Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 1/10/23: Biden Caught W/ Classified Files, McCarthy Social Security and Medicare Cuts, America's Views On 2023, Twitter Files Pfizer Vaccines, Prince Harry's Afghanistan, Russia Twitter Trolls, Jordan Peterson, Tech Layoffs, Ioan Grillo Cartel Interview

Episode Date: January 10, 2023

Krystal and Saagar discuss Biden being caught with classified documents in his office from his VP term, Republicans pushing to hold the debt hostage to make cuts to social security and medicare, Americans views on 2023 and the issues that matter most, Twitter Files uncovering Pfizer board members pushing to censor information on Twitter, Prince Harry's bizarre memoir about killing 25 people in Afghanistan, what the future looks like for the Tech industry among massive layoffs, Jordan Peterson takes fire for claims of misinformation, and an exclusive interview with journalist Ioan Grillo on the ongoing Mexican Cartel Wars.To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Indeed we do. Lots of interesting stuff breaking this morning, including we had to add a block into the show last night. Apparently some classified documents were found at a former office space of President Biden. These were documents apparently from when he was vice president. Break all of that down for you. A little bit awkward, I would say. A little bit awkward. At the same time, the rules package passed the House last night. This was sort of the first big test of Kevin McCarthy's new speakership. That went through. I think he won by like two votes or something like that. So he only lost a few votes in the Republican caucus. And there is a surprising advocate for some of the changes that are included in this Kevin McCarthy speaker deal. So we'll tell you about that. We also have some pretty stunning new polling

revealing Americans' priorities, how they are feeling about the state of the country. We've got some new Twitter files exposing big pharma and some major conflicts of interest with regard to media. Not that you will be shocked there. Prince Harry is making a shocking admission that somehow the media mostly ignored. Yes, is being completely ignored. We'll get to it. Yeah, this is an interesting one. And also, you gotta love this. How many years are we post-2015, 2016 Russiagate? The media is finally admitting that at least one aspect of it was completely fake news. Shocker. Amazing.

Excited to have Yon Grillo on the show. He's going to be giving us a report on what exactly is going on in Mexico. I am looking at the tech session, and Sagar is looking at Jordan Peterson. But before we get to any of that, live show. Live show. Put it up there on the screen. Last couple of chances here, folks, February 3rd. Tickets are being booked, travel, accommodations, all of that. Send your food recommendations in. We are coming. We'll

have a great show for all of you. We're going to do some fun stuff while we are down there in Austin, Texas. Okay, let's start with Biden. So late news breaking last night. Well, let's put it up there on the screen. It turns out that 10 classified documents were actually removed from Joe Biden's presidential, a vice presidential office found at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement. While he was moving out of that office in 2017, the classified documents were actually found by Biden's own team in an internal review, presumably, Crystal, after the Mar-a-Lago raid in November and the general public consternation about it. The Biden lawyers themselves were like, hey, maybe we should check our own archives. They did so. They found actually 10 documents

with classified markings on them that were inside of their archives, removed from the White House while Joe Biden was the vice president. Now, according to Biden and his team, they have immediately returned those documents upon discovery to the Department of Justice. However, the Department of Justice itself has actually opened a review of the case. Attorney General Merrick Garland actually appointing a Trump appointee to a special prosecutor to actually review the entire case. So all of this a bit awkward and frankly embarrassing for the Biden administration, just because they made such a big deal of the Trump case. I mean, I would have to say, of course, what separates the two is not the possession of the classified documents itself,

but with Trump, there appears to be, you know, a concerted effort by Trump, his lawyers, and others to simply just not return the documents, not necessarily out of malice, but increasingly out of arrogance and incompetence by basically saying these are my documents, which not really how presidential records work. But I will say, I think it does validate one of the points that a lot of people who had defended him said, putting the obstruction aside, they're like, hey, I think a lot validate one of the points that a lot of people who had defended him said, putting the obstruction aside. They're like, hey, I think a lot of these presidential libraries do have at least some sensitive documents. It also does raise a question broadly to me. Why do these people get to hang on to literally anything if they are matters of state?

Why are they allowed to be at these libraries at all? Should they not just be purely in the possession of the National Archives? Maybe that's just a crazy thought. Just because you're president, I don't think that entitles you for all time to possession of your own files. I think that's a good point.

I think another point is that, like, obviously over-classification is a massive issue. So a lot of these, I mean, I don't know what these particular documents from Biden were.

I don't know how secret they were, what the highest classification marking, et cetera, was on them. But a lot of stuff that is technically classified is totally available in the public sphere and really shouldn't be classified. So that's an important thing to keep in mind here as well. I think your point about the difference between him and Trump's case is also, you know, a valid one. Probably if Trump ends up being indicted on the document issue, it is more likely to be

because of the obstruction than because he, you know, accidentally or intentionally or whatever held onto these documents. At this point, there's all kinds of reporting about how they were going back and forth with the National Archives. For a while, it was productive. And then basically he decided like, no, these are my documents. I'm going to stonewall. They apparently have some camera footage of him moving boxes around and trying to conceal them. So that is probably going to be the bigger issue for Trump. But putting all of that aside, obviously, this is a very bad look for the president. It's very awkward, given the concern and consternation about the documents that former President Trump was ultimately holding onto. There's another thing that, you know,

it's I guess a little bit of a side story here, but something that Ken Vogel was pointing out, which I think is worth noting. So these documents were located, were found by Biden's own attorneys at the Penn Biden Center. And this is where he had this cushy gig during the offseason when he was not vice president and was not yet running for president where he made $900,000 over the course of just two years for a vaguely defined role that involved no regular classes and about 12 public appearances on campus. So this was a very cushy gig for him where he apparently did basically nothing and earned almost a million dollars and hung out with some classified documents in an office is apparently what was ultimately going on here. So there's a lot of layers of exposing the political system and the way all of this ultimately works at work in this

story. Oh, absolutely. It's just, again, I don't know how we created this weird system where presidents and former officials feel entitled to their matters of state while they leave office, even though they're allegedly, at least, important to the American public, and then are then just allowed to create these insane centers where they get paid a ton of money and also, by the way, get to solicit private donations. This, you know, like the Jeff Bezos giving $100 million to the Obama Library in Chicago. The fact that Obama, I believe, is like Jeff Bezos giving $100 million to the Obama Library in Chicago. The fact that Obama, I believe, is in consternation with some community activists in order to get some of the land for his own. But again, I don't even want to make it about them.

My hometown, College Station, the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library is there. And again, you'll go there and you'll see treasures, pieces of the Berlin know, jewels and other things that were given to President Bush while he was in office. And I was like, I don't really understand like why this stuff is all here. Like who actually owns it? There just seems to be this quasi almost like a royal treatment that we give people and that really just needs to go away completely. There's one last piece that I want to add on to this, which is the timing of the disclosure that these documents were located because apparently the documents were actually found like a week before the midterms. Wow. And then they waited a couple months until they, you know, secured their election situation for this revelation to ultimately be made. I'm reading

from a New York Times story here. They say the White House statement said that it is cooperating with the Department of Justice, but did not explain why Mr. Biden's team waited more than two months to announce the discovery of the documents, which came a week before the midterm congressional elections, when the news would have been an explosive last minute development. So also another little interesting note there. Just the level of corruption here. Listen, y'all. Unbelievable. Lock them all up. Yeah. Look, takeaway is, yes, it is substantially different, at least legally, you know, in terms of the way that it's being treated. But, you know, on the substance, clearly he did the exact same thing. I guess just didn't have the idiocy to try

and cover it up. And it's going to be embarrassing for him regardless, especially if Trump does get indicted. Expect to hear all about it on the Fox News channel and elsewhere. So get acquainted with the details, folks. And here as well, guys, because we're equal opportunity in terms of our coverage. Unfortunately, we've got to cover it. It's going to be an important story. Okay, so moving on to the very latest in the new Republican House majority drama. So there were some questions yesterday over whether the

quote unquote moderates in the Republican caucus might balk over some of the concessions that were given up to the Freedom Caucus members who were sort of, you know, holding McCarthy's speakership hostage in order to obtain some things that they wanted and frankly doing it very effectively. But ultimately, the conclusion was very undramatic. Let's go and put this up on the screen from The New York Times. That rules package was passed amid concerns about McCarthy's concessions. So that happened yesterday. And, you know, we've already been over yesterday. We went over in detail what some of this was. I mean, some of it really has to do with power, with individual caucus members and individual House members having more power in terms of the legislating process.

I think, you know, those shifts towards the way the speakership concessions from McCarthy that they would essentially use the debt ceiling to, you know, force spending cuts back to Tea Party era type tactics using budget government shutdowns over budget fights to also try to force spending cuts. But, you know, it was interesting because back in the Tea Party era, all of the talk was really about social welfare spending and defense cuts. They didn't really want to go there. They were reluctant to ultimately cut the defense budget, even though once they made a deal and they had sequestration, there were some defense budget cuts. But they were really more focused on the social welfare spending. So it was like, oh, well, interesting that they're actually floating defense budget cuts now.

