Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 11/14/22: Dems WIN Senate, Midterms, Ukraine, Twitter, Elon And MORE!

Episode Date: November 14, 2022

Krystal and Saagar bring the news about midterm polls, Biden's speech, Twitter policy, Ukraine diplomacy, Biden's stumbles, windfall profits tax, pandemic reckoning, and populist messaging!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.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. But there were some dark truths behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. Enter Camp Shame, an eight-part series examining the rise and fall of Camp Shane and the culture that fueled its decades-long success. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus.

So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. DNA test proves he is not the father. Now I'm taking the inheritance. Wait a minute, John. Who's not the father? and subscribe today. his irresponsible son, but I have DNA proof that could get the money back. Hold up. They could lose their family and millions of dollars? Yep. Find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. I'm also the girl behind Boy Sober, the movement that exploded in 2024.

You might hear that term and think it's about celibacy, but to me, Boy Sober is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's flexible, it's customizable, and it's a personal process. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it.

Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, Ready or Not 2024 is here and we here at Breaking Points are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that. Let's get to the show. Good morning, everybody.

Happy Monday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed we do. We are finally getting a little bit of clarity on where the Senate is going, where the House is going, where state legislatures are going, where key governors races are going. Got a lot of results in yesterday and over the weekend. So we'll break all of that down for you and bring you up to speed on the elections and where things are going to stand in the next Congress. At the same time, there is a lot of other news going on in the world, in particular, news coming out of Ukraine. We've got actually Zelensky

in Kherson right now, today, after Russians retreated from that key city. So we'll break down that for you. Also, more manic, crazy, all over the place moves from Elon Musk and Twitter. So we'll have that update for you. And also, Trump is apparently launching his presidential campaign tomorrow. So we're going to tell you what's going on there. He's getting a lot of pushback from members of his own party, people who used to support him. We'll bring you some of those highlights. And we're actually going to do a live stream of that announcement. We'll get to that in just a minute.

First of all, we have another big announcement, which is two more live shows on the calendar. Live show. Let's put it up there on the screen. Okay. Town Hall, New York City. We announced to our premium members over the weekend for an exclusive presale. They are now on sale to the general public. The link to those tickets will be in the description.

December 6th. The very next day, East Coast. We're very proud to present. Let's put the next one up there on the screen. Boston, Massachusetts. The Wilbur Theater on December 7th. 7.30 p.mpm for both of those shows. The links to those tickets will be down in the

description. We're going to have a great time. Crystal, Sagar, and Friends, the Friends promised. We've revamped a couple of different things from our previous live shows, so it's going to be even bigger, even better in preparation for the continuing around the country. And as Crystal mentioned, live stream! Let's go ahead and

put that on the show. So we're still trying to find. Let's go ahead and put that on the screen. So we're still trying to find a good slogan. For now, this is the placeholder. Road to the 2024 elections. We will be live tomorrow starting at 8 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. We'll do a little bit of a normal-ish type show at the top. We'll have Emily here. We'll have Ryan in remotely. And then we will watch together the live stream of Donald Trump's announcement for the presidential election. Presumptive announcement. Nothing is official with Trump until it's actually official. And then we'll break down a little bit of what it means and all of that afterwards.

So join us live, 8 p.m. Standard Time. We'll go all the way as long as we need to. And then the next morning, it'll be available in clips on the podcast for everybody who is out there. So again, just to be clear, not doing the normal show tomorrow morning. Instead, we're doing the live stream in the evening with Ryan and Emily to preview Trump's announcement and get into whatever additional politics news there is. Sure, we'll have new election results and all of that as well. We'll watch it. We'll do commentary on the other side. So instead of the normal show tomorrow, that is what we're doing. There we go. Okay. Let's start with the election.

Yes. Let's get to the one thing we know for sure, which is it has now been called Democrats will take control of the Senate. Having won every toss-up race except for Georgia, which is going to a runoff in December. Raphael Wardock had the edge in terms of the vote totals, although it was quite close. And so that one will go to a runoff, but it no longer sort of determines control of the Senate, not to say it doesn't ultimately matter. It does. We'll get to that in just a moment. So let's put this map up on the screen. The New York Times does these maps that I am a little bit obsessed with. Basically, what they show is where and how candidates either outperform Biden or outperform Trump. So leave this up on

the screen for a minute. The blue arrows are places where Senate candidates outperformed Biden's performance. So you can see Pennsylvania stands out. Actually, Ohio with Tim Ryan, even though he lost, that stands out. Kentucky, that was a surprising one. Eastern Kentucky in particular, Charles Booker was a Senate candidate there. And I know he spent a lot of time cultivating relationships in Eastern Kentucky. So that was kind of surprising. Missouri as well. Again, these are seats that went to Republicans as expected, but Democrats outperformed. You can see also out West quite a bit. Oregon, you can see Colorado shifted pretty dramatically to the left. California mixed bag. Arizona, a little bit of movement towards

Democrats. And then you look at, there's a lot of red arrows on this map as well. It really gives you a sense of how mixed the results of this election ultimately were and how regional. You can see in the South, actually, from North Carolina, South Carolina, a bit less. Georgia was a little bit more mixed. Did Raphael Warnock, like I said, does have the edge, but that one's going to a runoff. But you can see Florida, dramatic shifts to the right. And then you see sort of a shift in Iowa. You see South Dakota. You see a number of other states where you had huge shifts outperforming Trump's performance. So ultimately, Nevada called for Catherine Cortez Masto. Have to give a lot of credit to John Ralston on this one. He was right.

Who called it right. He was even on election day as he saw the numbers starting to come in. He was even starting to get a little nervous about his predictions. She narrowly hangs on in the final count. She is able to beat Adam Laxalt there in Nevada and hold on. Arizona also called for Mark Kelly over Blake Masters. We'll get to Blake Masters, who is not being a great actor in this whole situation, but that one has been called as well. And then, of course, we already knew the results of Pennsylvania, which ended up not really being particularly close. And Georgia, as I said, headed to that runoff. So Democrats have a chance to even pick up a seat, which, you know, does it matter? Does it not matter? We saw a good tweet

that sort of lays out why it makes a difference between Democrats having 50-50 control with Kamala Harris being the tiebreaker versus actually having 51 seats and having the outright control of the chamber. Let's take a look at that tweet. Three huge differences, Steve Vladeck writes here, between a 50-50 and a 51-49 majority, number one, having a majority on each committee versus power sharing and deadlocks requiring discharge petitions. Number two, no single D senator can hijack or block nominations. And number three, Ds can have two members absent and still be able to hold votes. So still a lot at stake in that Georgia runoff, but it no longer will determine control of the Senate. Exactly right. Also, 2024 was not looking to be a kind

year for Democrats. And so if they have a pickup, you know, of course you want the margins to be able. You have no idea what the election will look like in 2024. You want as many seats as possible to either lessen or blow or perhaps even keep the majority in 2024. Let me elaborate on that just to get really specific. John Tester in Montana and Joe Manchin in West Virginia are both up in 2024. Those are very difficult seats to hold. So just looking at those two alone, when you look across the map, you realize that's going to be a very tough Senate landscape for Democrats next time around. So if they want to continue to hold the chamber, any margin they can possibly have would be really important. Exactly. And with power in particular, that one we talked about on the committee,

that is much more important than people think. It's one of the things that right now, Senate business is really at an all-time low. One of the reasons the only things that the Senate can do right now is actually just confirm judges is because that one, at least in terms of the process from the judicial filibuster and more, they've got it down to basically so that it works perfectly well as long as nobody objects, which is a part of the other issue. However, with legislation, this was causing major problems on Capitol Hill over the last two years. So it would be a big impact. But overall, it does show you also that we have now moved away from the expected condition of the next two years, which was a total block against

the Biden agenda in both the House and the Senate. Now, we'll get to the House, but the Senate, of course, was always like the major firewall. That's where some of the most uncompromising, maybe one member could have held up the entire thing with a slim GOP majority. Now they've basically got it so that, you know, I was explained to me this way, which is that having a deadlock in the House, so we'll get to the House projection, but preview, Republicans look like they very, very slightly will get on. Part of the reason is that's not as quote dangerous as having a GOP majority in the Senate is that whenever the times when Boehner was there and he would have a Tea Party revolt, Pelosi would just give him 25, 30 votes to just fund the

government. So it was actually easier in order to have 20, 30, or 40 Democrats just cross across the aisle rather than have Marjorie Taylor Greene, for example, hijack the entire caucus. So it's less perilous for Biden for funding the government and many other like routine functions that could have been a real thorn in his side than it would have been if there was a GOP majority in the Senate. for is to launch a whole series of investigations. Hunter Biden is top of the list, Fauci and the COVID response, and they have a whole other sort of laundry list of investigations they want to launch. It seems to me a very different deal if that is just a House affair versus if, you know, the Senate is the more sort of prestigious body, garners more media attention. These are more well-known figures. And so if you have both the House and the Senate sort of on the same page going into these investigations, it also seems like that's a bigger deal versus mean, I was skeptical even on the Senate one, but you're right, which is that from the Senate, compelling authority, of course, the House will continue to have subpoena power. But even with the limited amount that they have,

we're going to see how it shakes out committee-wise, et cetera, like who gets placed, where, and what exactly the purview that they're going to get. But it's going to be a real wild ride, I think, for Kevin McCarthy and for the House of Representatives on the GOP side. On the Democratic side, I think what we can expect is just they are going to confirm every 27-year-old law student they possibly can to the back. I would do the same thing if I were them. It's a smart move. They are just going to sit there and confirm judges left and right as long as they possibly can. I wouldn't be shocked if you saw maybe one more Supreme Court retirement or some Supreme Court retirement or departure in the next two years because who knows where things are going to go. And I think a lot of the justices learned from what happened with RBG and are also looking at what Stephen Breyer did.

So on a practical level, it changes a hell of a lot here in D.C. On the debt ceiling as well, they could go ahead and maybe pass that during the lame duck and effectively take it off the table for the next two years. Even if they didn't, they have a little bit more of wiggle room. But many of the GOP bargaining chips, which were on the table to try and force the Biden hand, cause some more chaos in the lead up to the 2024 election, that's just off the table in a very, very big way. It's just stunning. It's stunning to see this happen. They also, I mean, they really thought they were going to come into, they being Republicans, going to come into this next Congress with a kind of a mandate from the American people where, you know, their view of the universe and their legislative priorities and their particular

culture war issues where they were going to be able to say, look, the American people affirm they are with us on all of these issues. And also on economics, you know, they thought they were going to be able to come in saying, look, the American people has repudiated the big spending of the Biden administration. Now is time to tighten the purse strings. That was going to be the justification for a potential debt ceiling crisis. That mandate is certainly not there. Now, Republicans have often acted in lots of ways without really having a public mandate. They're a lot more comfortable doing that, I think, ultimately than Democrats. But the bottom line here is with what looks almost certainly to be divided government, the Republican slim majority in the House, Democratic slim

majority in the Senate, of course, a Democratic president. Unless they find some issues of actual bipartisan cooperation, there ain't shit getting done in this town. Yeah, that's correct. And I'm skeptical that they are going to continue to, you know, they had a couple things where on the minor, like, gun reform legislation they passed, they were able to get some Republicans to go along with that. The CHIPS Act as well. The infrastructure bill also had Republican support. So there were a few significant items in the first two years of Biden's term that they got some Republican support for. I have a feeling we're not going to see them willing

to go along anymore because one of the narratives that's coming out of some corners of the GOP after a, you know, less than spectacular showing in the midterms is that they actually gave in to Biden too much. Now, I don't agree with that assessment, but I see that analysis coming from all kinds of corners at this point. So especially as you get closer to 2024, even on areas that, you know, in theory, there is agreement, like there is some agreement on potential tech legislation that you could see. There is some agreement on potential additional industrial policy that you could see. Are they going to actually go along with Biden and give him any wins in this next two year period? I'm pretty skeptical of that. What do you think? I completely agree, especially because I think it's completely underscored with the gun legislation.

Most of the GOP members who signed on to that were retiring or they were in extremely safe seats. Those people are going to be retired. They're going to be gone. So the Pat Toomies of the world, the Rob Portmans of the world, they no longer face a political price. Part of the reason they were willing to take that risk. Yeah. The newer crop, they're not going to do that at all. Well, on the other hand, there are some new Republicans in New York who just won in seats that Biden carried. Oh, in the House. Yeah, in the House by a couple. I mean, some of those seats Biden carried by double digits. So in the House, there will be a few new moderate members who have some incentive to show that they're willing to work with the Democrats. But ultimately, if you've got Speaker McCarthy controlling what comes to the floor, it doesn't make much of a difference.

