to try, as Axios frames it, to lock down that state for Fetterman and for Mastriano. They're going to barnstorm Philadelphia and Pittsburgh areas on November 5th with the party nominees for Pennsylvania governor and Senate. One thing that's interesting here is that, first of all, the choice of Pennsylvania obviously is interesting. They sort of see this as, I guess, the key state in terms of being able to hold on to the Senate. The other thing that's interesting here, though, is that Biden has really not campaigned for Democrats hardly at all. I mean, he's done a little bit, but at this

point, Trump had fronted rallies in 26 cities leading into his midterm election and Obama had held 14. I mean, Trump famously loves going out and being with the crowd, whatever, he eats it up. Right. But even, you know, Obama, who was equally as unpopular as Biden back in that point, and in some ways was more of a central figure in terms of the election and the messaging and whatever. He had gone out and held 14 rallies. So read into that what you will. Personally, you know, I mean, Biden's not great on the stump. He wasn't good on the stump in his own campaign. Sort of low energy, you know, kind of putting on display, creating opportunities for people to see some of the brain malfunctions and whatever. So I don't think that they've seen it as that much

of an asset either for him or for the candidates for him to be on the trail. But nevertheless, the two are reuniting for this tour of Pennsylvania, apparently. Yeah. I mean, that's interesting. I actually saw them speak in Pennsylvania. I think it was 2012. It was kind of interesting. It was a very different Biden back then. Yeah, that's right. Obama, look, he's a formidable force on the stump. That being said, the stump actually mattered. There really is not a lot of evidence to show that either. It really is crazy when you consider like all of the things that people pour money into. And at the end of the day, negative ads and then the national mood

seem to matter more than anything. And negative ads are probably a lot less effective than the national mood. Like I would much rather just something happened to Joe Biden or, you know, I'm saying this not in a good way, but like it'd be better if the economy crashed or something like that right before the election than any ad dollar you spend. I remember in my own hometown in College Station,

we had a place, a guy named Chet Edwards. He had survived every single challenge. He represented, he was a Democrat representing like an R plus 26 district. He always won on local issues, veterans affairs. He lived in office for 20 years. Great constituent services, that kind of guy. Incredible, blue dog to the core, all of that.

2010, wiped out by 30 points and he had survived 20 point lead. 30 points. 30 points, he lost the biggest margin in the entire House of Representatives. Wow. And I remember asking him, I was like, is there anything you could have done? He's like, nothing. No.

Nothing I could have done in this election. You know, there's having personally lost a congressional race by a large margin, there's some comfort in it. Because, yeah, you just know. You don't agonize over like, oh, it was just a few hundred votes. Have I just done that? No. You just look at it, you're like, there is no way anyone could have pulled this thing off, no matter how much money or different decisions or whatever. And I do think increasingly that's the thing.

You know, something that underscores my case also in Wisconsin in that CNN poll, there is no overlap basically at all between the people who have a favorable view of Fetterman and the people that have a favorable view of Oz. You're one or the other. There is like, so let me, I'll give you the numbers. 79% of Pennsylvania likely voters like one of them and dislike the other. 1% have a positive view of both and 8% have a negative view of both. So there's only 1% of Pennsylvania voters that's like, you know, either of these guys, they're kind of, they're kind of okay dudes. Like almost everybody is either I like Oz or I like Betterman and there is no in between. And like I said, Wisconsin, it was exactly, exactly the same dynamic.

Not that surprising, I guess, but just kind of interesting to actually see the numbers on that. Completely agree. Okay, let's go ahead and move on to Ukraine. Some fascinating stuff happening here in Washington. There's been some major debates. Counterpoints did a great job covering it. But we have an update on the Democratic front. For a while, Crystal and I have been asking, we're like, hey, where is the anti-war movement?

Like, does it even exist? So yesterday, heartened to see a letter. Let's put this up there on the screen. This makes it actually bipartisan in terms of criticism of the war. Paul called on Biden to have unprecedented, to pair their unprecedented economic and military support with, quote, proactive diplomatic push, redoubling efforts to seek a realistic framework for a ceasefire. That's it. If you go ahead and you read their letter, it is one of the most innocuous things possible. They do not call into question ongoing arms sales to Ukraine. They do not say that the U.S. should force the Ukrainians' hands. They do not say into question ongoing arms sales to Ukraine. They do not say that the U.S. should

force the Ukrainians' hands. They do not say many of the provocative things. In fact, they go out of their way, clearly, to not say that with reassuring language about, of course, it's up to the Ukrainians. And of course, we see Russia's not good actors here. Of course, we know this would be very difficult, but maybe, kind of, sort of, we should consider possibly thinking about diplomatic action. That's it. That's basically the letter. That is all they say. And I will very difficult, but maybe kind of, sort of, we should consider possibly thinking about diplomatic actions. That's it. That's basically the letter. That is all they said. And I will read you the conclusion. In conclusion, we urge you to make vigorous diplomatic efforts in support of a negotiated settlement and ceasefire, engage in direct talks with Russia, explore prospects for

a new European security arrangement acceptable to all parties that will allow for a sovereign independent Ukraine, and in coordination with our Ukrainian partners, seek a rapid end to the conflict and reiterate this goal as America's chief priority. That's it. That's all they said. that will allow for a sovereign and independent Ukraine, and in coordination with our Ukrainian partners, seek a rapid end to the conflict and reiterate this goal as America's chief priority. That's it. That's all they said. Frankly, innocuous, not particularly groundbreaking. Many much more provocative things have been said on this show, of which, you know, the pro-Ukraine people have been upset about.

That's fine. You could be upset about this. But I don't see how this is anything not within the bounds of public debate. And yet, the freak out that this letter caused in Washington is unparalleled. And especially because they're on the Democratic side and they're much more susceptible, I think, tell me if you disagree, to criticism from elite media circles and all of that. They caved within a matter of hours. That letter came out in the afternoon, four to five hours later. Put this up there on the screen. Pramila Jayapal, go ahead and issues a statement. She says, in a letter to President Biden, my colleagues and I

advocated for the administration to continue ongoing support. Let me be clear, we are united as Democrats in our unequivocal commitment to supporting Ukraine in their fight for democracy and freedom in the face of it. Diplomacy is an important tool that can save lives, but it is just one tool, as we also made explicitly clear all of that. I mean, it's a total capitulation where they came out and just said, actually, no, we didn't mean it. And actually, we're 100% in line with President Biden. And please don't criticize us anymore. We're not anti-Ukraine. We really just want democracy. It's just hilarious and pathetic to watch this real capitulation in real time. I mean, just instant, right? And I was tracking because

even as like moderate and carefully worded and milquetoast as this thing was, I was like, this is 30 Democrats. They're not all squad members, you know, AFC and Cori Bush and those folks, Ilhan, they were on it. Yeah, that's right. But it was also these sort of like more main, Jamie Raskin and other sort of like mainline figures. Sheila Jackson Lee from Texas. Right. I was like, okay. All right.

We're at least opening up a conversation. And I was shocked because I knew they were going to get massive backlash because, you know, we see the way that this all unfolds. There is zero room to question the direction and the strategy whatsoever. Zero, okay? So I was truly surprised and I was truly impressed. I was truly impressed. Ro Khanna is the only person I've heard saying really any of that before this letter comes out.

And then I start to watch online. In fact, while we were planning our show, I was looking at the replies and the quote tweets from all of the blob aligned mainstream resistance. All these people just went all in piling on these people, even some of their fellow members of the quote unquote progressive caucus like Ruben Gallego going all in, trashing them. They're being accused of being Russian stooges. Marcos Militsis accused them of making, quote, common cause with Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, J.D. Vance, and the rest of the MAGA crowd. All of this just absolute vicious attacks on these people, questioning their motives, questioning their intelligence, questioning the timing of the letter, everything. And almost instantly, they completely cave.

It's so depressing. It is so incredibly dispiriting to see that you can't even open the door a crack to saying, maybe we should think about diplomacy to end this war. And Ryan Grim, I think we have this. Let's put this up on the screen. Of course, our CounterPoints co-host here, he had a great article breaking all of this down. He says 30 House Democrats tried to gently open the door to diplomacy in Ukraine. It was slammed in their face by the end of the day. And he goes into some of the pushback that we saw online and on cable news and in other places. He goes into the timeline of how instantly Pramila Jayapal, in particular, just completely

caved. And it's utterly pathetic. He quotes here Eric Sperling, who's executive director of Just Foreign Policy, which had endorsed this letter. And he actually made, I thought, an interesting point. He cast the extreme opposition to it as a sign of the frag happened with the war in Iraq and many others throughout human history, war proponents attempt to silence debate in large part because they are not confident in their arguments and they are afraid that pro-diplomacy views will appeal to average Americans. And that's exactly what we have seen when the question has been asked, there is a large majority of people who are interested in diplomacy. Because guess what? If we want this war to end, that's the way that we're going to... I mean, even if you imagine, which most analysts don't say that Ukraine, even if we continue to arm them or not, most of them don't think that they can outright win and push Russia all the way out of their territory. But let's say, OK, maybe they could. Do you really think that Vladimir

Putin is just going to sit back and accept defeat without somehow escalating, without some sort of desperate moves, without creating some sort of chaos and catastrophe? Because I sure don't. So the idea that you can't even say this without being viciously smeared and attacked online and accused both of being, you know, Russian propagandists, but also the ultimate sin of having anything in common with, you know, people who are supposed to be out of bounds, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who I'm no fan of, who I think is a ridiculous person.