And the other piece as a lefty that I found interesting and you find interesting as well, and I think a lot of people in a bipartisan fashion found relevant and important, is a potential church-style commission where you would investigate deep state abuses, the surveillance state, and what they describe as the weaponization of the government against the people. Well, those two potential changes and concessions have found an unlikely ally in squad member Ilhan Omar. Let's take a listen. The obviously cuts to the Pentagon budget is pretty exciting for folks like me who are putting up amendments to do so. I also think the church style committee that they are thinking about to look into if there has been any violations of First Amendment rights of Americans by the FBI and others

also interests me. So we'll see what ends up happening and if Republicans are able to actually be able to get anything done. So noteworthy that she's saying that on MSNBC. I'm sure it's not a message they're really hearing from anyone else. What? And yeah, and you know, I give her a lot of credit for it. She's willing to stake out some of these like consistent principled positions on things like censorship and on these issues as well. Unfortunately, I wouldn't be so confident that this whole defense cut piece is actually going to come to fruition because while I do think you have a few people in the Republican caucus who would genuinely like to see the defense budget cut, immediately you had a number of members from the caucus in prominent positions running out to say,

no, no, no, the Republican Party will never, ever cut the military's budget. Let's take a listen to a few of them making that case. And the argument is this would affect defense spending, which I'm here to tell you guys, Republicans will not impact defense spending aside from efficiencies and waste. It's the domestic spending that we're going to go after. Congressman Mike Waltz, a Republican from a great state of Florida and a decorated combat veteran, joins me now. Congressman, should military spending cuts be on the table and put on the table by a Republican? Well, look, I agree with Jim Jordan that we are going to carve out woke policies out of the military.

We are going to look at the out of whack ratio of generals. I invite him to come on the Armed Services Committee and and work with us on that. But, Stu, and by the way, I'm all for a balanced budget. We've got to get spending under control, but we are not going to do it on the backs of our troops and our military. So this is, I mean, we can work on report prioritizing defense spending, but that's really nibbling around the margins. If we really want to talk about the debt and spending, it's the entitlements program. That's 70% of our entire budget. As you know, if we don't, if we don't raise the debt ceiling, all we've got to do now, this is tough and this is difficult. And again, it takes courage.

But what we've got to do is cut discretionary spending. So you can see there, clearly there's on a bit of a different page. Happy to talk about the woke policies in the military. But, you know, the second guy whose name I'm forgetting right now, who's like, no, if we're going to balance the budget, it's going to be, quote unquote, entitlements. That's Social Security and Medicare. He's actually the one that is being, I think, the most honest and straightforward there, that they have no interest in really cutting the military budget. What they're aimed at is social spending. That was Congressman Mike Walz. All three of those people were some of the holdouts. Part of the reason why we went ahead and highlighted them, because they were

the folks who might have been amenable to defense cuts. I will say I did appreciate his general's comment because he's actually totally correct about bloat within the bureaucracy. Yeah, I buy that. That's where it just all comes down to the question of like, what, how? And the other problem is like, okay, with entitlements, like, do you really have the votes to actually force entitlements, cuts on Medicare and Social Security? I don't even think that exists, even within the Republican Party. I mean, consider also that much of these are not even discretionary spending. Having been through so many of these shutdown fights, you and I know this, Crystal, which is that discretionary spending, really the only places you can cut are social spending. I

mean, that's pretty much it. Because the vast majority of the federal budget of federal spending is both the military and these mandatory entitlement programs, which can only be really changed by an act of Congress, which is far outside the realm of the normal budgeting process. The normal budgeting process is a genuine pittance outside of the defense spending. So if you're serious about reining it in, and look, I mean, even with defense, I care a lot about strong national defense. A point I've always tried to make here is that there is tremendous amount of bloat and ripoff happening within the defense budget. Like if you actually care about keeping safe, one of the segments we did on our holiday is that the Pentagon literally failed its own audit for what, like a fourth time or whatever since 2017. I

remember that I believe HR accounts for approximately $100 billion of the entire Pentagon budget. And it's not just that they fail the audit. The percentage of their budget that they can't even account for is like 60%. The number is completely absurd. And yeah, Congress passed this rule that every federal agency has to go through an audit, which seems like a reasonable idea, great idea. And they all seem to pass it except the Pentagon, which seems like a reasonable idea, great idea. And they all seem to pass it except the Pentagon, which has literally never once passed the audit. And then all that

this law ultimately created was a whole other bureaucracy to perform the audit that never, they can never actually pull up. Which costs us even more money. Additional like hundred of million dollars spent on an audit that they never pass and never seem to care to like clean it up to be able to. In any case, the whole point is there is a lot you could do if you were actually serious about cutting defense spending. But the fact that you have so many who were in the holdouts, who were the negotiation in the negotiations, who were the ones demanding concession saying, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We only care about the entitlements. We have no interest in the defense spending. Tells you everything you need to know about the likelihood that defense spending cuts are actually going to pass. Maybe the most noteworthy one here is from Congressman Chip Roy, who was probably the most significant of the holdouts in terms of actually coming to

a deal. He was the one that McCarthy was negotiating with, I think, the most. And he was the one ultimately who brought along something like 14 of his colleagues and among the holdouts that really sort of got them at the doorstep and forced the others to ultimately concede. Let's go ahead and put his thread up on the screen about this. So this is from this is, I guess, his office. Yes. So they say Representative Roy and his colleagues secured a commitment from Speaker McCarthy to enact the biggest discretionary spending cut ever in FY 2024. And like clockwork, big spending neocons and the military industrial complex have claimed this means cutting defense spending in all caps. That is a lie.

Representative Roy and his colleagues negotiate an agreement that would reduce FY 2024 spending to the overall discretionary spending levels we saw in 2022. For context, that's the same spending levels we saw about 10 days ago. But it would ultimately mean cutting 2023 spending levels by over $130 billion down to $1.47 trillion next fiscal year. And during negotiations, cuts to defense were, again, in all caps, never discussed. In fact, there was broad agreement. Spending cuts should focus on non-defense discretionary spending. This means cutting funding for the woke and weaponized bureaucrats that receive massive increases under the $1.7 trillion omnibus. And then in parentheses, this is not Social Security and Medicare. I think that

part is rather dishonest, frankly, just because of the way that the numbers work out. If you are really going to balance the budget in 10 years and do the things that they claim they want to do, there is no way that you do that without touching Social Security and Medicare, which is a dramatically unpopular thing, approach to take and thing to do. Yeah, I mean, that's one of the points where they try to have it both ways. You can't rule out defense and entitlements. Like literally one of them has to give. And one of them is the, we're about to talk about this in the midterm polling, but one of the top reasons that people even voted Democrat in the midterm elections. Also, I mean, good luck in a system where really only old people are the ones who are the most

reliable to vote. It's just not going to happen. So at that point, now you're talking about what? Like the National Park Service budget? Okay, you know, that's maybe one day of operation in the Pentagon, literally. Like I think less than one day of what the war in Afghanistan used to cost. The math doesn't work. I mean, on all of this, I just think it's incredibly likely, Crystal, that we go back to sequestration. I don't see it in the way. You think so?

For people who don't understand what that is, it's basically automatic triggers and cuts in the budgets across the board without being able to reach some sort of agreement. So instead of saying, well, we're going to carve out on X, Y side, given the fact that the Democrats do hold the Senate, they're not going to agree, even with some of the budgetary priorities of the House of Representatives. It's almost the exact same scenario of what happened back in 2011 at the beginning of sequestration. So I just think that's almost certainly going to come back because that will trigger spending cuts, victories for the Freedom Caucus. And it also just gives at least a, quote, fair blueprint for the type of spending cuts for the Democrats Caucus. And it also just gives at least a, quote, fair blueprint for the

type of spending cuts for the Democrats in the Senate. The other alternative is we should have a straight up government shutdown. But, you know, we had that last time around in the Boehner era, and that's ultimately what led to sequestration. So I see all roads just seemingly lead right back there. The first fight is going to be over lifting the debt ceiling. And you guys probably know this, but I mean, the debt ceiling is just is this sort of like arbitrary thing. It doesn't authorize more spending. It just says like, OK, you can spend the things that you've already appropriated. So it really should be eliminated altogether because all it's used for at this point is these sort of like hostage taking tactics. The expectation is that the debt ceiling will need to be lifted in August. Now,

the first thing I want to say about this is that Democrats, when they had control of the House and the Senate and the White House, probably should have done something about the debt ceiling. Yeah, they just didn't do it. And they just didn't bother to do it. You know, you could wager a lot of different guesses as to why that is. Incompetence, laziness, those are always decent guesses. Another one could be that actually they kind of like these fights because they make Republicans, you know, expose themselves as being ridiculous and irresponsible and hostage-shaking and having all of these priorities that are like radically out of step with the American people. And so, you know, that would be my guess as to why Democrats didn't ultimately deal with this

