Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 10/26/21: Facebook 'Whistleblower', Jan 6th, Obama Comments, Puppy Torture, The View, Covid Crimes, Biden's Taiwan Folly, Inflation, and More!

Episode Date: October 26, 2021

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where you get to watch and listen to the entire show, ad-free and uncut an hour early before everyone else. You get to hear our reactions to each other's monologues. You get to participate in weekly Ask Me Anythings, and you don't need to hear our annoying voices pitching you like I am right now. So what are you waiting for? Go to breakingpoints.com, become a premium member today, which is available in the show notes. Enjoy the show, guys. Good morning, everybody. Happy Tuesday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed, we do. Lots of interesting stuff to get into today. Also, a first-time guest, Heather Long. We've been referencing her stuff a lot on the show.

She's an economics reporter, colleague of Jeff Stein's over at The Washington Post, so we wanted to have her on. She also just got a big promotion over there, so we can talk to her about that and lots of other, obviously, economic news, including continuing inflation concerns, what that means as we come into the holiday season. As you guys know, if you exist in this country, lots of news about Facebook, lots of questions about this whistleblower, lots of interesting details to kind of dig into there. Who's behind her? What's her agenda? And what is the most important information to take from the leak of these thousands of documents. We'll get into that. Some new curious details about January 6th. We'll tread a little carefully here, but, you know, we've been looking into how many potential federal agents may have been there, may have been involved, other informants, operators, etc. Some new indications there that we want to bring to you. Obama is out saying the quiet part out loud as he campaigns for Democratic candidates about the mood of the Democratic base. Some horrific new details revealed about some of the,

I mean, just unconscionable experimentation that's taking place on animals. And Dr. Fauci is, of course, involved as a leader of the National Institute of Health. Tell you about that. Also, you guys remember that whole situation with Kamala Harris was supposed to be on The View. And then seconds before they bring her out, suddenly they pull two of the hosts because they test positive, allegedly, for coronavirus. And then it turns out they didn't actually have coronavirus. The whole thing was a mess. They never had an explanation of what actually happened here, because they'd given the vice president's office all clear the day before that they'd all been PCR

tested and that they were good to go. Now The View has thrown their nurse under the bus. I guess she is the fall girl, so we'll tell you all about that. But we wanted to start with the Facebook story that is so dominating mainstream media right now. Right, so I'm sure everybody saw basically the Facebook papers, files everybody is referring to have been all over the internet the last two days. Essentially what happened is that Frances Hoogan, I hope I'm saying her name correctly, she has come out. She's the former Facebook product manager. She has troves and thousands and thousands of pages of documents. Originally, she was leaking and working exclusively with the Wall Street Journal.

Now we know that she's actually expanded that to an entire consortium of journalists, many different media organizations. A consortium that she handpicked and selected. That's right. And that's the important part, which is that this consortium, this media leak is highly orchestrated by both Frances Hoogan and also some people who are funding her who may not necessarily, who have a little bit of a bone to pick with Facebook. Now, Ben Smith of the New York Times revealed some of this. Let's put this up there on the screen. What we essentially learn here is that Frances Hoogan had met with the Wall Street Journal,

originally was leaking her documents, but then all of a sudden, a former Democratic political operative named Bill Burton, who used to work for Barack Obama, all of a sudden was hired in order to manage the process. And what we learn further is that Bill Burton begins setting up meetings with all of these different media outlets, creating this kind of like group chat on Slack in which he requires them to kind of work together and wait before they go ahead and publish the documents. Now, this is fishy for a number of reasons. Anytime we start seeing PR officials getting paid by people who aren't necessarily the whistleblower themselves. I've got a lot of questions.

And we have also learned who the person who is funding some of these operations are. And Glenn Greenwald has shed a lot of light on this. Let's put this up there on the screen from his sub stack. Pierre Omidyar's financing of the Facebook whistleblower campaign reveals a great deal is his headline there. And what he points out, Pierre Omidyar, for those of you who don't know, he made his fortune in eBay. He was a longtime libertarian. He funded a lot of libertarian causes. But what Glenn points to is that when you have oligarchs who are financing various different projects, and you guys should remember that Glenn knows this because Pierre Omidyar famously financed The Intercept after the Snowden leaks.

He was an actual believer in libertarianism. But, as Glenn points to, while he was working there, all the way up until 2015, Omidyar had nothing, you know, he really did not do anything. However, he says, quote, there was never a single occasion to my knowledge when he attempted to override our journalistic independence. However, what he talks about is that the arrival of Donald Trump on the political scene changed all of that.

As Trump ascended to the presidency, Omidjar became monomaniacally obsessed with opposing Trump. Although he stopped tweeting in March 2019, his 2015-2019 Twitter presence showed that he basically was indistinguishable from the standard daily hysterical MSNBC panels or New York Times op-eds. In other words, what happened there is that Omidyar, his libertarianism was only up to a certain point, he was a doctrinaire, personal liberal, and his overriding disgust with Trump really started to have him compromise his principles.

He became obsessed with the idea that Facebook was responsible for, you know, gaslighting or for radicalizing the public. Whereas, you know, I think it's maybe people like Pierre Omidyar, but that's a whole other story. And essentially what has been revealed here is that this is really just a financed campaign by for Francis Hugen and the Facebook whistleblower by a rival oligarch, essentially, who hates Trump and has an ideological agenda that doesn't diminish necessarily what the papers are. Right. And we can talk about some of that, but there's just a lot of fishy financing, number one. And two, when you look at this whistleblower herself, she says she's currently living in Puerto Rico because she bought Bitcoin very early. Cool. You know, me too. It's all about Bitcoin. I am not a crypto

millionaire, unfortunately. I didn't have enough money to become one. But now she's living down in Puerto Rico, hanging out with her, quote, crypto friends. You know why? Because there's no capital gains tax down there for Puerto Rico residents. So there's a lot going on. There is a lot going on. And I think it's important to separate a few things out, just as you were doing there. So listen, reporters, journalists, they get information from all kinds of sources, some of them above board, some of them very much not above board all the time. Oftentimes, the people who you're receiving information

or documents or leaks from have an ideological agenda. They have an axe to grind. They have a certain political perspective that they want out there or some sort of

political goal ultimately. In mine, not always the case, but oftentimes the case. A good example of this that we talked about was the Hunter Biden laptop. Of course.

Like, came from the sketchiest possible. Yeah. And we were very open about it. But it doesn't matter. What matters is what is the information and what is its relevance? And let's sort through that and figure out what is in the public good here and what's in the public interest of transparency to know about a company in Facebook run by a billionaire that has a tremendous amount of power, although that power may be diminishing. We'll get to that in a moment. So it's important to separate those two things out. However, it also is very important to know

if the leaker or whistleblower, however you want to peg Francis Hogan, it's important to know what the ideological agenda is. Yes. Because this is one of the things we talk about on this show all the time. It especially applies oftentimes in any sort of national security or foreign policy stuff. Follow the money. Follow the money. Follow the ideological agenda.

And remember that everything is being pushed in a certain direction. And that's what you see very clearly with the, you know, very polished rollout of Frances Hogan, where she selects to start with a reporter at The Wall Street Journal who she feels because of his past reporting is going to view the information in the light that she wants it to, him to. Okay, so she starts with that. And then after giving the Wall Street Journal an exclusive for a time, and we covered some of the revelations there,

which were interesting, including that Facebook, you know, they'd lied about their treatment of elites versus everybody else. And they basically give like white glove treatment to celebrities and political officials, et cetera. So after the Wall Street Journal has their crack at it, that's when she opens the door to this handpicked consortium

that they invite onto a Zoom call to say, hey, we'll give you guys a crack at it. Y'all got to work together. We're going to put this embargo in place. This piece of it is being run by Bill Burton, who, as you point out, former Obama guy. Aspects of this, she says that she has her own financial resources.