But you can use that hard partisan divide to just shut people up. It's so disgraceful, I can't even wrap my head around it. I mean, honestly, I am finding some comfort in this crystal because I am just seeing that there is a massive political hole waiting to be filled that will one day make its voice heard by the democratic process. Americans are not stupid. The closer that we get to nuclear war, they're going to say, hell no, we're not interested in this. The establishment and the Ukrainians have made a tremendous, tremendous error in allying themselves with a mainstream Democratic Party, which is about to get its ass kicked in Congress. And guess what? House Republicans, there is already a civil war that is erupting.

That's right. Put this up there on the screen, which is that Kevin McCarthy came out and said to Punchbowl News, actually, we are very likely not to approve any more aid to Ukraine. Now, they used fiscal language in order to say that, and whatever, I mean, I guess, better than nothing. But Mitch McConnell said, no, that's not going to stand, all of that. Now, listen, do I think Kevin McCarthy will actually have the stones to stick by his position? No, I think he'll probably cave to the blob as well. But what it does show me is that if the pressure is on enough to McCarthy for him to publicly come out and to question the Washington consensus, imagine what a Donald Trump-like figure who we showed you is already advocating for negotiation and diplomacy. Let's say the war gets even hotter ahead of the 2024 election. Remember, everybody thought that Americans were going to freak out when Trump was calling out NATO allies.

Didn't happen. Everybody thought that the Americans were going to say, my God, he's questioning the free trade consensus. Nope. Actually, it turns out that they support it in wide numbers. So, listen, they have ceded the ground for the debate to the fringe and to Donald Trump. He is not a fool. Trump, if his his greatest skill is intuiting which areas of public consensus and rhetoric are completely out of the bounds, seizing onto it and hammering it home and hammering it and pissing off the establishment who screech and make the they make the issue even louder for Americans who love to see them melt down. So the Ukraine consensus of February of 2022 is long gone. Go ahead and take a look at every poll that exists. GOP voters are split right down the middle on continued aid for Ukraine. Every Concerned Veterans of America poll that we've ever showed you has shown a tremendous preference for diplomacy. Right now, the entire Ukraine debate really is shrouded in secrecy. They don't want people to know. And look, you know, we're not stupid. As many people could watch this show, as many people watch the news. Most Americans have no idea what's going on in Ukraine. They have no idea how close we are to a Cuban missile crisis. I said this

before. I believe one of the most shameful things that Joe Biden has done is to tell a bunch of rich Democratic donors that we are on the verge of nuclear Armageddon. And if you believe that, you owe a direct address to the American people to tell it. But he can't tell you that because if you do, you're going to be like, well, hold on a second then. What are we doing in Ukraine?

Are we going to stop that? He would prefer everybody go about their lives and go to the gym and argue about inflation or whatever because the longer that happens, Washington is allowed

to continue doing what it wants. It operates in secrecy. And yet they never learn their lesson. They didn't learn it from Iraq. They didn't learn it from Libya. They didn't learn it from Afghanistan. Americans will make their voice heard eventually in some way. And you are not going to like it when that day comes. That's right. And the instinct to just completely shut down any discussion, like there is literally, you are not allowed to dissent even one inch, which is effectively what this letter was. This letter was like one inch of dissent and they had everything thrown at them to shut them down. And, you know, they instantly cave. And this is a

repeated problem, obviously, with the, you know, so-called progressive caucus, where they cannot take any heat from Democratic leadership, from the mainstream press, from freaking idiot pontificators on Twitter. They can't take it. They just instantly fold. And so it is really depressing. Ro Khanna did have a decent statement even after everybody else around him capitulated. He said to Ryan, it should not be controversial to say we need to explore every diplomatic avenue to seek a just peace and to end the war, including the engagement of our allies to help with that. He's right. It shouldn't be controversial. But apparently this is, you know, considered completely out of bounds to even have the conversation about a diplomatic end to this war

when the president of the United States is openly admitting that we could face potential nuclear Armageddon. And yet we're still like, yeah, this direction we're going in is fine. And you can't even question it. You can't even say anything about it. You can't even say, suggest at all a different direction. It's so depressing to me. I wish they just wouldn't have said anything. And let's show them why. Why did this happen? Put this up there on the screen from the It's so depressing to me. I wish they just wouldn't have said anything. elite press, because if you suggest anything even close to diplomacy, you are a Putin asset. I have no love for Vladimir Putin, okay? I don't want to die in a nuclear Armageddon. I want America to survive and to be better off. I don't think that has anything to do with Vladimir Putin. I don't get to exist, sadly, in a world where he is dead and doesn't exist. We have to accept terms

on which they are. We can hope for many things. I hope for a world with no war, but I'm not an idiot. It's like one of these things where we have to accept the reality of the conditions as they exist in terms of their nuclear power status, in terms of what their red lines are. These are not things that we necessarily should be happy about. We have our red lines. They've been very clearly articulated. It's called NATO. Anything outside of that really is up for debate. This is the part of the thing that drives me insane. Whenever they say, well, if we capitulate in Ukraine, what will stop us from capitulating in NATO? NATO is a Senate ratified treaty.

The president has no authority to even withdraw from it, even if he wanted to. If they attack NATO, we will be in a nuclear war. If they attack anywhere outside of NATO, we have a choice. If we have a choice, we should probably do anything humanly possible in order to make sure that that does not occur. We had a play of this in the Cuban Missile Crisis. We had a play of this in Korea. I wish for the days of statesmen who had to confront the reality of war. We had three successive presidents that faced a nuclear crisis. Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy. All of them were forged in the crisis of World War II. Truman backed down and fired MacArthur because he feared that war over little Korea would have a conflagration. Basically pursued a strategy which may not have been best

on the battlefield. This is controversial, according to MacArthur, but had an overarching diplomatic aim of, I do not want to confront the Soviet Union. Same thing with Dwight D. Eisenhower. They wanted him to use nukes or threaten them in the Suez Crisis at Dien Bien Phu. He said, you're out of your mind. I've been through this. I'm not going to happen. John F. Kennedy, the exact same. I fear that our politicians have just been so far removed from the reality of what a global crisis actually looks like

that that's the cavalier nature of why elite media, too, whose sons, of course, have never served in the military or have any generational connection to this. They have no idea. I just watched All Quiet on the Western Front. I urge all of you to watch it whenever it comes out on Netflix. I saw it on its limited theater release. That's what war looks like.

People dying up until the last minute of the armistice for some scrap of France which was turned into mud. That's the reality of what the situation is. Right. And I mean, it just there's so much fuzzy thinking here. People love their simplistic narratives. And I get it. The Ukrainians are the good guys and Putin and the Kremlin and his allies are the bad guys. Like, no disagreement here. But give me some sort of logical endgame that makes any kind of sense that doesn't end in complete catastrophe

for the Ukrainians, for Europe, and potentially for the world. Give me some logical step-by-step. How do you see this thing ending? They never tell you that. They never get to that. And I think even though obviously we're very clear and very passionate about our own perspective on how this should all play out, I think we have tried to hold space for what the opposing view is, what the opposing arguments are. And I fully admit it is a complex situation. And the idea of giving into any of

Putin's demands or desires here is terrible. It feels terrible. It doesn't feel right. It doesn't feel just. I get that instinct and I get that perspective 100%. All I'm asking is that you also allow space for people to have a different view of the best way to approach this conflict and not accuse them of being in bed with this bad actor or this bad actor or being Kremlin stooges or being friends with Marjorie Taylor Greene or whatever. Allow people to have a dissenting view. And then guess what, guys? Those who are such big defenders of democracy, allegedly, why don't you let the voters hear out that fulsome debate and see what the American people think about this? Because I do think Sperling is 100% correct here. The vehemence of the reaction against such a totally tepid, reasonable,

couched in a million different phrases and language letter, the reaction to that is incredibly telling of how fragile their position really is. I completely agree. And meanwhile, the reaction to that is incredibly telling of how fragile their position really is. I completely agree. And meanwhile, the situation in Ukraine is getting heated and is getting very worrisome. So let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. We talked previously about the calls between the Russian defense minister and also our defense ministers, many in NATO countries. Well, that has continued at the conversational level, even more worrying some, between the chiefs of staff of the U.S. Joint Chiefs, General Mark Milley, and his Russian counterpart, as well as the U.K. and as well as France. The Russians are not dropping this so-called dirty bomb language. They are claiming consistently that it is on the verge, and they are going to use it as a pretext for escalation.