because they kind of like the prospect of, you know, watching Republicans hold the nation hostage over whatever things that they want to ultimately cut here. Another alternative that many people have advocated for is to hashtag mint the coin, where it's kind of a budgetary gimmick, but ultimately, I think it would work where you just mint this trillion dollar coin, you like transfer it over across the government balance sheets, and then you're able to continue spending. And that would diffuse this debt ceiling crisis and basically diffuse all debt ceiling crises in the future, because you know that they could just ultimately do that. So that is ultimately one. That is also one possibility of how this could all go down. And in some ways, the ball will be in the Democrats' court because the whole reason you ended up with sequestration is because Obama was really very open to this

balance the budget deficit hawk talk. He tried to strike the grand bargain that would have actually put Social Security and Medicare cuts on the table. So that's the other question is right now it feels like, oh, I can't imagine the Democrats going along with this. But Joe Biden was part of that Obama administration. Joe Biden's a longtime sort of like deficit hawk type of a guy. He said many times throughout his career that he wanted to cut Social Security. So, you know, I'm not 100 percent confident that ultimately some segment of Democrats will cave to some of these demands. So we will see. The last piece that I just want to mention here,

because we've covered, obviously, like the abuses of stock trading in the House and the Senate, Unusual Whales done a great job covering that, exposing that. I had a new report just recently showing how even in a terrible market, these people were all able to beat the market. I guess they're just trading geniuses. Who knows? Well, one of the offices that the Congressional Ethics Office, which has gone after members previously for violations of the Stock Act, which requires disclosure, the new rules package also guts that office. And this office, I think, is pretty widely respected. They've gone after Republican members. They've actually, there's an ethics complaint on AOC that they're evaluating right now.

And the new rules would effectively gut the sort of staffing and, my understanding, the budget and ability of this office to really function. So it will make it a lot harder for members who violate the Stock Act or whoever other congressional ethics violations like Mr. Santos potentially, as one example, it will make it more difficult for them to ultimately hold them to account. So I think that's a big loss here as well. That's a shame. Yeah. Okay, let's move on to the American people and what they want to see out of this Congress and how they are feeling about things in general. Let's put this up on the screen. This is the latest from CBS News. And they have a comparison in this poll of how people are feeling now versus how they felt back a year ago. And people are feeling a little bit better. It's not great. So back in January of 2022, only 26% of Americans said things were going well. Now that 26% has moved up to 34%. So we're up over a third of Americans who say things are going pretty well. In terms of going

badly back a year ago, you had 73% saying things were going badly. Now you have that number taking down to 65%. So you're basically at a third of people saying now things are going well and two thirds saying they are going badly. You also had some interesting data here about, you know, specifics on how people are feeling. It's kind of the same on the economy. Things are still not good. People are still saying they're not good, but they are a little bit higher than before the fall midterm campaign. The job market stands out as a bright spot in terms of how people feel, even as concerns about inflation continue. And fewer voters think the economy's direction is getting worse than thought so in October. I think part of this soccer is,

you know, during a political campaign and you're getting a lot of ads and a lot of commentary about how poor the economy is leading into the midterms. I think that does affect the numbers somewhat, although I think the biggest thing that affects these numbers is the way people feel in their normal everyday life. Yeah, I mean, look, the midterms really just gave us a lot to chew on because the truth is that a lot of people cared about inflation, but enough people were willing to say that they care about much more intangible things than inflation. So even though the going well number has slightly increased from now to the first of 2022, the still vast majority think it's going bad. But as we saw under Trump, that didn't actually mean anything in terms of

the vote split. The condition of the economy, people are willing to vote it bad, and yet they still really just don't care or they split on partisan in terms of the view that it looks like. So or they didn't feel like the Republicans had an answer. Right. That was going to make sense in terms of making the economy better. Yeah, it's very interesting, again, to just look at all of this. I will say, look, on a broader level, this is not partisan compared to a year ago. Is your family family faring financially? Forty three percent either say worse off or about the same, and only 15% are better off. I'd like to meet those people. And then in terms of feeling about things,

how they are in the US over the next year, I am scared, hope, 47% say hopeful, which is kind of amazing, but the vast majority are either scared or angry. So, I mean, look, overall, Biden's approval rating in this poll comes out to 44%. That That said, the fact that he was willing to was able to pull off the midterm victory that they did at approximately 40 percent, maybe even 39, by some respects, is not a terrible place to be. I'll never forget Ron Klain tweeting out Emmanuel Macron, president of France, his approval ratings before he was reelected. And they were like in the 30s. And he was like, oh, interesting. He got reelected with an approval rating that was like super low. Yeah, but he's right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that clearly is their strategy. Like they don't they think they can win. And, you know, they were basically right in the midterms, even though

they lost the House. And it wasn't the grand celebration maybe that, you know, they portrayed it as. But they bucked historical trends in the midterms. And I think Joe Biden does have a decent chance to get reelected as it stands right now, even if his approval rating remains in like the low 40s. And let's go to the next one, because this is very interesting data as well. In terms of the priorities of those who voted Republican, we shouldn't forget, you know, in terms of the popular vote, the Republicans did broadly win the popular vote. If you look at it on a national scale, lowering inflation was at 89%, securing the border at 85. That actually explains why Biden is paying so much attention to the border right now. Third was increasing U.S. energy production. And then fourth was actually reducing crime. What was even more interesting

is actually if you look at the split in MAGA Republicans Republicans because it does show you just how different the split is between people who self-identify as MAGA Republicans and what they actually view as being loyal to Trump and their priorities over people who just vote GOP at the top of the ticket. Let's go to the next one that is there. They say Republicans being loyal to Trump is, quote, very important for 35 percent. 30 percent is somewhat important. 21%, not too important. 14%, not important at all. So the vast majority rating some importance. What's even more interesting is that if you look even deeper within those MAGA Republicans and their priorities, Crystal, they say that investigating the Hunter Biden laptop is actually more important than inflation. So this actually shows you part of why the GOP Congress is acting in the way that they are. Because, remember, the only threat that a sitting member of Congress really has is primary.

Within those primaries, only the crazy people vote, really, on both sides. It's very rare for normal people to engage in a primary election or even, frankly, like a midterm election. It's very, very rare. And statistically. So what do they care about? They have to appease. They're our most ardent base, not on policy. The thing that they care literally the most about is investigating Joe Biden.

So you have that there. But then you also have a broad swath of the public who is like, hey, you know, the economy really sucks right now. Like, it would just be nice if I could pay less at the grocery store and even less at the pump. That's what I mostly care about. So it's a major problem, I think, for the Republicans to be in this stuck position where policy is what the vast majority of people care about. But the actual people who mostly control their fate in Congress, that's not really what they care about at all. Yeah. And, you know, if you look at the numbers, too, they had some about like, do people want to see you standing by your principles or working with the opposition to get things done? And this is another area where like, you know, the hardcore Republican base

wants to see you basically doing what Matt Gaetz and co did with the speakership fight. And a large majority of independents and the general public wants to see people like working together on, you know, an infrastructure deal or whatever. And so you see and you see this in the way that Joe Biden is positioning himself to run again, going to Kentucky with being seen with Mitch McConnell in, by the way, a swing portion of Kentucky. I know people don't think of Kentucky as a swing state, but they actually have a governor's race on the ballot this year. And it's a Democrat who runs the state right now.

And he is one of the most popular governors in the entire country, which is also very interesting. Side note, you guys know I'm obsessed with Kentucky politics. Okay, so that's the Republican side of the ledger in terms of what they want to see out of this Congress. They also asked Democrats what their priorities are for this next Congress. Let's put this up on the screen. Number one priority for Democrats for this Congress is protecting Social Security and Medicare, 78%. Refer back to our previous segment about how, you know, at least some Republicans are being quite upfront about how, quote unquote, entitlements, which is Social Security and Medicare, are in their sites. And you can see how unpopular this would be, certainly with the Democratic base.

But this was also one of the top priorities. There's actually the second highest priority for all voters overall. For Democrats, the second highest priority is addressing climate change. Third highest is protecting abortion access. And fourth highest is lowering inflation. Zoom out to the general public and you have number one priority continues to be lower inflation. 76% say that. 71% say protect Social Security and Medicare. So again, this is a challenge for the Republican Party, which has staked out an ideological position, which is directly at odds with what an overwhelming majority of Americans want to see out of this Congress. And then 63 percent say reduce crime. There was another peace saga here that I thought was

interesting, which is they asked about supporting aid to Ukraine. This is one where there's starting to be a growing partisan split and especially a big split within the Republican Party, within the general Republican voters and what they define as MAGA Republican voters, where the MAGA voters were basically split on whether they support aid to Ukraine or not. Overall, you've got 64% saying they support aid, 36% opposed. I'd have to go back and look at some previous numbers, but I believe that number of support is trickling down over time and definitely softening ultimately over time. Oh, no, there's no question. At one point, it was almost 80% or 90%, I think, at the outbreak of the war.