This isn't a Ben Smith piece, but that she's accepted help from nonprofit groups that are backed by Pierre Omidyar for travel and similar expenses. So she's being funded in a certain sense from this other rival billionaire. Yes. And so it's just important to have that frame in mind as you're looking at this. And of course, the political end result is also really important because even though you do have some people on the right who are actually serious about antitrust and serious about dealing with power and not just interested in like, well, we want to be the censors, not y'all. And even though you do have some people on the left who

are similarly serious, we know that there is a dominant strain within the Democratic Party that mostly wants to use these sorts of revelations just to censor, not to challenge power, not to actually think more deeply about the way, not just Facebook, but Google. I just saw Google removed a left-leaning news outlet from YouTube. The way that all of these tech oligarchs have so much hold on society and what we can do about it. So I think those are the pieces that are important to separate out. Important to understand what her ideological lean is. She's been, to her credit, pretty upfront. She's been open. About what she wants to see happen. Important to understand that. And also important to deal

with the information and for us to think deeply about what this means about how we might foster a better democracy where, you know, you have free speech truly honored and you don't have these tech oligarchs responsible for who gets to say what in the public square. I think that's the most important part. And this isn't really to besmirch her. It's more to say, how is this information being used and to what agenda? And increasingly, all across the mainstream media, we are seeing it used as justification for trying to censor Facebook, either pressure Facebook into self-censoring or really pressuring Congress and the White House and more in order to censor Facebook. We've already seen the current White

House try to dictate to Facebook what posts should stay up and what should not. We've already seen the current White House try to dictate to Facebook what posts should stay up and what should not. We've seen them say that if you're banned from Facebook, you should be banned from other platforms. But increasingly, Crystal, I am so frustrated about this because it presumes that Facebook is the most important place for everything. And guess what, guys? The most important part of the Facebook documents documents to me, let's put this up there from The Verge, which is that inside Facebook's lost generation, they find Facebook's own data shows that it has an increasingly aging boomer user base, that the majority of the people who are active on the platform are aging, that they are aging up, that young people increasingly are abandoning not just the core product of blue Facebook, but Instagram as well. My friend Alex

Kantrowitz, who has his own big technology newsletter, let's put this up there. He grabbed this from inside of the Facebook papers. Their own data shows that teenagers spend two to three times more time on TikTok than they do on Instagram. And TikTok has currently surpassed Instagram for time on app, which means that they have your attention for more time than Instagram has. That is the entire ballgame. So beneath all of this, Crystal, is this monomaniacal obsession with Facebook. Oh, we need to get Facebook to censor. And it's all just because that is where the boomers are. In terms of a broader American culture, it is radically diminishing in its effect. That's the biggest story in the whole world to me. So this whole,

like, oh, we got to break up Facebook, regulate Facebook. Yeah, I mean, that's like a near-term problem. But if we want to talk about actual technology in the future, I think Facebook, by their own admission, Mark Zuckerberg yesterday on his earnings call went out and said, I believe we actually have this tweet, let's put it up there, which is that he said, Facebook will be moving to retooling to make serving young adults the North Star rather than optimizing for older people. He says the shift will take years and not months. So to me, the only part of this story that Facebook itself is reacting to is the now emperor has no clothes moment where you're like, wait, Facebook is kind of a dying company. Now, I'm not going to say they don't make billions, trillions of dollars. Definitely true. But it is going much more in the vein of Microsoft, where it's just like this enterprise software that makes a lot of money,

but it's like really boring, as opposed to the actual like driver of culture and politics. So in the near term, it's definitely true. But I would say in the future and where the discussion should be focused, it should be a lot more than Facebook. I mean, the fact of the matter is that these same issues that we talk about with Facebook apply to all of these giant tech and social media companies. So whether or not Facebook is on its way in doubtful or on its way out, more likely, some of the same principles apply here. And also would say look obviously I mean listen I have a teenage daughter she would be would laugh her head off to think of

even getting on Facebook and she spends way more time on TikTok than she has an Instagram account she sort of occasionally uses it they have finstas and more finstas yeah I mean she dabbles in but she definitely is more sort of addicted to TikTok.

No doubt about it. Even my eight-year-old son would tell you, like, Facebook's for old people. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Right? Like, the conventional wisdom about it is, in fact, true. On the other hand, we do know right now that Facebook was really instrumental for Trump. Absolutely.

Again, boomers. They leaned very heavily into Facebook. And fortunately or unfortunately, boomers are very politically powerful, right? So this is a group that votes. This is a group that, you know, engages in a lot of cringe memeing and all of those things. They're very loud. I don't want to say that Facebook is like irrelevant to politics because I just think that that is not accurate at this time. Is it going to, you know, be like a cultural trendsetter among young people? No. I mean, Zuckerberg is trying to retool it. They are changing the name even. They're investing

in building the metaverse. I don't really know what that means, but probably because I'm too old to understand it. But that's the direction that they're going in to try to recapture the attention of young people here. But there's another issue that I think is important to kind of separate out, which is that there's a difference between being, you know, having the ability to have a platform and being able to say what you want to say without censorship, which is something I am like extremely in support of. And I think the banning of Trump and the censorship that we've seen of figures on the ideological right and the ideological left, I think is a horrific infringement on people's free speech rights, because at this point, the public square is these online social media spaces. Part of what we do learn in this reveal, though, is that they juiced the algorithm to not just sort of allow content that may be, you know, less than ideal or super inflammatory design to make you angry and make you feel, you know, those sort of rageful emotions.

But they elevated that. So it was not like a neutral surfacing of content. I think that's an important thing to ultimately think about. But look, the bottom line with all of this is that we don't want to take the power from one billionaire, Mark Zuckerberg, and hand it to another like Pierre Omidyar. We don't want to take the power from Mark Zuckerberg and hand it to like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. No. Right. These platforms really need to have their power checked.

And, you know, this isn't like a personal affront to either Pierre Omidyar or Mark Zuckerberg. It's or Joe Biden, for that matter. You should not have one person who has so much control over what are absolutely critical spaces of public debate. There should be a lot more of a democratic process of thinking through how these spaces are operated, how the algorithm works, how things, because you're going to have certain content, hate speech and threats and those sorts of things that are out of bounds. Where do we draw those lines? How do we make sure, and this to me is maybe the most critical part, how do we make sure those lines are drawn and enforced in a transparent and consistent manner? Because that's the other thing that you learn from these Facebook files is it's wildly inconsistent. They're just making it up. It's seat of their pants. Right. And there's tons

of politics that are involved. They're worried about a backlash from the right, but then they're worried they don't like the content of this outlet or that outlet. So these are not like content neutral. Here's the rule. We're going to apply it and we're going to disseminate to everyone why and how we applied it. No, these are deeply political decisions that comes across very clearly. There's different treatment for elites versus the rank and file because they're worried about PR blowups if the elites are wrongly censored. They know that their automated algorithms

for pulling content are deeply flawed. They know all of these things and they consistently lie to you about the way that their platform ultimately operates. So I think there are things to take from this that are interesting. But the overall point here is that, of course, what it's mostly being used to drive towards is just more censorship and more, you know, sort of like power vested in a different group of people to decide what's allowed on the platform and what's not. That would be my takeaway as well. I'm a very big believer in algorithmic transparency and in moderation transparency. I think these companies should be forced by the FCC in order to publish their moderation guidelines. So that way we know whether they're abiding by their rules or not. That way,

there's no politics. You're just like, look, these are the rules. This is what they are. This is how we came to them. You either follow it or you don't. And that is, you know, unfortunately, that kind of common sense stuff doesn't have a lot of headway here in Washington. Because, as you said, the real battle is over trying to censor each other, not actually making it a fair playing ground for everybody. Yeah, that's well said. And speaking of that, January 6th, long been pointed at. It's Facebook's fault, apparently, and not, you know, Trump, the president, for fostering all this stuff. I don't know why we can't assign more human agency to people.

Facebook is not going to force you to go out and storm the Capitol, okay? Being in a Facebook group, like I've been in some crazy Facebook groups before, too. Mostly fan ones for TV shows, but let me tell you something. There's some weird stuff that goes down in there. And nobody forced me to do anything, and nobody forced those people to act like weirdos either. Okay, that being said, Representative Thomas Massey, in a most recent congressional hearing, confronted Attorney General Merrick Garland over alleged federal conspirators who were involved in the January 6th Capitol riots. He put together a mashup of a certain individual who there has been a lot of attention paid to

as people have gone through a lot of the video on what happened on January 6th. And we have to be honest, it's extraordinarily suspicious behavior. We actually have that mashup of this individual both on the night of January 5th and during the course of January 5th and during the course of January 6th, talking about storming the Capitol. After we show you the video, and for those of you

who are just listening, you'll be able to hear it as well, we'll tell you a little bit more about this man and what we've learned. Let's take a listen to that video. In fact, tomorrow, I don't even like to say it because I'll be arrested. Well, let's not say it. We need to go. I'll say it. All right. We need to go in to the Capitol. Let's go. I'm going to put it out there.

I'm probably going to go to jail for it. Tomorrow, we need to go into the Capitol. Into the Capitol. What? Peacefully. Fed. Fed. Fed? Peaceful. Fed. Fed. Fed.

Fed. Fed. Fed. Fed. Fed. Fed. Fed. Fed.

Fed. Fed. Peaceful. Okay, folks. We're at the ward. As soon as the president comes speaking, we go to the Capitol.