The U.S., after put out a statement, let's put this up there, says that it sees no indication that Russia is preparing to use nuclear weapons, but says that dirty bomb claims are a pretext for escalation in Ukraine. This morning, Crystal, things continue to move in a very, very worrisome direction. So the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia actually just put out a statement where Lavrov, their own foreign minister, has come out and said that he believes that there will be a dirty bomb warning. Let me go and read it to you. He says that dirty bomb warnings are continuing in Ukraine. And he says that we'll have some pretext for response. Now, why does that matter? When the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Russian minister to the United Nations are all putting tweets out in a concerted propaganda campaign saying, oh, Ukraine is about to use a

dirty bomb, all of that. At the same time, by the way, the U.S. warning about no potential nuclear threat on the Russian side, that does not currently stand. Max Sedan, who is the Financial Times correspondent in Moscow, put out a statement actually showing that a U.S. official said on background to reporters that there were some worrying signs. Yeah. So you have that. This is pulled from a New York Times article. It's kind of buried in there. It's sort of like, you know, classic bury the lead. But one senior U.S. official said there were new troubling developments involving Russia's nuclear arsenal. The official asked for anonymity and declined to provide any details given the sensitivity of the issue. Now, I should say the same article quotes other officials who are saying, no, we don't see any movement. We don't see any change.

As you know, we continue to be concerned, and especially with the dirty bomb rhetoric, we don't actually see anything shifting here. But there was at least one senior U.S. official that was telling the New York Times this for whatever reason or whatever they're saying, we have no idea. And, you know, we should also say, like, remember the very beginning of the invasion, there were all kinds of, there was all kinds of rhetoric coming from the Russians about like, oh, the Ukrainians are going to do this and the Ukrainians were going to do that. And the whole idea then too was like, oh, this is a false flag. And they're going to say that it's the Ukrainians, even though they're the real ones that do it. And that actually never, that never really happened. So we should say there is a

history here too, of Russia using this sort of like, you know, rhetorical, whatever they think they're doing here, and then not it not leading to some sort of false flag action from them. But obviously, that is the concern at this point. Yeah, I mean, I think we should also say that this was a pretext for, look, nobody will ever know what happened in Syria. What we do know is that the Russians claimed that Assad opponents had used some sort of chemical weapons, and the same general who was in charge right here of Ukraine, who was in charge of the Syria campaign, used it as a pretext in order to drop cluster bombs, vacuum bombs, all of that on civilians and massacre like 250,000 people in the Battle of Aleppo and further. So this is not outside of the Russian playbook. What some people are saying is that they're worried about Russian

nuclear escalation. I mean, I'm worried just as much also about conventional. A lot of people can die in conventional war. They have a hell of a lot of munitions if they want to, and they can launch a full-fledged attack. They've got all these conscripts. I mean, we'll see if they're even useful on the battlefield, but bodies are bodies. We have no idea. Kursan, you know, they keep saying it's going to fall.

Hasn't fallen yet. We don't know what exactly that looks like. Belarus has a troubling sign. They have a variety of options that they can reach into if they want, and the fighting season really only has three weeks left in terms of the ground and before snow and muddy conditions strike the region. So we'll see.

Right now is a very, very tense time. I think it's probably the best time in the world to have a debate. And it's also the time whenever we are lacking in- We're not allowed to do that. Let's put this next one up there. Also from Ukraine's own commander of forces on the ground. In that CBS News interview that we showed and talked to you a little bit about yesterday,

he said, quote, the world should be worried about a Putin nuclear threat. Not from us, from the Ukrainians. Now, of course, they say, if so, then the U.S. should come into the war, all of that. So maybe they have an incentive in order to continue pumping these up because they effectively just want the U.S. to fight the war for them. But listen, I mean, troubling rhetoric all around, and we are forced to take it seriously, even if we would like to see a different outcome. Indeed.

There was an interesting moment yesterday with a lot of speculation in Washington when the DOJ, Merrick Garland and others at the Justice Department called a press conference about an urgent national security matter. It ended up actually being about an indictment of some Chinese spies here in Washington, almost a comical case, which shows some of the tech wars that are happening at the governmental level right now. Let's take a listen. Over the past week, the Justice Department has taken several actions to disrupt criminal activity by individuals working on behalf of the government of the People's Republic of China. As always, the defendants in these cases are presumed innocent

until proven guilty in a court of law. Earlier today, in the Eastern District of New York, a complaint was unsealed charging two PRC intelligence officers with attempting to obstruct, influence, and impede a criminal prosecution of a PRC-based telecommunications company. The complaint alleges that in 2019, the defendants directed an employee at a U.S. government law enforcement agency to steal confidential information about the United States criminal prosecution of the company. The defendants believed that they had recruited the U.S. employee as an asset, but in fact, the individual they recruited was actually a double agent working on behalf of the FBI. An amusing turn of events there. I think the case really was meant to just embarrass the Chinese intelligence services for being so embarrassing by trying to recruit somebody and pay them off. Embarrass them for being embarrassing.

They really thought that they had it all figured out. They're like, oh, we're just going to pay off this guy and we'll get our thing. And of course, the entire thing was like an FBI op the entire time. I mean, it does underscore a convenient talking point, which is the company Huawei, which was under investigation. The Chinese government keeps saying, well, we have nothing to do with it. It's completely separate. We have no control over Huawei. Well, then why are you using your spies to try and defend them in U.S. court? That's interesting. It also highlights, actually, some of the troubling connections that Huawei has here in Washington.

Ken Vogel over the New York Times did a great job, put this up there on the screen. He shows just how many U.S. lobbyists are on the take for Huawei, which, you know, technically a foreign company, but in reality is a complete foreign government. The Podestas, you guys will remember, Squire, Pat and Boggs, Imperium Global Advisors. These are big players in D.C. Rosewood Consulting. These aren't like fringe players. These are some of the big dogs. I was going to say,

these are some of the top Democratic lobbyists in all of D.C. Also, Crystal, our old company, The Hill, actually used to have Huawei ads,

which used to trouble me significantly whenever we were over there. So nice to be independent, isn't it? Yeah. The point is, is that Huawei is genuinely just an arm of the Chinese intelligence services. I mean, I guess

that's fine if we're all just open to telling the truth. However, should you allow them access to your critical infrastructure like 5G? I mean, that seems pretty insane. Definitely not something they would ever allow you over there. And yet, the fact that it's even up for debate here, I think is completely crazy. Let's go and put the next one that's even up for debate here, I think is completely crazy. Let's go and put the next one that's up there on the screen. Really what it shows you, though, is that China right now, their markets are taking a massive hit from two ends. Number one is actually their biggest stock losses since 2008 because foreigners had to sell a record of $2.5 billion in mainland shares.

What that is, is troubling sentiment from investors in Washington, in London, and in Singapore, who are worried that the inward-looking Xi Jinping administration after the People's Congress will make it much more difficult for foreigners to do business in China, beyond how difficult it is right now. And two is, look, got to give Biden credit where it's due. Some of his latest moves on the Chinese semiconductor industry. So it's complicated because it's not the victory

that some have hailed. It is good that, you know, U.S. companies and all of that have to pull out of the Chinese semiconductor industry. But there are still many American citizens who are still working

for major companies like ASML and other semiconductor companies that have been stealing U.S. technology and are effectively trying to supplant our defense industry and more. The point being, though, that the Biden administration's moves, the fact that they're willing to call out Huawei like this, their executive action on semiconductors and others, on top of Chinese kind of inward-looking, really want on their part to consolidate control and have no competing centers of government, make it a bad day for the Chinese markets. But in some ways, the CCP also doesn't really care.