And that's, I think, the point that should be underscored. Yes. Okay, so we'll see what all of that looks like. At the same time, there was a lot of, I would say, very justifiable concern about all of the candidates who, you know, were election deniers and unwilling to say whether they would have certified Joe Biden's election in advance, casting doubt on whether the elections would be free and fair. There's a lot of concern about what those people would do if they lost. By and large, I mean, this is the lowest bar of all time. They all accepted their defeats and eventually conceded Mastriano in Pennsylvania. I was going to say, even Doug Mastriano. Even Doug Mastriano.

He initially didn't, I guess, call Shapiro and didn't outright say that he would concede, but then he finally, I guess, five days later got around to actually doing it. So, again, lowest bar of all time, but he managed to surpass it. There are a couple holdouts, though. Blake Masters, let's go ahead and put this up on the screen. He has, as of last night, declined to concede at Arizona. He says he wants to wait until all the votes are counted. And, you know, he's got some language in here.

He says, if at the end Senator Kelly has more of the votes than I do, I will congratulate him on a hard-fought victory. But voters decide, not the media. Let's count the votes than I do. I will congratulate him on a hard-fought victory, but voters decide, not the media. Let's count the votes. He also said, for my people who knock doors in 115-degree heat and for the million-plus Arizonans who put their faith in me, we are going to make sure that every legal vote is counted. So, has not quite brought himself to concede yet. Yeah. I mean, look, you can wait if you want. I mean, personally, I just think it makes you look like even more of a loser. Like, at this point, it's very clear, like, you can wait if you want. I mean, personally, I just think it makes you look like even more of a loser. Like, at this point, it's very clear, like, you're not going to win. That's why, look, we're not talking here about Decision Desk or something calling it.

The AP has gone ahead and called the race. All of the Arizona data guru people that I see people following, all of them have pointed the fact that they're. I haven't seen anyone casting doubt on this one. Right, there is no chance. And by the way, we're not sitting here saying that Carrie Leak is lost yet for a reason, which is that she still has a possibility. It's a slight possibility. So if she doesn't want to concede, I completely understand that one.

But on his, it's very clear, like, he does not have the votes. There's no outstanding number of batches which could possibly really break that way in any realistic fashion. So, look, I mean, if you want to hold out for another week, I guess go ahead. Not really a headline, you know, that I would necessarily want given that, you know, now you have to go back into private practice. So it's not like, you know, now you actually have to go back into private practice and work in a business and, you know, potentially do deals with major companies and be a venture capitalist. It's like, that's where I think reputation, as I'm going to be talking about in my monologue, I would say matters a venture capitalist. It's like, that's where I think reputation, as I'm going to be talking about in my monologue, I would say matters a little bit. I mean, look,

in general, with the guy, dug himself on massive holes, went way too hard in the paint during the primary in order to try and score the Trump endorsement, you know, the clownish, I think Trump won ad, then of course the national abortion abortion ban. A lot of his ads have been circulating online to just show how, frankly, cringe he was throughout the entire process. He's also just, in terms of, like, personal qualities, an off-putting, like, dude. Yeah, I just don't think he was a natural politician, period. And I think a lot of his decisions underscored that, right? There was a, McConnell's, I think, lead pollster said that Blake Masters tested the worst in front of focus groups of any candidate that they had literally ever seen.

So even putting aside like national abortion ban and calling abortion genocide and the like Trump actually won 2020 and whatever, just on like, you know, that natural like that instinctive vibe you get off of someone. We didn't focus as much on Masters as, like, say, Walker or Oz. There's an argument he was actually a worse candidate than certainly Walker, who at least is still in the ballgame. Right. I mean, all you have to do is take a look at the vote. Of course you have to do a vis-a-vis. I mean, right now he's blaming Mitch McConnell on the cash. I mean, I guess there is an argument to be made for that.

But it's also like, well, why weren't you raising more money? You know, like, why were you you raising more money? Why were you relying on Mitch McConnell to go ahead and raise? I mean, look, looking at the race, it's very clear that many of the things we were saying a couple of months ago from the Kansas referendums, from the polls and more, and from Mark Kelly's strength as a candidate actually all bared out to be true. The fundamentals didn't end up mattering nearly as much in this election. I think that's very interesting in terms of takeaways. I have very, very multifaceted takeaways from all of this.

You can't help but have multifaceted takeaways because we showed you on that map before. I mean, look, no doubt, much better night for Democrats than Republicans. I mean, compared to how the party in power normally does, it was actually a historic night for Democrats. But you look at Florida. You look at New York But you look at Florida. You look at New York. You look at, you know, some places Democrats really romped, like in the industrial Midwest. And some places like Arizona, they really had to sort of like, you know, eke it out.

California, same deal. So there was a lot of regional variability. There was a lot of state-to-state variability. It really was almost the return of more local politics that we haven't seen, certainly since the Trump era. So there is going to continue to be a lot of takeaways from exactly how all of these races went. We've mentioned Carrie Lake now a couple of times. Let's go ahead and put this up on the screen because she's the other one, big questions over whether or not she's going to concede. And that question mark is still very much there. Katie Hobbs grows lead over Carrie Lake in latest returns from Arizona governor's race. Dave Wasserman over at Cook Political, who's everybody's sort of like go-to data analyst, he says it looks nearly impossible for sure, but it is looking very good for the Democrats in Arizona and that gubernatorial race. And, you know, we'll see if Carrie Lake loses, if she is willing to

concede. Some of her supporters have been out marching on voting centers and all this sort of stuff. So we'll see how that ultimately goes. But, you know, in terms of like how all the election deniers fared, she was the only one who at the end the day, really had a shot at the governor's level to be able to hold on. She was, you know, she was very politically talented in terms of, like, personal charisma, sort of the polar opposite of Blake Masters there. And also had some, you know, she was well-funded. She was well-networked in the state and with the political Republican establishment there as well. And so for Carrie Lake, even to be on the verge of a loss, it does show you what a political price there was to be paid for refusing to say who actually won the 2020 election. Yeah. Here's the other thing I've seen a lot of people say,

like, why does it take so long to count the votes? I agree with you. It's a disgrace. However, it's a longstanding disgrace in the state of Arizona, apparently, for some reason. And I'm curious what you think. They have it such that they don't even start counting the votes until election day itself. Also, they have this crazy system where you can do like a day of mail-in drop. So you can basically write your mail-in ballot, then you come on election day and you have to drop it off. I guess that's fine, but we got over 100,000 more this time than we did in 2020. Some 276,000

ballots dropped on on day of. Then signature verification has to go through per their laws. It's a very, very, like, it's a problematic and long process. People can do challenges. Only then can a vote get counted. It's like, well, no wonder. It's taking days and days in order to count votes here.

Here's the other thing I want to say to Republicans here. I agree. It should be simpler. But why does Florida, which has a bunch of old people, well, how can they count their votes in one day? Agreed. But I also want to say for all the Republicans who are complaining about this, like they're shooting themselves in the foot by encouraging their base to wait until the day of. And, you know, we talked about this with regard to Georgia and Trump last time around, which is there is a real argument that if Trump had just embraced early mail-in voting, he might have won Georgia and might have won the whole darn thing. Because ultimately, listen, you know, not everybody is a like ride or die all the way in for the cause going to be able to vote no matter what it takes on election day. Shit happens. People's kids get sick and work goes long and they just

forget about like whatever. So if you are banking on having every one of your voters have to show up on election day, that's going to be a wildly more challenging organizational task. It's going to take way more resources, whereas Democrats had a huge advantage in that they had in some of these states, you know, a month where they could turn their people out and check whether they voted or not and nudge them and get them to fill out their ballot or get them to go to the polls or whatever it was. So this direction that Republicans have gone in has really ended up being just a catastrophic, idiotic mistake. Zero disagreement. I'm like, listen, I want more voter participation. I think mail-in ballots are fine in general. Everybody's like, oh, we're going to end the ballot harvesting

regime. I'm like, well, you just lost the election. So first of all, it's not going to happen. But second, you know, you could just get your people to vote by mail as well. Here's a practical solution from what I read. There's something called an extrication machine, which Florida has and Arizona doesn't. It uses a laser to cut off the top of the envelope so that they can more easily extract the value. Oh, is that all it is? I am calling on the federal government to purchase extrication machines for the use by the states for everyone so we don't have to live through this shit ever again.

Let's get that appropriation done. So, Arizona, I am pleading with you. You guys have plenty of money. You can buy an extrication machine. Is this the problem in California, too? Because they always take forever. And usually no one really cares that much because ultimately, you know, it's going to go blue and it's just a question of the margin. But now we have house control coming down to some of these California

districts. And I keep looking at the update and they're like, we've counted 60 percent of the ballots. Like, what? It's insanity. Why? Why is it taking so long? Anyway, the other piece of this with regard to the Senate is now because, you know, unexpectedly, Republicans will not have control. There are some pushback. There's a lot of recriminations over who's to blame and what happened. And, you know, is it Mitch McConnell's fault? Is it Trump's fault? Is it Rick Scott's fault? Is it Peter Thiel's fault?

I mean, there's just like all sorts of finger pointing all around. And so there has been a question over whether Mitch McConnell's leadership would ultimately be challenged. Let's put this first piece up on the screen from The Washington Post. Classic Republicans in disarray headline. Congressional Republicans panic as they watch their lead dwindle. Private consternation reached a public boiling point on Friday as lawmakers from both changers confronted the fallout from Tuesday's elections. For now, since we're talking about the Senate, I'll focus on the Senate piece of this. A group of Senate Republicans on Friday actually called for a delay in GOP leadership elections after the party's failure to claim the majority.

That move poses a direct challenge to McConnell. We're talking about six senators who I guess signed on to this letter or publicly called for this delay. Marco Rubio, Rick Scott, Josh Hawley, Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, and Cynthia Loomis. That vote was supposed to be on Wednesday. McConnell was expected to be reelected in a secret ballot. Hawley suggested waiting all the way until after the December 6th Senate runoff in Georgia. That would, of course, be a delay of multiple weeks. We also have reporting that apparently before the election catastrophe for the Republicans, Senator Rick Scott, who was in charge of the Senate Republican campaign effort, was all set and ready to run. Let's go ahead and

put this up on the screen, was ready to run against McConnell for leadership until he saw how poorly things went. And now he is rethinking that. He had gone so far as to cut an announcement video declaring his intentions. Word had reached some prominent conservatives outside the Senate and a handful of GOP senators had gotten wind of his plan and started calculating just how many votes his long-shot campaign could accrue at the leadership vote next week in the Capitol. They go on to say he would have been virtually certain to lose even if Republicans had done well in these midterms, which of course they ultimately did not. But Scott's challenge was not so much aimed at unseating the longtime Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, as it was channeling the anger of grassroots conservatives and President Trump, who were peeved at McConnell's criticism of the candidate quality of this year's roster

of Senate GOP candidates. But ultimately, Mitch McConnell now is looking pretty prescient with those comments, I would say. Yeah. And, you know, actually, Tom Cotton had an interesting response to all of this. So today he said, quote, I don't see why we would delay the election since all five or six of our leadership elections are uncontested. And he says, you know, there's a great saying, to be the man, you got to beat the man. And so far, no one's had the nerve to step forward and challenge Senator McConnell, which is true. Even Rick Scott, you know, who's talking a big game, he's not actually in the running. And also, why would you want to elect the guy who both screwed up the midterm or the midterm elections, was literally on a super yacht while all of this was going down. And then third, the guy who published the let's cut Medicare and social

security plan. It's like, really? That's the person that we want to put in charge of this whole thing? So look, I think McConnell is absolutely going to be the next leader of the Senate GOP, especially like minority leader, does not particularly matter that much. However, Trump has also weighed in. So he's both been critical of McConnell. Sometimes he praises McConnell. They have a very complicated relationship. Here's what he had to say to Glenn Beck.

Well, I think he's got a lot of pressure. His wife is a big person for Chinese investment and his family and him, China. I don't think that's appropriate. No, I think Rick Scott would be much better than McConnell. I know McConnell well. I guess probably better than most. And his wife, I call her Coco Chow. But she worked for me for four years.