The Capitol is this direction. He's not speaking. We are going to the Capitol where our problems are. It's that direction. This direction Okay, so that was a mashup of all of the different times where you saw this individual saying we need to go into the Capitol all the way until the time that he was actually at the very, very front of the group that actually went on into the Capitol. Look, obviously, Trump also said, hey, guys, we're going down to the Capitol. So let's not absolve anybody here about what exactly was going on. But this is a question of, is this an agent provocateur? Is this some federal agent himself? Is it a conspirator? His MAGA brothers and sisters seem to think he might be.

They called him a Fed. So you can believe them if you want. There has been now an interesting investigation. This is from a site, Revolver, a right-wing site. Glenn Greenwald has spoken with them in the past, and they were some of the first in order to look into this reporting, and we give credit wherever it is due because this is a very thorough report. Can I just pause you there? When mainstream media

refuses to cover and investigate these things. We have no choice but to cite the people who are. You have to look to ideological outlets because they're the only ones who are looking into it. That's right. So with that being said, you know, we went through the report and he definitely, you know, brings the receipts in terms of. It's all about screenshots and reports. Screens Screenshots, and here's what happened, and here's the old website, and here's the new. So with that being said, go ahead and lay out the report. So let's put this on the screen. It's the title, Meet Ray Epps, the, well, he says, the Fed-protected provocateur. We don't know that.

That's not proven. The provocateur who appears to have led the very first 1-6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Now, Ray Epps, the individual who you heard and saw there in that video, was originally placed on the FBI Washington field office's seeking information list. He was identified as suspect number 16. There was an Arizona Central article written about Mr. Ray Epps. He was of the 486 suspects listed on the FBI's capital violence most wanted list. Like I said, suspect number 16, they said that he was controlling the crowd. They could see some of the stuff that he was saying. Obviously, he was right there on the front line of the very,

very first group in order to breach the Capitol itself. So what they go through and they show is that from 3.37 a.m., sorry, from January 8th, 2021 until 3.37 a.m. on July 1st, 2021, every archived version of the FBI Gov's website shows Ray Epps as suspect number 16. However, on July 1st, at that time, Epps was taken off of the website. There is no explanation as to why. There was no announcement around whether his home had been raided. There was no announcement about being arrested. He was simply disappeared from the list itself. Now, this doesn't necessarily mean that he is a federal cooperator. There's no proof necessarily of that, but he wasn't arrested. He hasn't been arraigned. He hasn't been named in court as many of the January 6th defendants

and all those people have. We simply know that he was on a public most wanted list, identified as suspect number 16, and then he was taken off of it six months later, which does seem to be a deliberate action. It's as if he was just disappeared. And given the central role that he seems to have played in instigating the crowd, once again, Trump also did so as well. So it's not like he was the only person, but he certainly was in there and was certainly pushing and he certainly was at the very, very front

of the group himself that it seems mighty suspicious to me. So that's what we know, Crystal. Right. So, and there's a couple other pieces here. So as is demonstrated by that video, Ray Epps features in any number of videos that have been passed around of that day,

including in New York Times coverage, their recreation of what happened and went down on January 6th. So he featured prominently. As you guys probably know, there was a left-wing effort to identify a lot of these individuals to effectively turn them into law enforcement. Not just pro-public, like a grassroots effort to identify these individuals and turn them into law enforcement. There was not just pro-public, it was like a grassroots effort to identify these individuals and turn them into law enforcement. Epps was identified very quickly, very quickly within days of January 6th.

By January 11th, internet sleuths had said, hey, this is the guy, this is where he lives, this is his Facebook profile. He gave an interview to a local paper admitting he was there and some of the things that he was up to. Right. So this wasn't, if you're law enforcement and, you know, obviously they have been charging plenty of people who were there trespassing at the Capitol. If you're interested in going after

someone who seems to have played a fair, I don't want to say central, but he seems to have played a significant role. Outsized role. An outsized role, that's a good way of putting it, in encouraging people to break into the Capitol. If you're interested in that type of person, this seems like a no-brainer that you'd go after this guy. And yet, for months, he was on this list as suspect 16, and there were no, to our knowledge, no arrests made, nothing happened, even though, again, random people on the internet were easily able to identify this guy, where he lives, what he does, his Facebook profile, what plumber he uses. I mean, all of these things were easily available. So that is strange to start with. And then the fact that he's just disappeared from the website

is strange. And then also, you mentioned Thomas Massey, who, you know, has been sharing this video compilation that we showed you. He also asked Merrick Garland directly about this guy. And Garland really fumbled around and looked very uncomfortable and ultimately, you know, effectively dodged the question. So, look, here's what we know to bottom line it. We know that there was at least one Fed informant who was involved at the Capitol that day. We know that. Based upon affidavits. Yes.

We don't know much beyond that. And we also know from how the FBI operates that typically you wouldn't have just one person at a big event like this. We know that some of these groups have been address was listed in a leaked database of Oath Keeper, not members necessarily, but from their websites. It has people who are listed as affiliated with the group. And we do know that organizations like that, Oath Keepers, 3%, I mean, these people are riddled with feds. Like, that's basically how—it's been like that since, what, the 1990s or something, ever since Oklahoma City. And so, you know, it wouldn't be a surprise necessarily. And again, this isn't even to allege that he's a federal agent. Only we know there's a long history. The Proud Boys founder or whatever, Enrique Torrio, I think is his name. That guy has a long time federal informant. We know there's a long history of informants and others who have worked with the

FBI, who have been involved. And look, maybe he was doing it at his own behest and then he turned cooperator. That's very possible, right? Somebody who already had history. He says he's a law-abiding citizen and that he didn't do anything wrong. It's actually not known whether he breached the Capitol himself, like as in whether he actually entered it or not. I will say the fact that they have the video, and for those who are listening, he was literally there the night before, January 5th, talking about how they have to go into the Capitol. That is quite stark. Yeah. I mean, that is the, I have not seen that from other people who were protesters or not. And it would cast, you know, some doubt that there weren't some provocateurs and bad

actors within the group who steered things in that direction. This is also not to absolve many of the morons who marched through the Capitol as well. That's right. Listen, this was a horrible day. I mean, it really was a terrible day. It was incredibly fraught. Thank God there weren't more lives lost. It was a dangerous and extraordinarily chaotic situation. This is not to downplay any of that. This is not to downplay Trump's wildly irresponsible, reckless role of incitement, how he seemed to delight in what was going on, all of those things. Like, this isn't to downplay it. It's actually to say this was a horrible day and I want to know how it actually happened. Yeah, that's right. Exactly. Not like the DC ideologically driven narrative of what happened and why. I want to actually understand how it came to this point. And so if there were federal agents who were involved in incitement, I want to know that. Yeah, because it's certainly Lord knows wouldn't be the first time that you had federal agents

who were deeply involved in crafting plots to the point that, you know, those plots like the Gretchen Whitmer thing that we covered may not have ever come to fruition if it wasn't for all the many feds involved being like, here, go here, and here's some money to do it, and let's call these guys, and I've gotten a great idea. We saw this with the war on terror, how many young Muslim men were effectively preyed upon by federal agents, radicalized, talked into some tangential involvement in a plot, and then they're snapped up and criminalized and thrown in prison for the rest of their lives to serve a political agenda and help heighten the careers of politicians who are involved in this.

So that's why we're covering this, because we actually care about what happened on that day and not just from, like, an ideological agenda. Bring it back to the Facebook segment. We care because we know how it's being used. They want this to be some MAGA thing, which was organized on Facebook so they can censor Facebook. And so then they can use a security state in order to criminalize, you know, half the population. Now I want it to be, Hey, how does this happen? How exactly do we get a bunch of people who have no faith in the entire system and believe an idiot like Trump and are willing to like put their life on the for a complete fantasy. That's a lot more interesting question to me. And also, if this does come out in terms of federal cooperators and all of that who were involved and possibly even instigators, it undermines the central idea

that the feds themselves should be responsible for surveilling and for creating even more operations against these types of groups. That question are you keep actually keeping it safe are you making more are you creating more i want to be more safe i want to live in more harmonious place and i'm beginning to suspect i think many of you are too that the people tasked with that are not doing so good of a job yes that's all um and the other piece of this that we wanted to mention here is there was a piece that was making the rounds yesterday and cited on cable news. Although even some of the sort of most iconic resistance sites were a little wary of this piece. Let's throw this up from Rolling Stone. So again, so the headline here says exclusive January 6th protest organizers say they participated in dozens of planning meetings with members of Congress and White House staff.

Now, that headline and the way that it was portrayed by some of the, I would say, less above board actors is that members of Congress were directly involved in planning the incursion into the Capitol. That's what it sounds like, right? But if you actually read through the piece, they were involved in planning the protest. Protests are allowed, even if it's for a cause that's a pure, ridiculous fantasy and that you don't support. You're still allowed to protest and you're allowed to be involved in planning that protest. That's really all that this piece ultimately alleges. And so when we talk about how there's an ideological agenda among Democrats to, you know, make this into it was it's Facebook's fault and it's these particular political members of Congress who have power, their rival opponents. It's their fault. And then, you know, on the right, you have an attempt to say like, oh, this was all just federal agents and there was no organic anything.