What they care about is control. They care less about the economy. Yeah, I mean, that's something that's very different from here. Oh, totally. They have other goals and priorities than just, like, the stock market. And some of the numbers here, China's richest is from Bloomberg, lose $12.7 billion in a day following Xi's reshuffling and his re-anointment. You know, the richest tycoons lost $12.7 billion in market sell-off that followed Xi's tightening grip on the government. One of the things like just specifically that they're pointing to is that they're worried,

you know, there's going to be even more COVID zero lockdowns and crackdowns, obviously bad for the economy. But, you know, overall, as you were pointing to this, he, him really consolidating power with his closest allies and rooting out any sort of even remotely dissenting voices,

they're worried about what that's going to mean for ultimately foreign investment. So a lot of people are just saying, guess what? We're out. I mean, it's not a bad situation. I support it 100%. I guess if Wall Street wants to lead the way, they could be our guest. I just think it's absurd on several levels. And actually, there was some excitement on my part. And in some circles that I run in, there were some rumors going around, actually, that this was going to be the Biden administration banning TikTok. So let's go to the part two here and put this up there on the screen. This was a really landmark report that dropped a couple of days ago from Forbes magazine. And what they say is that TikTok parent company ByteDance plan to use TikTok to monitor the physical location of specific

American citizens. And I think that why this is so important is that, look, you can, you know, everybody has ridiculed people saying that we should be worried about the Chinese government have access to data. They're like, who cares? Why does it matter? Well, specifically in this report, what they say is that internal materials show that the TikTok CEO and others have been using data from the app to keep track of the specific location of American citizens for non-advertising purposes. Right. As in, not for ads. Right. Which is what they're, I mean, listen, Google, Facebook. You're only allowed to surveil us if you're going to try to turn a profit off of us. At least that we understand.

As a government entity, no, no, no. That's where we draw the line. You got to try to turn a profit off of us. That's the only way it's allowed. Yeah, like, listen, Facebook, Google, like, they have everything about us, but at least they're just trying to make money. Like, this is all just about, I mean, straight up surveillance. Shit should all be mailed.

By dance, honestly. And more. Yeah, I don't even disagree on that part. I mean, the surveillance capitalism stuff is incredibly nefarious as well, but yeah. What it does show us is that longstanding security experts have always warned. They're like, the TikTok app is significantly more malicious than many others in terms of the permissions that it has on your phone, even more so actually than Facebook and others. And they've been warning about some of the loopholes within it. Location data obviously is something that almost every app has. And it really just comes down to whether you trust some of the safeguards in place. And I don't trust them

on the US companies. At least in this country, you ostensibly need to get a warrant. And technically, the company can fight you in court, as we saw with Apple. That does not exist in China. The ByteDance CEO has literally had to pull apps. You know, ByteDance used to have a Reddit clone, which is like a news thing in 2016. The current CEO of the company, Zhang Ziming, I think is his name,

he had to issue an apology saying that he apologized because there was a story went viral on his app, which was embarrassing to the CCP. They destroyed the app overnight. And he had to put out a letter saying that he was apologizing for not abiding by CCP socialist principles and Xi Jinping thought. I mean, that's a literal quote from him. Well, and this is part of our like Western arrogance in a way where we've just projected our model onto them and just assumed it works just like it does here in the company.

Of course, the companies are totally separate. And why would you think that? Even here, that's not always the case. But it's a very different dynamic here when you're talking about the Chinese government and you're talking about these large companies and the way that ultimately they have the final say and they have access to everything they want to have access to. I mean, there were other incidents too, I think with like a ride sharing app, remember where they were like, we want your data. And they're like, okay, I mean, we have no choice. Here you go. After pledging that, of course they would keep it ultimately private. I mean, the other thing to say here is like, there's a massive role for Congress to pass legislation that would, you know, make it so that apps are not allowed to collect data that they don't directly

need to do the thing that the app is about. You know, if you had that kind of legislation in, because right now it's basically the Wild West. If you had that kind of legislation in, you could use it to crack down on TikTok and whatever data they're gathering that they don't actually need in order to be able to provide the service. Would it be like total silver bullet? No, but at least then you would have some tool that you could use and consumers would have some kind of protection, not just with TikTok,

but across all of their digital life. Yeah, and look, I think that the Biden administration is a rebind, right? Because on the one hand, they don't want to piss off young people. And I get it. I'm sure many of the people who watch the show use TikTok. On the other hand,

what I think they need to pursue is a forced sale of the company. I think that's the fairest thing, which is to say, look, I mean, I'm watch the show use TikTok. On the other hand, what I think they need to pursue is a forced sale of the company. I think that's the fairest thing, which is to say, look, I mean, I'm not a fan of TikTok, like in terms of what it's doing to society, but whatever. It's a free country. People can do what they want.

I would just say we need to safeguard citizens and say this company, as this is what the Trump administration tried to do, he's such an idiot, he wasn't actually able to pull it off, which is you're like, look, TikTok can exist. You just have to sell it to a US entity and keep all keep all the data on u.s soil the current view that the biden administration is pursuing i reject completely they're trying to broker some deal where tiktok only stores its data here in in oracle servers and a quote independent board will

review it from time to time but bite danceteDance remains ownership. It's a ludicrous. You cannot have that whenever ByteDance's CEO and all of them are complete. I'm not even going to say toadies because I don't even think that they necessarily want to be in this situation. But if you want to be a billionaire in China, you don't want to happen what Jack Ma happened. You don't want to be locked in your basement and do a forced apology video. You got to toe the line. And even if you don't, you got family, you got kids, you got uncles, they'll do anything they can to twist your arm. So they're in a tough spot, and we should just put ourselves in the easiest position. I think a forced sale makes the absolute

most amount of sense. And if they can pull it off, I would support it 100%. But if they pursue the other option, absolutely not. Yeah, that makes sense. I do actually like TikTok. I think TikTok is fun. I think it's funny. I think it's very creative. It can be. Yeah, it is. It's like all things. All things are fine. I mean, lots of it is stupid. But when I look at time on app for some of these kids, I'm like, this cannot be good. Look, I mean, look, I'm just saying. Yeah, but that's everything. It is everything. I mean, it is very like, it's very addictive. There's no doubt about it, but that's the whole goal of every single freaking thing they put on this. True.

So that's a whole separate conversation. Okay. Speaking of the youth, we got some new troubling numbers about exactly what happened to our kids and to our students during the pandemic. Let's go ahead and put this up on the screen from the Wall Street Journal. Math scores dropped in every state during the pandemic. Report card shows the largest education department analysis of test scores since COVID-19 pandemic began reveals sweeping declines. I want to read you a little bit of this so you can have some more of the details. So they revealed a nationwide plunge in reading as well that wiped out three decades of games.

So this was not just in math. This was reading and math. Low-performing fourth grade students saw larger declines in both math and reading scores compared with high-performing ones. So if, you know, the kid was already doing well, they didn't suffer too much of a hit. The kids that most needed the help and, you know, were the furthest behind, well, guess what? They got even further behind. They also found that black and Hispanic students in the fourth grade saw larger score drops in math than white students. I have no doubt there is a massive class dimension to that. The kids who were the most vulnerable or the most precarious situations, they are the ones that suffered the most. I was looking at some of these numbers.

Interesting to note locally that D.C., Virginia, and Maryland were among the worst in terms of the test score drops. And of course, the test results follow a period in which school districts wrestled with how quickly to resume in-person instruction during the pandemic. Scores fell across jurisdictions with differing policies for schooling in the pandemic. So this is part of what makes this really complicated. LA, which had, you know, schools shut down for some significant period of time, was actually the only place, city or state, to show a significant increase in eighth grade reading. On the other hand, you had some states that had fallen more on the let's open up more

quickly that suffered significant declines. So they point to Arizona, which returned to in-person learning relatively quickly. They still saw declines along with those that stayed remote longer, such as California. So it is a complicated picture because, you know, it'd be really clear cut if you could just look and see a clear correlation between like, okay, Florida reopened quicker and their scores did better. Arizona reopened quicker, their scores did better. But it really was a nationwide phenomenon and hard to pinpoint exactly what the factors were that led to this decline. Some of the things that they point to as theories, which is all anyone has at this point, is, you know, the psychological stress of the pandemic that even if schools reopened more quickly, you know, the psychological stress of the pandemic that even if schools reopen more

quickly, you know, you probably were having, you were having sick days. I experienced this with my own kids. Once the schools were reopened, then, you know, every other week someone was having a close contact with a COVID case and having to go back home and do remote schooling again. So even when the schools were technically reopened, there still was a lot of disruption to kids being in class. And then, of course, all the, you know, stress around the pandemic and all of that certainly must have had an impact. So that's the picture. And it's really not pretty. No, it's horrific. I mean, I think what it really does show you is that you just can't put a lot of these things back in the box. Maybe some of it was inevitable, but even with school openings and all of that, at a certain

point, I remember you telling me about some of the COVID procedures at your kid's school. It's like, I don't know how you're supposed to learn in that. I just, I don't know how it's possible. Like every two weeks, someone's getting pulled out of school. And at a certain point, it's probably inevitable. Like even if you opened up or not, you know, I mean, personally, like we knew a lot of the data not that long ago, but just by unplugging from the economy, we saw this in social reasons. Like the way that people socially behave has just irrevocably changed the way that people are moving around the world. And we shouldn't be surprised then that by irrevocably pulling kids

out of school for a couple of months, a couple of months to us is not that much. A couple of months to a child's life is like, you know, if you think about percentage-wise, it's a lot, especially in terms of their learning cycle. The fact that every single one, pretty much every what state across the country is trending down, it also highlights a class dynamic, right? Which is that a lot of working parents just didn't have the time to sit with their kids

and make sure they were getting through. We've long seen that richer parents have the luxury and the ability in order to spend more time with their kids, learning and to help them with homework or tutors, all of that. Now the gap is only going to get even worse. And yeah, and you can see that right in the class data, which is that the richer households basically find the poor households of which public education is supposed to be the real backstop. It's supposed to give you something in order to be able to lift you up and equal opportunity. It was, it's a huge

failure. I don't really know how to fix it, to be honest. DC, I always think about this. DC has the highest dollar per capita spent on children and the worst test scores in the entire country. I'm like, I don't know. It's not more money. I don't know what it is. I couldn't tell you what the actual answer is.