But she was so heartbroken, you know, like she's got this big heart. She was so heartbroken at the January 6th she's got this big heart. She was so heartbroken at the January 6th, even though it had nothing to do with me. And she left, you know, a week and a half early to make her big statement on the way out the door. So I was I was glad to see her go, but she wanted to make that statement. Now, I'm not a fan of McConnell and I am a fan of Rick Scott. So Trump is for Rick Scott, although Rick Scott is not officially in the race. And if he hated Elaine Chao so much, why did he hire her for four years?

Why'd you put her in your cabinet? By the way, some of us were saying that thing about her father's Chinese ties for 2017. Nobody listened then. Only whenever she spoke out about January 6th, like, oh, then we're allowed to notice. This is always the issue with Trump. By the way, also, he criticized Trump,

Mitch, a million times while he was the president, and it never actually mattered. McConnell has an ironclad hold on the caucus. Tom Cotton is eminently correct. Nobody has a credible challenge yet to McConnell. And also, what are you going to do? Are you actually going to do something new? I mean, Ali is like, we need a new party, all of that. It's like, okay, then run against McConnell and say like, this is what we're going to stand for. Here's our vision. Here's what we'd do differently.

I think what you would find out though is that most people don't agree with him in the caucus. He was like, maybe we shouldn't have filibustered on insulin prices or whatever. And it's like, yeah,

well, most of them agree. We're not doing it yet. Also, actually, I mean, the Rick Scott line of attack on McConnell and co.

is like, we should have even, like, we shouldn't have worked with the Democrats at all. We shouldn't have gone along with them on infrastructure. So if Holly's. It's like, we shouldn't have worked with the Democrats at all. We shouldn't have gone along with them on infrastructure. So if Hawley is out there saying like, oh, maybe we should have helped them on insulin prices.

That really is a viewpoint that is on an island in the Republican caucus. And look, in all of these, it's very similar to Pelosi. Why does she have such a lock on leadership with the House Democrats? She raises a boatload of money and she doles it out. And so a lot of these incumbent Democrats, they owe their seats to her. Same thing with McConnell.

Rick Scott was a pathetic fundraiser, ultimately, when he was running the Senate Republican Campaign Committee. And so Mitch McConnell had to bail him and a bunch of other candidates out as well. And to the point about candidate quality, if Blake Masters or whoever wants to complain about there not being enough money, I mean, partly Republicans shouldn't have had to spend so much money bolstering J.D. Vance to get him across the finish line. And so that stretched them thin. And on the other hand, like because the Republican senatorial campaign committee didn't do their part, that also stretched them thin. So I don't know how you can lay that at the feet of Mitch McConnell when he raised, like, more money than anyone. Well, look, the real person to blame is Trump. Like, Trump didn't spend any money boosting the candidates that he ultimately endorsed.

And he sucks up so much of the Republican grassroots space fundraising. He just sends something to us about, he's like, Trump sent out an email where it's like, donate to Herschel Walker and, like, 90% of it goes to Trump and, an email where it's like donate to Herschel Walker and like 90% of it goes to Trump and like 10% of it goes to Herschel Walker. That's exactly right. That is exactly right. That's what he does. I mean, look, all he cares about is himself. He barely spent any money trying to even push these candidates off the line. That's why it's funny to me when Blake goes on Tucker and he's like, well, this is all on Mitch.

I'm like, really? Is it not on the guy who endorsed you? Also, look, maybe this is just me, but if I had a billionaire benefactor and he didn't actually cough up for me near the line, I'd be like, what's the point of being an oligarch? If you're going to be an oligarch, you can spend the money. And if you're going to be an oligarch-backed candidate, but you can't rely on your oligarch, what are you really doing? What's happening here? If you have billions of dollars, which Peter Seale did, why are we haggling over $20 million? You wipe your ass at at 20 million. But anyway, whatever. I don't have 20 million dollars, so I

guess I will never empathize. Bottom line, Mitch McConnell is very safe. And I do think it is a great parable of like how unserious Trump ultimately is because he's had these criticisms of Mitch McConnell since January 6th. Right. And if you really wanted to organize against him, you had some time to do it. You had some time to figure out your candidate. You had some time to line up support. Trump had all kinds of chits he could have used, including the fundraising money that he could have flown into various races. But he didn't do any of that because he's not fundamentally a serious person about any of this. Correct. All right, let's move on to the House.

Let's get to the House. So we are starting to get some clarity in the House as well. I mean, it is crazy that at this point we don't know that the GOP certainly has control. But after some results that came in yesterday, it looks very, very likely that they are going to be able to clinch a very narrow majority in the House. Much different picture than what they thought they were going to be bringing into the next Congress. So let's go ahead and put Dave Wasserman's tweet up on the screen. This is from two days ago. So this is where things did stand. He says, new house math, Dem called or likely they had 213 seats. Republicans called or likely 217 seats. Remember, majority is 218. So he's already got Republicans really

knocking on the door at 217 and then five toss ups. So that would mean that Democrats would have to run the table in all five of these toss ups. Those would be Arizona one, Arizona six, California 13, California 22 and California 41. So two seats in Arizona, three seats in California. And again, at that point, those were all toss-ups. And the idea was, Dems, you got to win every single one of these in order to get to 218. Now, there are some other potential fringe scenarios on the board. Lauren Boebert looks like she's going to hang on in Colorado. That one's probably going to go to a recount. Is there a chance that once ballots are whatever, a theoretical possibility that the Democrat comes from behind, yes. Would you count on it? Absolutely no. So there are some other potential scenarios. But after yesterday,

you had three of those toss-up races go the wrong direction for Democrats. You had Arizona 1, Arizona 6, and California 41. So three out of the five toss-ups go towards Republicans. I think one of those may have even been called. So with those three moving towards Republicans, that leaves two toss-ups that would put Dems at only 215. So what he's saying is basically Democrats need a miracle in order to pull this off at this point. Yeah, it doesn't look likely. We've only got two more. It looks like the GOP majority will be anywhere between like 219, depending, like you said, and like 222. But let's all put that in perspective. It's supposed to be R plus 25. So one of those things where if you only got three seats, now

you're really looking like Nancy Pelosi. And this just causes so much consternation. Steve Kornacki broke some of this down in the projection as well. Let's take a listen. 218 seats needed for a majority in the House, and we are now estimating that Republicans will finish with 219. That is down from our previous estimate, which had them at 220. And I would stress, the margin for error here is plus or minus four seats. So why does that matter, though? And I think this is it's a little bit different than control, which is that when you have the majority, as long as you can get the speakership, you still control the committees. You have the discharge ability over Congress on the big votes. It will matter. But the day to day running of the House, it will still shift towards the speaker, presumptive possible speaker, Kevin McCarthy, which we will get to. It's not all presumptive, as I might have

been laying out. So the point is, is that it will be hell for GOP leadership, but the day-to-day action of the House of Representatives, if they have that slight majority, it will still be in their control. If you're speaker, you control what comes to the floor. Exactly. And that's ultimately what matters. Now, how successful is Kevin McCarthy going to be at wrangling this caucus? I mean, I do not envy if he ends up as speaker, which is the big if. And like Sagar said, we'll get to that in a minute. I do not envy him that task because whereas Pelosi really sort of like whipped the dissident progressives into line and they more or less went along with basically everything that Democratic leadership ultimately wanted. And they're more sort of like moderate blue more or less went along with basically everything that Democratic leadership ultimately wanted.

And they're more sort of like moderate blue dogs, mostly went along as well. The Republican caucus is a different beast. The Freedom Caucus, I mean, they are much more willing to sort of buck leadership. And this goes back even to like the Tea Party days. Think about John Boehner and the headaches and heartburn that he got from the Tea Party wave of new Republicans. And you've got, you know, you've got Marjorie Taylor Greene's of the world, Paul Gosar. It looks like Lauren Boebert's going to be back. You've got a real group of people who are willing to cause a lot of problems for their own leadership. So good luck,

Kevin McCarthy. I think this is going to be a very difficult caucus to manage. The other thing that Daniel Nishaney over at Bolts Magazine is pointing out is that, you know, if you have this bare majority of like two seats, that means any sort of vacancy can throw your majority into doubt or make it so that you don't have the majority of votes ultimately on the floor. And he pointed out that, I mean, there is almost never not some vacancy. Yeah, people die. I mean, you're talking about 435 members. Like, somebody, something's going to be going on. Somebody is going to be sick.

Someone's going to die. Someone's going to retire. Like, that's going on all the time. So if you have this bear of a majority, it really makes it difficult to get anything accomplished. It causes a lot of problems on the big, like some routine business, like funding the government or whatever, naming a post office. Like all this stuff matters and has to actually go through the House. Same with committee business.

That's going to be a big one, the steering committee, what exactly they can get through and whatnot. So I'm very interested to kind of see how it all plays out. I think that's going to be the story in Washington over the next two years. The Biden administration, like you said, look, the days of legislative accomplishment, they're over in a Republican House. It's just simply over. Democratic judges will be confirmed en masse and effectively both confirmed and appointed by the president. But on a major structural level, many of the battles for the future GOP, we're going to have to look to the House, both on the speakership, in terms of the legislation they may or may not allow through, exactly the holds, you know, future aid to Ukraine, or, you know,

who's going to vote which way, whether that McCarthy may have to work with Nancy Pelosi or whoever, Hakeem Jeffries, to get 20 or 30 votes to fund some legislation. That was always humiliating for Boehner whenever he would have to go to Pelosi. And the thing is, though, is that the Dems would almost always certainly give the Republicans, like the centrist Republicans, what they want rather than them cave to like Marjorie Taylor Greene's demand on some legislation. Although, who knows? You know, then they can also extract a fair price for giving it over. So it's going to be very interesting to see how it works.

The Democrats more power in the House. And it also gives, you know, the House Freedom Caucus and the Marjorie Taylor Greene's a lot more power too. So, I mean, you saw the way Joe Manchin used the narrow majority that Democrats had. I mean, the basically 50-50 situation that Democrats had to extract all kinds of things and really hold up the process. So a, you know, a concerted group of just a handful of members in the House

can really kind of run the show. And ultimately, when you're talking about Republicans having the House, Democrats having the Senate, Democrats having the presidency, the likelihood that these groups, these parties are going to be able to come together on any significant legislation, I think pretty slim. We looked at some of the history of the last time a House majority was this small. There was actually a period in, what was it, like 2001 to 2003 under George W. Bush, where there was a very, very narrow Republican majority. But you have to go all the way back to Eisenhower in 1952 to find the last time a House majority was as small as 221. They had apparently gained 22 seats from the Democratic Party. They gained a majority of the House. But Democrats had almost 250,000

more votes thanks to overwhelming margins in the South. That would be that narrow majority they had then would be the last time the Republican Party actually won a majority in the House until 1994. You know, we're very used to this idea that like, oh, it just flips back and forth and it's always a new wave election and the country is really closely divided. Easy to forget that Democrats had a lock on the House for a very long time and very large majority, especially like under FDR. So in any case, that's the history of that. There was another one. I kind of got a little bit obsessed, Zagra, with the history of this. Back in 1931 to 1933, Republicans had just 218 seats, so the barest of bare majorities. Democrats had 216 and farm labor had one. And the reason they were able to gain such a small, thin, you know, the barest of majorities was because,

think of how crazy this is. Before the first day of Congress, so after Election Day, before they were sworn in, 14 members of Congress died. What the hell is going on here? What a weird year. Right? Yeah. I was just thinking, if that happened now, imagine the conspiracies. Oh, yeah, people would lose it.

Oh, people would lose it. It would be crazy. So anyway, 14 representatives elect died. And then Republicans were able to pick up just enough to be able to gain the majority of House seats. And, you know, in past eras, when you've had these bare majorities, you actually haven't seen mostly total gridlock and stalemate because you had some sort of bipartisan common cause around like World War I, for example. but hard to see them really like linking up,

joining hands and singing Kumbaya here over the next two years of the Biden presidency. The 1952 elections were actually really interesting. That's when Lyndon Johnson became very powerful in the Senate. And actually they made a gamble. At that time, there's actually not an uncommon split in the GOP, which is there were like Eisenhower Republicans and there were like Barry Goldwater, Robert Taft types. So the Robert Taft types wanted to go all in on McCarthyism, you know, losing Truman lost China. They want to go after the communists and they're much more isolationist, anti-martial plan. Eisenhower much more makes peace with the New Deal. And so at that time, they, Eisenhower would actually rely on Johnson and the Democrats to deliver some of his votes, even though Robert Taft and his own party were going to go against it.