And of course, Trump's totally absolved in all of this is to say we're trying to sort through what we actually know and come to some understanding of how we came to that point that is not just solely filtered through an ideological lens. Exactly right. Hey, so remember how we told you how awesome premium membership was? Well, here we are again to remind you that becoming a premium member means you don't have to listen to our constant pleas for you to subscribe. So what are you waiting for? Become a premium member today by going to BreakingPoints.com, which you can click on in the show notes. Our former president, Barack Obama, has been out campaigning for Terry McAuliffe in Virginia and whoever the Democrat is that's running for governor of New Jersey. I can't remember his name.

And he had a pretty interesting moment, fairly revealing, quiet part out loud moment while campaigning in New Jersey. Yeah. He kind of told on himself here on this one, but also told on Joe Biden and on how the way that the Democratic base may be feeling right now. Let's take a listen to that. I know why sometimes folks just get tired and maybe maybe they say, ah, you know, I'm not going to bother voting this time. But here's the thing, we can't afford to be tired. I remember in 2016, folks said, ah, you know, I'm not inspired. You know, Obama was okay, but we didn't get everything I wanted, so I'm just going to sit here next time. And you know, y'all know how that turned out

that's what happens when you're not paying attention that's what happens when you become complacent or you let your frustration lead to inaction we cannot afford to be tired because of the young people here and the ones who are coming

I know it's hard. Phil doesn't claim he's going to solve every problem in New Jersey right away. I didn't solve every problem when I was president. But the fact is that as hard as it is, we can still make it better. It's hard to undo the legacy of discrimination that goes back centuries, but we can make it better. It's hard to undo the legacy of discrimination that goes back centuries, but we can make it better. It's hard to deal with special interests who want to keep the status quo when you're trying to make the economy more fair and just, but you can make it better. It's hard in a big country where people disagree to get everybody moving in

the same direction, but we can do better than we're doing. We really can. We can make it better. And when you've got the right person in the job, we might not get every single person employed, but we can get more people more jobs. We may not get every child the best education in the world right here in Newark. We can give a lot more kids a better education here in Newark. I didn't get every American health care, but boy, we got a whole lot more people in America.

It makes a difference when we decide to make things better. When you've got somebody in your corner who's shown you that they will work for you, who has a track record of accomplishment, you've got to go out there and work for them. Not because everything's going to suddenly be perfect, but because it's going to be better. And you're preventing others from making it worse. So there's a lot that's interesting there. First of all, classic Obama, rather than demanding anything of the political class, it's on you. It's your fault you didn't show up. It's not his fault. It's not his fault that he didn't meet your expectations.

It's not his fault that Democrats have been promising prescription drug reform since 2006 and haven't delivered. It's your fault for being lazy and complacent and failing to take action. That's number one. The other thing that's really interesting here is, look, what is Obama's interest right now? Obama's interest is in preserving Obama's legacy. And so he's very invested in this narrative that, like, well, there's just not that much that politicians can really do, right? The health care thing is particularly revealing. It's like, we didn't get everybody health care, even though that was your promise.

But, you know, we did we did get some people health care. We can't do that much, but we can do some tinkering around the edges here. So the message is lower your expectations, even in the best case scenario, like Obama had when he had control of Congress and a supermajority in the Senate. 60 votes. We're going to dramatically underperform even in the best case scenario. So just accept that, you know, what you're going to get is effectively peanuts. And if you don't show up enthusiastically to vote in favor of those peanuts every damn time, that's on you and never on the politicians. What they want to do is basically make it so that their record is completely pristine. There's nothing better that he could have done. And also, look at the other guy.

They suck. That's all Obama is saying. How far of a cry is that from 2008? It's amazing, actually. But it's important to watch because Obama is admitting a couple of things there. Number one, that his 2008 promise was a total and complete failure. But number two, that's the first time I've ever heard him actually admit that people realized that they were not getting what he promised back in 2016. And that I've played that clip so many different times where Obama would come out and be like, my name might be on the ballot.

My legacy is on the ballot. Justice is on the ballot. The last speech that he gave of the Hillary 2016 campaign. And boom, complete and total failure. That's the first time I've ever heard him actually reckon with that. But worse, Crystal, as you said, it tells us where we are with Biden. Because Obama knows that this is Biden's 2010 moment. He can see the exact same change within the air.

You know, speaking of Virginia, I just looked. Emerson College, which had the most accurate poll of 2013 governor's race, has Glenn Youngkin up by 1% in their final poll of the race. Maybe it's total BS, okay? I have no idea. I would personally bet that Republicans are generally undercounted, as they have been over the last, I don't know, six years in polls. And look, maybe we're going to see a massive upset. But as Kyle Kondik said on our show yesterday, if McAuliffe wins by one in a Biden plus 10 state, that's a total disaster.

I mean, you lost nine points. That's exactly what's happening here. Obama sees the same apathy and his only response is, yeah, but the other guys suck. How did it work out for you in 2010? But more importantly, what does that say about you, man? You were elected to transcend all of that. And I actually encourage people. I read his book and Obama's a smart guy, but he rationalizes everything, every turn. It's not his fault. It's the other people's. It's, oh, I was boxed in by the system. Your job is to be elected to transcend that. I've got books with LBJ, RFK, FDR back there, you know, many more at home. The history of the American presidency is exactly, or at least the good ones who transcend all of

those things and they figure out a, and they create a new era. And he had all the tools, and he completely broke it. He had all the tools and more, and at a pivot point. And this is why his time in office is so important and leads us to where we are today. Leads us to Trump. Leads us to this moment of national depression and nihilism, effectively. Yeah, listen to that speech.

I'll be a nihilist. Right. You're like, I mean, we're not even going to promise you that much anymore. Like, at least we used to try to get you to believe in something. Now we're just going to say, well, we can't really do all that much for you, but you should probably vote for us anyway because the other dude is worse. I mean, that's what they've collapsed down to. And, you know, you see with Obama how the only time he really jumps into the political fray, which is not something he likes, he doesn't like to get his hands dirty in such

tawdry affairs. The only time he does it is to stop, like, the Bernie Sanders type movements. Why? Because Obama's trying to persuade you like Obamacare, let's be real, is not that great, but it's a little bit better. And it was the best we could do at the time. Bernie and his ilk are saying, no, actually we could have universal health care for everyone. Obama has a personal, deep personal interest in proving that that's false, proving that that's impossible. And so that's why you see him intervening to make sure Keith Ellison doesn't end up head of the DNC, that instead you get Obama's guy, Tom Perez. That's why he makes sure to intervene in the last moments of the Democratic primary this time around

to make sure that it ends up being Joe Biden and that Bernie Sanders is stopped in his tracks and he's making phone calls behind the scenes. So that's what his interest is. There's also in Virginia, just to show you the way that this plays out sort of on the ground, this contest in Virginia is effectively coming down to whether McAuliffe can scare people enough about Trump. It's not about a forward looking agenda for McAuliffe. It's not really about a forward looking agenda for Glenn Youngkin either. It's about who can sort of freak the other side out more. Let's throw this Harry Anton tweet up on the screen because this is really interesting.

Trump is still, even though he's not president, even though he's deplatformed, even though Joe Biden is president, Trump is still leading Biden in Google searches. Furthermore, Biden and Trump are tied for the percent of Virginia voters who are saying, I hate Donald Trump so much that I'm going to vote for Terry McAuliffe. As you have voters who are saying, I hate Biden so much, I'm going to vote for Glenn Youngkin. And that's kind of what it comes down to. I mean, I will say in the end, I think if Trump did not exist, this is a very winnable race for glenn youngkin right and i think if he loses even by a narrow margin i think you can pretty much directly point at trump and say that the trump effect really hurt youngkin and caused him not to be able to win in a state that you know he has a real shot at given the overall national apathy but as you pointed out before like if it's a one point

mccullough win or it's a one point mcciffe loss, this is still a really bad sign for Democrats in a state that not only did Biden win by 10 points, Ralph Blackface Northam won by nine points. So it's not like we just showed up in droves for Joe Biden because we love Uncle Joe so much. This is a state that's now a nine or 10-point Democratic state. That's sort of the baseline. I am going to be stunned if McAuliffe does lose. I mean, as much, you know, I'm kind of hoping for it, honestly, just because it'd be a great headline.