There was a huge, you know, there's huge disparities too in internet access. Oh yeah, yeah, that's true. There's something very dear to my heart, living in a place that does not have broadband internet. I mean, my kids have all kinds of advantages. Very lucky, but they did struggle with the internet. Just doesn't really work that well at my house. And you couple on top of that, if you're a working family, you don't have good internet access, like you're having to rearrange your life to try to make this work with your kid. It was a disaster.

And I've said this a number of times, but it's really important. I think we learn the lessons from this. And again, I want to point out, like, this was across the board. This wasn't just in the places that stayed closed the longest. So it is a complex picture. There's no doubt about it. But, you know, in the early days when we didn't know how deadly the pandemic would be to kids and there was a ton of fear and just, again, we just didn't know, right? It was all so new. To me, it was entirely understandable and justifiable. That spring, I totally, I supported it. I pulled my kids out even the day before the school district announced

because there was so little information about what the risks were for them, what the risks were for their family members, you know, elderly, grandparent, all those sorts of things, okay? That was the spring. Then when you got around to the fall and schools were still not reopening, even though at that point we had enough data to know a lot more about the risks,

we had the beginnings of data to know about some of the learning loss and the challenges from this approach, that's when, to me, the big, massive mistakes were made. And I just hope for these kids that they're able to regain what they lost during this time period. And it's not clear to me at all that that is going to be a possibility. I mean, this period may impact their trajectory for their entire life. And that's just a really sad reality that we're facing right now. I don't think there's a question.

I don't know if it can be undone. I think there's major structural problems in public education today. And the system is not really designed for any of that. This would be a great thing for our leaders to be obsessed with. Imagine if they spent all day thinking and talking about this.

We can't even agree on what the point of an education is, which is actually a deep question, by the way. It's not a simple, straightforward thing. But yeah, there's a lot we could be doing better. That's really sad. Okay, let's move on. This is a hilarious moment from MSNBC. This is a true worlds colliding.

I enjoy it for two reasons, which is that crossover between these two groups is almost very rarely seen. It needs to happen more often, honestly. It really does. It's great television. Not only is it great television, in a way, you can learn something from each other if you care to listen, which unfortunately neither group here really was. So MSNBC held a focus group with some Pittsburgh Trump supporters about Doug Mastriano and January 6th. And the takeaway from this is that neither side

was at all prepared for a discussion whatsoever, and it went totally off the rails. Let's take a listen. Mastriano was at the insurrection, and he was photographed breaching one of the restricted areas. Is that okay? Which area? Because I saw a video where Capitol officers were taking away barriers and unlocking doors. So, I mean, I... They opened the gates. So it shouldn't be disqualifying for an elected official if they participated in January 6th. He didn't strike anybody. He didn't hurt anybody.

And the only one that died was a protester there, not a Capitol police officer. An unarmed female veteran. That's the only one that died. That's the only one who died. A police officer did die. No. It was a stroke. That's not...

That's not on site. That's caused by that. That's because he shouldn't have been a police officer. So what do you make, though, overall of January 6th? I mean, watching that footage, it was pretty disturbing. I mean, there were people throwing excrement at the walls, and it was the Capitol. It looked a lot like Antifa's actions to me. Except on a much smaller scale.

It looked the same as the Black Lives Matter riots. That's what I saw the similarities to be. I mean, not just one. Burns, Kenosha. But so it's okay just because one side that you disagree with? No, I'm saying it's even infiltrated. It's good for one, it's good for the other. Anybody who harms anybody, anybody who caused property destruction, that needs to be dealt with.

But if you're there making your voice heard at the people's house, no less, that's, again, it's a fundamental constitutional right of an American citizen. And people should not be being held political prisoner because of it. For misdemeanors. That's East Germany. That's East Germany. Yeah, that's what's scary. It was an actual fiery, but mostly peaceful protest. And the other ones that were the opposite. Was the protest legitimate in your eyes? Our administration, I feel like, is using it as their Reichstag fire. Yeah, that's exactly what they're using it as. Do you think that President Trump could have coiled the violence that day? Not him.

I don't think so. It started while he was still speaking. I was actually there. I was there to see what I thought was going to be the last time I ever saw Trump. So did he tell everybody to go and start riding? No, I didn't think so. No, and actually, I stayed for the whole speech. Like, a ton of people did.

And then we all headed to the Capitol because he said, let's go to the Capitol and peacefully let our voices be heard. And we get to the Capitol and we're like, what the hell is going on? Because it had already happened. I'm pretty sure I saw Democratic operatives instigating people to cross barriers. All right. Lots to say. Yeah, I like. Lots to say. Yeah, there is a lot to say. I mean, the part, the like cognitive dissonance part that I like the most about it is how

they're both like, it was peaceful. And I actually was there and I walked over with other Trump supporters. And then at the same time, they're like, I think it was Antifa. Yeah. What I enjoy about it is that there are certain facts that neither side has ever really heard. So I remember, I forget which guy I was interviewing. He was like, a police officer was beaten to death. And I was like, hey, man, I'm not justifying January 6th.

This is not true. I was like, a guy died from a heart attack. I'm not saying it wasn't precipitated by a riot, but he wasn't beaten to death. He's like, this is a lie. And I was like, oh, you don't even know the facts. Like, you're an author. And, you know, of course, you know, on the same thing same thing, they'll say, on one hand, it was completely peaceful. On the other hand, they were democratic operatives. Are they democratic? I don't know. Were they working

for the FBI? That's actually a whole other question. And really what it is, is that the FBI reports that you and I have delved into here, there is no acceptance or even really, frankly, awareness in a lot of the mainstream press. And that's actually part of why I think reaching a consensus on this is so difficult, which is that both sides has an array of facts, which the other is generally not aware of and makes it so that your own, like, for example, what they're talking about people being held in prison, that actually is a real issue in the DC jail, you know, people being held without bail and all that. And that's what uses the political prisoner the D.C. jail, you know, people being held without bail and all that.

And that's what uses a political prisoner rhetoric and all that. I don't even think many mainstream reporters like even aware. And if you are aware and you support it, I think you should just say that. But the fact is, is that it's new info coming at each other at the time. And it just highlights like how far past each other most people are. And in general, though, I support this. I thought it was good. I'm glad that they aired the entire segment. Yeah, I think they should do more, even though it has a feel of

like, remember right after 2016, they were all like, let's go on safari in the industrial Midwest where we've never set foot and really don't understand. There was sort of like a caricature-ish view that was created, but I still think that's better than nothing. And yeah, I mean, to me, the biggest takeaway from this, like, obviously they've been filled full of all kinds of propaganda, very selective telling of the facts, things that are in Congress that don't even make sense together. All of that being said, it would be a lot better if we didn't have completely siloed information systems. And in a way, the direction that media is going in, there is an even larger risk that we silo even further. Oh, that's their fault. See, that's MSNBC's fault.