So not entirely uncommon. There was some cross-coalition cutting and all that stuff. One of the ways that Democrats became popular is they were like, well, Eisenhower is so popular, we don't want to be oppositional to him. We'll let the idiot Republicans like Robert Taft get the baggage of that. So anyway, yeah. So in terms of coalitions and all that stuff, not uncommon in American history. Unfortunately, I mean, fortunately or unfortunately, the reality of modern politics is all of the ideological sorting has basically occurred. So again, there are issues where there is theoretical agreement, even on something like potential

child tax credit. I mean, you had like Mitt Romney's and Marco Rubio's of the world floating something. But, you know, you look at something like tech legislation where there's been bipartisan collaboration. You look at something like a stock band where there's been bipartisan collaboration. There are theoretical issues where you could have a bipartisan majority. Do I think we're going to see any of that? Very unlikely. At the same time, we keep sort of assuming that Kevin McCarthy is going to be speaker, but we should not be doing that because if you're talking about that thin of a margin, you have to keep everybody basically in a line in order to win the 218 votes that you need to become Speaker of the House. Let's go and put this up on the screen. Kevin McCarthy's bid for Speaker, this is from the

Wall Street Journal, complicated by GOP's 2022 midterm results. You have Representative Chip Roy saying pretty bluntly, he is a Freedom Caucus guy. Let's just say no one currently has 218. I think it's hard to disagree with that. There's about three dozen Republicans in the Freedom Caucus who, you know, are willing to cause problems for leadership and have a bit of an adversarial relationship. They say with control of the House and Senate still undecided, angry Republicans mounted public challenges to their leaders in both chambers Friday. So they confronted the possibility of falling short of the majority. Now it looks like they will achieve that slim majority.

But very you've got a few who are really out there saying, listen, we haven't decided that we're with Kevin McCarthy. We think that there deserves to be a challenge. Matt Gaetz told reporters that McCarthy was not his first choice to lead the conference, echoing calls by the Freedom Caucus members. However, McCarthy does have the backing of Trump. And also, some of the most credible potential alternatives, people like Minority Whip Steve Scalise, Representative Jim Jordan, and Jim Banks, they remain supportive of McCarthy. So he has been savvy in sort of co-opting some of his potential adversaries to his side.

That's true. But Freedom Caucus is still likely to mount a bid against him. I've been reading and listening over the last couple of days. Andy Biggs is very likely to run against him in Arizona. He's the chairman of the Freedom Caucus. At the very least, he's either going to run and extract something at the end or he won't run because they're going to basically buy him off with something. We will see what that pound of flesh that he will be able to extract is. What is it they want? They want more prominent committee seats, chairmanship, stuff like that? Likely, it will come down to chairmanships, committee seats, maybe shifting a round of

committees. Marjorie Taylor Greene being restored to her committees, that's going to be a big one. In terms of promises for Trump and elsewhere, again, there's so much shifting dynamic here that I really have no idea. They're going to get something. I think that needs to be certain. I mean, probably the most likely scenario here is McCarthy does end up as Speaker, but yeah, the Freedom Caucus gets whatever it is they're asking for effectively. I know one of the things they were asking for was to make it easier to bounce the Speaker of the House if they're not happy with him. That one piece, I don't think he's going to give them. But if they want particular committee assignments or chairmanships or whatever and to have more power and visibility, I think those sorts of things will ultimately be on the table.

Yes. All right. So there was one seat that I've become a little bit obsessed with because I think it tells a lot of the stories and dynamics of this election. And this was, I think you have to say, the biggest upset in the House in terms of not the biggest margin to overcome, but the most surprising result. And this is the seat out in Washington's third congressional district. Let's go ahead and put this up on the screen. So going into Election Day, here's what FiveThirtyEight was saying about this race. They had Joe Kent, the Republican, winning in 98 of 100 simulations. And his opponent, the Democrat Marie GlusenkampCamp Perez, winning in two out of 100.

Now, let me give you the backstory here. So this was a seat that was held by a woman named Jamie Herrera Butler. She had voted for Trump's impeachment. And so she faced a MAGA primary challenger, this guy Joe Ken, who actually was kind of a star. I mean, he was on Tucker Carlson all the time. Like the MAGA wing of the party really liked this guy. They loved him. And he won. And my recollection is he won quite easily in that primary, ultimately. Yeah. So he, I mean, it was a little bit contested, but he didn't win like overwhelmingly, but he beat her in the primary. Solidly. Yeah. So he wins in the primary.

And this is someone who, you know, he played footsie with a lot of the fringier elements, I think is the best, the most diplomatic thing you could say here. He called for a full investigation of 2020. He was, you know, hiring Proud Boys to work on his campaign. He's close friends with the Patriot Prayer people. There was some sort of Nick Fuentes link. Anyway, he's hardcore MAGA Republican in this district that looked pretty solid Republican. And like I said, 538 had it.

98 out of 100 times. This dude is ultimately going to win on the Democratic side. You actually have a very interesting candidate. She didn't run your typical like what the DNC consultants would tell you to do of like, you know, be a centrist and don't say anything and, you know, just talk about like vague things like accountability or only talk about abortion. This woman named Marie Glusenkamp-Perez, she was actually a Bernie caucus voter and ran quite a sort of economic populist campaign and also personally has an interesting bio. She owns, she's a small business owner, she owns an auto repair shop. So let's take a look at a little bit of how she presented herself. who just pay attention to big corporations and the wealthy, and ignore us, and ignore the growing threat

facing America like China and Russia. I'm not running to represent drug companies or oil companies or frankly, any special interest. They all have lobbyists. They don't need politicians too. I'm not taking a dime of corporate PAC money. I'll work to get money out of politics so our representatives can work for us again.

I'm very proud that Dean and I have created family wage jobs. But like most small business owners I know, we can't afford health insurance for ourselves. We pay $500 a month for health insurance for our son. We are young, healthy, and have no pre-existing conditions beyond an entrepreneurial spirit. The trade skills we have used to guarantee a comfortable life for families,

free from out-of-control childcare costs and astronomical health insurance premiums. But today, too many Washington families who work for a living are struggling to make ends meet, having to make tough choices and painful sacrifices, while big corporate interests maximize their profits at our expense. We don't need another corporate shill

or extremist in Congress. I will fight for working Washingtonians just like me. Join me. She had me at, you don't need another corporate shill in Washington. But I mean, you can see there. I don't think it's fair to call him a corporate shill. He has always been, look, I'm not saying I'm a fan of Joe Kent. What I am saying is that he was probably as analogous to like Tucker thought as a candidate that exists. Now, that's not necessarily a good thing if you're going to run and lose in a pretty held GOP's play, but he's had some good things on Ukraine,

and he was always willing to contest the quote-unquote GOP consensus. I don't know anything about all this Proud Boy stuff. What I do know is what I think personally doomed him was Stop the Steal. I think that he went all in with Stop the Steal. Abortion was another big one. I know that she also talked about that quite a bit. So I don't know how much her whole working class thing actually had any difference as him being like pretty crazy. I think it's both. I mean, probably something. But that's why I'm, because you had, you know, you had a real model. So like Sean Patrick Maloney, chair of the DCCC, ran the DNC playbook, you know, by the book, flooded with cash, $6 million, then DCCC flows into his race, and he gets his ass kicked in a Biden plus 10 district.

You have this woman who comes out of nowhere, and yeah, she had a candidate who, you know, who definitely appeared to the electorate as an extremist. If it was Jamie Herrera Butler, I think she would have cruised to re-election, no doubt about it. But you can also see in the way that she approached her campaign, she took a different tack. It reminds me also running on this like economic populist message. Pat Ryan, it turns out, in the newly drawn districts, he ran in the one that Sean Patrick Maloney had jumped out of that he thought was too hard for him to win. So Sean Patrick Maloney goes over to this district that he thinks is safe and runs the standard corporatist campaign and gets his ass kicked. Pat Ryan in the district that Sean Patrick Maloney said was too hard to win. He ran that same like economic populist plus abortion campaign and he won. Dude is, you know, barely an incumbent. So it's incredible. You see these little regional variations and you have to dig into like, well, why did why was Pat Ryan able to win in this more

difficult district in New York in a year that was bad for Democrats in New York? And Sean Patrick Maloney loses. And this woman, you know, out west, who basically no one gave a shot to, is able to ultimately pull it out off. So I think what was interesting to me is that you had both the story on the Republican side of extremist candidate losing totally winnable seat, but also really interesting campaign being run on the Democratic side that I think had to, you know, ultimately have an impact here and obviously resonated with the public in that district. The test will be, can she beat a normie Republican in 2022? Right. I don't think so. I mean, it depends because also- Incumbency bias is very strong. Well, that's what I was going to say because now you're an incumbent and that, you know, that helps. And we'll see what

2024 looks like for Democrats and Republicans. At this point, I would say we have no idea. Yeah. I think that is all I've been, all I have learned from these elections. Don't know anything, but it is exciting. I will say that. I love watching the results and seeing the regional variation is actually something that gives me a lot of hope. Because if we can return some level of localism to politics, there is something there, you know, in terms of something.

I don't want to overstate it. We're talking about very, very small margins. Maybe 90-10, but it used to be 95-5. It's also like, is this the now anomaly? And is it just because Trump is not in presidency and Trump is not on the ballot? But you did see a return of like, oh, people are actually evaluating these candidates and their platforms and what they're saying and, you know, whether they're like totally psycho and way too out there or not. And that is encouraging to see. I mean, you can very clearly see there was in this race and Carrie Lake and a bunch of other ones, there was a huge price to pay for Stop the Steal. You called that immediately.

I mean, when you saw that percolating. Oh, I want to listen. to pay for Stop the Steal. You called that immediately. I mean, when you saw that percolating, you called that immediately. When you saw that percolating, you thought this is going to be a big problem for them. Like, good luck if this is going to become the obsession of your party. And it did in a lot of ways. I mean, that's why a Joe Kent ultimately wins a primary and, you know, loses a very winnable, a seat that should have been a layup for Republicans if they had their incumbent there ultimately. This is the issue with slavish Trump devotion, which is like, when he says something good, you can be like, okay, yeah, I agree with that. When he says something stupid, you have to

be like, wow, that's really stupid. And you saw a lot of people beclown themselves, willing to play footsie with that. And in some way, I am heartened, which is that Americans don't like freaks. They don't like theocratic freaks, and they also don't like people who are freakishly devoted to Donald Trump for no particular reason other than like political cravenness. So look, in some ways I am heartened by the election and looking at that because I think that people are showing that they think for themselves. They're not slavish. They also look, you know, they showed us on inflation and on elsewhere. They're like, yeah, well, you know, what are you going to do about it?

Right. And they also showed us that they are not automatons or stupid enough to just say, well, he say inflation bad, so I vote for him. You know, they're like, well, actually, they're very multifaceted. So my major takeaway is like, you know, this just affirms like how much I think we should continue to put trust in people. They're not as dumb as many people here like me. Yeah. And the amount of ticket splitting shows that as well, where people were really evaluating, okay, this one, I'm good with this one.

You know, Brian Kemp in Georgia, he stood up to Trump. I respect that. On the other hand, I'm not sure about this Herschel Walker guy. Maybe I'm going to vote for Raphael Warnock there instead. You add the slate of election-denying Secretary of State candidates. All lost, yeah. Every one of them lost. I mean, again, incredible repudiation of that whole direction of the Republican Party. And we'll talk about this more when we get to Trump about to announce his

presidential campaign. But the question is whether they're too far down the rabbit hole to be able to everybody, anybody with a brain in the Republican Party right now sees this is a problem for them. But can they ultimately walk away from Trump? Can they pull the party back after they've let it go this far? Hard to say. Yeah, I think it is very hard to say. Look, we'll talk more about this in the Trump. Yeah.

Let's get to Ukraine because there's also a lot going on there right now. Let's put this up there on the screen. We had this last night with as Russia completed its full retreat from the city of Kherson, which we'll all remember they annexed not that long ago. And in a genuinely humiliating act, Zelensky has visited Kherson only days after the Russian retreat, putting himself squarely in the middle of the city center and vowing to reclaim all of Ukraine's, quote, we areby-step coming to all of our country. I am happy that we are here in Kursk and literally just days after Ukrainians marched into

the city. Let's go ahead and put this video that we cut of Ukrainian forces marching back into the city. You can see, look at the amount of Ukrainian flags of people that are swarming the streets of people, which are happy. This by the way, is what Russia wants you to believe is Russia. This is how you're being greeted supposedly in a foreign country. I can't think of anything more than a massive repudiation to Kremlin claims about how all of these places even want to be Russian and all of that than the fact that they were greeted as heroes and liberators in what is supposedly foreign territory that always wanted to be there. So, I mean, there is no better FU than literally marching back into territory that you claim is officially yours. Also, I want us to zoom out a little bit. This is part of why the strategic ambiguity on the Russian part is

maddening and so difficult and dangerous. According to them, this is sovereign Russian Federation territory. Well, you just had the president of a foreign country, supposedly, according to your law, march into that, and you're not really doing anything about it. So then how are we supposed to know when you're bluffing and when you're not? This is what causes a tremendous amount of uncertainty and is pushing things possibly in a more favorable direction towards negotiation, which is where things are kind of looking at right now. But I think the top line takeaway, Crystal, which is that the Ukrainians really had up until today. I've talked here before. November 16th is generally regarded as the universal turning point towards the muddy season, towards the cold.