And also I just, I think people need to wake up a little bit about what's going on in terms of Joe Biden and a lot of the national Democratic mood. And it's fascinating to me that, as you said, Trump's Google searches are at a 2015 low and he's still beating the sitting president of the United States. That's wild. And it just goes to show you the level of enthusiasm

there with Biden is beginning to match not even Obama levels. It's worse than what we're seeing. And that's what led to Obama really saying the quiet part out loud there. Indeed. All right. We've got a really sad story to bring you here that you may have seen. There's been a lot of discussion about this particular item. So let's throw this Substack post from Leighton Woodhouse up on the screen. Breaking down the U.S. government-funded animal experiments. Yeah, I did not know about all this. That are ongoing.

And, you know, Leighton really details these in horrific detail. So the one that really caught people's attention, I'll just read from the beginning of this piece. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases,

the division of the NIH that's run by Anthony Fauci, funded a recent experiment in Tunisia in which lab technicians placed sedated beagles, dogs, heads in mesh cages and allowed starved sandflies to feast on them alive, to feast on the dogs alive. Then they repeated the test outdoors with the beagles placed in cages in the desert overnight for nine consecutive nights in an area of Tunisia where sand flies were abundant. And ZVL, the disease caused by the parasite that the sand

flies carry, was endemic. So these beagles are sedated, heads put in mesh cages, were left outside, and the sand flies literally eat them to death. I mean, the most horrific thing that you can possibly imagine. And what's more, there's allegation that the scientists slit the dogs' vocal cords so that they wouldn't have to listen to their anguished howls. Horrible, horrible, horrible thing to think about. Horrible to know that our government is funding it. And there's actually been some bipartisan opposition to this particular procedure, but also our funding, routine funding of these type of animal experiments, which, you know, Leighton kind of makes it, like focuses on Fauci here with some justification because Fauci is part of leadership. Nebraska, who says that the reason for what they describe as animal-centric culture, meaning culture centered around experimentation on animals, is people like Fauci and another leader,

Collins. The quote is, they really believe in that animal model. It's a huge impact having those two at the helm. The two directors unquestioned commitment to animal testing sets the tone for science as a whole. thanks to them, it is industry standard and careers are based on it. So the allegation here is that tone comes from the top. Fauci is one of those leaders who really believes in animal experimentation as essential. Let's go ahead and throw this New York Post report up on the screen that shows bipartisan. I can see that photo there for those who are watching. The beagles with their heads in the cages.

Terrible. Bipartisan legislators demanding answers. There's also some movement in terms of a bipartisan bill to try to eliminate funding for these types of experiments. Activists have used some on the libertarian rights in particular, like Rand Paul is one of the people who's supporting these efforts. They're aversion to sort of like wasteful government spending. They've used that to say basically, you should get on board with getting rid of this. Because also, look, this isn't a topic that I know an extensive amount about, but from reading in preparation for this segment, science has moved a lot in that what we're able to do in order to test has developed greatly with technology, with AI. And so the argument is that these experiments, if they were ever necessary, not clear that they are, are really not necessary anymore. And what's more, oftentimes, they don't actually even provide effective data about how various treatments or parasites or

whatever is their testing, how this would play out in human beings. That oftentimes there's a huge error rate. And so the dogs or whatever animal is being tortured and tested on, it doesn't even provide data that's really useful or relevant to human beings. So pretty horrific what's going on and that I think most people have no idea that we're funding this sort of stuff. No, I had no idea. First of all, I have the beagle, love beagles, and so I did not know that beagles are actually the standard dog used in many medical experiments, which is disgusting to me for a variety of reasons. And Leighton actually got a good response from the University of Georgia, which is one of the stories that they talk about. They call it like a dog model because the disease has no cure.

Unfortunately, animals part of this trial must be euthanized. We do not take lightly the decision to use such animals in our research. But really what it is, and look, there has to be a balance, right, obviously, in terms of experimentation and more, is that the way that the dogs and the animals themselves are even treated throughout the experiment, it's clearly incredibly cruel. And, you know, like you said, debarking, cutting out their vocal cords, letting flies, like, eat them to death. That's not the same as testing out a vaccine or something. And even then, maybe we should all have a discussion. So I try to look at this in the same way that we did gain of function, which was, okay, gain of function, we all began to learn about it because of the lab leak.

Now, here's the thing. Whether the lab leak's true or not, and we'll probably never know at this point, although I strongly suspect that it is true, you often say this. I think we have enough information to say, hey, if there's a 50-something percent chance, and I think it's more like 90, that this causes a pandemic, maybe we tighten up all the restrictions around this thing. Maybe we don't do it at all. Maybe the public should have some sort of a say. And that's what I am heartened and hoping. Look, obviously, this is coming in a culture war story. People are like, oh, Fauci and puppies. And look, that's actually completely true. But really what it is, is maybe we should have Congress who appropriates, and I did not know

this, $40 billion a year on different medical experiments, set some standards as to what the U.S. government is going to fund. And if there is a culture from the top saying, no, no, no, no, dog experiments are actually pretty crucial. Last time I checked, these people are not gods. They do not create the rules on their own. It's our money. We're the public. We get to decide how and what and where things are going to be done in our name. And I would just encourage you that if you're a dog person like me, now I have a cat, so I'm also a cat person, but a dual personality. But if you take a look at that photo and you tell me whether

you're cool with that, and I'm going to say, no, I'm not. And I think it's important that we all see exactly what's going here. And this is a much deeper story. If people knew exactly how those factory farms and all those things. I've had the misfortune of having to drive past a slaughterhouse in Amarillo, Texas. And I can tell you, you never want to hear or see any of that stuff in your lifetime. Yes. Yeah. Glenn was on Rising, actually. That's right.

Oh, wow. And talked about, he's, I looked at him on this issue because he's very passionate about it. Right. Very much more knowledge about it. And it's reported on on factory farms and on animal experimentation, all of this stuff. And with regard to the necessity of animal experimentation, which is what the proponents argue, like, look, yeah, it's awful. This is what the University of Georgia is saying. Of course it's awful. Of course we don't like doing it, but we're trying to save human

lives. And so there's a balance here that has to be struck. Glenn compared it to the argument that people make in favor of torture, which is you can come up with some sort of theoretical scenario, the ticking time bomb, that if you could torture this one person into telling you, you could stop it and you could save all these lives. And so people who are proponents of torture, they'll concoct these elaborate scenarios to make you feel like, okay, well, we have to sanction this because people's lives are at stake. When in reality, that scenario actually never plays out. And so Glenn made that comparison here of like, yeah, you can concoct, of course, scenarios where it's like, well, would you torture a puppy to cure everybody of cancer? All right.

And you'd say, well, I mean, it's horrible, but I guess if we're going to cure all technological advances where a lot of this experimentation can happen using technology where no animals have to be harmed at all. So even this idea that like, oh, there's a difficult balance here and sometimes we have to test on animals to save human lives, even that is somewhat questionable. I feel like I can't do this segment without saying that, honestly, I feel like a gigantic hypocrite talking about this because the factory farm treatment is awful. I'm not a vegan. I eat animals that come from those factory farms. And so I just want to put out there that this is a really difficult and challenging subject and i am by no means like pure or being totally ideologically consistent here if i'm being honest well so am i and look

this is the thing it's not on you we did not design the meat supply chain okay yeah like it's on the public to make it so that there are certain standards that we can make it so that we can live we can both all eat a healthy diet and also- And have life-saving treatments and cancer cures and all those things. And also not have people tortured in our name. And this is where you see the intersection. I mean, in the factory farm industry, it's just all about profit, which is that the animals themselves are just commodities. You can treat them horrible. And actually, it's worse for the animal. It's worse for you too, in terms of what you're eating and the diet and all that. I would really

encourage people to look into the actual stuff that those animals are eating and how it affects you, your hormone levels and more. I have personally made that choice. But once again, it should not be on me. This is not something that you should have to go through and make sure what you're putting in your body is not even about ethics, but really about over your health and their health, they should make it so that it is more sound. So I would put it as a much more systemic problem. That's exactly how I see this one. And to me, it just highlights the fact that Fauci is a creature of the system. Gain of function was and is part of the scientific system, which then possibly created this horrific pandemic.

These, you know, beagle experiments, these animal experiments are being highlighted, you know, for a variety of reasons, but it's a creature of the system in which they see it as necessary and they want to hide the truth, just like they do from gain of function from you. It's your money and you get to decide how we actually want to do with it, regardless of what all the myths are. And I think that we should try at least our best in order to at least raise awareness and possibly have these lawmakers do something about it. Look at what a good friend Sagar is. He'll even justify my moral hypocrisy for me. Thank you, Sagar.

Well, I have to justify my own. All right. Big update on a story that we brought you before. Okay. You remember Kamala Harris was supposed to do this big VIEW interview. She doesn't talk to press that often because it doesn't really go that well when she usually does.