Yeah, I mean, 100%. But what I'm talking about is even in the new independent media landscape, there's a lot of opportunity for siloing and increasingly actually niche factions. So it's not just like the Democratic view of the world, the Republican view of the world, but there's like these increasingly siloed viewpoints that are totally shut off from other parts of the news and information ecosystem. So it is like, I mean, this is a challenge that is going to have to continue to be confronted and dealt with. I mean, it's part of what we try to do here and try to, you know, keep each other in check and try to meld together our different information ecosystems and all of those sorts of things. But unfortunately, I think these like even as cable news, which has been such a destructive and nefarious and divisive actor in American political life across the board. Even as we watch his decline and demise,

there are no guarantees that what comes after is going to ultimately serve the public better. No guarantee, but I just think it's their fault. I mean, in general, like, I bet you, I mean, I always think about that profile of one of the guys who had a heart attack on January 6th. And I'm just laughing because it was like, they described it as one of the most exciting days of his life,

which I just think is pathetic for anybody, really. And he was an Alabama guy. He voted for Obama, like 2008. It's from ProPublica, if anybody's interested in reading it. Like basically lost a union job and just lost his mind after became unemployed. We've met some of those people. I was saying, Crystal and I recently had a run-in with a full-blown QAnon supporter. And, you know, it's aggravating and it's really annoying to be spouted at a bunch of conspiracy.

But it also came out that this person had lost their house in 2008 and had been completely screwed by the system. And so I'm not explaining, like, why I think these views are good. But, like, I'm like, okay, well, I mean, I could somewhat understand like the social conditions through which something like this can arise. You can choose to take that view of it or you can take the other view of it. I mean, look, ultimately, MSNBC, CNN, Fox News, they're looking out for their bottom line. The thing that sells for them is feeding a selective view, selective facts, partisan view of the world, you know, that does where the answer to every segment on Fox News is, therefore, Democrats are bad. And the answer to every segment on MSNBC, including this one, I'm sure, is, therefore, Republicans are bad.

They don't do that because, you know, they're good people or bad people or evil people or wonderful people or whatever. They do it because that's what clicks, that's what sells, that's what their audience has become accustomed to ultimately wanting. And so you have to dismantle that system. But the point I'm getting at is you have to be thoughtful about what replaces it to deal with those issues and that incentive structure that ultimately leads to us basically living in two different realities, two different countries, two different views of the world, at least two different views of even how events are ultimately unfolding. I absolutely agree. Crystal, what are you taking a look at? Very bad news for Democrats this morning,

and this one really is kind of a stunner. So Cook Political Report has shifted Representative Sean Patrick Maloney's race from lean Democrat to toss up. That is a big deal for a couple of reasons. So first of all, this is a New York district that Biden won by 10 points. It should be a slam dunk for Democrats. And if it's not, let's be honest, they are facing imminent doom all over the map. Second, Sean Patrick Maloney just happens to be chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. In other words, he is literally the guy responsible for Democrats

trying to hold on to their House majority. And now he himself might lose. He would be the first Democratic campaign chair to lose his seat in 40 years, an indictment if there ever was one, of the thoroughly bankrupt strategy and ideology that has brought Democrats to this pathetic point. There's so much to say about this particular situation. So first of all, let's recall the backstory. New York has a new congressional district map, caused all sorts of chaos, putting Democratic incumbents against other Democratic incumbents. Some of that chaos, though, was directly caused by Sean Patrick Maloney himself, who immediately, once the map was announced with no heads up, said he would run in a newly created district that mostly lay outside of his own district boundaries.

Now, he made this choice because the new district is a slightly safer seat than the district that encompasses the bulk of where he currently represents. Now, all of this was already a bad look. You're the dude who's supposed to be telling Democrats how to win, but you don't even have confidence in your own ability to win in a Biden plus five district. But what made it worse is that there was no other incumbent to run in the old Maloney district, leaving it an open seat, more difficult to hold. Meanwhile, there was another incumbent in the district that Maloney jumped into. That would be Mondaire Jones. It was a whole thing at the time. You can go back. We covered it. Jones went public, trashing Maloney before eventually deciding to run in a different district where he then lost in the primary. This all fed into yet another war between the left and the corporate wing of the Democratic Party as a different progressive jumped into the primary against

Maloney. But at the end of the day, Maloney won. Seemed like it was all going his way. It's the DCCC chair, something he'd been angling for for years. He got the district he wanted. He dispatched with his left-wing opposition. Should be smooth sailing from here, right? Well, apparently not so much. Now, ironically, according to Cook Political Report and their analysis, Maloney's move to bigfoot the progressives and grab this new district of his choice may have actually backfired. Although the new district is technically more Democratic-leaning, Maloney only represents like 25% of it currently, and so that severely limits the benefits of incumbency. What's more, cut out of the district are some key constituencies that Maloney had spent a lot of time

courting and winning over. As they write, quote, Maloney thrived electorally in his old 18th CD in part because of the crossover vote he earned in the block voting Hasidic community, Kiryas Joel, which almost entirely supported Donald Trump. In 2020, Trump carried Orange County, which includes that locality, 49%, 49.3% to 49.2%. so just barely, but helped by this block voting. The same year, Maloney carried the county 55-43 by pitching his ability to secure much-needed infrastructure funding in that area. Now, that particular area is no longer in his district, and Maloney's opponent has cultivated a strong relationship with the Orthodox Jewish communities that are in the new district. Oops! But the bigger problem has less to do with these specific districts and

areas and a lot more to do with the increasing problems of the Democratic Party strategy, led by fools like Sean Patrick Maloney. First of all, the Republican culture war issue of crime is starting to beat the Democratic culture war issue of abortion. Republicans resurfaced an old debate clip of Maloney saying he supports ending cash bail, and it seems to be taking a real toll. According to Lawler's internal polling, that's the Republican that Maloney is up against, he has widened his lead from two points to six points. Now, Maloney has not shared his own internal polling, but also acknowledges this is now a tight race. Meanwhile, in his instructions and Maloney's instructions to outside groups on how to attack the Republican, Lawler, he is all in on the standard Lawler's too extreme rhetoric.

So here are the suggested attacks for any outside money riding to the rescue. Lawler was a member of a political group that was denounced for creating and disseminating an anti-Semitic video. Lawler's political consulting forum worked for a candidate with alleged ties to a dangerous right-wing militia group. Lawler opposes abortion rights and supports allowing states to set their own policies, paving the way for abortion bans that do not have exceptions for cases of rape and incest. So Maloney here, not hitting his opponent at all on economics, even though Republicans are planning, as I covered yesterday, a debt ceiling crisis in order to cut taxes for the rich and for corporations, potentially spiking inflation. Oh, and they also have floated cutting Social Security and Medicare. Oh, but instead, he's focused on the fact that a

political consulting firm, Lawler Hired, works with someone who might have ties to something bad. Fantastic attack. I'm sure that's really going to land, and I'm sure people really care more about that than whether grandma is going to be eating cat food next year. So here's the way Maloney framed the election overall in a recent Fox News op-ed. Quote, the difference between the two parties could not be more clear. On January 6, 2021, insurrectionists stormed the Capitol and beat police officers with American flags. House Democrats stepped over broken glass to certify the election, but 139 House Republicans voted to throw on Americans' votes

and side with the insurrectionists who wanted to overthrow the election just because they didn't like the results. Every day since, Democrats have rolled up their sleeves and passed impactful, popular legislation to help American families. Republicans kept sprinting down a path of extremism, hell-bent on ripping away our freedoms. He then goes on to detail the legislation that Democrats have passed under Joe Biden. Now, keep in mind, Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg says that this is literally the worst possible messaging for Democrats. According to Greenberg, it lands as tone deaf to brag about your accomplishments without offering a concrete plan for the future as Americans continue to suffer real economic pain. Quote, Republicans are hitting us on crime and border inflation. That has huge power.

And we have the self-satisfied message of how much we've accomplished rather than being focused on what is happening to people. Now, as I covered yesterday, Republicans, they provided plenty of ammunition to hit them on their disastrous economic plans. And there's lots of data to suggest that if Democrats offered even something simple, like a new child tax credit, it could be really impactful. But instead, party elites, like Maloney, have decided to lean into scolding voters about democracy without actually listening to what those voters participating in our democracy actually care about, trying to assure them that the economy is actually all good because they fixed it, even as the day-to-day reality of struggle obviously remains.