It just becomes far too cold in order to wage any sort of full-scale warfare. The Russians, despite conscriptions and despite all of the materiel they're trying to amass, they don't seem to have the capacity right now to mount a real offensive in the 2023 fighting season. So for them to end the note on a withdrawal like this, humiliating. Possibly leading us in a more favorable direction. Do you have anything you want to add on Kursan before we get to negotiations? Just a couple quick things. First of all, we did have a Kremlin comment on Zelensky's trip to Kursan. They say, quote, we will leave this without comment.

You know that this is territory of the Russian Federation. Right. Okay. And I do think it underscores, again, what a foolish move they made. Because there was this sort of sense that Crimea was different, that this was a real red line. But then when you go and, you know, do these pretend referendums and pretend like Kursan is also part of Russia, you really make it a lot less clear where your actual red lines are, which I think is bad for Russia. I also do think it is a dangerous situation. And the thought is, you know, I was trying to gauge, which is an impossible thing to do, but I was trying to gauge a little bit of how the Russian domestic population was sort of taking in

this retreat and this humiliating loss ultimately. And, you know, you do have some of the pro-war, like, you know, ultra, like to the the right of Putin, like, militarists who are very upset about this once again. And I think the idea for Russia strategically is basically, like, they didn't feel like they had the ability to hold Kursan for the winter, so they decided to fall back, dig in their trench lines, and try to be able to hold on to a more defensible position going into the cold months. Yeah, Dugin, Alexander Dugin, whose daughter was assassinated possibly by Ukrainian forces, actually criticized Putin directly, basically saying, he said, the fate of the king of the reigns, autocracy has a downside, completeness

of power in the case of success and completeness of responsibility for failure. You thought otherwise, basically issuing a threat kind of from the Russian ultra-nationalists against Putin. Who knows whether it's controlled opposition or not. But look, at this point, you know, Richard Henania said this. And I think this is, if you think about the side-by-side of Zelensky marching into Kursan and Putin cowering in like COVID madness, impossible illness, sending his foreign minister to the G20 because he doesn't really have the balls to look actual foreign leaders in the face. It's humiliating. I mean, how else can you describe it? To have this like aging autocrat in Russia having launched now this failed war, being humiliated. I'm not saying it isn't still dangerous, but you know, he's betting

the house, the fate of his regime, really, on the future of this. Because think about this. If he retreated fully and capitulated, his grasp on power, his entire sale to the Russian public, they'd be like, well, what was the point of all of this? You know, Russia is not democratic, but it's a lot more democratic than it was, you know, a while back. And that doesn't mean that they can't have major social strife, too. So I predict big problems on the horizon for the Russians. And look, it's literally all of their fault. So I don't have particular sympathy. Okay, let's get now to the negotiation part. This is really interesting. There's a full scale kind of shadow war here in Washington over whether we should urge diplomacy for Ukraine or not. So let's put this on the screen. These are very

calculated leaks. So the Pentagon is leaking that the top general, General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is repeatedly and forcefully making the case in the Situation Room that the Ukrainians should try to cement their gains at the bargaining table right now. So let me read this to you. A disagreement has emerged at the highest levels of the government over whether to press Ukraine to seek diplomatic end to this war. America's top general is urging negotiation while other advisors to President Biden argue it is too soon. General Milley said in internal meetings, Ukrainians have achieved about as much as they can reasonably expect on the battlefield. Before winter sets in, they should try to cement their games at the bargaining table.

However, senior officials have resisted that idea, maintaining that neither side is ready to negotiate and that any pause in the fighting would give Putin a chance to regroup. Biden advisors believe the war will likely be settled through the negotiations eventually, but they have concluded the moment is not yet ripe and the United States should not be seen as pressuring the Ukrainians to hold back while they have momentum. So then National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan weighed in aboard Air Force One on the way to Bali. Let's put that up there. And I want to read you directly from this quote. Here's what he says. The United States approach remains the same today as it was six months ago. We're going to do everything we can, including our announcement, our military announcement, our military security assistance, to put Ukraine in the best possible position on the battlefield

so that when they make their determination to proceed, they're in the best possible position at the negotiating table. There is this sense of Ukraine going to negotiate. Ultimately, at a 30,000-foot level, Ukraine is the party of peace. Russia is the party of war. Russia invaded Ukraine. If Russia chooses to stop fighting and left, it would be the end of the war. If Ukraine chooses to stop fighting and give up, it would be the end of Ukraine. So this notion, in the Western press, of when is Ukraine going to negotiate, misses the underlying fundamentals, which is that Russia continues, even as recently as the last 24 hours, to make outlandish claims about Russian annexed territory. So that's kind of the high-level view. But here's the bigger confounding variable, Crystal, which is that this morning we are learning that Jake

Sullivan has apparently been pressuring the Ukrainians behind the scenes to say, hey, you need to stop talking about Crimea. And that is where I almost feel like there's this shadow campaign going on in the media where Jake Sullivan and the Biden people need to keep the Ukraine stands mollified. They're like, no, we would never pressure them. But then apparently behind the scenes, there's some interesting stuff. So to have the top general leak that out, that could be a shot across the bow to say, hey, you know, your universal support in the top general leak that out, that could be a shot across the bow to say, hey, you know, your universal support in the Pentagon that was long there, well, that's not there.

And from what I'm hearing, one of the reasons why Milley is pressuring the Ukrainians to negotiate is not only because of what he thinks is good for Ukraine. He's looking at our stockpiles of Javelin missiles and many other things that we've shipped. He's like, we can't keep this thing going on forever. He's like, we are running low on very critical military supplies. So here is a leak to the Wall Street Journal just this morning. Two European diplomats briefed on the discussions,

says Mr. Sullivan has told Zelensky's team, start thinking about realistic demands and priorities for negotiations, including your reconsideration of your stated aim for Ukraine to regain Crimea, which was annexed in 2014. So that is a major, major leak coming out. The fact that Sullivan would be willing to say that. This morning also, there's an interesting meeting going on in Europe. We don't have the full details on this exactly, but the Russian media is reporting that the head—

Do you want to go ahead and set this up? I do, yeah. So originally it was just being, but the Russian media is reporting that the, do you want to go ahead and set this up? I do, yeah. So, originally it was just being reported in the Russian media, but now the White House has actually confirmed that CIA Director Bill Burns is in Ankara for the first direct U.S.-Russia contacts since Putin invaded Ukraine. Burns delivered a message, according to the U.S., quote, on the consequences of the use of nuclear weapons by Russia and the risks of escalation to strategic stability. Now, I don't doubt that that was part of the conversation. But given this other chatter about potential negotiations, I mean, this could have also been, you know, some conversations about what opening up more channels might ultimately look like. Yeah, I think it's interesting in terms of

what exactly it will all mean, because yeah, I mean, Bill Burns actually has done some secret diplomacy for us in the past. He was dispatched, I think, for the Saudis. He's been working behind the scenes, I know, with the Venezuelans. So he's kind of been like a quasi-diplomat for the Biden administration. Obviously, you know, as CIA chief. He has a lot of authority in speaking on behalf of the government and it will keep it, it will keep it very much secret given the fact that the two counterparts could, could be meeting. Let's be very clear about that. So lots going on, you know, to have the fact that Biden today is actually in Bali at the G20. Here's another interesting one. Meeting with Xi, which is a whole other. He had a meeting with Xi Jinping. Yeah, we'll probably do a whole segment on that tomorrow. But in terms

of flash for what matters for everyone here, Biden, Xi agreed, quote, nuclear war should never be fought by effectively condemning Russian nuclear threats. And of course, he agreed that nuclear war is bad. I mean, I guess that's good. But for the Chinese, you know, for them, that is that's not nothing. Just for Xi to meet directly with Biden is a bit of a rebuke to Russia. And then we've had, you know, the comments that Xi has made previously. You know, the other thing I wanted to say about the politics of this with Ukraine is, first of all, I can't help but go back to the, you know, aborted progressive letter that in the mildest possible terms called for basically what the administration is now floating, which is, hey, you know, Ukraine, you run the show like you do what you want to do. But maybe we should try to look potentially possibly at some point in the future at negotiations. And now we see that this debate is really happening in the administration. I kind of read it like you do, Sagar, that actually there may be less of a debate going on and more of an attempt to put up to the media this idea of like a good cop, bad cop kind of a situation.

And then the other thing that there is to say is the fact that now the Republicans in the House are going to have such an incredibly narrow majority makes Makes it much less likely that the House Republicans are in any way going to challenge whatever the direction that the Biden administration ultimately takes the Ukrainian policy in. Yeah, that is exactly right, which is for Ukraine is the best possible thing that could have ever happened to you for the U.S. political system. So lots of interesting stuff going on. I did want to read one interesting quote, which was a leak to the Financial Times. They say, according to four people who were briefed on February meeting, Xi was caught off guard by the invasion by Putin and did not warn him in advance, jeopardizing the safety of thousands of Chinese nationals who were living in Ukraine. Putin did not tell Xi the truth, a Chinese official

told the Financial Times. Quote, if he had told us, we wouldn't have been in such an awkward position. We had more than 6,000 Chinese living in Ukraine. Some of them died during evacuation, although we cannot make that public. Wow. Kind of interesting. So not as rosy as a picture in the back there, and not a Xi green light necessarily. Look, there's one anonymous official.

Who knows whether it's true or not? Chinese could be lying, but some cracks emerging in the international consensus. Some interesting things that are going on right now, which we'll continue to track. Let's move on to Twitter. Absolute chaos breaking out over at Twitter. Who could have thought? Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen.

This was, we wanted to develop a whole just segment to this in particular, which is that Elon is currently saying to Twitter internally that Twitter could go bankrupt without more cash. Now, the context of that is important, but he held a basically surprise all-hands-on-deck meeting with the entire staff after he laid off about $7,500 earlier that day. Well, what happened? He said, quote, this is my first email to the whole company. There's no way to sugarcoat this. Without significant subscription revenue, there is a good chance Twitter will not survive the upcoming economic downturn. Whenever somebody asked him about whether bankruptcy was on the table, he said, yes, it is certainly possible, including bankruptcy. I don't know that the economic downturn is the issue here, guys. Well, actually, I don't know if that's true,

Crystal, because even normal advertising companies are already down by 40 percent. So on top of the chaos. Obviously, like advertisers absolutely fled Twitter. And, you know, already Twitter, you're right, was in kind of a precarious financial situation. But Elon has definitely exacerbated that and made it much more likely that any potential economic downturn is going to be possibly devastating. Yeah. So right now, really what we're seeing is that Twitter's finances are a massive mess. He's had both in terms of cutting the staff, now having problems with his advertising revenue. We talked previously about saying that major advertisers were pausing all of their campaigns on the platform. He also, Nat, we're about to get to, this just insanity going on with the rollout

of his verification system. Let's go ahead and just roll this into this segment. Let's put the next one up there on the screen, which is that Twitter is now having to stop the rollout of its Twitter blue, granting out blue check functions after impersonators were taken to the platform. Who could have possibly seen that coming?

And this just underscores how, frankly, badly thought out this all was. The idea behind Twitter Blue was to incur subscription revenue by charging for a checkmark. Okay, I've got no problem with that. But as we said, why was a checkmark invented in the first place? To ensure the reliability of the information on the platform. The person saying it is actually them. They were claiming that this would the information on the platform. The person saying it is actually them. They were claiming that this would reduce spam on the platform, but then they didn't include any necessity to submit personal information.

Right, so they didn't require... Like identity verification. Right, it'd be one thing if, okay, now we've got a lot more people who are actually verified to be who they are, but then they just totally skip the whole part of the verifying who you are. Yes. And so it ended, I mean, it was, it was funny, actually. It was quite amusing.