So this was a big deal. It was billed in advance. The VIEW was really touting, et cetera. So comes to showtime and they're halfway through the show. They are just about to bring out the vice president. And suddenly there's a kind of a strangeness on set. And they actually tell to Anna Navarro and Sonny Hostin that they have to leave.

And it turns out that they have received a positive COVID test. Yes. Again, so there's a lot of strangeness here because you're like, wouldn't you have tested before the middle of the show? Like, wouldn't you have had this figured out? Right. And then we learn after the fact from some reporting from, I think, the Daily Beast and a couple other outlets that the vice president's office is extremely pissed off because they were told the night before their requirement was that everybody involved would be PCR tested. That's a gold standard test.

The night before, they were given the all clear. Everybody's tested. Everybody's negative. And so they're like, what the hell happened? And then after being told mid show that they're positive for COVID, Anna and Sonny both take like million other COVID tests and they're all negative. So it's a false positive, which on a PCR test is incredibly. Yeah. You went through the data. This is incredibly. It basically doesn't happen. Okay. So something happened. There was some screw up or potential plot. I don't know. But this did not go smoothly. And there were a lot of unanswered questions. And the vice president's office even was never able to get satisfaction. They still don't have an answer. About what the hell happened here. Well, they still don't have an answer. About what the hell happened here.

Well, allegedly they don't have an answer. Yes, right. Yeah. Put that out there as well. So here's the latest. Let's throw this tear sheet up on the screen. Somebody had to take the fall, and so who did they pick but their nurse?

Their on-staff nurse. Nurse Wendy. Nurse, Nurse Wendy. The view ditched its hero nurse after Kamala Harris COVID chaos. The registered nurse was once touted as the talk show's own Florence Nightingale, but apparently she had to take the fall for last month's on-air testing meltdown. Here's a little bit from that piece. They say multiple people familiar with the matter told the Daily Beast that following the on-air fiasco last month, the daytime talk show ditched its health and safety manager. Her

name is Wendy Livingston, whom the program affectionately referred to as Nurse Wendy and once labeled a health care hero during an effusive tribute. ABC says Wendy has not been fired. She remains a part of the health and safety team supporting testing and vaccine verification. So what that seems to indicate is that they've taken her out of that role. She doesn't work for the show anymore. She's been, yeah, significantly demoted. So they decided to take this like working class nurse, registered nurse, and make her the fall guy for their whole disastrous situation or whatever happened. Yeah.

And look, you raised a lot of questions in that monologue, which is that PCR false negatives almost so never happen. Also, very convenient that Kamala just didn't have to do the interview. Also, or sorry, that she didn't have to do an interview with two of the people who might have asked her tough questions once again. Then you come to the fact that there was this bizarre on-air apology from the executive producer of The View to them saying, hey, we're super sorry. And then everybody just dropped it. And look, it's a mighty fishy incident. These things generally don't happen. And then weeks later, the nurse somehow is the lady who takes the fall. And there was never an explanation around,

oh, the nurse screwed it up or whatever if that was true then they should have said so they just quietly kind of take her off she's the fall guy um for all of this and you found this this is how they used to treat this nurse um this is how well they thought of her just to give you an idea of how her stature was within the team before she got canned, let's take a listen. Your optimism, your kindness do not go unrecognized by those of us here at The View. She is adorably kind, compassionate, and she's made me feel taken care of. And as a mama myself, that doesn't happen very often. A very special thank you to Nurse Wendy for everything you've done to keep the VIEW family

safe and sound. Thank you so much for all your incredible work and how amazing you are. We love you and you have been absolutely integral to getting the ladies of the VIEW through this time. Thank you so much, Wendy, for keeping us safe this year. I have never had so many cotton swabs up my nose in my entire lifetime. I don't think we could have gotten

through this without her. She's been an enormous asset. She is our own Florence Nightingale. Hey, Nurse Wendy, I just wanted to say, nurses rock. We love you. Thank you for everything you do. Thank you. Thank you very much. Our own Florence Nightingale.

Our hero. Our own Florence Nightingale. I will say, of course, Florence Nightingale is sort of like founder, originator of the nursing profession, treating soldiers during the Crimean War. And it could be sort of a battlefield there with the ladies of The View, no doubt about it. But look, I think there's a larger metaphor here for the country. When it benefited The View to hold her up, oh, we love our essential workers. It's so amazing. Our own Florence Nightingale, you kept us safe, et cetera, et cetera. That's what they did when that was like, you know, a good look for them.

And then the minute it was inconvenient, they were happy to kick her to the curb and have her take the fall for whatever the hell happened there on that fateful day. Very, very interesting what's happening here. I want answers.

That's the bottom line. It still remains one of the most bizarre. I mean, look, they got huge ratings. They got a ton of media play out of this. Like, oh my God.

They got pulled off live on the air. It was nuts, right? And then they're like, oh, it's a false positive, even though that almost never happens. And the vice president, you know, doesn't do this interview with two of the people who might have asked her the toughest questions while they were there. It's a total fluff piece. And then they are completely freaked out about what's going on. Then they offer some, you know, crazy apology, which doesn't make any sense. And now the nurse, who by their own estimation,

was, you know, the hero, the Florence Nightingale, who manages the whole process. Now she's taken off of the entire thing. Now, you know, we don't know all the details, but I don't think we're getting the full story. I'm team Nurse Wendy. That's all I'm saying. Yeah, I'm team Nurse Wendy too.

I blame somebody much higher up. Indeed. There we go. Wow. You guys must really like listening to our voices. While I know this is annoying, instead of making you listen to a Viagra commercial, when you're done, check out the other podcast I do with Marshall Kosloff called The Realignment. We talk a lot about the deeper issues that are changing, realigning in American society. You

always need more Crystal and Saga in your daily lives. Take care, guys. Crystal, what are you taking a look at? Well, guys, the biggest COVID threat to Americans does not come from the vaccine hesitant. It is not, in fact, anti-mask Karens refusing to wear their pandemic protection and being jerks about it. It's not Kyrie Irving liking posts about vaccines being microchipped. It's not even Nicki Minaj and her cousin's friend's swollen balls. No. The biggest pandemic threat comes from an older and much more intractable foe, greed. Greed of pharmaceutical companies looking to profit as

much as they possibly can off of a life-saving vaccine, combined with the corruption and cowardice of politicians like Joe Biden, who are unwilling to stand up to those pharmaceutical companies. This deadly combination has made it so that only 0.7% of vaccine doses have gone to poor countries. Now, we are learning new details of just how far these companies are willing to go and the lies they are willing to tell in order to protect their bottom line. Let me tell you a little story here about one of the worst actors involved, the company of Moderna. Now, you will recall at the beginning of the pandemic, wealthy nations, the World Health Organization and Big Pharma alike, they were all singing the same tune. They said we needed a World War II level effort all in it

together to develop a vaccine and then to go out and vaccinate the whole world. Through Operation Warp Speed here in the U.S., we were integral to the development of several of those vaccines, including what turned out to be the most effective version, Moderna. Now, this mass mobilization and significant funding came on top of years of publicly funded research, which led to the development of that mRNA technology that, of course, allowed the Moderna and the Pfizer vaccines to be created so rapidly. In fact, no vaccine owed more to the U.S. taxpayer than Moderna's. They were little more than a startup when they jumped in the great vaccine race, and the U.S. government backed them bigly. According to the New York Times, when the Moderna partnership was first proposed to Dr. Fauci,

he said, quote, go for it, whatever it costs, don't worry about it. And the U.S. government kept their word, flooding the effort with resources of all kinds. So for those of you keeping track at home, you funded the mRNA research, you funded the Moderna vaccine development, and your government moved heaven and earth to make sure that every issue and wrinkle and hiccup in that vaccine development was ultimately sorted out. They even brought in top military brass to make sure that every single obstacle would be removed. But now that Moderna has their publicly funded vaccine, they want to keep all the private profits for themselves and they want to milk it for every last dollar they possibly can, even if that means risking another pandemic. After all, they did profit very handsomely off of this

one. In fact, Moderna has limited production of their vaccine and sold it almost exclusively to the rich world, where governments can afford to pay premium prices. Here's the New York Times with that report headlined, Moderna racing for profits keeps COVID vaccine out of reach of poor. Quote, Moderna has shipped a greater share of its doses to wealthy countries than any other vaccine manufacturer. That's according to Airfinity, a data firm that tracks vaccine shipments. They are behaving as if they have absolutely no responsibility beyond maximizing the return on investment, said Dr. Tom Frieden, a former head of the CDC. A for-profit company only caring about profits? Who could have seen that coming? Now, for their part, Moderna says that they asked for government funding to scale up their production, but didn't receive it and that they are so sad

that only rich countries have essentially received their vaccine. Of course, if you genuinely wanted to increase production capacity, there is a simple and obvious way. Drop the patent protection and provide the details of how to make the vaccine so that manufacturers around the world can start churning out millions of lower cost doses. Now the Biden administration, they claim to be pressing Moderna to do more to expand production and to drop the patent. At the same time though, they're saying,

well, we don't have the legal authority to unilaterally share the vaccine recipe with the rest of the world. Of all the excuses though, the biggest one for not sharing the vaccine has always been that these third world countries can't possibly produce the vaccines to our standards. Well, we're now seeing just what a bold-faced lie that excuse ultimately was. It turns out not only do pharmaceutical makers around the globe have the ability to produce the vaccines, scientists in South Africa are making a concerted effort to pull off what would be a truly incredible feat. They're trying to reverse engineer the Moderna vaccine,

cracking the code of that vaccine recipe so that they can have a chance at a premium vaccine for their own population. This effort has received backing from the World Health Organization, which is helping coordinate training and source raw materials for the effort. One young scientist involved in the effort said, quote, we are doing this for Africa at this moment, and that drives us. We can no longer rely on these big superpowers to come in and save us. Just think of the insanity here. Moderna could just give them the recipe, opening the floodgates for more production. The Biden administration, which funded the Moderna vaccine, could exercise margin rights, lift the patent protections, and also open the floodgates.