Ironically, if the supposedly democracy-obsessed Democrats lose, it will be precisely because they ignored the democratic will of the people. Perfect encapsulation of their problems here. Sean Patrick Maloney. And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. All right, Sagar, what are you looking at? Well, something I've long emphasized here at Breaking Points is the importance of the U.S. birth rate, its death rate, and the causes of death and life expectancy. The most basic job of a civilization is to replace itself. It's hardwired into our DNA. It's something that modernity has largely led people to stray away from,

for a variety of reasons. Over the last few years, the story has been the same. Americans are having fewer children, they're getting married less, and they are dying much earlier. The contradiction of our lifespan hit a major crisis in 2021 when deaths of despair combined with COVID dropped life expectancy at the most precipitous rate since the 1920s. That's a trend you mostly see in third world countries, one that mirrors what began to happen in the former Soviet Union right before its collapse. It's bleak. But underneath is a fascinating, perhaps hopeful trend for all of us, a mini baby boom that nobody expected, and tells us a lot about what types of pro-natal policies actually might work in America. A new

paper, which was published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, finds an unexpected increase in U.S. fertility rates during the pandemic. Fertility rates declined in 2020 and were expected to continue doing so, possibly for decades, but something very odd happened instead. In 2021, the trend completely reversed and, in fact, increased for the first time since 2007, effectively reversing the carnage of the Great Recession for the very first time. How did something so remarkable occur that nobody planned for? To find the answer, let's take a step back. How bad things are. From 2007 to 2020, the US TFR, total fertility rate,

which measures the average number of children expected over a woman's lifetime, declined from 2.1 to 1.6. That's a disaster, because 2.1 is the bare minimum a society must maintain in order to replace the number of living individuals. Otherwise, your age pyramid reverses, and soon you have too many old people relying on the young. Take it to its logical conclusion, you end up like Japan, something we desperately need to avoid. The pandemic, in its early data, seemed like it was going to be even further of a nightmare. The pandemic and its early data seemed like it was going to be even further of a nightmare. The fertility rate dropped a further 2%, more than normal,

expected during lockdowns. But then things reversed nearly overnight in 2021. Not only reversed, but actually increased over pre-pandemic trend. A total of 6.2%. That 6.2%, not only the very first increase since 07, it was enough to reverse two years of trends in a single year. Again, unheard of in modern times. So who was having kids? First and most surprising is that the biggest baby bump happened amongst women who were under the age of 25.

This is especially stunning because for years, the trend lines have suggested that US families, women desire to have children much later in life, year over year. Furthermore, the big baby bump actually happened amongst another population, women between the age of 30 and 34. But when you dig into education data, it's even more interesting. Women between the age of 25 and 44, with a college degree or more, had the biggest bump of all three groups. So what lesson do we have here? Very profound ones that actually strike

at the heart of a lot of debates around modern feminism and what actually good family policy looks like. For years, debates have raged in the West as how to boost TFR rates and ensure a population replaces itself. The internationalist response is simple. Don't boost domestic kids, just let more immigrants in. On the furthest right of the spectrum is the opposite. Let no immigrants in, throw as much cash at the population as possible to get them to have more kids. The former is the Germany model. The latter would be called the Hungarian model. As the Germans found out, it doesn't work because the populace revolts across the continent. And as the Hungarians have found out, their policies have worked only to a limited extent and not even close to the degree

they've wanted to. Somewhere in the middle is where the U.S. debate lies, a mix of immigration and family incentives, the left mostly wanting more immigration and specifically more child care subsidies, the right wanting less immigration, and then various different mixes of fiscal conservatism and idiocy. I have always favored a more hybrid approach, which I believe is borne out in this data. Less unskilled immigration and flexible cash incentives to parents who can use them on childcare if they wish or to stay at home if they want. First and foremost is the reason why births dropped first place in 2020. One of the undernoticed part of this study finds that the drop in fertility rate was entirely because of lack of immigration inflows to the US. In effect,

the drop was not because Americans were having less kids. It was because we were letting basically nobody in during the pandemic. So actually, the behavior of citizens really didn't change that much. Second is the fact that American women, when given more work flexibility via remote work, chose to have a lot more children, especially those who were college educated. And that proves a central critique that people who have really been only talking about child care have long discarded. Many women don't want more childcare. They want to spend more time with their children at home if they are able and still work.

Just until the pandemic, technology was not normalized to those conditions really aligned. Third is the fact that younger women chose to start a family much earlier when not faced with the prospect of only having to go to work or do nothing else. There is something deeply profound about seeing that data, validating the fact that work is in fact a detriment to both family formation and civilization. The solution is not to quote, send women back to the kitchen. It's to give women options to do whatever they want. Fascinatingly enough, it turns out many chose to have children. Even if you disagree on immigration, at least take away this. The crime here is the current situation only works for college-educated women. Luckily enough, to have jobs where they can work from home. Working class women or house moms deserve the

same flexible conditions that upper classes have now been afforded by the remote work revolution. Right now in the US, having a child is a luxury good, and the mini baby boom amongst the college educated proves it. But it's not just money. It's time and it's flexibility. That's what shift workers and those who work in the service industry, they lack freedom more than anything, and something our government actually can give them if they so choose. So let the data be a lesson. Simply freeing people up can have amazing results. Let it also show that the solution was under our nose the whole time. Let people do whatever they want. And when you do, you can actually have some pretty crazy things happen. I mean, I thought it was amazing to see

that. And if you want to hear my reaction to Sagar's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Very excited about our next guest, someone I've been following for a very long time. Rana Foroohar is author of Don't Be Evil and Makers and Takers, both great books. She's out with a new book. It's called Homecoming, The Path to Prosperity in a Post-Global World. And she is also global business columnist and associate editor for The Financial Times. Great to see you, Rana. How are you?

Good to see you. So good to see you guys. Thank you for having me on. Yeah, absolutely. So I don't want to butcher your thesis, but basically your idea in Homecoming is that the age of unfettered globalization is ending, that we're headed in a different direction. And you try to sketch out a little bit of, you know, the science that that's already happening and also what this future might look like. So just, first of all, did I capture that accurately? And second of all, lay on a little bit of what you see happening here. You're wrong, Crystal. You got an A.

I get an A. Yay. Basically, we've been living for the last half century in a world of hyper-globalization, no-holes-barred, financialization. Big companies can put jobs, put money wherever they want. That is the neoliberal paradigm, and that's a mouthful. But neoliberalism is really the political philosophy that's been adopted by both parties, in fact, in the last half century, both by the Reagan-Thatcher sort of Republicans, but also the Clintonian Democrats. And the idea is that trickle-down theory works, markets are efficient, and just let people go where they will, let money and goods go where they will, and it's all going to land where it's most productive and best for it to do so. But the problem is, while that

created a lot of wealth at a global level, it also created tremendous in-country inequality. And we've been living with the consequences of that. The hollowed out parts of the Rust Belt and the South that have become red states or swing states, the deaths of despair, the sense that American competitiveness has been eroded because we've outsourced our entire supply chain. All these things are now coming to the fore, particularly in the wake of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. Right. And so one of the things that a lot of people woke up to with the supply chain crisis and more is like, wow, I can't get stuff that I ordered. But what is the solution to that? You know, we see a lot of people saying,

oh, well, we need to build here at home, as we've all found out the hard way, it takes five to 10 years to build. If you want a new semiconductors, you got to wait 15 years, you know, at best, in some cases, if you can even do it at all. And something I think that you get in the book is about what the solutions that look like on a practical level. So lay it out for us. Yeah, so there's not one silver silver bullet to be fair. And yeah, building a new semiconductor fab time, but we actually have, and this is really the good news, and it is a good news book. We have a lot more agility and a lot more manufacturing competitiveness in this country than we're aware of. And I'll give you one story because my book has these big

lofty theses, but it sort of looks at them through the lens of three different industries, agriculture, textiles, and technology. And I spent a lot of time in the Carolinas in the textile supply chain before and during the pandemic. And here are these companies, okay, nobody's buying clothes. So they're looking around and thinking, what can we do? Well, they turned on a dime in 48 hours and started making masks. And they were moving millions of them around the country. Now, what's very interesting is before the pandemic hit, Americans were basically buying three cent masks from China, which, by the way, is dumping because the raw materials would make it a five or six cent product. But that's another topic. Beijing decides, understandably, it wants those masks

for its people. It hoards the masks. We have to start producing them in the USA. The cost of a USA mask is 30 cents. But by the end of the pandemic, these folks, these very nimble, often family owned private businesses had driven those costs down to 10 cents. And then when you factor in higher labor standards, good environmental standards in this country, not having to haul things, you know, thousands of miles and spend that energy cost and the emissions cost to bring things through the South China supply chains. You know, it actually makes a lot of sense to do more at home. All kinds of reasons for this technology that are, you know, allowing things to be 3D

printed in real time are taking off. I think we're going to be doing a lot more here at home. What did you make of the sort of instant calamity triggered by the short-lived prime minister of the UK, Liz Truss, who went all in on the sort of most ideological, most strident version of the Reagan, Thatcherism, free market economics, comes in with this proposed mini budget to slash taxes on the rich and forego a raise in corporate taxes.