There were some real heroes out there who were like, you know, tweeting out to Ellie Lilly that insulin was free and impersonating all kinds of people. I mean, it was amusing, but it definitely degraded the quality of the platform for sure. It's amusing for sure because what was happening is that people were setting up fake accounts for like Glenn Greenwald, Ben Shapiro, Eli Lilly, many companies and others. And everybody had very much difficulty telling whether it was true APAC, you know, others. And it caused a huge fury for people whose accounts were being impersonated. The most significant of them was actually Eli Lilly. So let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. You know, the Eli Lilly stock dived

significantly after a fake Twitter account tweeted, quote, we are excited to announce that insulin is free tomorrow. They lost potentially billions in their market cap and their stock was tanking based upon the tweet. They had to come out and clarify. They're like, no, we won't be giving out free insulin, which actually caused an entire news cycle around why exactly is insulin so expensive. I guess it's an entire different case. But the point is, is that verification itself was a complete disaster. And effectively, Elon has now had to reverse course, stopping Twitter Blue in the rollout of the checkmarks, although the people who already have the checkmarks

will get to keep the checkmarks. And that's what this one on the screen. He now says, quote, rolling out soon, Twitter will enable organizations to identify which other Twitter accounts are actually associated with them. So he says, ultimately, Twitter will be the final arbiter as to who these organizations

are, which really belies the entire question of why we're doing this in the first place. Look, I get the impetus I've said here before. I think charging people is a great, great idea. This just is clearly not working because the entire impetus, the value of the platform, was reliability of the information and elite discourse. There's a better way to charge this. I did a whole monologue on Twitter for Enterprise, and I think that's looking better by the day after how terribly this entire thing has gone for them so far. I mean, it's just an absolute cluster. Yeah.

And it's a cluster on a business perspective. By the way, I'm not shedding a tear for them. This part I think is glorious. But Eli Lilly still has not recovered their stock price since this happened. And by the way, it wasn't just them. It was other insulin makers also saw their stock price and their overall valuation plummet with this fake tweet that went out. So, I mean, obviously, I delayed in that particular example, but it's just complete chaos. None of it was thought through whatsoever. So from a business perspective, clearly a disaster. And then, you know, the whole supposed like, oh, I'm doing this not for the

money, but for the free speech. Like, obviously that's not the case. That's like really clearly not the end goal of the decisions that are being made right now. With regards to whether Twitter declares bankruptcy or not without more cash, it's like, dude, you're a billionaire. If you want to put more cash in, if this is, like, your thing, you're all in. He sold stock. He had to sell, like, $3.5 billion in stock in order to pump the company and keep it running, which really sucks. His thing coming in was like, I don't care about making money off of this. It's like a public good, whatever, whatever. Like, okay, well, if you want to make it a public good and actually do a decent job with this, that is not what's happening right now.

The real danger is that it's actually putting Tesla stock in danger because he has to sell so much of his stock on the open market for cash in order to save Twitter. And now should be a great moment for Tesla because I was actually just reading about how sales of electric vehicles doubled in like the first quarter of this year or whatever. I mean, it's a huge. Sales of electric vehicles doubled in like the first quarter of this year or whatever. I mean, it's a huge and it's going right now is sort of the pivot point where and he gets a lot of credit for this. He really deserves a lot of credit for this, where electric vehicles are going from like niche early adopters in California to a much more mainstream market, especially some of the more affordable like the Nissan Leaf. Some of the more affordable models where, you know, this is, I guess, the silver lining of high gas prices. Not that I'm cheering for that, but a lot of people are looking at this, plus the government incentives and saying, oh, this adds, this actually works out for me economically to lean into electric vehicles. So like I said,

it should be a great moment for Tesla. I think Tesla is a very important company in terms of, you know, what I believe in and dealing with the climate crisis and moving towards electrification. And instead, he's like over here, you know, trolling senators and making chaotic decisions all over the place and then rolling them back in the next day. One other thing I wanted to point out this morning, before I forget, is, you know, amidst the advertiser exodus and the cash crunch and all of these things, we just learned from CNBC that apparently SpaceX, one of Elon's other companies, just made a gigantic ad buy on the platform. So a little bit of self-dealing there to help prop up Twitter, which is clearly not doing so well. That's what's going to have to happen at this point.

I mean, look, there's two ways to look at this. This is a total shit show. Elon doing what he always does, which is running companies, you know, very chaotically, eventually may actually settle upon a good business model. It's possible in a year from now, we will look back and be like, wow, we actually turned the company around. He did it with Tesla. He did it with SpaceX.

So I'm not going to count them out just yet. But, you know, things have not gone as well. And the stakes are high. You know, you have the economy against you. Basically, also, you know, the sources of his real wealth, which is Tesla and others, should not suffer as a result of these acquisitions. So Tesla shareholders, the board there, also of SpaceX, may pressure him to return to that. Can he really run three companies all at the same time? I have no absolute idea. I'm not willing to bet against Twitter just yet because, you know, on the one

hand, the thing failed spectacularly and they just pulled it, right? Then they were like, fine, we're going to redo it. But he does seem so very committed to this verification idea that to me almost seems ideological in a belief and not fully backed up, you know, conceptually as to what a really good product is. But eventually I think he should pivot towards an enterprise, like I said, and actually settle upon some real, actual business recurring revenue that would work and keep the platform reliable and useful in the long run.

Yeah. I don't see another way out yet. Finally, the big news, the ones I guess everyone has not been waiting for and is yet going to get anyway, which we will be covering, as a reminder, live here at 8 p.m. Standard Time. Let's put dreading it. Anyway, which we will be covering as a reminder, live here at 8pm Standard Time. Let's put this up there on the

screen. Donald J. Trump has a big announcement for all of us on November 15th. I wonder what it's going to be. 9pm Eastern Time from Mar-a-Lago. No idea what it's going to be, although it's the worst kept secret so far. Let's put this caveat with Trump. Who the hell

knows whether he actually goes through with it or not? It'd actually be kind of fun if we're live and he doesn't do it. Which is, look, right now he's inviting- He announces Tiffany Trump's wedding. Yeah, apparently Tiffany Trump got married. So right now, here's what we know. He says there's going to be a big announcement. He's invited a lot of congressmen. At this point, his advisors and others. So all leaked out to the mainstream press that it was coming on November 15th. At a high level, here's what I have to say before we get into the criticism. He's never been weaker in terms of his hold on the GOP. I think that's clear, which is why he has to announce now. And I'm speaking not in the country's interest,

in his interest. You need to freeze out all potential competition so that if you are willing to challenge him, you are effectively coming out, not before him, but saying, no, I think Trump is unfit to be the GOP nominee in 2024. That is just going to put you by definition in a weaker position. Now, two weeks ago, I would have told you you're completely crazy. Today, I think it's more possible, although still very unlikely, that it could be possible even in a head-to-head matchup. Although, look, with these election results, really what we've shown is, like, actually a lot of this shit is unpopular.

And does the GOP base really care about electability? That's going to be the ultimate test, I think, for this. They like Trump, but do they care about electability? Do they care about power? Personally, I don't think so. I haven't seen a lot of evidence for that. But, look, you know, as we've shown, what do I know? I mean, we also have to consider, like, they don't look so. I haven't seen a lot of evidence for that. But look, you know, as we've shown, what do I know?

I mean, we also have to consider, like, they don't look at these election results and they don't look at the last election results the way, like, I do. Right. They don't think Trump lost. 70% of the Republican base does not think Trump lost in 2020. They're going to also believe, you know, a lot of whatever narrative he's blaming Mitch McConnell or whatever it ultimately is or that it was rigged in Arizona, all these sorts of things, like, there's going to be an appetite for that as well. So I just think it's always important to keep in mind that they're not seeing this landscape in the same way that, like, I'm seeing this landscape ultimately. So, yeah, I mean, I think it's a very different deal for Ron DeSantis to be someone that the Republican base likes. They are looking forward to sometime in the future him being their standard bearer.

A lot of what they like is some of the things that he frankly copied from Trump. And it's a very different thing, though, to actually go head to head and make the case and be able to dethrone the king. So I agree with you. I don't think Trump has been weaker since right after January 6th. I think there was like a week when, you know, his grip could have been tenuous. If someone had made a concerted play, then they didn't. And, you know, this is a similar moment where, you know, I 100 percent agree with you for Trump. The right move politically is to announce right away. I saw all this commentary from within his circles or leaks or whatever, people saying, oh, you got to hold off. Now that makes no sense to me whatsoever politically.

You've got to come out. But I think it's the same thing from the, you know, would-be contenders, the Ron DeSantis's of the world. You also can't sit back and just let him reclaim ground. Because right now is probably like, you know, we're at the trough, like the lowest of his support and the weakest that he is ultimately going to be. And once he gets, if he gets indicted, which looks kind of likely, that'll be another rally around the cause kind of a moment.

And if you haven't already come out swinging, made your claim, made a case, built your own base of support as a real credible alternative, I think you're going to be left out in the cold. I agree. Okay, so let's get to the next part, which is we were very selective in this. We did not want to pick people who were never Trumpers who are now like Ron DeSantis once when. We picked people who are Trump people who are saying that Trump should not run again, which is why I think this is actually far more interesting to me. So let's start with Mo Brooks. Woke Mo Brooks getting his revenge. Mo Brooks was all in on Trump. He sought his endorsement. He backed him 100%. Wasn't he one of the earlier backers?

Very early backer. He's more like Jeff Sessions type thought. Well, he's come out and now says, quote, Trump is dishonest, disloyal, incompetent, and crude. Mo Brooks says that Trump should not be elected again. Obviously, you know, he's bitter because he lost his nomination to the U.S. Senate. But here's what he had to say, quote, it would be a bad mistake for Republicans to have Trump as their nominee in 2024. Trump has proven so dishonest, disloyal, incompetent, crude, a lot of other things that alienate many independents and Republicans. Even a candidate who campaigns from his basement can beat him. Now, I'm not so sure that's true, because we will recall Mo Brooks was with Trump on everything but policy, and all he said was maybe we shouldn't redo the 2020 election.

Trump accused him of going woke. And that lady, Katie Britt, still kicked his ass in the primary. So it's not like Trump's word doesn't still have a hell of a lot of sway. You know, what's his name? Tommy Tuberville beat Jeff Sessions in Alabama. So it's not like he didn't have a tremendous amount of swing and say in that party. But for Mo Brooks to come out and say that, it's significant. Second was Winsome Sears. She's the Attorney General here in the state of Virginia. She was one of the head of the re-election

committees for Donald Trump. And after Trump attacked Glenn Youngkin for allegedly having a quote, Chinese name, which is an entirely different segment in and of itself. She came out and was like, you know what? We need new leadership. Let's take a listen. You know, the voters have spoken and they have said that they want a different leader. And a true leader understands when they have become a liability. A true leader understands that it's time to step off the stage. And the voters have given us that very clear message. I apologize. She's actually the lieutenant governor. I got her confused. However, still stands. And Winsome Sears, again, was working for the re-election

committee of Donald Trump. She won successfully in the state of Virginia. I think that's very significant for her. And then finally, Candace Owens of, I don't even know necessarily how to describe her. I guess full scale, Trump has been now for quite a long time, a defender of effectively everything that he's ever done. She is now coming out to say some things about Trump. Let's take a listen. I think after the 2020 election and because of the shock of all the things that happened and the answers that we never really feel that we got this like sinking realization that we might be actually losing our country. I think that it pushed him into an angry space where he doesn't trust anybody, where he doesn't listen to anybody, where he's almost

likely to believe that everybody's trying to turn their back on him and stab him in the back. Interesting. She also, by the way, elaborated, Crystal, that he was personally mean to her. So that probably is part of the reason. But again, we curated those because those are all people who were willing to back Trump on basically anything. I mean, Candace, do you think it's fair to say, because I haven't followed her trajectory that closely, but I mean, she basically comes to prominence as a Trump supporter, right? Kind of. I mean, provocateur, you know, almost like a Milo-ish type figure, much more cultural than Trump, but gloms onto Trump with

the whole turning point thing. But that's how she becomes a real celebrity. Yeah, she became a national celeb because of Trump, I think it's fair to say. Yeah. So the backstory story with that is, I don't know if you guys remember, she did an interview with him. I think we covered it because she was asking him about the vaccine from like a vaccine skeptic perspective. And he was very clear of like, no, the vaccines were good and they were great. And then afterwards, she tried to explain to her audience like why his view was different than their view. And she was saying basically like, oh, I think he's too caught, like, what his aides or what the media is saying or whatever. Basically trying to make excuses for him. And according to her, he did not appreciate that.