So, I mean, it makes sense. We're about a year in now, and so you're, of course, going to see that. People are starting to ask questions about how this is all going to play out. Look, I mean, the way the question is asked to me is outrageous. Like, do you support aid to Ukraine? Nobody, very few people are like, zero aid to Ukraine. We're talking about the type of aid to Ukraine in conjunction with what? In conjunction with deployment.

So don't let yourself get gaslit on aid to Ukraine or not. Is there an inspector general overseeing how the money is being spent? What are you sending? There are many nuances to this entire discussion which do not belie I support aid to you. Yes. Do you want to send fighter jets? Do you want to spend humanitarian aid? There's a lot of different ways that you could slice this.

So within that context, what can we learn from this? All of this, which is I think that's why the cutting the Social Security entitlement program being pushed by the Freedom Caucus. It's going to be a big problem for Republicans. I mean, we underrate significantly how much Paul Ryan's addition to the Mitt Romney ticket really hurt him in the general election because it wasn't just about painting Mitt Romney as like out of touch, rich elite. It was also like Paul Ryan wants to cut your Medicare. I mean, do we all remember that famous video that Paul Ryan did with the charts about Medicare? Oh, the PowerPoints and whatever.

Yeah, and the PowerPoints. God, I'm really—I hate myself for even remembering it. But it mattered a lot to the American people. People resoundingly rejected it. So over and over again, we've had a situation where touching the entitlement programs is just looked at as complete anathema, especially whenever you're not willing to discuss cuts elsewhere, or especially whenever you're trying to discuss it in the context of removing benefits away instead of trying to make it, quote, more sustainable. And what they really mean by that is like pushing retirement ages up or cutting benefits over the

years, or even worse, which is privatizing it. Yeah. Something Mr., by the way, Blake Masters suffered at the polls. We also underrate that. under that. So you can see very clearly in part of the reasons why people voted Democrat. If you're going to have Medicare and Social Security spending up there. This also shows you how difficult and how bad the, there's a lot of old people in this country, a ton, and they vote. And it's like the media and the politics and all that, that you and I consume, the vast majority of our audience cares about as well, is just totally out of step. So for them, I mean, they probably, you know, view their AARP blasts and mailers, all this other stuff. And I can't fault them. You know, they're the ones who actually benefit from it. When you look at 71% saying that protecting Social Security and Medicare is priority form for this Congress, like it's clearly beyond just the boomers and the silent gen that is concerned about this. These programs are really popular. People are proud of these programs.

They really believe in them. And obviously, the Republican Party has long, ever since the programs were passed, basically, they've been trying to do whatever they can to dismantle them. George W. Bush ran up against a brick wall in this on his efforts to privatize Social Security. So they've continued to try to tweak and find ways that they can message this in some way that's going to be more palatable to the American people. but people really, really see through it. And it is, you know, it is just insanely, insanely unpopular. One more piece of data from here. And then I actually had a question for you, Sagar, on the Paul Ryan piece. So they asked Republicans how they felt about how the speaker fight was handled. And it was split pretty much 50-50. 51% went one way, 49% went the other way. I can't remember which way

it was divided, but basically 50-50. Some people half said this was great, half said this was terrible. So divided in terms of how people felt about that. But the question I was going to ask you is, you mentioned Paul Ryan, and a lot of the priorities that are reflected in the concessions that the Freedom Caucus was able to extract from Kevin McCarthy are very Paul Ryan type priorities. And yet I know that they like really hate Paul Ryan now, and I don't really understand it. Well, I mean, the whole knock on Paul Ryan is that he was, you know, he didn't, he wasn't a fighter. And I will say like part of the reason he got the speakership in the first place, because he did agree with them substantively on some of the

spending cuts. So it's not like that's why they didn't get some they more view him as like a traitor to trump because he kind of criticizes the movement a lot of it is like more metacultural in terms of the it's more about the aesthetics it's a lot more about about the ideology well remember also paul ryan did hate them and basically actively spoke out against him after he left office part of the reason why they also hated him as well. They never saw him as like a genuine ideological, a lot of it comes down to whether you're willing to quote fight or not. That's all that really matters. And that's why, I mean, look, if you're looking at that number, 50%, 50% is a lot of Republicans who support what only what 20 actually were willing to do. So

that shows you they got a lot of support. Everything I read from Boehner and all of them is that they despised Roger Ailes and Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly because they always had Jim Jordan and Michelle Bachman and many of the other Tea Party warriors. They're like, you don't understand what stars you're making out of these people on the amount of leverage that they have now over my caucus. We're basically now 10 years or even more into that phenomenon and just shows you that these people, look, you can hate them, love them, whatever. They really have the pulse of the actual base of the party. Or at the very least, like the people who have been there, like rock red, not only just love Trump, but like hate the establishment at a core level. The Jim Jordans and the Gaithers of the world, like they are heroes for exactly this

reason. And see, it's funny you could even mention Jim Jordan and Matt Gaetz in the same breath because ideologically they're actually quite different. Total difference. But I think what you're pointing to is they love the fight. Yeah. And the details of what it's over. Don't care. Are less important. So there's a contradiction here where we're talking about how, you know, this priority and that priority and this tactic that these things are going to be really unpopular, things like going after Social Security and Medicare. But the fight itself is very popular. People love to see people love to see a goober like Kevin McCarthy twisting the wind. I love to see it. Right. So I think the fight and the affect and the approach is extremely popular.

It's extremely satisfying. And it's only down the road when you see what concessions were, what that actually means and what their ideological priorities are, that the bloom kind of comes off the rose and you end up like Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan and a lot of other Republicans finding out exactly how much appetite the American people have for dismantling Social Security. Very true. All right, let's go to the next one. Some Twitter files actually broke last night, given over to Alex Berenson at his Substack. So let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. The headline from Alex is, quote, from the Twitter files, Pfizer board member Scott Gottlieb secretly pressed Twitter to hide posts challenging his company's massively profitable COVID jabs. To funnel his demands, Gottlieb used the same Twitter lobbyists that the White House did, fresh evidence of an overlap between the company selling the mRNA shots and the government forcing them on the public. What he specifically points to is that Dr. Scott Gottlieb, who previously headed the FDA under Donald Trump

and then later became a director on the board of Pfizer, saw a tweet that he didn't like. And that tweet explained specifically about natural immunity after COVID infection was at the time being litigated as whether it was superior to vaccination protection. It actually called on the White House that tweet to, quote, follow the science and exempt people with natural immunity from upcoming vaccine mandates. Remember that we all went through this big debate at the time as to whether natural immunity should count or not in any sort of mandate type system in which you would have, you know, almost like social credit, be able to board flights, many of the things that were floated at the time for interstate travel, et cetera. Anyway, by suggesting some people might not need this vaccination, the tweet

could raise questions about the shots. So basically, Scott Gottlieb reached out and used a Twitter lobbyist to actually email the top point of contact in the White House, saying that the post was, quote, corrosive and that it would worry that it would, quote, end up going viral and driving news coverage. So that email was actually found in a search of records that they were run over at Twitter last week as part of the Twitter files. All of this also kind of involves Alex himself, because we should all remember he was banned from Twitter and then actually unbanned after he was effectively able to prove through the discovery process way before Elon even took over Twitter

in the first place at the White House. Specifically, Andy Slavitt, who was working there at the time, mentioned him in private communications on Slack, some of which I've covered here before. So anyway, a lot more still needs to be come from the Twitter files on Dr. Fauci and more. I believe Alex is working on that right now, but this was one of the first things, Crystal, that he decided to go and put out there. Yeah, well, the other piece of this is Dr. Gottlieb is a CNBC contributor. Yes. And he also sits on the Pfizer board of directors. Yeah, that's the problem.

And this is not disclosed. Yeah. So when he's doing his little like contributorship, let me just, and pretending like he's just a neutral expert. obviously Pfizer has a deep financial stake in how people view the vaccines and how they feel about, you know, getting a shot every year and all of those things and the safety and efficacy, et cetera. So that seems like something that should be disclosed every single time that he's on air. And this is par for the course with not just CNBC, with CNN, with MSNBC, with Fox News, with all of them. They'll have these people on. They'll portray them as if they're just neutral experts, just calling balls and strikes based on their expertise. And you do one internet search and

you find out, oh, they sit on the board of Raytheon. Oh, they sit on the board of Boeing. Oh, they sit on the board of Pfizer. And so they're not just offering you their unbiased opinion. They actually have a huge direct financial stake in the commentary that they are ultimately providing. And this may be one of the grossest parts, honestly, of cable news. It actually, I'll show you even more why it matters, which is that internally within Twitter, after the complaint was forwarded to the Twitter strategic response team, it was internally flagged saying, quote, please see this report from the former FDA commissioner.