And even like, I'm going to lift the cap on banker bonuses, like just whole hog on this thing. And the very markets that she revered completely turned on her. And there was an almost complete collapse. I mean, what did you make of that in terms of, you know, what it says about where we are in the era of neoliberalism and what the both public and market reaction is to this type of ideological project at this point? You know, it's a great question. peg, a news peg for my book, because if you think about, okay, trickle down started with

Reagan Thatcher, that pendulum swung so far that we now have this incredibly bifurcated economy, both in the US and the UK. You get a prime minister that comes in and says, yeah, you know, we still believe that the way to growth is to cut taxes on the rich. That's worked. No, it hasn't worked. It hasn't worked definitely for 20 years. If you look across the board at all workers and all salaries, it hasn't worked for 40 years if you look at working people. So, you know, no big surprise that the market said, hold on, we don't think so. And particularly if you're going to cut taxes, even as you're increasing fuel subsidies and spending. We don't like that. So I think the demise of trustonomics, if you might call it that, is potentially the apex and the turning point, you know, where we start going down this hill of neoliberalism, hopefully to something better. And what are the downsides, you know, to this change? Obviously, deglobalization, we've gone through a period of this with depression and all that in the 1920s and 1930s.

Can we avoid some of the pitfalls, both politically and economically, from that time? Or do you think it's maybe just as raucous in the transition? Great questions. So, look, we are in a bumpy period. I mean, the world is not flat, right? That's one of my big theses. The world is bumpy. It's never been flat.

I've been going to China, for example, for 25 years. I never landed in China and looked around and thought, wow, this country, big, rich, old country with its own traditions, own system is going to seamlessly fit into the Washington consensus. Yeah, that's going to happen. You know, it's it. But we now see those things. And so we're no longer willfully blind to them. Some people would look at, say, the export bans that the Biden administration has put on high-end chips to dual-use chips to China as being an aggressive action. In fact, this administration is just reacting to China's own stated goal of being totally independent of Western technology in the next few years. And the party is really hardening. You saw that at the last party conference over the last few years. And, you know, the party is really hardening. You saw that at the last party conference over the last few days. So this is reality. But it doesn't have to be a zero-sum game. I think, you know, I did an event with Janet

Yellen, Treasury Secretary of the Atlantic Council, several months ago, where she first used that word friend-shoring, which is about, let's create a trade system that's about values. Let's make sure we're not buying cotton t-shirts that are made by tiny fingers in a forced labor camp in Xinjiang. Let's make sure we're trading with companies that treat workers and the environment properly. And, and this is part of the Inflation Reduction Act, let's make sure that we give some carrots as well as sticks. So domestic producers at home that are doing the right things, let's reward them. Let's incentivize them as well as making it harder or more expensive for folks who are doing the wrong thing to bring stuff into the country. So Rana, I very much see all the signs that you're pointing to. And I think, you know, the trustonomics collapse,

it really demonstrates that whatever there was to get out of that worldview has long been gotten. If there ever was anything to get out of that worldview, those gains have already been attained and it leads to, you know, nothing but catastrophe at this point. But in the same respect, you know, I get pushback about the idea that sort of the neoliberal era is ending because they're like, Joe Biden is a consummate neoliberal and he's in charge. And yeah, Truss is gone. But now you've got like a Goldman Sachs dude who's prime minister of the UK. A lot of the power is still with this ideology in terms of the institutions that are, you know, supporting our government. So what do you say to that pushback? Oh, well, Crystal, for sure, the neoliberals are not going to die easily. You know, I'm doing personal hand to hand street fighting with some of them right now, I can tell you.

I would actually, it's funny with Biden, I would, I think Biden is pre neoliberal. I mean, you know, I think he actually harkens back to an era in which the state and business worked together better and also parties worked across the aisle better. You know, I don't think there's been a more labor-friendly president in this country in decades. I mean, this guy has a bust of Cesar Chavez in his office, so I wouldn't call him a neoliberal. That said, there definitely is an existential fight, I would say, within the Democratic Party, not just folks that are in the administration, some of whom are, as you say, hardcore, you know, markets are always right. Everything has to be cheaper. You know, you hear Larry Summers saying that drives me crazy. Cheap isn't cheap, by the way, if you factor in the real cost of energy,

emissions, quality, labor, et cetera. But there is also a contingent that's saying, you know, hey, we need to do things a different way. And I know that that contingent has the president's ear. Now, I will say, you asked about challenges earlier. The big challenge is inflation because creating this new world, frankly, means pricing products the way they should be priced. We've gotten used to total cheap consumer

culture in this country. And we thought, we bought the Kool-Aid that if we outsourced our entire industrial base, didn't care about manufacturing jobs, thought everybody could be a software programmer or a banker or media people like we are, that the country would be fine. And it wasn't. Cheaper flat screen TVs in Walmart did not make up for the fact that the price of everything that makes us middle class, housing, health care, education is going up even before the latest bout of inflation, three times the triple, you know, three times the core inflation rate. So that bargain doesn't work. And we've got to get to a better place because, you know, you cannot have an economy that's based simply on asset prices going up and the rich getting richer. As I think you all would agree, we're really at a

social breaking point here with this. Yeah, very well said. You know, Rana, you in Makers and Takers actually have an anecdote that I have referenced a number of times, but I think it's really important for understanding the realities of the modern economy because the system of neoliberalism, one of the promises is like, oh, this is going to fuel all kinds of innovation. But even whatever there was to be gained from that has sort of run its course. And you point to the fact that I think your stats are when Apple decided to, when they created the iPod, this like, you know, sort of transport formative device and really popular and all of this, they didn't actually do well in terms of the public markets and their stock price

when they did their financial rigging stock buybacks. Oh, then they're rewarded, which is a perfect anecdote for what actually drives our economy at this point. So I wonder if you could explain that piece a little bit, because, you know, I use this term like the economy is really financialized. Sagar and I have thrown that around, but I'm not sure people really understand what that means. Could you help us help explain that?

Yeah, absolutely. It's a great point. So if you look back again to about the 1980s, companies started being incentivized. And our whole economy sort of shifted to being incentivized to help companies, global companies, get bigger, get richer. Things like bans on share buybacks, which are when a company goes out and buys its own shares on the open market. That used to be considered manipulation because it automatically jacks up the price of shares because you're ring fencing them. That was turned over. So companies you know, companies start spending a lot of money on their own shares. They start spending less money on things like, you know, R&D or building new factories or retraining workers.

Hmm, there's an idea. You know, and that just gets put on kerosene fuel in the 90s with taxed preferential treatment for shares. You know, the Silicon Valley movement towards paying people in shares. So basically, the economy starts to be all about pleasing Wall Street, not building real things on Main Street. And so that's why you have this very weird feeling that and we all felt this in the pandemic, wait a minute, the sky is falling, and yet stock prices are higher than they have ever been. Well, that's because we threw the ball to the Fed for the last 40 years, both parties did,

and said, you fix it, keep rates low. But what that does is it just inflates asset prices. It doesn't change the story on Main Street. It doesn't help us create the new, new thing. And we're now at the end of that too because interest rates are rising. We're done with cheap capital. We're largely done with cheap labor from China because they're ring-fencing their own economy. And we're done with cheap capital. We're largely done with cheap labor from China

because they're ring fencing their own economy. And we're done with cheap energy from Russia. So that whole cheap model is gone and we need a new plan. And some of it is gonna have to be about building resilience at home, paying workers more, having a more balanced production and consumption economy,

and then figuring out who's gonna to pick up the tab for that because there are going to be some costs. And I suspect, and I think it should be this way, that companies should pay more. I support things like the CHIPS Act to create some incentives to build semiconductors in this country, but I sure as heck don't want to see every industry lining up the White House to get a handout or a bailout.

They need to be spending their money productively to create real innovation, real growth, and real jobs. And the clean energy transformation that we're going to be going through is the perfect example of this. If you look back historically, the periods in time where you see long-term sustainable shared growth are when there is a transformative technology like, say, the railroads or the internet, and the public sector puts a floor under it, and then private sector companies come in and commercialize it. And that's when you start to lift all boats, not by doing financial engineering of share buybacks or private equity firms coming in and splicing and dicing companies.

We've got to get away from that. We can't compete with China if we keep doing that. Yeah, I think it's really well said. I really encourage everybody to go and buy the book. We'll have a link down in the description. Thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate it. Great to see you, Ronna. Thank you.

Thank you guys so much for watching. We really appreciate it. It's going to be fun times. We're going to have a great show for you on Thursday. CounterPoint's going to have a great show on Friday. We've got some fun stuff happening schedule-wise. Stay tuned for a little bit of administrative announcements.

Premium subs, you guys make it all possible. We've got some great hiring going on right now, literally made only possible by you. So we can't thank you enough for putting us in this position. We alluded earlier today

about The Hill having a sponsorship from Huawei, which always drove me insane while we were over there. They had all kinds of comers over there. American Petroleum Institute, Coke Industries. Such a nightmare.

So to be truly only relying on you is a great privilege of our lives. Indeed. Thank you all so much for enabling our work and we will see you all later. This is an iHeart Podcast.