And then the next time he saw her, he was apparently rude to her. And so it wasn't anything else he did. It was that he was personally rude to Candace Owens that caused her to rethink whether he was, you know, the great man she had thought. But to have all of that, you know, come out. It's a lot. The election, that's significant. A lot of people, you know, it's Winston Peters. You know, she was a major Republican figure.

RNC touted her. Didn't she lead like black Americans for Trump or something like that in 2020? Exactly. That's why I'm saying she was a major figure in the election and then goes on to win a race herself in basically a purplish, almost blue state in Virginia. Well, there's another piece there, which is DeSantis gets the most attention. Glenn Youngkin, who, of course, is now the governor of Virginia, is also thinking about running for president. And so she may be switching her loyalties because obviously she's his lieutenant governor. And so they have, I'm sure, a close relationship.

At this point, he's been talking to donors and he's been flying around the country and sort of potentially laying the groundwork as well. And after Saga referenced before, like Trump posted this bizarre thing about how Glenn Youngkin's name sounds Chinese and whatever, Youngkin got asked about it and he just just said, like, oh, I didn't have time to look at that because I'm busy. Good for him. Yeah. I mean, I don't I think personally that Glenn Youngkin is probably overestimating his appeal nationally. He kind of was, you know, right place, right time in Virginia. And frankly, if you're just like the most generic

possible Republican, that actually is quite a benefit. You know, he did well in the suburban areas of Virginia. But to read that into like, I have some sort of a national base of fervent grassroots support to carry me to the presidency. I think that's probably a bit more than what he's got. I like Glenn Youngkin, but there's no way in hell you can win a GOP primary. And I think like that, like I think if he was on a national ballot, yeah, I think he would win. But guess what? I mean, you got to win the primary system.

That's how it works. They literally had to rig the Virginia GOP primary just to elect the guy as the nominee. So how are you supposed to win? If you can't win a Virginia GOP primary, which there's no way he would have been able to with all the Trumpiness, like how are you going to win a national GOP primary?

So, I'll put that aside. Well, it also, the other thing to say about that is that even though DeSantis is clearly the alternative that has the greatest support, the largest, widest possible path, the most, like, you know, fervent grassroots energy, like, legitimate, genuine, there are a lot of other people out there who are thinking, Larry Hogan and Glenn Youngkin and Mike Pompeo and Nikki Haley, Tim Scott even, who are thinking about running. And so it's very likely to not just be, if anyone decides to run against him, you're probably going to have four or five run against him. So then you're talking about, you've got a committed, Trump has

his committed core that's not going anywhere. And then the people who are open to voting for another candidate potentially somewhat split among a number of candidates, which is another thing to keep in mind with all of this. We'll see. So to DeSantis' point, can DeSantis do it? Who knows? We've got conflicting data for all of you, which we love. Let's put this up there on the screen. This was a poll that was taken at the very end of October through November 2nd. Trump was standing at 65%, and this was amongst GOP primary voters. DeSantis at 15%, Pence at 7%,

Cheney 3%, Cruz 3%, Haley 1%, Tim Scott at 1%. Okay, but then there was another poll, came out after the election. Let's put this up there on the screen. This is from YouGov for the 2024 Republican primary. This has DeSantis at 42% and Trump at 35%. But Crystal, let's give them the caveat on this particular one. This was a poll not just of likely Republican primary voters, which obviously is a thing that matters in a Republican primary, but it was a poll of all Republicans and Republican-leaning independents. Trump was still winning the actual Republicans, whereas DeSantis had a significant edge among the Republican-leaning independents. So, listen, that being said, I mean, the poll numbers have clearly shifted post-Tuesday in a very significant fashion.

The election results could not have been better for Ron DeSantis if he crafted them in a lab. That's right. You have two states, Florida and New York, but let's focus on Florida for a moment, where Republicans cleaned up. I mean, the red wave did come to Florida, and DeSantis personally wins by frickin' 20 points, right? Meanwhile, Trump candidate after Trump candidate after Trump candidate just going down in flames across the country. And, you know, even J.D. Vance in Ohio manages to eke out a victory, underperforms across the state. So it was as direct a repudiation of the Trump direction of the party as you could possibly, possibly get. And, you know, clearly some part of the GOP base has, in fact, taken notice of that. Yeah. Look, it will be the fight of the century.

I am incredibly—or maybe it won't be a fight at all. Maybe DeSantis just says, I'm done. He's like, you know what? Why bother? I'm the king of Florida. I won it by 20%. If Trump wants to embarrass himself on the national stage, be my guest. I'll be here waiting in the wings.

At the same time, Chris Christie, I think we can all say, made a massive mistake by not running for president in 2012. I think he honestly, I think he could have won. And now, you know, he's the one floating. Let's throw this next one on the screen here in the Washington Post. He's like, well, maybe I will still run. Glenn Youngkin is apparently talking to some people. Ron DeSantis is, you know, exploring the idea. Although I don't know how as seriously the Mike Pompeos, many of the other, many of the others, Republican rivals, there's also a lot of donors. I think the fundamental problem is this, which is that most of the people, the GOP elites, you know, the media commentary, chattering class type figures, they were all against Trump originally. So for them to come

out and say, we need to move on from Trump, I don't think they have any credibility with the base. You need the figures that we showed you. And you need that times like 2000 for there to be a real actual move on case to be heard by these GOP voters. And I don't see that yet. Even that, I mean, think about like, there have already been a lot of people who were true Trump believers at the beginning or who were in his administration who have turned and who have written books and who have gone the other direction.

And it's just like because the party has become defined by one question, which is where do you stand on the question of Trump? The minute you turn on him, it doesn't matter if you were there from the beginning. It doesn't matter if you believe whatever his policy agenda even is at this point. It just matters that today you do not support him. And so that's why I continue to be skeptical. You know, Rupert Murdoch has clearly, with all of his media outlets from Fox News to New York Post to Wall Street Journal, all united in trying to, you know, put the test balloon out there and try to move everybody on. But again, like I look at Fox News, Fox News was in some of their hours very against Stop the Steal. Did it matter? Did the Republican base believe them? No, they still thought Arizona was stolen.

And they, you know, were aggressively against the Fox News call specifically in Arizona. So the fact that you have like Brett Baer out there being like, you know, I kind of like this Ron Sanders guy. I don't know how much weight that ultimately carries. So listen again, I think he is the weakest he has been.

But I think if you are actually going to move the party on from Donald Trump, you have to have a concerted, consolidated, unified effort. And it has to be right now while he's down. Otherwise he's just going to gather strength again. And I don't see that yet. And by the way,

if that existed, we would absolutely know about it. I would have heard about it from somebody. So and so is moving to Florida to go head all this up. So unless there's some real secret campaign that I'm not aware of, I don't see it yet. And DeSantis has just thus far in response to Ron DeSantis and all, he's just decided not to say anything, which in some ways is smart for him if you're playing the long game.

But if you're actually going to dislodge Trump right now this cycle, I think you have to get in the game. That's absolutely correct. Okay, final one here for the show. I know it's been a long show. Mike Pence speaking out against Trump for the very first time. Let's take a listen. Members were barricaded inside the House chamber. And in the middle of it all, you can see that the president has tweeted. 2.24 p.m., the president tweets, Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done. It angered me.

But I turned to my daughter who was standing nearby and I said, it doesn't take courage to break the law. It takes courage to uphold the law. I mean, the president's words were reckless. It was clear he decided to be part of the problem. The most interesting thing I found is he still finds it obviously very painful. So it's two things. It's either painful or he's very calculating and trying to figure out exactly what he says. I'm curious what you made of it.

For me, I'm just like, what's the point of this? To sell a book? Like, it's been two years, dude. Yeah, where were you? Yeah, where were you? Like, either say it then or don't. Like, what's the point? Now you want to run against Trump?

Good luck. Like, you know, it was Trump-Pence, but Pence was always the asterisk. Yes, for sure. I mean, when I've seen Pence in polls, sometimes he gets like 10%. Yeah, I think evangelicals like him. Evangelicals continue to like him. And again, if Pence is in the running, if you were talking about an open prep where you have Pence and you've got DeSantis and you've got Youngkin and you've got Larry Hogan and you've got Mike Pompeo and whatever, you know, Pence is going to eat into some percentage of the vote because he does have, he has a lane.

When the Roe versus Wade was overturned, he right away jumped into, I want the national abortion ban. So if you are a voter in the Republican base where that is your issue and you want someone who was really all in with you, Mike Pence is going to be your choice. That's going to be a small percentage of the GOP base. But again, if you are, you know, if you're dividing the, you know, potential non-Trump vote within the Republican base, even if you're taking 10% away from a potential Ron DeSantis, it can make a difference. I think that's right. Crystal, what are you taking a look at? Well, in an election full of stunners and big upsets,

one of the biggest came in the fiercely contested Senate race in Pennsylvania. Now, the storyline almost reads like a movie. You've got the brash steel town mayor, a larger-than-life figure, laid low by a devastating stroke. He literally won the Democratic primary against the entire Democratic establishment while laying in a hospital bed. Up in the general election,

he's up against a rich celebrity TV doctor brought to stardom by Oprah herself. And after a brutal debate performance by Fetterman, it looked like the smarmy celeb was poised to take advantage of Fetterman's health struggles. But then on election day, what do you know? Not only did Fetterman win, it wasn't actually all that close.

He bested Dr. Oz by more than four points. He performed better than Trump, Biden, or outgoing Senator Pat Toomey in the state, cut down on rural margins, and won back white working class voters who had been fleeing the party in droves. So how did this man, struggling to recover under the glare of a national spotlight, actually pull this all off? Well, Fetterman's unexpected against the odds win is a perfect parable

of what happened in this election and specifically how the media misunderstands politics, voters, and elections. In almost every instance, their narrative of this race in particular was not just off, but actually the polar opposite of reality. And it was asked backwards in ways that are consistent with their misreading of this election and many other elections besides. So let's dig in to three of the myths and what the actual reality is. So the first myth is that Fetterman is a bad candidate. Let's start off by talking about that debate. It was pretty rough, y'all. If you are a remotely empathetic person,

it was painful to watch this burly figure struggle to get his words out when it mattered most. Media was quick to pronounce it a disaster and potentially campaign ending. I couldn't help wondering myself if the principled choice to do the debate had ended in political catastrophe for the big man. But as I argued here, I wasn't so convinced that voters would read it the way that the pundit class did. Perhaps, instead, they'd see Fetterman as kind of courageous for subjecting himself to such a humbling, humiliating experience and for showing such vulnerability. Perhaps they'd see in Oz's performance the smarmy dickishness that had held his approval ratings deep underwater.

And it turned out, when all was said and done, I was correct. Because not only did the debate seemingly not hurt Fetterman, there's actually an argument it helped him. In fact, according to favorability tracking of the race by civics, Oz's favorability rating had been slowly improving up until that debate. Afterwards, it stopped dead in its tracks, leaving him upside down by a devastating 22 points. Fetterman, on the other hand, saw his favorables actually gain slightly following that supposedly devastating debate performance, going from slightly underwater to actually neutral leading into election day. In the end, Oz's debate quip that abortion should be between women, doctors, and local political leaders might have ended up being the most consequential moment of the night. Now, the lesson here is that candidate quality does actually matter. The media just has no clue what qualities

voters actually care about. In Pennsylvania, they cared more about Fetterman's authenticity than about his health struggles. They cared more about Oz being out of touch than his slick TV presentation skills. In the same way, while Hershel Walker still not a great candidate because of his strained relationship with the truth, he is actually probably a better candidate than Oz, who is elitist, Blake Masters, who just comes across as extremely strange, and J.D. Vance, who came across as wildly inauthentic. Mitch McConnell's lead pollster apparently said that he had never seen a candidate

do as poorly in focus group testing as Blake Masters. Vance, of course, was able to win, but underperformed in every county in the entire state. Turns out that fallible humanity trumps a silver tongue, celebrity, or fancy credentials when it comes to the voters. The second myth that was destroyed by Fetterman's win is that progressive policies are bad politics. So before the stroke and before he was up against Oz, the entire Democratic establishment was aligned against Fetterman, backing corporatist golden boy Conor Lamb.