Again, ascribing him former FDA commissioner, not current board member with a financial interest in the mRNA vaccine. And actually what ended up happening is they ended up putting a quote, you know, tag on the tweet itself, but it arose all the way to that level. It actually happened again one week later after this, where Gottlieb tried to actually complain to the Twitter lobbyists who then forwarded it specifically about a vaccine and lockdown skeptic saying, quote, sticks and stones may break my bones, but a viral pathogen with a mortality rate of less than 0% has cost or approximately 0% has cost our children nearly three years of schooling. Now, I don't even know why Mr. Gottlieb would even object to that, because that's just objectively true in terms of both the mortality rate and schooling.

It's also clearly a policy dispute. And last I checked, at least at the time, they didn't necessarily have a financial interest in lockdownest, all the while flagging them as done by former FDA Commissioner Gottlieb, not Pfizer board member. And that one was too far even for Twitter. They're like, no, dude, we can't really take this one down. But this is part of the issue, which is like, why is there this special program where blessed individuals get to forward? You know, I don't also even understand this mindset. I see dumb stuff on Twitter all the time. I don't think I've ever flagged literally anything.

Because I'm like, all right, whatever. You know, like, who are these people who get up on their high horse and, like, start emailing powerful contacts? I mean, I guess, you know, I know some people. I could probably forward it to them and be like, Elon, please ban this person. Like, I can't imagine the mindset. So there's two parts of it. Like, maybe it's financially motivated. It's very possible, given his own Pfizer board membership, but also just the secret system, which you can just, you know, email a guy. I know a guy, effectively content moderation. Like, what kind of system is that? And also, you know, the larger level conversation about some things were very clear about COVID and the vaccine and some things

weren't and some things continue to be subject to debate and different studies show different things. And so to put yourself, to assert yourself as Twitter, as like a definitive authority on COVID or any other, you know, medical information is a very, very dicey, let's just say, place to ultimately be. And Alex does point out with regards to Gottlieb flagging that tweet about kids and school shutdowns. I think that was right before they were getting ready to approve the vaccine for 5 to 13-year-olds or whatever. So, you know, there was a potential interest in making sure people, you know, were interested in that vaccine uptake. Although I will say, you know, it's hard to separate out people's financial motivation and their just pure ideology. Yeah.

Because— Well, they very often go together. This fits with the Freedom Caucus also where, you know, is it because of their donors and what they want? Maybe. Is it because they're just truly like hardcore ideological actors? Sometimes it's the latter. Sometimes you, they're just like very radical, hardcore believers. And Dr. Gottlieb might have fallen into that category as well. I don't want to put that off the table. Yeah. Well, look, yeah, I don't, I don't either. All right. Let's go to the next as well. I don't want to put that off the table. Yeah, I don't either. All right, let's go to the next part here.

C2, let's put it up there on the screen because all of this matters. In what context? Well, Moderna, releasing the news yesterday, plans to follow in Pfizer's footsteps and charge up to $130 for the COVID vaccine here in the United States after they pivot from a focus on government contracts to commercial distribution centers. And I have a lot of questions about this. First of all, why would anyone even buy this vaccine at this point in the future when it was literally free? I don't really understand how that works. Same with Pfizer and many of the things that they have said about their own vaccine efficacy in terms of preventing infection and all that, which was a major selling point to most of

the people who even got the vaccine. For those who are wondering why I say that that was the main impetus, look at the number of people who have their fourth or fifth booster. I think it's like six or seven percent of the entire U.S. population in terms of the belief in the vaccine efficacy, at least in the way that it's being promised now itself. So first of all, I don't see the commercial demand. But it also – this just shows you just how disgusting the entire price system within all of this is. U.S. government technology is the one that created this vaccine. The United States government literally moved heaven and earth in order to make sure that the vaccine was created. The FDA literally fast-tracked and emergency use authorized it. And then some states actually mandated it for basically

participating in society. In what world are they then allowed to turn around and make even more profit? Because they've already made billions of dollars in profit at this point. So how are we possibly allowing this? Like, at the very least, the IP belongs to the U.S. government. And that's a good thing because then we can have debates about it. We can study it, you know, all this. Instead, you know, now it belongs, or not now, it has always belonged to Moderna and to Pfizer, who now want to commercialize it across the entire world.

The amount of disgusting price gouging that happens with big pharma is truly criminal, and yet we just allow it to happen. I mean, the amount we pay for any drug in the U.S. versus every other country in the world is astounding. Insulin is obviously the perfect example. But yeah, I'm reading here a Yahoo Finance report on Moderna and their prospects for 2023. And it all hinges on the vaccine. You know, they made in 2022, they made some $18.4 billion on this thing. So this has been phenomenally profitable for them. And we were the ones, you know, our taxpayer dollars that funded the original research and the original technology. And guess what, guys? Pharma loves to tell you a story about all of the life-saving drugs they're developing, etc., etc.

It's all total bullshit. Every new drug molecule has been developed by, in the past decade, has been developed with U.S. taxpayer dollars. This whole system is disgusting. It's corrupt. It's insane. And, you know, the media outlets and social media companies are all in on it. Well, I mean, that's something Rogan actually always talks about is the level of television advertising. Some like 70 or the vast majority of television advertising that you see. Oh, look, I don't watch cable news. But on the rare occasions that I'm at my girlfriend's house or parents have it on, I'm like, oh my God, ask my doctor about this drug. And I'm like, well, hold on a second.

If I need the drug, the doc will just say that you need this. Why should I be asking him anything about this? Maybe I have restless leg syndrome or something. Or he can just tell me it sounds like you have restless leg syndrome. Here's what works for that. Yeah. I mean, it really is crazy. And it's a world that, you know, obviously we don't live in and most of our viewers don't live in because we don't even consume a lot of this stuff. But, you know, for reference to my previous, do not underestimate the millions of people that do consume network and cable television. And they are bombarded with the stuff 24-7. By the way, remember how we talked about that Alzheimer's drug? Oh, yeah. And they just approved it. There was a lot of question about whether this thing really worked. The cost of it was astronomical. It was causing just this

one drug alone being added into Medicare's coverage plan was increasing premiums for seniors. I mean, it was this whole big deal. And there was actually an investigation that found there was improper coordination between the FDA approval board and the company. So there are problems at all levels. So one thing I do want to say is a lot of people understandably look at this disgusting corrupt system and were like,

let me then pursue alternative medicine remedies. That stuff is even less regulated. Well, it depends. I'll speak up. It's even more corrupt. I'll speak up for some alternatives. There is no regulatory regime covering like these supplements and whatever and all of these different like chiropractors and all this stuff. And it's very loosely regulated in terms of what sort of results they can ultimately promise.

A lot of these pills that you buy in the store, you don't even know what's in them. Nobody is checking to see that these supplements actually have in them what they claim to have in them or that they're going to provide the benefit that they're supposed to provide. No, that's definitely true, especially on supplements. The supplement industry in the U.S. is completely unread. It's totally insane. There's actually a very, I forget the documentary, it's escaping me at the time, that really goes into, it was actually Orrin Hatch, the senator from Utah, where a lot of these things are manufactured. It led to the fact that they don't have to be evaluated by the FDA. All they have to do is put on the bottom, these statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. Another reason, actually, you have to do a lot of due

diligence. I take a lot of supplements every day and you have to do a lot to try and find companies which actually test their stuff is what you're saying is actually in it. Anyway, it is an absolutely out-of-control industry in its own right. That said, I will speak up for some alternative medicine. Some, like, old wives' tales and all those things are actually true. That doesn't mean, though, that what you're being sold for them is what you're getting at the store. So that is a problem in and of itself. Yeah.

I'm just saying I think a lot of people, understandably, they're like, okay, well, this is corrupt. True, but at least there are some clinical trials and some sort of government regulatory body. Alternative medicine over here, there's basically none of that. So just keep that in mind as you do your own research, etc., etc. Do your own research. All right, let's go to the second question. This is something our producer, Griffin, reminded us of. And the more I think about it,

I can't get over it. Prince Harry, of course, is in the news. There's all these discussions about how he lost his virginity to an older woman, how he got into an altercation with Prince William, whether or not he called the royal family racist. Nobody apparently is focusing on the most insane part of his interview and of his book, where he admits and discusses killing 25 people in Afghanistan. Let's get to it. I was able to focus on a purpose larger than myself, to be wearing the same uniform as everybody else, to feel normal for the first time in my life, and accomplish some of the biggest challenges that I ever had. I was trying to become an Apache helicopter pilot. You don't get a pass for being a prince. The Apache doesn't give a crap about who you are.

No, there's no prince autopilot button that you can press and just takes you away. I was a really good candidate for the military. I was a young man in my 20s suffering from shock, but I was now in the front seat of an Apache, shooting it, flying it, monitoring four radios simultaneously, and being there to save and help anybody that was on the ground with a radio, screaming, we need support, we need air support. That was my calling. I felt healing from that. So let's get now to the actual excerpt from his book where he discusses killing 25 people. Let's put it up there on the screen. Our graphics team made an excellent one here. And he says, quote, while in the heat of fog and combat, I did not think of those 25 as people. You can't kill people if you think of them as people. You can't harm people if you think of them as people. They are chess pieces removed from the board,

bads taken away before they could kill goods. I'd been trained to otherize them, trained well. On some level, I recognize this learned detachment as problematic, but I also saw it as an unavoidable part of soldiering. Now, he's probably right about that, Crystal, but it seems like one of those things that somebody should just really never say, especially whenever they're in a prominent position, because, as predicted, his flippant discussions here aren't just damaging the royal family. They're actually causing problems for the British army and for Afghanistan. So put this up there. There's actually been mass anger and protest that broke out in southern Afghanistan after Prince Harry specifically talked about killing 25 people. He's even been, quote, clapped back

by Taliban spokespeople who are like, our soldiers were not simply chess pieces and pawns that were on the board. And then actually in the UK, people who are in the British military are denouncing Prince Harry saying, this is not how we teach our soldiers to behave while they're in combat. This is not the way that somebody who served in combat should be speaking about it. You're not talking about it in a respectful way. Like you're actually denigrating the service that was made at the time. And actually it belies some crazy kind of war propaganda that also happened at the time in the UK where Prince Harry and William were like genuinely hailed as heroes.

And it was one of the ways that the war effort was sold to the British public. So anyway, all of this put together. The point is, is that him flippantly talking after his mushrooms trip about 25 people getting killed and all that is being totally ignored by the media. And the actual problems that he was now causing for the British military in this entire... I find the whole thing just kind of insane

because I literally checked the Daily Mail and all that this morning. It's all just about Prince Harry and whether Meghan effectively called them racist or did not call them racist

or not. I'm like, look, I guess I care about some of that, but not even close to an actual geopolitical problem that the prince has now created here. I mean, the words here, to go back to them, are truly disturbing. You can't really harm people if you think of them as people.

They were chess pieces removed from the board. Bads taken away before they could kill goods. I'd been trained to otherize them trained well. And, you know, at this point, we know how many Afghan civilians, including children, were murdered during our occupation of Afghanistan. And it was, I'm sure, enabled by exactly this type of mindset and type of thinking where, you know, a lot of this would be different neighbors have a grievance and they go, oh, this one's Taliban. And the next thing you know, you know, you're doing a night raid and killing some family on our way out, which I

supported the withdrawal from Afghanistan, as did you. We advocated for it here and then we took a lot of heat and, you know, backed Biden on it. But on their way out, in order to show their, like, tough guy credentials, they do this final drone strike on what was supposed to be this terrorist, militant, etc. Turns out it was an aid worker and his family and his young babies in the middle of a busy residential area in Kabul. So we know that this fairy tale that he's continuing to tell here about how, oh, well, I only murdered bads that were taken away before they could hurt the goods is complete and utter bullshit.

The fact that it just goes by without a care shows you that it's not just people you know, people like Harry who were trained to otherize Afghani civilians. It's the entire media. It's the entire, you know, U.S. public, U.K. public, et cetera. You know, it's like, you should not be talking so flippantly about,

especially in a public, and bragging about it then on national television. And look, just to give you guys a taste of like, wow, this is really being received, put this up there on the screen. These are all the major takeaways for most of these people. Prince Harry says the UK royals got into bed. Yeah, him literally calling Prince Charles's wife, the Queen Consort Camilla, quote, the villain. Prince Harry says his abusers he still hopes to reconcile with, accuses the royal family of being complicit in Meghan's pain and suffering.

And Anderson Cooper asking him about Meghan Markle and reconciliation with the royal family. Like, this is the actual important part, and a while ago, you would think that it probably would have caused a stir. So anyway, this is what the tabloid press is focused on all of the wrong stuff. Like, this, to me, is the absolute top takeaway, especially given the fact that it's causing problems, that the people in the British military are very pissed at him for talking this way and actually almost encouraging

this type of, like, machismo behavior in the way that you talk about conflict afterwards, and then in Afghanistan itself also causing mass protests after it. So it's a funny episode, and it just shows you, like, for some reason, the stuff that they go for is like the least

consequential when you know anyone watching that is like oh my wait hold on a second what? Also what with Anderson Cooper

you're like he's like glory I mean look Apaches are cool I'm not going to deny it as a helicopter and the people who fly them are legitimately impressive

but he probably should have asked a couple more follow up questions about the mission being like well are you sure who you killed? Did you ever do an after-action thing? Did you find out about what exactly it was? What do you think about the withdrawal

from Afghanistan instead of the rest of the crap that they end up focusing on? Yeah. Just classic. Indeed. Absolute classic. Alright, media segment here. Speaking of classic media moves. This is one of the most classic. So, it has now been seven years since 2016, although it feels like it literally never ends. I guess six or something years since the actual November election in 2016. Let's go ahead and put this up influence on the 2016 election, on 2016 voters specifically, and yet in February of 2018,

what exactly did they publish? Timeline, quote, how Russian trolls allegedly tried to throw the 2016 election to Trump. And the actual story itself is a masterpiece in just the delay of how long it took. It says, quote, a study finds minimal impact from Russian influence operations on Twitter in the Trump-Clinton presidential election.

The study, which the New York University Center for Social Media and Politics helmed, explores the limits of Russian disinformation and misinformation. My personal sense coming out of this is that it got way overhyped, one of the report's author says,

about the meaningfulness of Russian tweets. We're looking back on the data. We now see how concentrated this was in one small portion of the population and how the fact that people who were being exposed were really already very likely to vote for Trump anyways. And then we have this data to show that we can't find any relationship between being exposed to these tweets and people's change in attitudes now i did not need a study to say that a weird meme of a bear with trump's face on it was going to influence the election broken english with like i you know love donald j trump with the like what these, I remember looking back,

and I encourage all of you to go and look through some of the old memes. Or even some of the trolls are broken English. They were terrible. They were really, I mean, they were not influential really in any way. And I also remember at the time, the way that they would talk about this,

they'd be like, seven billion people scrolled past a Russian meme. You're like, oh my God. But it's like, okay, how much bullshit do you scroll past literally every single day? How much of it has an actual impact not only on you on that day, on when you're going to vote in 2016? It was a ludicrous story that was pushed at the beginning, of which a lot of people really believed. I've always thought, Crystal, that the cope with the whole Russian troll influential thing is that a lot of elite liberals just cannot fathom that any person would vote for Trump, like in a normal way. They're like, no, it's not possible. They had to be fooled.

They had to be tricked. Remember, they also used it to discredit Bernie. Yes, of course. Same thing, like his supporters were all influenced by these like Russian Bernie bro memes or whatever. So here's some of the findings of the report. 1% of Twitter users accounted for 70% of the exposure to accounts that Twitter identified as Russian troll accounts. Highly partisan Republicans were exposed to nine times more posts than non-Republicans.

So again, these were people who were already Trump fans and going to vote for Donald Trump. Content from the news media and US politicians dwarfed the amount of Russian influence content that electorate was exposed to during the 2016 race. There was no measurable impact on political attitudes, polarization, and vote preferences and behavior from the Russian accounts and posts. Again, anyone who was really thinking this through at the time could realize you have these campaigns that are spending billions of dollars oh yeah if you put super pack money in there it's like tens of billions to try to influence and persuade people you really think some like like half-assed bad russian memes that was the thing like they're

just so and this got you know this played into the whole like putin the puppet master and the mastermind and he's just so really he's like manipulating us like puppets or whatever and it turns out none of this mattered at all and it's just too perfect that it comes so many years later and they finally are like by the way that whole thing we sold you for years and years and years and told you that was like explained all of our politics. Turns out that was totally fake. I had a Russian professor in graduate school at kind of the beginning, like when some of this was going down. And I won't say too much about him because he was an interesting guy. But something that he said was he said, you do not imagine how much power that you people have given Putin by being able to portray himself to enemies of the West as the

great puppet master to elect the president of the United States, when in reality, he had nothing to do with it. They were like, that is the greatest victory that you could ever give a former KGB operative. It is one of those things that bolsters actually his image as a strong man and a tough guy in Russia and gives him way too much credit than he actually deserved. Well, and that's the irony is it wasn't the posts themselves that influenced our politics. It was the hysterical Russia derangement that then infected all of our politics that now that has definitely manipulated public opinion and changed the way people view world affairs.

I mean, just look through, you know, the Hunter Biden, who has all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation. That reverberated throughout our politics and elite figures and media and has had a massive impact. But the actual posts and memes themselves, nothing. No, absolutely not. Amazing. Well said. Crystal, what are you taking a look at? Well, learn to code. For years, this was the condescending mantra chanted at downwardly mobile workers suffering from the devastation of bad trade

deals and disastrous dealings with China. The idea was that while the old middle-class jobs might have been destroyed, there was a new glistening industry with plentiful high-paying jobs if you were just willing to obtain the necessary skills, i.e. coding. Now, the claim was always questionable, both from a numbers perspective. There were never enough tech jobs to ultimately fill the gap. And also from a practical standpoint, not everyone wants to be a programmer, and plenty of people find deep fulfillment in working with their hands or working with people. But the tech path to prosperity did seem to exist, at least. Now, tech is looking a little less like a promised land and a little more like a wasteland.

Overall, job creation in the economy has actually remained strong, with 223,000 jobs added in December that was led by growth in healthcare and in hospitality. But while jobs in those sectors were on the rise, the tech industry has been in the middle of a complete bloodbath. An independent website called layoffs.fyi tracks these tech layoffs, and the numbers are really pretty stunning. Meta is cutting 11,000 jobs. Amazon is slashing 18,000 jobs. Salesforce is cutting 8,000 jobs. Cisco is cutting 4,100. Twitter is slashing 3,700. All told, more than 1,000 tech companies have laid off more than 268,000 workers. Stunning comedown for a sector that was flying high, amassing unbelievable fortunes for billionaire founders just a couple years ago. And of course, it's not just in layoffs

where the sector has taken a hit. Companies from Netflix to Uber to all the crypto players, they have all seen their market caps collapse in recent months. Check out this chart with the stock returns from a bunch of big tech players. You got Apple, Alphabet, Amazon all here. The green positive bars, those are their stock returns in 2021. The red that you see there is how they fared in 2022. Every one was down about 20% or even more. Come down as being felt already in the San Francisco and Silicon Valley housing markets.

I won't say that they've returned to earth, but San Francisco posted some of the biggest drops in the country last year in terms of housing prices, and they are projected to see the largest housing price declines in 2023 in the entire country. That is a big change from the breakneck pace of housing price inflation that has been the norm there for years and years and years. A clear indicator of the changing fortunes that we are witnessing in the tech sector. Now, there are two things going on here, I think. One is cyclical, and one might be with us for the long term. The first is that a lot of companies boomed during the pandemic as people stayed home, worked on Zoom, ordered Uber Eats, watched Netflix, and shopped on Amazon. CEOs like Salesforce's Mark Benioff and Meta Zuckerberg have admitted that they overhired

during that time and are now dealing with the post-pandemic reality. I'm sure their heartfelt apologies are cold comfort to the workers who were hired and then summarily terminated. But the other factor here is the Fed's actions to lift interest rates. The Fed's policy of zero interest rates during the 2010s created a lot of fakeness in the economy. Tech valuations that were wildly inflated, cheap cash that could be used to finance unprofitable companies. This easy money financed a lot of tech industry bloat and an irrational expectation that everything in the stock market would always just go up. The Fed is now trying to let the air out of the bubble that they themselves created. Of course, their one tool of hiking interest rates is bound to create massive pain for ordinary people who do not deserve to be collateral damage from a recession caused by the

cleanup of elite failures. Now, what does all of this mean for the country and for our workforce? Well, one welcome development is it has already taken a massive bite out of the fortunes of many tech billionaires. Elon Musk's net worth took a historic hit last year, but Bezos, Zuckerberg, and other tech billionaires suffered inconceivably large losses as well. Don't worry, though, their net worth continues to be inconceivably large, so they will be just fine. Where the blow is going to be felt the hardest is in the upper middle class, which has really been built and seen its fortunes separate from the lower middle class on the backs of tech job growth. And it is this segment of society that much of our entire economy has been built around pleasing. Hospitality, service, and retail sectors, they have all been designed to cater to the tastes and interests of this affluent, but not quite rich

group. That a blow to their fortunes could have big cultural and economic implications. Could be a huge psychological impact here as well. For a long time, a major dividing line in the workforce has been those who are catered to, treated as human beings, and those who are just treated as basically interchangeable meat sacks by corporate bosses. Well, now the tables are kind of turned.

Retail and service sector workers, they're in huge demand. Tech workers, meanwhile, are facing unemployment. And Mark Benioff might be very deeply sorry that he has to lay you off, but ultimately, when market conditions changed, tech industry workers were just as likely to be treated as interchangeable meat sacks as their blue-collar and service sector brothers and sisters. Not a single wage earner is protected from the whims of the market and their bosses. So suddenly worker rights and protections that white-collar workers kind of took for granted, those might seem a little bit more relevant than they did just a year earlier. And finally, while I expect tech to rebound and to, of course, continue to be a really important part of the U.S. economy for the foreseeable future,

those who offer the industry as a panacea for the woes of the American worker have now been thoroughly repudiated. Some jobs of the future will be in tech, but plenty more are going to be in healthcare, retail, service, and hopefully a new reshoring movement and green energy movement that will bring back an American industrial base. Making all of those jobs good jobs with living wages, with healthcare, with worker protections, that is a much better answer for workers than learn to code ever was. And Sagar, this is one of the stories that I kind of have my eye on. And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at breakingpoints.com. All right, Sagar, what are you looking at? Well, about a year ago, before times, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the biggest story,

one of the biggest in the country, was the Canadian freedom protesters and the government's response. The response included the smearing them as racist, financial warfare, including the closure of their bank accounts, seizing cryptocurrency donations, the implementation of the most Chinese-style social credit card system that we have seen in the West, especially since Australia's response to the coronavirus. This story mattered for many reasons. First and foremost is it's Canada. The whole thing is that they're nice. But the real point was it's real close to home. We have a lot in common. And if it can happen there, how soon can it happen here? That's why what's happening right now with author Jordan Peterson of The Daily Wire is actually crazy because it's happening in Canada in a system that could easily rear its ugly head here in the U.S. very soon. The Ontario College of Psychologists, which is the regulatory body through which the profession of psychology is licensed, is currently mandating that Peterson subject himself to a literal re-education course in social media communications after a, quote, investigation into his behavior.

Peterson, luckily I guess, for our sakes, actually uploaded the entire complaint against him since deleting it, though. So-called transgressions are reviewed, and if you review them, they're crazy. The first allegation is that Peterson made a joke about suicide directed at someone on Twitter. The exact incident's right in front of you. It was an anonymous tweeter raising a concern about overpopulation, to which he replied, quote, you're free to leave at any point. Frankly, not even that good of a joke, but I guess if you're, is it really telling someone to kill themselves? Like, come on. The second is even more absurd, an allegation that Peterson undermined the ability for psychologists to encourage children to be removed by their parents. However,

specifically, he was criticizing the Canadian government's attempts to forcibly remove children from the freedom protesters area. The exact tweet is in front of you right now. It's a statement of opinion against the exact policy in this instance or against the practice in general. Ask that question. It is obviously a disagreement in policy. In no way does it imply that it's sometimes not appropriate to remove children from the care of parents. Next up, and this is really not a joke, is that Peterson violated the standards of the profession because he called a key aide to Justin Trudeau a, quote, prick and continued his criticism of the aide as corrupt. He also called Trudeau a puppet.

All of the tweets in question occurred during those freedom protests. There are many other complaints included against Peterson, including him saying a plus-size model was not beautiful. But the most egregious is this action against him for violating the so-called COVID misinformation policy. It included a direct call for an end to COVID mandates on January 24th, 2022, and an end to mask mandates and lockdowns in December of 2021. Keep this in mind. This is months after the vaccine was rolled out, well within the bounds of acceptable debate at the time. So there you have it. I left out some of the most cringe complaints about him for misgendering individuals, but of course that makes an appearance in there as well. Take this in totality. What do we have? We have Peterson

having the temerity to express an opinion. Look, even if you don't like the man and think he is cringe, which I very often do, why should any of it matter? Why should the profession of psychology litigate literally any of this? Because consider the standards that they are setting. Having political opinions against the Canadian establishment and against the COVID regime is a violation of the field of psychology itself. Furthermore, the actual sentence is even crazier than it sounds. Not only does he have to subject himself to, quote, re-education on social media, but there is no set number of hours. At his own expense, you have to take as many hours as they see fit until he has been sufficiently re-educated, almost out of 1984. It's own expense, you have to take as many hours as they see fit until he has

been sufficiently re-educated almost out of 1984. It's an indeterminate sentence. Luckily, Peterson, I guess, seems like he's doing fine. But what about people out there who are not rich? How is this not a very chilling warning to anyone in the profession in all of Canada? Keep your mouth shut about the regime or we will come after you. Furthermore, consider this. How is this not preceding itself a blow to science itself? How exactly are people going to practice, experiment, determine what is the cutting edge in mental health if they are so cowed they cannot express a contradictory opinion? Ask yourself if any of the psychologists in Canada who pushed, let's say, SSRIs on patients,

despite faulty and objectionable science, will be subject to re-education on that policy, or any psychologists who encourage cracking down on freedom protesters or praise Justin Trudeau. Think about the inverse. We now know that masks were highly ineffective against Omicron and mostly completely against COVID unless it was properly fitted N95. Why aren't the psychologists who advocated for them in Canada guilty then of spreading medical misinformation? I don't even want them to be reeducated, as satisfying, I guess, as it would be,

because the profession of psychology should be focused on psychology. If they happen to have opinions elsewhere, so be it. That's what it means to be a citizen in a supposedly free country. And don't think this can't happen here. Already the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association are singing the same tune on gender ideology.

It probably won't be long until this exact same type of occupational censorship worms its way into America. From medicine, the Bar Association and law, many areas of American life, ideological takeover of higher institutions is rupturing trust and will have actually the opposite intended effect. Ask yourself, after two years, do you trust the science more or do you distrust it more than ever? I know which camp I fall in. I suspect there are millions more just like me with every more action just like this. That's like I said, Crystal. Do I have behind Peterson? And if you want to hear my reaction to Sagar's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Got a great guest standing by, Yon Grillo.

He's been living in Mexico and reporting on narco politics. He's got a great sub stack. Let's go and put it up there on the screen. Discussing AMLO's government, recapturing El Chapo's son, slaying the demon of El Coolia Khan. So we have him to join us now to talk on not only about this, the cartel violence, but also President Biden's visit to Mexico. Yon, thanks so much for coming back on the show. We appreciate it. Great to see you.

Yeah, great to be here. Thanks. So why don't you give us the context of the capture of El Chapo's son right ahead of Joe Biden's visit to Mexico, his first visit as president of the United States, and also what the AMLO government is trying to accomplish with all of this. There's been a lot of careful stage managing happening behind the scenes. Yeah, well, the timing, it's always hard to believe this is a coincidence. There's a history in Mexico of every time a Mexican president meets an American president, capture a big narco, make a big seizure. And when they're having these conversations, and Biden was particularly going down with a mandate of saying,

I'm going to ask about fentanyl because why is it that so much fentanyl is coming through Mexico right now? Then AMLO can answer and say, well, we're fighting, we're capturing these guys like we did last Thursday, and we're even, you know, we're capturing these guys like we did last Thursday. And we're even taking casualties doing this. Now, the particular importance of Obedio Guzman is really he became a symbol after 2019, when there was an attempt to arrest him by soldiers in an anti-narcotics unit in 2019. And they pinned him down in a luxury house in Culiacan. And 700 gunmen came to his rescue.

There was fighting on the streets of the city of Kuliakan, Tinaloa, with 700 gunmen against 350 soldiers. And after four hours, the government let him go. And so he became really a symbol of impunity and a symbol of the gangsters running things. And people would use this against the president of saying, well, you're either weak or you're corrupt or both. Now, what happened last Thursday was you had a much more sleek operation. They went and they got Obedeble's man in a small village,

so it's not a tight urban area, and they went in early in the morning. It was the first of 2019. It was the middle of the day. It was early in the morning when it was still dark they got him it was still a fierce gun battle they got him they got him out and they flew him to mexico city before the hit men took to the streets now there was still a lot of crazy fighting the official numbers were 29 dead including 10 soldiers so a lot of lives at cost of. And it could be a lot more, because in many cases, the gunmen will take away the bodies of their people, take them themselves, so they won't be going in the official count.

Talk to me about, you know, AMLO. This was obviously embarrassing for him when he had to back down and they had to let a video go. But he is incredibly popular. I mean, by some metrics, he's the most popular world leader on the planet. What is it that people have really respected about him and appreciated about his leadership? Yeah, I would say AMLO plays a kind of populist game quite well and a lot of you know he uses in some ways the same way that like a leader like Trump did or some other populists but he kind of has a broader support I would say than Trump or the country's not quite as fiercely divided as in the case of Trump. And in some ways, he's had a certain steady hand of leadership. Now, some of his critics will disagree with this.

Some of his critics do think he's really doing a lot of these bad things. But if you look at Mexico the last four years and through the pandemic, which is a very, very difficult time, there's been a certain steady hand of leadership, and it's still this kind of playing up of certain ideas of regaining the nationalism of Mexico, which appeals to a lot of people. So I wouldn't say, I don't think the figure is the most popular in the world, but it certainly maintained a level of popularity in a very difficult time. I was just in Mexico. There was some discussion

about hugs, not bullets, kind of being the original doctrine. You've actually written about that on your sub stack. What does this usher in like a new era for how Amo is going to treat the drug cartels, especially with so much pressure from the Biden administration? Is he abandoning that? Was it a front? Like, what do you make of the way that he's handled the cartels the last couple of years? Yeah, so I think that the hugs, not bullets has basically gone now, in most ways. Really, it was a notion at the beginning when he first was running for presidency in 2018. It was this idea of, okay, we've had this horrific war the last 15 years. We're going to have to have a reconciliation. We're going to need to make up. The violence is over.

Now, in some ways, there's a certain point to that. I can understand this. I mean, you've seen this horrible violence and trying to end this whole kind of war on drugs thing. The problem is, is the reality of what do you actually do? And the reality is that the cartels, they're trafficking drugs and making billions of dollars, and that's funding them and financing them then,

but they're also in a whole bunch of different rackets. They're also involved in human smuggling with the migrants on the border, with theft of oil, with arms trafficking, with prostitution, with illegal mining, and with all of these things. And you can't really just kind of go back and give them space or just allow these gangsters to operate.

So I think he kind of already gradually moved away from the hugs, not balloons kind of gradual thing. He didn't really have many concrete policies for that. And the flip side, he's moved more and more towards supporting the military and building up, he built up this new force called the National Guard, and then he handed that to the military effectively. And so you've got a more bolstered and powerful military in the country as well. Do these, as a practical matter though, do these tactics actually work? So if you take out a leader and lock them up, if you have a big

seizure and, you know, or interdict a bunch of drugs, does it actually slow the flow of drugs across the border? Does it decrease the supply that's ultimately available here in the US? Yeah, I mean, you've really kind of hit the point there, Crystal, with the, you know, it doesn't. And that's one of the issues that come around. I mean, especially with Obedioglu's man, he's one of four of his brothers in this one faction of the Sinhala cartel. And the Sinhala cartel is one of many cartels. So still many people are moving drugs. Now with the issue of fentanyl, and I was over at the port of Manzanillo recently on the Pacific coast, where a lot of the fentanyl comes in from China or the ingredients coming from China. And yeah, I mean, there's huge amounts coming through.

And there's other big issues like corruption in the people running the ports, corruption in the officials and the military itself, moving these drugs as well. So that, you know, I don't think just this kind of taking down King Pins does. Now, I've been covering for 20 years, this war on drugs and many things and often been a critic of the fundamentals of the war on drugs. However, with the severity of fentanyl, with the level of deaths you're seeing right now in the United States, and it really is, I mean, 107,000 overdose deaths in 2021. I mean, it really is. I mean, the 107,000 overdose deaths in 2021, I mean, that really is a mind-boggling number, the way it's gone up. And I really don't know what you do really about fentanyl and crystal meth that are causing so much harm.

Interesting. And so then broadly, do you anticipate more cartel violence in the months to come after a relative lull, I guess, in the last couple of years? Like, is this the opening shot as a result of U.S. pressure? Well, I would say, yes, drug cartel violence will continue. I mean, I wouldn't say there's really been a relative lull the last couple of years. I mean, it's been, I mean, this last year, we've seen a slight reduction of murders compared to the year before. But still, if you look at the last few years, Mexico in every year is registering official numbers of well over 30,000 murders. I mean, very, very, very low levels of violence there.

Yeah, an important point. And we really appreciate your reporting. You're literally on the ground, been covering this for a long time. We're going to plug your sub stack. It's right in the description of this video. We encourage you guys to go ahead and subscribe. Some of the best reporting from actually on the ground and a very knowledgeable person. So we appreciate you joining us. Thank you, sir. Great to see you, Ian. Yeah, great to be here. Thanks much. Our pleasure. Our pleasure. Thank you guys so much for watching. Really appreciate it. Love being back here in the

studio, Crystal. And it's a pleasure to say CounterPoints is tomorrow. The graphic is fixed. We've got some fun announcements and all that coming up. Of course, the live show as well, and we'll be teasing and introducing some new things for our premium subscribers that you guys can vote to improve on and build out from the set and et cetera. So I think you guys will really, really enjoy that. But CounterPointpoints tomorrow, regular show Thursday. Other than that, I think that's it. We love you guys.

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