Instead, Africa is left to try to crack the code and define the process in a last-ditch effort to access what should have always been publicly available. And make no mistake about it, the consequences for our own population of this greed, cowardice, and corruption will be deadly. We can get every last solitary soul in our own country vaccinated, and it is not going to matter much in the end if new variants are constantly emerging from an unvaccinated global South. The pandemic will never end so long as billions of people remain vulnerable as a laboratory for COVID to mutate and jump the vaccines that we've already created. It's an unconscionable and frankly murderous crime to hoard this vaccine, artificially decreasing supply, keeping prices premium so that some pharma exec somewhere can get

a bigger yacht. Stop worrying about the anti-mask Karens and start worrying about the real COVID criminals, the CEOs and the politicians who would let millions die to protect their profits. And Sagar, that's the very last update to this story. The Biden administration said, ah, we've done a legal review. And unfortunately, one more thing I promise. Just wanted to make sure you knew about my podcast with Kyle Kalinsky. It's called Crystal Kyle and Friends, where we do longform interviews with people like Noam Chomsky, Cornel West, and Glenn Greenwald. You can listen on any podcast platform, or you can subscribe over on Substack to get the video a day early. We're going to stop bugging you now. Enjoy.

All right, Sagar, what are you looking at? Well, if we're being honest, in many aspects of American lives, it really does not matter who the president is. The president rarely has much control, as we may think, over most of the things that we interact with on a daily basis. The only place that they really have total and complete control is foreign policy. That is why who we elect as president, their faculties, their judgment, their worldview, is arguably the most important thing about them, even though consistently most Americans never really care that much about foreign policy and rank it as a top priority. It's especially important when you're dealing

with nuclear powers and matters of war. A miscalculation, as we learned in the Cuban Missile Crisis, can literally be a matter of life or death for tens of millions of people. That is why I am getting increasingly dismayed by Joe Biden's cavalier, confused, and apparently contradictory statements on Taiwan. Now Taiwan, as many of you know, is the island territory, or nation, depending on who you ask, off of the coast of China. Taiwan was originally the refuge of the nationalists who lost the Chinese Civil War in the 1940s. It has since developed into a thriving democracy and a technological powerhouse. By nearly all measures, it's a mostly separate ethnic group almost at this point from China, but that doesn't stop the Chinese Communist Party from claiming it as its own.

The CCP views Taiwan's existence as an affront to its legitimacy of governance over all Chinese peoples. Now, rhetoric from the CCP in recent months has escalated significantly. Chinese President Xi Jinping vowing that what they call peaceful reunification with Taiwan, as we have seen multiple instances of Chinese military aircraft penetrating what's called the Taiwanese defense zone in the aerial defense zone. It leaves everyone asking the question, so what's America going to do if something happens out there? Now, the answer is pretty complicated, because our relations with Taiwan are not entirely up to the president. The Taiwan Relations Act of 1979

establishes non-diplomatic relations with Taiwan, effectively not recognizing it as a country, but also kind of doing so. Militarily, it does not guarantee defense of Taiwan, only that the United States can provision Taiwan with the military capability to defend itself if needed. Now, on a broader, more conceptual level, this is known as strategic ambiguity. Now, it doesn't say that the U.S. will defend Taiwan, and it also doesn't not say it. So that's the effect of U.S. policy towards Taiwan

has been now for four decades, at least until Joe Biden spoke in his most recent town hall. Let's take a listen. Listen carefully to exactly what he says. China just tested a hypersonic missile. What will you do to keep up with them militarily? And can you vow to protect Taiwan? Yes and yes. We are militarily, China, Russia, and the rest of the world knows, we have the most powerful military in the history of the world.

Don't worry about whether they're going to be more powerful. What you do have to worry about is whether or not they're going to engage in activities that will put them in a position where they may make a serious mistake. And so I have had, I've spoken and spent more time with Xi Jinping than any other world leader has. Now, look, that is an extraordinary statement. Biden answered definitively that the U.S. would defend Taiwan. That is a major change in American foreign policy. Except that hours later, the White House put out a statement by Jen Psaki saying, quote,

In other words, what Biden just said is not the official position of the U.S. government. Or is it? Now look, this is the worst of all worlds. If Joe Biden is saying we're going to defend Taiwan, then okay, that's policy. That would certainly change the calculus in Beijing as to whether they're going to make a go for that island or not. But instead, Biden is saying one thing definitively, and then the White House is effectively saying he misspoke. And actually, maybe we will have to do something, maybe not. If anything, that level of drawing back commitment could actually signal to the Chinese, oh, if you do go for it, we won't do anything,

which in turn could actually influence their calculus to make a go for the island. Now, as some of you know, I'm pretty obsessed with the First World War. One of the reasons that war broke out in 1914 was specifically because of lack of clear communication from world leaders as to what their real intentions were. The Kaiser would say one thing, and then the foreign office would say another, and then the ambassador would say something else. Now, the lack of clarity and communication left the interpretations up to a series of autocratic rulers. And at that point, when the decision is in the hands of a single man, it takes only one

misreading of a situation for tens of millions of people to die. With nuclear weapons now, we're talking about hundreds of millions of people, lives at stake, and the same level of potential miscalculation by human beings. One reason I am highlighting this now is because I believe the potential for a major escalation in Asia is higher than it has ever been before. Not because China is rising, but conversely, because it may have peaked already. I've become obsessed recently with an argument advanced by Hal Brands that the Chinese economy, as we know, is basically completely fake.

Evergrande was just the tip of the iceberg. Its tech companies, while good, are artificial state constructions. The foundation of its economy is graft and horse trading among senior Communist Party members. Such a system can only go on for so long. With COVID, with global economic disruptions, perhaps the music might stop domestically. And it's precisely at that moment,

when a power believes that it may have peaked, when it has done all it can through domestic policy, that it may be at its economic peak that war is actually most likely in history. It's the time, rationally, that would be the best to make a military move or to consolidate power and potentially attain or redirect more resources back to the declining state. Now, it's not without precedent. Look at how Russia has behaved under Putin, despite that it's an economic and demographic complete joke. It would also explain Germany's behavior in the First World War, Japan's in the Second World War. In all three cases, it entails a lashing out, an ignition of a major war.

And in all three cases, clear communication from the United States or Great Britain could have prevented it. Now, it was precisely because of confusion that millions of people have died previously. Joe Biden is playing with fire. When he says one thing, the White House says another. People's lives are at stake, and we need a hell of a lot better right now. This is the thing, Crystal. I used to be very worried about this whenever it came to Trump and North Korea. Now, when they were talking... Joining us now to talk about inflation and all that's going on with the economy is someone whose work we have really relied upon here, Heather Long. She's economics correspondent for The Washington Post. Great to have you, Heather. Welcome.

Good to see you. Hi. Could you just give us an overview? And I think we have your latest piece here that we can throw up on the screen about inflation. If we can put that element up on the screen, guys. Uncomfortable inflation is here and it's changing the economy. American families and businesses are altering their habits as they increasingly believe high prices are here to stay. Give us, Heather, just an overview of where we stand with regards to inflation and what goods in particular are driving those numbers. Yeah, it's really astounding. Obviously, we have inflation, depending upon which measure you look at, that's at a 13-year high, or in some cases, if you look at some of the other gauges, you could even argue it's at

over a 20-year high. So people are feeling it. I was really stunned to see the latest CNBC polling that shows that people are as concerned in America about inflation now as they are about the coronavirus. And a lot of that reason they're so concerned is just what you said. People are feeling it in so many areas. You know, it used to be in the spring and summer, everybody was talking about the used car prices and the lumber prices soaring. Well, if you weren't buying a used car, maybe you didn't feel it. But now we just see inflation across the board. Not only do we see it in furniture and appliances and TVs, but it's also food price inflation is very high. Almost any kind of protein, any kind of meat or even eggs you would

buy at the store up about 10%. And the one that really worries me, of course, any kind of meat or even eggs you would buy at the store up about 10%. And the one that really worries me, of course, people are focused on those gas prices up about a dollar from a year ago. But the one that really worries me is rent prices have taken off. They are near a 20-year high in many parts of the country. And this time around, it's not being driven by New York and San Francisco, the big coastal cities. The really big surges are in places that we used to think of as affordable, like Phoenix, Arizona, or Boise, Idaho, or Spokane, Washington. So it's just getting harder and harder. If you're a working class family, those gas prices are up, food prices, hard to get any sort of rental right now. And there just seems to be no end in sight to this. And that's really my main concern in that piece. The era of uncomfortable inflation is here.

Whether it stays at 5%, I don't know, but it's certainly going to be well above that 2% we're used to. So what's the cause, Heather? That's really what it all comes down to. We've tried to cover a lot of the stuff of what you're discussing, the supply chain crisis, obviously, with used cars as well. Microchips get involved. Then we have the port backlog. We have a trucking thing. What is the cause of some of the most significant inflation that we see for the pocketbook of those who are middle class Americans? Well, you're absolutely right that the number one cause right now is these supply chain backlogs that you just outlined really well, and that's what's freaking people out. Can they get their holiday gifts?

But also we're starting to see some people rushing to get toilet paper again in some parts of America, or alcohol has run short, various types of liquors, because they just can't restock the shelves enough in most parts of the country. It's almost a joke if you order something like a couch right now. It's at least six months wait. But I think for me, what's really worrying, obviously, the supply chain issues are likely to linger, at least we're hearing through summer of 2022. So we've got over a half a year more of this but i think the bigger problem is we're starting to see some other drivers of

inflation picking up and what i mean by that is we're starting to see restaurants aggressively raise prices or home goods aggressively raise prices because of the supply chain but also because they're having to pay their workers more. Some of those labor shortage issues are now feeding through into inflation. Similarly, a lot of those housing price woes are now feeding through into those higher rent prices. And so those things are not temporary. The White House and the Federal Reserve loves to say, hey, it's short term, it's temporary, it's transitory. But when you start to see, even if they can clear those supply chain backlogs, these labor shortage issues and the rising rents are going to linger. Well, and this is where things get interesting, right? Because one man's labor shortage issue

is another man's ability to earn a higher wage, or as you've documented, leave a job they really didn't like and go somewhere else and earn a lot more money or potentially go on strike and bargain for better conditions. So how do we square the fact that on the one hand, things actually seem pretty good for workers, you have people who feel confident enough to leave their jobs, you do see wages that have been stagnant for decades starting to increase. You see a lot of activity, whether it's at John Deere or IATSE threatening the strike. You see a lot of sort of labor activity that also signals that workers feel like they can bargain here for a better deal. And on the other hand, you have a plurality of Americans who are worried

about a recession, who believe a recession is coming in the next year. You have these supply chain issues. You've got inflation spiking. So how do you make sense of this overall picture that seems to be a real mixed bag for people? It is. And it's a good word, mixed bag. It's certainly, I called it, I think, in a piece in early September, the I don't know economy. We've just not seen these funky dynamics that we're in right now. And it's not clear how it's all going to end or even what the right policy response should be from Washington and other parts of the world. The European Central Bank is meeting this week as well. So it is a very confusing time. And I just go back to first principles in the sense that

you're right. It's a good sign that these wages are finally picking up, particularly I look at restaurant grocery store workers for the first time in U.S. history. The average pay for those workers is above fifteen dollars an hour. That happened over the summer. Basically, 15 is almost de facto the minimum wage in the United States right now. Many workers say they won't even look at a job that doesn't pay at least $15 an hour. So, but the big but there is, if you look, those wage increases, as great as they are, are almost entirely wiped out by rising inflation. So the optimistic scenario is usually when prices go up, I mean, excuse me, wages go up, they don't get cut later. It's not like we're

going to hit March and those wages are going to go from $15 back to $13. So wages, when they go up, usually stay up. And the hope is that inflation will eventually come back down a little bit. But again, whether that's going to come back down enough is my big concern for people to really feel like they're finally getting ahead in 2022. Right. Yeah. I mean, that's the question. When do you think that we'll know and have the answers kind of definitively? Will it be a year from now, two years from now? Does it depend more on COVID? Is it the White House? Who are the actual key players who are going to be determinants here? Yeah, that's a great question. I think the key thing to watch is definitely

what's going on with the supply chain. Certainly, there was some size of relief on Wall Street, even just in the last few hours, as finally we're starting to see a little bit of come off on some of those shipping costs. They are still astronomically high compared to where they were even in the spring or last winter, but they have come off a little bit from the September all-time record highs that we saw. So in that sense, there's maybe a little bit of sign of hope that at least it may not get worse in the coming months. But certainly, when does it really get better? When are we back to something that looks more normal?

Again, a lot of CEOs now are saying that won't happen until summer 2022. So I think we won't really know a lot until we get through the holiday season. It's clearly going to be a crunch. And can we work things out in the spring, which tends to be a little bit slower shipping period? Right. And Heather, finally, one of the things that I wanted to get from you is you have been tracking the great resignation, the historic number of workers who are leaving their jobs and switching industries and some of the dynamics and trends that are behind that. How much of that is attributable to, I saw a quote where someone said, you know, when you realize your boss during a pandemic will literally kill you or sacrifice your life,

that changes your relationship to that employment. And in fact, we do see workers disproportionately leaving retail, restaurant work, those sort of frontline essential nursing, you know, nursing home workers, that was the most dangerous industry in the country last year. So you see a lot of workers moving out of those industries that were really forced onto the front lines. How much do you think a sort of pandemic rethinking of what their employment was accounts for this big shift in workers? I think this is a huge, huge factor. I've been writing about this since the spring. This is the biggest shakeup in the labor market that we've seen since World War II.

And what I mean by that is this pandemic has affected everyone. You know, we've had over 700,000 deaths in this country. It's affected high-wage workers, low-wage workers, all different types of communities across the U.S. And it also a lot of restaurant workers, when you ask them, why are you quitting now? They say two things. They say, number one, the pandemic, when I was off for a bit on unemployment, it was the first time in my life I really slowed down, you know, that I had a minute to think, what do I want in my life? Is this what I want to be doing? Is this how I want to do my family? I call it YOLO on steroids. We only live once on steroids. Sure, we all knew you should seize the day and all that kind of advice, but to have that time finally to be able to really think about it, I think has galvanized people. The other key thing that I hear right now, and I just want to say one of the numbers really quickly, over 30 million people have quit their jobs so far this year. That was through August. We have the data through August. If we continue at roughly that pace, we will end the year with over 45 million people quitting their job. We have

just never seen anything close to this. But it's not just quits. We have millions more people retiring early. And on a positive side, we have an uptick in people starting new businesses, almost near a 30-year high in starting new businesses. So we see people making these decisions in so many different areas. And the other thing I hear, which you really went to the heart of, is burnout. I was talking to a server yesterday in Memphis, Tennessee, and he said to me, you know, not only is the job harder now than it used to be because we don't have enough staff, so we're all waiting more tables. But he said to me, I was just stunned to hear this. He said, you wouldn't believe it. The number of people who are under tipping right now are leaving zero tips.

It's just all of these factors are coming together and people are saying, I've had enough. Wow. They're really amazing. Well, Heather, we want to thank you for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. Congratulations on your new, I guess, is it a promotion? I don't know. Move within the Washington Post to the columns.

We will absolutely be having you on again and reading with great earnest. We use your work all the time. So thank you. Thanks, Heather. Great to have you. Thank you. Take care. Absolutely.

And thank you guys so much for watching. We really appreciate it. It's just awesome to do this show every day. And we've been ending the show this way for a reason, but we consistently see wild swings in our YouTube revenue. And that just makes it so that we can't plan as a business. We have great improvements that we want to do. The only thing we can rely on are you, the premium subscribers. So we really appreciate you. Anytime that you guys join and you can support us, we have some awesome, awesome technological developments

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To help other people find the show, go ahead and leave us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps other people find the show. As always, a special thank you to Supercast for powering our premium membership. If you want to find out more, go to crystalandsager.com. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator,

and seeker of male validation. I'm also the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. You might hear that term and think it's about celibacy, but to me, voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's flexible, it's customizable, and it's a personal process. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to voiceover on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. DNA test proves he is not the father. Now I'm taking the inheritance. Wait a minute, John.

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