Lamb nearly swept the endorsement race, garnering the backing of state and national electeds. The reason for this lopsided situation was simple. Lamb was a centrist and Fetterman was a Bernie lefty. The powers that be thought Lamb would be more electable and probably worried also about Fetterman being less easily controlled. Well, we all know what happened next. Fetterman destroyed Lamb, romping with a 30-point margin over the anointed golden boy. In the general election, Oz's team seized on Fetterman's progressive credentials as their primary line of attack. They bashed him in paid ads and on social media as being supposedly a Bernie Sanders socialist. But none of this scared Fetterman off from embracing a left economic populism, and he arguably pulled it off better than any other Senate candidate in the entire country. Fetterman's profile was perfect, of course. The heavily tattooed former Steel Town mayor who looked the most himself in a pair of basketball shorts and a hoodie even in 30-degree

weather. But more important than the everyman vibes was the policy posture. He was unabashedly pro-union. Labor went all in for him. He was also unabashedly pro-weed, which in focus groups is actually one of the top policy issues that voters associated with him. He leaned into a message about corporate price gouging rather than just seeding economic issues to Dr. Oz and the Republicans. And his negative messaging on Oz was also pitch perfect economic populism. Part of why Oz's favorability ratings were so low was because a devastating early campaign by Fetterman to define him as a rich Hollywood New Jersey elitist who was more familiar with crudité than with the Steelers' home game schedule, and who couldn't possibly

relate to the struggles of normal Pennsylvanians. In the end, Fetterman's lefty economic populism was a boon and not a curse. In fact, if you dig into the numbers, Fetterman, the furthest left battleground Senate candidate in the whole country, outperformed every other Democratic candidate with independence. Take a look at this. He did better with independence than Mark Kelly, someone who positions himself as a moderate and has a generally positive statewide profile in Arizona, did way better with independence than Raphael Warnock, a man who talks and inspires for a living as a pastor. But I've got a metric that is even better than that. statewide profile in Arizona, did way better with independents than Raphael Warnock, a man who talks and inspires for a living as a pastor. But I've got a metric that is even better than that. I am

obsessed with these maps in the New York Times that show how the vote shifted between the 2020 presidential election and 2022. Most of them look a lot like this one in Georgia. Some of the areas shifted more to the Republicans, some shifted more to the Democrats. But here you can see Warnock outperforming Biden in and around Atlanta, while Walker made gains in the rural parts of the state. Now take a look at the map of Pennsylvania. Fetterman literally gained in every single county in the entire state. And not only that, his strongest gains came in rural areas with the very white working class voters who've been fleeing the party since the Obama era and accelerated under Donald Trump. The very voters, by the way, who Oz's socialism

scare messaging was aimed directly at. Fetterman's largest outperformance came in a place called Greene County that's in southwestern PA. Now, Greene County is an old steel town where Democrats used to absolutely dominate. But in the Trump era, it went hard to the right. Trump won it easily with 68% of the vote in 2016. And in 2020, the county shifted even further, handing him 71% of the vote. Now, it's easy to assume that these realignments are just done, that they're set in stone. But actually, Fetterman clawed back 13 points of that margin. He still lost Greene County, mind you. But there's a big difference between losing by 30 and losing by 43,

especially when you replicate that consistently across every rural county in the state. Turns out that Fetterman-style left economic populism is a winner and the key to reversing the working class realignment of the Trump era. It is also key to creating a durable majority that can do more than eke out narrow wins. The final myth here is that Obama is a political master and Biden is a dud. The final stretch of the campaign, Obama came out barnstorming for candidates across the country to rapturous reviews from the media. And there is no doubt on the measures of pure rhetorical prowess and ability to boost his own brand, former President Obama is second to none. But as I pointed out at the time, this never translated into gains for his party, especially not during his time in office.

Obama oversaw a bloodbath of more than a thousand state legislative seat losses. He lost governors' mansions, the House, the Senate, and ultimately handed the presidency off to Donald J. Trump. Biden's midterm record is now the polar opposite of Obama's. He held the Senate and might even pick up a seat. In spite of coming in with a very narrow margin for error, Democrats still have a shot at holding the House, although that looks very unlikely now. But some of the most impressive victories for Democrats came at the state level, where they flipped state legislatures, won back governor's mansions, made background among demographics like Latinos and white working class voters that had been

increasingly moving to the right. Nowhere was Biden's midterm success more impressive than in the Midwest. Now, I broke this down in detail for the lever, but the gist is this. Up and down ballot, Dems beat polls and generated upsets across PA, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and even reclaimed some of the ground they have lost in recent years in Ohio. And to get this back to the protagonist of our story here, John Fetterman, the party's unusual strength in the so-called Rust Belt is part of what helps sweep Fetterman into office. So to what do we attribute this success? Well, no accident this region also is the one that has benefited most from Biden's baby steps towards economic patriotism, from nibbling an industrial policy to green manufacturing, pro-union personnel, and also antitrust enforcement. Under Biden, bottom line,

some 350,000 jobs have come back to the U.S. That is a dramatic turnaround from the accelerated offshoring job losses of the Trump and the Obama administrations. Some of this is because of Biden's policy, some of it isn't. But even these incremental half measures are a damn sight better than what has been a devastating stretch for this region of just getting kicked in the face routinely by every politician from every party. Turns out, when you do even the bare minimum for people, they tend to vote for you. The reason the media rates Obama as a god and Biden as a schmuck has everything to do with the first two media myths that I just described. They think the candidate qualities that voters care most about are rhetorical skill and charisma. What voters actually value in terms of personal qualities is humanity and authenticity. They also

think that left economic policies are an albatross rather than a strength. How much hand-wringing and haranguing did we see about Biden's economic policies and how he'd spent too much money? Think of Larry Summers and the other mainstream deficit hawks who gained a lot of purchase in mainstream media spaces. Turns out, the little bit that Biden did for people was a huge factor in this election. Look no further than the student debt relief, which was much derided by mainstream pundits, but which contributed to a youth vote shift which arguably saved Dems' asses across the entire country. Obama's personal charisma meant that people admired and voted for him, yes, even as they felt increasing content

for the party as a whole. Biden, on the other hand, his solid policy steps have improved the party's standing in a lot of the country, and particularly in the Midwestern region, that has benefited most from them. This made the landscape much easier for John Fetterman, Gretchen Whitmer, Tony Evers, and a lot more. All right. It's a lot to learn from and grapple with for all of us. But if the lessons from this midterm are that humanity beats showmanship and that policy substance actually maybe matters, well, then the results of this election really did defy the modern odds and could chart a very different path for American politics.

And Sagar, one of the things I've been thinking about a lot is the difference... 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, as many here know, I've been interested in Bitcoin and its promise here for many years. When I first got into it, the promise of it really didn't have anything to do with making money. It was about censorship-free resistant money, about the verifiability of the blockchain, tales of circumventing government sanctions or hyperinflation. Somewhere along the way, though, it reached escape velocity in price, and then it

actually became simple. It was all just about getting rich. When people began to not just get rich, but get filthy rich, that's when institutional capital, Wall Street, and the two-bit players that we're about to mention became the real people in the driver's seat behind crypto. It became instead of a promise of a better financial system to one that simply circumvented existing financial regulation on Wall Street to see genuine Wild West speculation on the internet. A reversion to the past rather than a leap to the future. It is in that vein that we have to discuss the stunning and precipitous fall of Sam Bankman-Fried,

who in the period of just the last two weeks saw his net worth fall from a near $17 billion to zero overnight. So to start with, who is Sam Bankman-Fried? Well, I think it's fair to say he's a pretty weird dude. We've covered him before on the show as a major Democratic donor. He wanted to donate billions of dollars to Democratic Party, to other aligned causes for something that's known as the effective altruism movement.

We will save how cringe that discussion is for another day. But, of course, the question arises. Who is he? How did he make all that money? Bankman-Fried was the CEO of the crypto trading platform FTX, which was based out of the Bahamas. The reason FTX was based in the Bahamas is because its main value proposition was illegal in the United States. FTX enables massive leverage loans and bets on cryptocurrency futures, circumventing the global banking system, and serving effectively as a speculative non-US hub

of crypto trading. Bankman-Fried's core innovation was essentially building a platform enabling sophisticated types of financial transactions that Wall Street players have had for years, but for crypto ahead of the boom in asset prices, enabling him to be poised perfectly for the last two years. The volume of trades on his platform ballooned over the last several years, surging his net worth into the tens of billions and turning him into some kind of effective altruist. But how does a multi-billion dollar empire just crumble in just a week? So here's the story. November 2nd, Coindesk, a crypto news platform, reported on a leaked document that one of Bankman Freed's hedge funds,

which is separate, had a large number of crypto tokens belonging to FTX on its balance sheet. That matters because Bankman Freed's other firm, Alameda Research, was supposed to be a separate business. But in reality, it showed that one of Bankman Freed's businesses rested nearly entirely on a coin that was invented by the FTX exchange, not by any real dollars or other assets. This set up the perfect opportunity for a company called Binance, which is an alternative large crypto trading platform who struck. They announced, based on the news, they would then sell many of the tokens they had held issued by FTX, which effectively triggered a collapse in the price. Now, the fall of the price of that token triggered a separate run, traders on the actual FTX platform scrambling to

withdraw their actual dollars and other assets. That run caused some nearly $6 billion in assets to be withdrawn from FTX in the span of just 72 hours, which of course triggered a cash crunch, as in FTX did not have enough cash to meet its outstanding obligations. At this point, SBF was screwed. He straight up didn't have the money and he needed someone to bail him out. So he went to Binance and he begged for a bailout. On November 8th, Binance announced that it would reach a deal to bail out and buy FTX, but caveated that they had the right to pull the deal at any time of their own choosing. And then, the very next day, when we're all dealing with the election results, there was even more stunning news.

Binance says, actually, they're pulling out of the deal as a result of, quote, corporate due diligence and hinted that there were, quote, reports of mishandled funds. That is what set the spark with an apologetic thread from SBF on Twitter, where he said, quote, I fucked up and should have done better, with a pledge that he would be trying to raise some nearly $9 billion to cover the remaining assets within FTX so that his customers could withdraw their funds. But of course, with all the news, and despite previous major Silicon Valley backing, nobody was willing to bail him out this time, which ended in an official Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

But now, with the bankruptcy filing, there's even more questions. What happened to all the money? Reuters reports that SBF had transferred some nearly $10 billion of customer funds from FTX to his sister hedge fund, Alameda Research, and that a large portion of that has since disappeared. Anywhere between $1 to $2 billion in cash. SBF's defense of the $10 billion in transfer is he had confusing internal labeling on his cash and, quote, misread it. When asked about the missing money, he simply replied, three question marks. Furthermore, FTX's own legal team finds on the bank backend, SPF had implemented a quote, backdoor into the bookkeeping system, which allowed him to execute commands,

altering the company's financial records without alerting other people, including external auditors. That is how he was able to internally transfer billions upon billions to his hedge fund for then speculation without anybody noticing. As for what next, who knows? Cointelegraph reports that SBF is, quote, under supervision by Bahamian authorities and that he is exploring going to Dubai where there is no extradition treaty with the United States. The crypto industry has lost nearly a trillion dollars as a result of XTF collapse, and trust in the industry is at an all-time low, comparable nearly to the Lehman Brothers' collapse in the American financial system. I will end this monologue as I began it. When I first got interested in Bitcoin, it was the promise of something other than getting

rich. Those that I met in the industry actually had a real passion for that. But just like with our original financial system, once speculation became involved, it became just like the Wall Street banks, but with looser regulation. I'm honestly not sure what the answer is. I know this. My friends who work in the industry have a lot of trust to gain back from the general public, who rightly are looking at this and they say, this sounds crazy. That's where we're at right now, Crystal. I mean, it's, you know, we've talked about Bitcoin. And if you want to hear my reaction to Cyber's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. All right, guys, we had a very long show for everybody today, so forgive us premiums. I am

already sure it's going to be late. No worries. Tomorrow, we are going to have that live stream. Also, don't forget, we're coming to New York. We're coming to Boston. Go ahead and buy tickets down in the description. Let's just go ahead and get to it. We'll see you tomorrow at 8 p.m. Standard Time for our live stream. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight-loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. But there were some dark truths behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children.

Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. Enter Camp Shame, an eight-part series examining the rise and fall of Camp Shane and the culture that fueled its decades-long success. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus.

So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. My father-in-law is trying to steal the family fortune worth millions from my son, even though it was promised to us. He's trying to give it to his irresponsible son. But I have DNA proof that could get the money back. Hold up. They could lose their family and millions of dollars. Yep. Find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. I'm also the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. You might hear that term and think it's about celibacy, but to me, voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's flexible, it's customizable, and it's a personal process. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast.