Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 11/22/21: Rittenhouse Verdict, Arbery Case, Biden 2024, Hunter's Dealings, Supply Chains, YouTube Censorship, Delusional Dems, Amazon Union, and More!

Episode Date: November 22, 2021

Krystal and Saagar discuss the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict, Ahmaud Arbery case, Joe Biden running for re-election, Hunter Biden's business dealing, supply chains ahead of the holiday season, YouTube censoring Breaking Points, delusional Democrats, the fight to unionize Amazon, and more!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/Amazon Labor: https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-the-amazon-labor-union?utm_medium=copy_link&utm_source=customer&utm_campaign=p_lico+share-sheet  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, thanks for listening to Breaking Points with Crystal and Sagar. We're gonna be totally upfront with you. We took a big risk going independent. To make this work, we need your support to beat the corporate media.

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ad-free and uncut an hour early before everyone else. You get to hear our reactions to each other's monologues. You get to participate in weekly Ask Me Anythings, and you don't need to hear our annoying voices pitching you like I am right now. So what are you waiting for? Go to breakingpoints.com, become a premium member today, which is available in the show notes. Enjoy the show, guys. Good morning, everybody. Happy Monday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed, we do. Pretty remarkable reporting for The Washington Post about the Biden folks, the Democratic Party, whether he's going to run in 2024. Some really interesting tidbits therebalt mine to the Chinese.

Cobalt, very important for our, you know, electrified. Electric cars, all the batteries in your phones. Renewable energy. Like this is actually really important stuff. New York Times with that report. Also, a few glimmers of hope that maybe the supply chain crisis is easing. We will bring you all of that. Also, our friend Chris Smalls is going to join the show again.

Of course, he's been involved in organizing at Amazon. He's going to give us an update there. We wanted to start with acknowledgments of what's going on in Wisconsin now. Yeah, so this is a breaking story. We don't have a lot of the details. But last night, a car plowed through a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Five people have been confirmed dead, and there are at least 40 others injured. A lot of them were children. If you guys have seen the videos, it's really horrifying. I mean, it's just, you know, the most evil thing you can do is plow into

a bunch of kids at a Christmas parade. We don't have any details around who the assailant is. There was somebody who was arrested, but nothing has been released there. They found the vehicle. They have a person of interest. There you go. That's what we know at this point. We'll keep everybody updated tomorrow whenever the details become fuller. But yeah, got to start with and acknowledge and really think about all the people in Waukesha right now.

Absolutely. And we'll keep monitoring that. All right. So guys, going to be real with you. We didn't really want to talk about the Kyle Rittenhouse trial. And there's a couple simple reasons why, at least this from my perspective, you can say if you feel differently about it,

but the discourse around it was extraordinarily polarized. It's poisonous. It's completely poisonous and very toxic. So that was one reason. The other reason is I think, frankly, the stakes in this trial, in my opinion, were not either what they were being portrayed as on the right or the left.

I agree with you. And so we didn't feel like we needed to wade into it because, frankly, we felt like there were other things more consequential to the future of the country going on. However, because the coverage has been so poor and so polarized and so tribal, we felt like we should, that we had a responsibility to sort through as best we can the facts of this case. And since we haven't covered it yet, we wanted to start from the ground up of just what we know confirmably happened on that night. As you guys probably know at this point, Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted on all charges stemming from he killed two, wounded one other. This was during

the protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin. So there's a couple things to sort through here. One is just the law, and that's probably the most clear-cut piece. And then there's the question of the morals, the ethics, the politics. That's where things start to get a little bit messier. So let's start with the law. And I thought Eric Levitz over at New York Magazine did a good job of just laying out the undisputable facts, undeniable facts of what we know happened on that night. So no speculation, no spin this way or that way. This is what we know happened on that night when Kyle Rittenhouse ultimately killed two and wounded one. Let's throw this first piece of this up on the screen. So he says, before examining the

substance of Rittenhouse's defense, it's worth reviewing the case's undisputed facts. Bystanders' cell phone videos establish that 36-year-old protester Joseph Rosenbaum chased Rittenhouse into a parking lot, shouted F.U. and threw a plastic bag at his back, that a different protester fired a gun into the sky, and immediately following this shot, Rittenhouse ceased fleeing and turned around. That Rosenbaum then moved toward Rittenhouse, who proceeded to fire four times. Rosenbaum was killed. Those shots attracted the attention of nearby demonstrators.

Let's put the next piece of this up on the screen. One ran up behind Rittenhouse and hit him in the head. Another kicked the gunman to the ground. Then 26-year-old Anthony Huber whacked Rittenhouse with the skateboard and appeared to reach for his rifle. Rittenhouse shot Huber through the heart, instantly killing him. Gage Grosskreutz, 28 years old, approached and pointed a handgun at Rittenhouse. Rittenhouse nearly blew Grosskreutz's right arm off. So really the key piece here, because of course what Kyle Rittenhouse and his defense team argued and what the jury agreed with them on, is that this could plausibly be self-defense. And I say it in those

terms because in Wisconsin, as is the case in most states, the burden is on the prosecution to disprove a self-defense defense. That's right. So he comes in, Kyle Rittenhouse, to this trial with effectively an assumption that this was self-defense. And the prosecution has to fully disprove it. And if there's even a reasonable doubt that it might have been self-defense, then what the law says is you have to acquit. You have to find in favor of the defendant. So that's the piece of the legal burden we can put. There's a little bit of New York Times analysis here that we can throw up on the screen, just indicating what I just said. When it comes

to self-defense, the prosecution has a heavier burden. Wisconsin's rules for self-defense, they say, are well within the national mainstream if people reasonably believe they are at risk of death or great bodily harm. They can use deadly force. Most states say that someone who provokes violence or is acting illegally waives the right to self-defense, but Wisconsin allows it if the person has exhausted every other reasonable means to escape from or otherwise avoid death or great bodily harm. So at the very beginning of this video, when the chaos and the mayhem unfolds, the fact that Rittenhouse is retreating, we don't know what happened before that. It's possible there was a product. We just don't know. OK, we don't have that on video. But at the very beginning of this video,

when Rittenhouse is running away and he's being pursued and he turns around and Rosenbaum, who he ultimately kills, moves towards him, the fact that he was retreating and that he was being pursued gave the jury enough to say,

we believe this could reasonably have been self-defense that he may have believed he was in danger of bodily harm. Obviously, this is fairly subjective because you have to take what was in this person's mind and what factors were they wearing, et cetera, et cetera. But that is the law. That is the way it was written. And that's why legal analysts who were following this were not surprised ultimately that the jury found him not guilty. That's right. And you'll recall, for those who watch Rising, my friend Richie McGinnis was actually on the ground. He actually interviewed Kyle Rittenhouse moments before all of this happened. And he actually tried to save Joseph Rosenbaum's life. He wrapped his head

around it. So anyway, he was right in the thick of it. And I remember asking him at the time, I'm like, well, the facts of this are going to matter a lot. Richie actually did end up testifying in the trial. And it was very clear that under, you know, pretty standard self-defense law that it was going to be a very difficult case for the prosecution. That's why if you'll look at what the prosecution went throughout the case, and I know there's been a lot of amateur legal analysts out there, which has been quite annoying, frankly, to watch. It was clear what the prosecution was trying to prove is that Rittenhouse himself rose above the barrier of provoking the incident. But they were always going to be able, they were always going to run up against the fact that they have on camera him fleeing the scene and then being pursued. And as long as that remains the case under Wisconsin state law and

pretty well established self-defense precedent, it was just going to be a very difficult thing for them to be able to rise above. And there was also a question there around misdemeanor. They were like, well, they could have bumped it down, manslaughter and all these other things, but that's not actually how self-defense works. It's not like a car accident where, you know, like drunk driving equivalents to one thing as opposed to like second degree murder and felony. It there's not like a car accident where, you know, like drunk driving equivalents to one thing as opposed to like second degree murder and felony. There's not like a lesser degrees. It's either self-defense or it's not. And so in that particular thing, what the prosecution, their Hail Mary, it basically nullifies any other positive charge,

which makes it so that, you know, the facts of the case and all of that, the prosecution had an incredibly difficult job there. And look, I think they should. I mean, there's a legal precedent that we should establish that self-defense is a longstanding tradition. And there's also been a lot of talk I've seen online around stand-your-ground laws. Wisconsin is not a stand-your-ground state. Actually, they don't even have the stand-your-ground provision. So they have to basically prove that as long as the defendant made a reasonable attempt to flee or to avoid a deadly situation, and then you act and use deadly force, and in a know, in a particular case, like somebody points a gun at you. So you have all of that together.

It was always going to be a very, very difficult problem for the prosecution to rise to that level. Right. And listen, from what I saw of the trial, I don't think the prosecution was particularly well prepared or that good at their job. I do think that the judge seemed quite biased and didn't allow things into the trial that may have been relevant in terms of Rittenhouse's state of mind, etc. Ultimately, I don't think those things made a difference in the trial. Because that initial shooting is the one that was most in question. Because after that, Rittenhouse is being pursued.

He gets hit with a skateboard. And Gage ultimately pulls a gun on him. So, and listen, if this had been turned around, let's say that, you know, Rittenhouse had ultimately been killed in this situation. Those guys may also have had a claim to self-defense because he's already an active shooter on the scene. They're pursuing him. they could also have argued that they had reasonable self-defense interest in that regard. But Rittenhouse, obviously, is the one who ultimately is the shooter who the jury decides acts in self-defense. And so that first one to me was the most controversial, the first shooting and the one that was sort of the stickiest. But since he was fleeing, it almost didn't matter what happened

before the video started because he was retreating and because he was being pursued. And so ultimately, you know, that's a lot. To your point about, let's talk about whether the law should change. There was one other charge that was a gun charge that at the very last minute, the judge dismissed.

And there's effectively, without getting into all of the very last minute, the judge dismissed. And there's effectively, without getting into all of the sort of like, you know, technicalities of this, there's effectively a loophole in Wisconsin law that says, you know, if you're, he was 17 at the time, you're 17, you can't have a sawed off shotgun. But since this was a long rifle, he got through on a technicality. Now, if I was going to look at the laws to change with regards to this, I would personally say I don't think it's great for 17-year-olds to be running around with AR-15s, period, end of story. It's not even legal for them to buy one. It seems like the law is outdated. The idea was for hunting. It's an old law, et cetera, et cetera. So that might be a place it could change. But on the question of where the burden should fall to prove self-defense, if you feel a certain violence who otherwise would have a very hard time proving if they strike back or if they shoot or kill their abusive spouse or partner, they would have a hard time proving that they were acting in self-defense.

So there are a lot of other fact patterns that may cause you to feel differently about how and when you exactly want the burden to fall. So that's why this is so incredibly complicated. Now, as we talked about before, obviously, this was politically a powder keg. Biden put out an initial response that was very sort of like neutral. The jury has spoken. Let's take a listen to that. Well, look, I stand by what the jury has concluded. The jury system works and you have to abide by it. He then, I think probably after getting a lot of outrage. Let's just say he got roasted by a lot of the identity left. On the left broadly. He put out a sort of a statement that put a little bit of a different spin on it. Let's go ahead and put that up on the screen. The relevant part here is at the beginning. He says, while the verdict in Kenosha will leave many Americans this was and the fact that he initially put out what, in my opinion, was a very appropriate neutral response, was met with a lot of anger from people who, and we'll get to this in a minute, you know, had, I think in a lot of ways, been misled about what direction this case was likely to go in and some of the basic facts of the case. That's really why it was so difficult and also why I still don't think covering trials in real time is necessarily a good thing. When facts are changing all the way throughout the ground,

you have this and that. And the way that the media had coverage of this, it was like OJ all over again and where people feel bought into something which has nothing to do with you. It has to do with exactly what happened at that time. And so let's put this up there on the screen. This best crystallizes what I have seen as a right-wing reaction. The Onion says, Kyle Rittenhouse is sentenced to 45 years of CPAC appearances. What's hilarious, Crystal, is that they turned this kid into a hero when at the time the general consensus was, hey, the whole reason you won't want chaos is because chaos loves a vacuum or chaos creates a vacuum and all kinds of crazy stuff happens. And I saw a lot of right wingers are now very upset at Kyle because he just did an interview with Tucker Carlson, which fully airs tonight, where he said, quote, I am a supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement. They're like, wait a second. What happened? Why is Kyle turning on us? That's the

whole point. When you try and make this stuff all about one tribe and Matt Gaetz and all these people offering this kid an internship, you don't know anything about him. And it's like turning the him and all of this into some like heroist, like heroic, you know, stand down between two groups you don't like. As I have been trying to point out, the law is the law. You know, in September, just last month, a black George Floyd protester was just acquitted on all charges on the chart of self-defense with the defense of of self-defense, after he shot at Minneapolis police because they were deploying non-lethal rounds and he felt that his life was threatened. That just happened last month. So do you not now believe in self-defense? I do because I think that when you have that standard, the prosecution had to prove that this man, this George Floyd

protester back in September or last month, did not have a reasonable right to self-defense whenever he felt his life was threatened, even by the police. Yeah. This is why whenever you try to nationalize this and say, oh, in this particular case, that one, whenever it fits my priors, I don't want the law to apply. This is why it all just completely breaks down. And the culture war really rots people's brains. That's the problem. I don't know what's in Kyle Rittenhouse's brain or in his heart or anywhere else, but we can see, you know,

how the law applies to the specific facts. I do think it's disgusting the way that he's being treated as some kind of hero. You don't want anybody, no matter their age, running around with AR-15s, making an already volatile and chaotic situation, helping to turn it deadly, taking the law into their own hands, thinking they're going to run out and play police.

There's the opposite of what you want. I would say that very resoundingly to a lot of people who, if you believe in law and order, this is literally the opposite. The opposite, right. And so there's a big difference, and I think this is where the coverage has gotten really muddy. There's a big difference between what the law technically says and what the wouldn't have had two deaths and another individual grievously wounded. And so to turn this guy into some sort of a hero, to want to make him an intern, to he probably will be sentenced to 45 years of CPAC appearance, all that stuff. It's ridiculous. It's completely absurd. And yet there are so few voices out there who can hold those two thoughts in their head that based on the law as it exists, he was always very likely to get off.

And that this is not a person or a set of actions that should be celebrated in any way. So that's why we felt sort of compelled to say our piece on this. I completely agree with you. And I know it's very frustrating and emotions are high. I mean, should, you know, these guys have had guns, been out there protesting and, you know, causing violence and looting and rioting? No. I mean, but that's the whole point, which is that when all this chaos and all this stuff happens, then there's going to be a chaos within the vacuum and you do not want to celebrate that. That's the entire point. And Jesse Singel actually wrote a fantastic piece to this point, Crystal. Let's

put this up there, which is that the Rittenhouse verdict should not have been a surprise if people in the media had done their job and explained how Wisconsin self-defense law works. You know, Glenn and many others have been pointing out that abroad in the UK, the UK media was reporting that they thought that the protesters who had been killed were black because they literally did not know based upon the way that the US media was reporting it. And what Jesse points to is that the actual facts of the case were almost never discussed. It was always discussed, as you're pointing to, in a moral term of like, oh, it shouldn't have been. That doesn't matter. That's not how self-defense law works. You can argue it like I just did on both sides in terms of who should have been there and who should have not been there. That's on your moral judgment as to how you decide. What matters is how the law

applies in a very narrow fact pattern whenever a death occurs, whenever it comes to self-defense. And what Jesse continues to point to is that the actual specifics of Wisconsin state law were never discussed by CNN and MSNBC and many of these other people. And so that actually did a grievous disservice to a lot of people, probably suburban moms, you know, others who did not know what the actual facts of the case were. That's where this all just completely breaks down. And I will also, I'm not going to spare my brethren on the right who, you know, are all very, very obsessed with, you know, the actual minutiae or whatever the facts of this

case and are going to ignore the one that we're about to talk about or the one, you know, many other cases, this George Floyd, St. Paul man, because he doesn't fit their political narrative. That is why I truly despise so much of the discourse around this, which is the selective brain fog on who you want to focus on and not. It just rots everything down and it makes it unable to have a conversation in this country. I am. I can't. I really wish it hadn't happened before Thanksgiving. Can you imagine how many people are going to have to have a stupid fight about this? It's like, just spend some time with your family. Yeah. Seriously. Just leave. Yeah, exactly. Don't bring this one up at the Thanksgiving dinner table. It's not

going to end well. I'm certainly not going to go there with my family. But yeah, I mean, on the right, they want to paint a portrait of him as a hero. They want to focus on, here's a video of him, you know, attending to someone and pretending he's an EMT. And he really was there out of the goodness of his heart, et cetera, et cetera. They don't want to talk about the video that emerged of him saying at, you know, CVS a couple of weeks earlier that he wished he had his AR-15 so he could shoot at people. Right. So there's an attempt to paint a portrait of Kyle Rittenhouse that's very favorable on the right. And of course, as you said, the media, in terms of most mainstream liberal outlets, they just did not give people the hard facts here and

the relevant law in advance. So people had a lot of fuzzy thinking about what actually happened here. One of the things that you mentioned is there was assumption by some and by major outlets in places like Brazil and currently the UK that the people who had been shot were Black. And the reason that that assumption was made, even though I at least never saw that actual mistake made in the US press where they said these protesters who were shot were Black, but because it was framed as a racial justice issue. And I do understand that because, of course, you're talking about the protests that came out of George Floyd and then Jacob Blake. And so there is an element of racial justice, but they created a false impression among people that

also, I think, changed how people were emotionally thinking and feeling about this case as well. So it sounds very complicated. Ultimately, in terms of the law, it's really not. It's not complicated. He was on the video. This is, you know, you can't deny it or dispute it. For whatever reasons, he was there. For whatever reasons, whatever he had in his mind, he was going to do that day. The facts are he was retreating. He was being pursued when he first turned around and fired the first shots. And ultimately, whether the judge was terrible or the prosecutor was terrible or anything else that happened, those were the relevant facts that the jury took into account in coming to this verdict. Yeah, that's right.

Now let's talk about another case where the defendants are also arguing self-defense, where they have a much less of a leg to stand on here. This is why we decided to put these back to back, because you guys are seeing here how self-defense law works. And the specifics in the case matters a lot. So you guys will recall the horrific video back in February of 2020, which kind of preceded a lot of this, Ahmaud Arbery, who was jogging near his home in the outskirts of Brunswick, Georgia, when he was pursued by two guys in a truck with guns,

who said that they were performing a citizen's arrest based upon what they claim was a reasonable assumption that Arbery had been involved in a crime which was nearby. Okay? So this caused a lot of consternation given the whole, you know, citizen's arrest, you know, which you're not really supposed to be doing, you know, in the year 2021, unless you literally see something happen in front of you.

That's not what happened here whatsoever. The defendants, Travis McMichael and Gregory McMichael, they were charged in May with murder and with aggravated assault. That was after the video actually came out. And there was some discussion and evidence there that there had been some connections, at least with the McMichael family and some of the prosecutors there in Georgia. But the video made it undeniable such that the county did have, or sorry, that the district attorney's office did have to bring a charge against these. Let me pause you there on the prosecutors because I do think this part is

important. These individuals were not initially charged. That's right. And one of them was former police officer who had a lot of personal relationship. That's why they had these relationships with these prosecutors. Multiple prosecutors who were put on the case ultimately had to recuse themselves because they had personal or professional relationships with Gregory McMichael. And one of those prosecutors, the very first one, has actually been indicted for giving the McMichaels favorable treatment, including suppressing this recording that ultimately is released that shows a much more horrific set of actions that were taken here than was sort of initially portrayed to the public. That's right. So you can see there that after all that happened, there's been four prosecutors now that have had to take over the case, which is completely crazy.

You can actually see that eventually what happened is that these gentlemen were then charged with murder. Now, the thing is, is that there was a previous Georgia citizens arrest law, which eventually did get overhauled in response to the circumstances of this case. But that Georgia law is kind of what is subject of the self-defense claim of the McMichaels. However, the problem is that, and let's put this up there on the screen, the AP actually did a pretty good job of what the defense strategy there in the case is, is they are arguing in the trial that Achmed Arbery, who was shot three times, that it happened in the course of what they say was a citizen's arrest.

Now, according to McMichael, he said that he was going past his house. He believed he'd committed burglaries nearby. He ran inside. He grabbed a handgun. He shouted to his son, who then came out with a shotgun. They jumped in the pickup truck and they ran after Arbery. He told the investigator that he used his truck several times to block Arbery. This is the third man who was also involved in the incident. And at the end, you can actually see Greg in the bed of his truck with a handgun and McMichael outside with a shotgun. They claim then they chased him to keep him from leaving the subdivision and told him to stay until the police come and then check him out. Now, state law on the books at the time said exactly this. A private person may arrest an offender if the offense is committed in his presence or within his immediate knowledge.

If the offense is a felony and the offender is escaping or attempted to escape, a private person may arrest him upon reasonable and probable grounds of suspicion. The actual words of the citizen's arrest, they do not appear there. So again, this comes to the private person. However, the key that the judge has also ruled is that the self-defense claim must be evaluated within the McMichaels claim that they were arresting an offender if it was committed in his presence or within his immediate knowledge. Now, here's the thing. We already know from testimony and from the previous interviews of the McMichaels and the third man that they did not have immediate knowledge of any crime that Ahmaud Arbery had committed,

and it did not happen within their presence. So already within the grounds of the law, they have essentially admitted that they did not act within those grounds. There is not a lot of doubt here as to how the jurors are going to find if they interpret act within those grounds. There is not a lot of doubt here as to how the jurors are going to find if they interpret it within this statute. And the judge made a ruling within that case and dismissed a mistrial based upon the, they dismissed a mistrial motion introduced by the defense saying that this was an illegitimate prosecution under those grounds, which essentially kicks it now to the jury, who will have to evaluate it within the exact text that I read you.

But as I said, within that text, there is no realm in which they had immediate knowledge, they suspected him of burglaries that had happened, and they did not see anything happen. So if you don't have immediate knowledge and you didn't see anything happen, then the subsequent altercation that happens between them and Arbery is not going to fall within the grounds of self-defense. Yeah. I mean, what the family has said about Ahmaud Arbery is this was somebody who had been an exceptional athlete growing up, who still really took pride

in keeping himself in shape. He was a regular jogger in the neighborhood. He's out for a jog. There is video of him on a construction site. There has been nothing proven or even really alleged that he did that was illegal at that construction site. Okay. So he's out for a jog and he's pursued by these individuals, three of them who have now been indicted, one of whom actually is the one who recorded this video, and released it thinking it was exculpatory. It is not exculpatory. But so he's out for a jog. He's pursued by these individuals who are screaming at him and by their own admission trying to run him off the road. That's the context for the altercation that unfolds. They have it in their mind that he's a criminal, even though they didn't see him

commit a criminal act, and it does not appear that he committed any criminal act. So those are the facts there. One of the issues in this case that's been relevant as well in terms of the trial is the jury is nearly all white and the defense, you know, went out of their way to strike most of the black jurors from the pool. So that has raised concerns that the jury will ultimately be biased because clearly the defense thought that they would have a better chance if they had an all or mostly white jury. So that has been one of the issues at play. And I will say, you know, I looked at the data here on how, because these self-defense claims, part of what makes this so challenging is they do introduce a lot of individual bias into the system because they are so, they are so much up to your subjective judgment. And so there was an analysis of homicides done after Trayvon Martin's death, and the Urban Institute did find that cases with a white perpetrator and a black victim were 281% more

likely to be ruled justified than cases with a white perpetrator and a white victim. So in a society where, you know, unfortunately we'd love to get to a place where we're colorblind, that is not the case. It's certainly not the case in the criminal justice system. Routinely, systemically, white perpetrators who claim self-defense are more likely to be let off by a jury than black perpetrators than when it's, you know, when it's reversed or even when it's white perpetrator and white victim. So those are, that's the background. That's why, you know, people are watching this case very closely. But the facts here, very, very different from the Kyle Rittenhouse situation. So

they're doing closing arguments today. Expectation is we could have verdicts this week. So we'll see what ultimately happens. That's right. It's also going to lie on Georgia does have standard ground law, which means that you don't have to flee the situation. But all the prosecution has to argue is that Arbery was allowed to defend himself against a man who was chasing him and was pointing a gun at him. That's all they have to argue in order to prevail on the facts of the case and actually prevail over the self-defense claim. So that's more than you probably ever wanted to know about self-defense. And we apologize, but I do think it is important for, I'm sure,

you know, it's ruling the nation. Everybody's on Instagram and has a take one way or the other. The facts of one case aren't always the same as another case. And get familiar with the law, especially with the state law, in which these things happen, and it will become clearer as to how the outcome will eventually be. Yes. So we will keep our eye on that. But, yeah, we felt a responsibility to kind of lay out

the hard, objective facts as best we could, and hope you guys have found that useful. All right. Somewhat lighter topic, maybe. Joe Biden, will he or won't he be alive and well enough to run in 2024? Washington Post has a very interesting report. And I'm actually going to talk a little bit more about some of what is in this report in my monologue as well. But let's throw this tear sheet up on the screen. So President Biden and members of his inner circle have felt it necessary. That's my own spin on it. But they have reassured allies in recent days that he plans to run for reelection in 2024 as they take steps to deflect concern about the 79-year-old president's commitment to another campaign and growing Democratic fears of a coming Republican return to power.

Let me just stop there because it's extraordinary that they feel it necessary to tell the Washington Post and telegraph to everyone. And he also said something directly to a group of donors recently. I am planning on running in 2024. They enlisted a longtime Biden friend, Chris Dodd, to also get the message out there saying to The Washington Post, the only thing I've heard him say is he's planning on running again, and I'm glad he is. However, effectively, no one is buying it. They say in interviews with 28 different Democratic strategists and officials, they none of them believed basically that he was very likely to be on the ticket.

One of the ones that they quote here involved in campaigns, they say, said they could not think of a single person they had spoken to in the last month who considers the possibility of Biden running again to be a real one. So pretty extraordinary landscape. And then they go on in the piece to be like, well, here's some of the other potential candidates, of course, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, but a whole other list of names, none of whom have an approval rating over 40%. Yes, that's right. That's where the Democrats are. I also think what is in there is also extraordinary as to if he did run in 2024. Let's put this up there on the screen, which is that the Biden team's top priority states. And again, this is from the mouth of the Biden team.

Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, and Nevada. Now, what's missing from that list, Crystal? Florida, Ohio, they are effectively writing off Florida with its, you know, lot of electoral votes and saying that it is effectively a red state. This is going to be the first presidential campaign in my entire lifetime where that will be the case. As to considering Florida a de facto red state, it was always, you know, all the way back until the 90s, considered a battleground state, one to be warred over. Ohio, same thing. Ohio went, I think, eight points for Trump in 2020. So that just goes to show you how far that one has moved. It probably never was realistic for them to try and contest it there. But Florida in particular, I mean, yes,

Trump won it by 3.3, which is the highest margin, higher than Barack Obama in 2008. But still, I mean, you would expect them to at least try and say, oh, we're going to contest there. Instead, they're going all in on the former blue wall of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and Nevada, also showing that they really want to rack up those small electoral vote victories. And they still see some contestability in North Carolina. I don't think that's realistic. So Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, those are the states that made Joe Biden president. Georgia and Arizona in particular, which put him over the top, and he's going to have to try damn hard in order to keep on to them

in 2024 if he were to run. It is just fascinating to have a electoral map in my lifetime where Arizona and Georgia are considered more contestable than Florida or Ohio. I mean, it just goes to show you the changing coalitions, how they are really banking on those suburban white voters in Arizona, Maricopa County, and in Fulton County in Georgia in order to carry them over the edge. And, you know, Crystal, what did we just see in Virginia? I mean, those people will come right back to the Republican Party if they're not happy. And they centered their entire democratic political strategy around these folks, and it didn't work out. It already, within a year, they were willing to turn on them. The Biden-Yunkin voter is a very real voter that is almost a carbon copy of the people in Maricopa County, of the people in Fulton and Atlanta who went ahead and voted for Joe Biden, in some cases reluctantly, but were still willing to do that, still willing to give blue seats to the senators, those people can turn literally on a dime, as we just saw. The changing political

nature right now, we have seen that in those states that they listed, Biden's approval rating is actually lower than his overall national approval rating. His battleground approval rating right now is somewhere in the 33 percentile on average, 33 percentile. And he's more popular still than a lot of the people that are floating as his potential alternatives if he doesn't or is unable to run next time around. You know, Ohio's been gone for a while now. And it doesn't have to be. I mean, Sherrod Brown still wins there. Yes, he's actually very popular.

Last time he ran, he won easily. I mean, it wasn't even particularly close. I just looked up the margin yesterday. It was not particularly close. Ohio, you guys, some of you know, I used to live in the state. I actually happened to live in the district in the entire country that has moved to the right the fastest of any congressional district in the entire country. And it was in the state of Ohio. And it was exactly what you think is sort of white working class district that used to have labor Democrats represent them. And then in the Tea Party wave, that's when they really made a hard turn to the right. And now, I mean, it is a

very right-leaning, a Democrat won't win there again for a long time. But this is one of the things that, you know, I really hate about the Democratic Party is rather than being like, oh, hey, what's going on in Iowa or what's going on in Ohio? Why did these voters who used to support us as recently as Obama, why have they run in the other direction? Maybe like, what is it about our program or what is it about the way we're talking about issues that's turning people off in droves? Instead, they just write a state off the minute that they get a little bit behind and they try to move on to somewhere else that's going to be a little more favorable to them. And it is incredible to me that Ohio to me is not a surprise at this point because I think they've

written off Ohio and effectively Iowa a long time ago. Florida is pretty surprising because at the very least, even if you think you can't compete, you want your opponent to have to spend some time and resources and, you know, trying to make sure that they have that state locked up. And so the fact that after, you know, a couple of defeats there, you're just ready to write the whole thing off and move on is, is pretty astonishing. Um, but going back to the, the Biden questions, this is very unusual for there to be such opening questioning of whether he's going to be on the ballot the next time around. And then the fact that when you look down the lineup, there's no one that, you know, has much promise. Yeah.

If you think Joe Biden can't win Ohio and Florida, go ahead and see how Pete Buttigieg or Kamala is going to do in those states. The one person that they floated here that might be interesting is Sherrod Brown, who I just mentioned, who sent her from Ohio. I mean, his problem is, first of all, no one knows who he is. Yeah, he has no national name ID for a reason, because he doesn't really fall within the Democratic priority. Yeah, I mean, he's one of the very rare sort of like more populist and labor-oriented Democrats in either the House or the Senate. And clearly, he's been able to create a brand for himself in Ohio where people feel like,

okay, this guy really is on the side of the workers. If he could translate that nationwide, I mean, out of this list, I think he's of the workers. If he could translate that nationwide, I mean, out of this list, I think he's by far the best bet. They had Elizabeth Warren on there. We know how that went. Yeah. They had AOC on there. And I mean, she's made herself a niche player. That could have gone another way, but she has made herself into a niche player. So that one's not going to work out. But yeah, pretty dire landscape for Democrats at this point. When you have to say it, you shouldn't even have to say it. When you're the leader of the party and you're president of the United States, if people have actual, you know, confidence in you having to go around saying, no, no, no, no, no, he's definitely going to run. And then having all

those people on background tell the Washington Post and what is, you know, the hometown paper, everybody in the White House reads this thing. They know that it's a real shot across the bow. And not only do you have that going on with Biden, but if there was the assumption that Biden's not going to run, it should be Kamala. I mean, that should be obvious. She's the heir apparent. That's why they put her in that position was exactly for this eventuality or possibility. And so the fact, I mean, nobody's scared of jumping into a primary against her is also fairly extraordinary. Yeah. Okay. There you go. All right, let's move on. Concerning the president's son, this is extraordinary. And it's funny to me, before I even get into the facts of the case, how this all happened. So the New

York Times set out to do a big investigation into cobalt. Now, cobalt is something which is very, very valuable for electric vehicles, for batteries. It's in a lot of people's phones. It's one of the most valuable resources in the world as we move to towards a battery, electric vehicle type consumption for our energy. Okay. Very important mineral that is mined predominantly in Africa. Well, what they uncovered whenever they began diving into cobalt crystal is they uncovered how the president's son somehow found himself at the center of all of these deals. And because they uncovered it, they had to print it, even though they didn't make it one of the top stories that came out of this.

Let's put it up there on the screen and we'll give you guys all the facts. How Hunter Biden's firm helped secure cobalt for the Chinese. So the president's son was a part owner of a venture involved in a $3.8 billion purchase by a Chinese conglomerate of one of the world's largest cobalt deposits. Now, as they point to, cobalt is one of the most important minerals for putting into batteries. Now, one of the world's largest cobalt deposits. Now, as they point to, cobalt is one of the most important minerals for putting into batteries. Now, one of the world's richest coal mines, cobalt mines, is located in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And I was telling Crystal before this, anytime that you have multi-billion dollar deals involving the Congo, and especially involving mining, there's some sketchy stuff going on. And Hunter Biden is at the very center of this, which is that BHR Holdings, if you guys have heard about this in

the past, it's a Chinese investment firm where Hunter received a lot of money in terms of payouts from private equity deals and more, some of which were linked directly to the Chinese government. Anyway, he continues to own 10% of this firm to this day, by the way, despite resigning from the board of directors, as if that removes this conflict of interest. The three Americans who were involved in this deal were controlled 30% of BHR Holdings. Now, the rest of that company actually owned by the Bank of China and, was one of the early ones to actually help finance this actual deal itself. The mining deal actually happened in 2016, whenever a previous Chinese firm announced it was going to buy $2.65 billion in order to buy this mine. Now, as part of that deal, they needed a partner, this Chinese firm. And that partner became BHR Holdings. They put $1.14

billion through subsidiaries in order to buy a part of this deal, which was then involved in the purchase of this mine. So there's a lot geostrategically that actually matters around here. And this goes to the point of the original Times investigation in the first place. Let's put it up there on the screen. How the US lost ground to China in the contest for clean energy. What they point to is that clean energy actually has a lot of dirty stuff behind it. And one of those being cobalt and especially the war over all the raw materials that you need to put into electric car batteries. I don't know if people are familiar, but electric car batteries are huge. One of the reasons why a Tesla or a Ford Mustang Mach-E or whatever can only go a couple hundred miles is because, well, it's really hard to put a lot of energy into a

battery, which is not only not too heavy, but small enough in order to fit inside of the chassis of a car. It's quite difficult. And so what you can see from that is that the raw materials, if you want to move in that direction, given that we're now subsidizing up to $12,000 for every electric vehicle purchased in this country, and President Biden in particular wants to do the whole highway of electric charges all the way across the nation, if any of that were to ever become a reality, it's going to require a ton of cobalt and a lot of these raw materials. And what they point to in the story is that China, who has been going all in, not just on solar panels and the production of solar panels, but also in terms of battery production, has gone and has bought

the controlling interest in some of the world's largest cobalt mines. And they compare it back to a race over uranium back in World War II for the Manhattan Project. So that is kind of a comparable realm in which the competition for raw materials is also a competition for the future, but the president's son intimately involved here and has a direct financial interest in Chinese ownership of this cobalt mine. So very, very dirty stuff that's going on here, Crystal. Yeah, I mean, effectively, there's a low-key global resource scramble going on.

Right. That's not in the headlines a lot, but is actually really important if we care about, you know, making electric cars here and moving, you know, getting a foothold and having a leg up in the electric car market. This is not something that's a Democrat or Republican thing. This sort of focus on these raw materials started under the Obama administration, continued at least in word under Trump, although they didn't really do anything about it. And then has also, obviously, Biden has actually talked about it a bit more and made it a focus. So this particular mine that a Chinese company was able to acquire

is one of the largest and richest deposits of cobalt in the entire world. So then to go and find out that the president's son, and again, this President Biden has, I think, talked more about the importance of these type of minerals and about moving to electric vehicles than any other president before. So to go and find out that his son had anything to do with getting this particular mine into the hands of the Chinese is really something. There's also, though, a lot to be said about some of the sort of policy and political details here are really interesting. And effectively, what the New York Times lays out is because we haven't had an effective, a real industrial policy, we've gotten way behind.

The Chinese have had their eyes on the prize here. They've been going after and securing all sorts of resources around the world. And we've been sort of fumbling around because, you know, it comes back to a theme we talk about here all the time, which is that we only prioritize like corporate profits and the bottom line, and we haven't done what it takes to make sure we have an industrial base here, that we have a capacity to produce here and all of those things that would be inherent in an industrial policy. And so that's how you end up with, I guess, the president's son being involved in the sale. Here's my favorite part of this. Mr. Biden's father was near the end of his term as vice president when the mine was sold. In the run-up to 2020, his business

ties were obviously scrutinized, but the role of BHR in this mining purchase was not known. When asked if the president had been made aware of his son's connection, a White House spokesman said no, and that's all that they had to say. I mean, as you said, Crystal, there has been no president in American history who has cared more about electric vehicles, which fine, that's okay. But if you are going to, and this president will be, a person who passes a $12,000 subsidy for electric vehicles, and your son has a direct tie to the minerals that are involved into going into electric vehicles, and then even more so has a direct financial tie and interest in a deal which makes sure, or at the very least biases, Chinese control over electric vehicles for the future,

that is such an obvious conflict of interest and of corruption. It is difficult to even describe. Did it influence Biden's decision to pass the thing? Probably not. Okay. But that doesn't matter. Why is his son have a financial interest in this whatsoever? It should not even be a question. And this is again, a media problem, which is that they don't even point out in this New York Times story, because, again, I really do assume that they stumbled across it and they were like, well, shit, I resigned from the board. Okay. If you resigned from a company and you're still being paid out from that company, or you have an investment or you have equity in that company, do you not still have interest in how that company does? Obviously. And at the time he was actually intimately involved in many of the dealings of this company. So this is the type

of thing where if Jared Kushner or them had done it and they did some similar stuff on visas, which we covered, um, at the time, people would have freaked out about it. And they should. I mean, this really is just outright corruption from Hunter Biden. He gets away with it completely free. The Biden administration, you know, this is buried in the New York Times. They made it one of the very bottom parts of the story itself after they uncovered it. And, you know, now trying to even bring it

to you, I know it does sound complicated, but it's very basic. He owns an ownership in a stake in a company, that company helped buy one of the largest cobalt mines in the world. Cobalt is super important for electric vehicles. And the race for the control of cobalt is a race between the United States or the West and China. That's it. It's very basic, and he has a direct financial interest in this company. Pretty wild. Yeah, it is. Okay, supply chains. This is something that you flagged for us, and I actually do think is very important. Let's put it up there on the screen. Supply chain problems are showing signs of easing. So Christmas, which was previously canceled, may be uncanceled. Christmas is back on. Christmas is back. So it turns out that Asian output is actually coming back in terms of their ability to deal with production. And some of,

some of being the key word there, bottlenecks are beginning to clear. Labor shortages are going to continue to be one of the major ones. But shipping, manufacturing, and retail say that they actually don't expect a return to totally normal operations until next year, and that cargo is obviously going to continue to be delayed around COVID. But that the previous level of COVID disruption that we had seen is no longer really the case. The number of ships waiting to unload, for example, at the port of LA and Long Beach has improved. Now, it's still hovering near record levels. It's just not at the backup that we had seen previously. And there's beginning to show some signs of easing. And obviously, we wanted to cover this in the past whenever it showed like it was going to be really bad. But the costs right now in order to move container across the

Pacific actually fell more than a quarter in the week that ended of November 12th. That's the biggest decline in two years of the cost of shipping. That's something that obviously is going to translate into the cost whenever you buy something. I also saw, Crystal, the gas futures in the next couple of weeks are beginning to go down in terms of how it should be in the case if Exxon, Chevron, and all those people, prices they are supposed to in terms of the futures. In the next couple of weeks, if the price of gas, sometimes it doesn't always track with gas futures and barrels and all that, should go down to like two something dollars a gallon, 290, 280. I'm not saying that's good, but it's better than what it is right now. Maybe a 40, 50% reduction on average, especially out in California. I'm so

sorry to you guys. I've been seeing these screenshots of like $6, $5, $50 or whatever a gallon. I can't even imagine. That's totally insane. But we are beginning to see what we might be on the other side of the curve on the supply chain. And we should look at that. We should celebrate that. Yeah. Directionally, at least what this article indicates, it's moving in the right direction. That doesn't mean the problems are fixed. Still huge, almost record-level backlogs at the ports and shipping prices are still elevated and there are still definitely a lot of problems. But it seems like by some metrics, directionally, we are headed the right way. With regards to Christmas, they say in the U.S., major retailers say they have imported

most of what they need for the holidays, and ocean freight rates have retreated from record levels. So Christmas is on. You guys will be able to get all your stuff. Maybe. Is what it looks like at this point. But, you know, I mean, the very real issues that the supply chain crisis has caused obviously has contributed to inflation. Obviously, it's contributed to those increased prices that then, as we reported last week, companies have used the excuse of inflation to inflate their prices even more, something that at least some advisors are telling the Biden administration and Joe Biden that he ought to be more aggressive at sort has cut into some of the very real wage gains that have been had and made it so that even as wages are going up, you're not really feeling the benefit of that because prices at the gas pump and the grocery store are so much more. Yeah, you know, something I found interesting from reading this is that the labor shortage is not just an American phenomenon. And this is what I always love about this, which is, look, we live in a globalized world, so we're going to actually have globalized responses to this. You see inflation. China's inflation is out of control. If you think that ours is bad, go and take a look at the price fixing that is going on from the Chinese government. They have rolling blackouts in their major cities because they don't have enough coal in order to keep up with demand. It's totally crazy in terms of the disruption to day-to-day life in China. What they're pointing

to here is that actually there's even labor shortages in Vietnam where a lot of this stuff is made, especially furniture. So they are running at like 60, 80% capacity, not necessarily because of COVID, but there's just a lot of disruption. You shut things down, people leave, they go get different jobs, and you're trying to wrap up at the same time. Basically, the one year pause in the global economy has created havoc. Who knew? And inflation is not just an American problem. It's a huge European problem. It's a huge Chinese problem. Labor shortage is not a problem for the Asia and for, or labor shortage is a problem in Asia and in America. Why? Well, Europe actually had more of a program in order to keep people connected to their jobs. So they've

had a lot less disruption in their supply chain, something that maybe some of us were advocating for back in the time, but who knew that it was going to have major consequences in order to let a bunch of people leave their jobs. And then starting up again is actually very difficult. Asia didn't do that. Neither did we. Consequently, we're the two places facing massive supply shortages whenever it comes to labor and a lot of chaos in the way that people are feeling about all of this. But you put it all together, things are moving generally in the right direction. I think we'll probably reach a new equilibrium in like two years. Yeah. I mean, look, I'm in favor of a labor shortage because it means that workers have a little bit more power, something that we've been seeing.

Actually, we're going to talk to Chris Smalls. And John Deere workers just won a contract with significant increase in pay, increase in bonuses, getting rid of another tier. Like, they won a lot in this contract. So congratulations to them for having the courage to go out on strike. So, yeah, I mean, listen, there's actually a good piece in Jacobin right now that's pretty interesting saying, you know, our COVID relief. Some of these things really were effective to help people get through what was an incredibly chaotic time. Some people were able to, you know, get unemployment and save a little bit in their bank accounts. Lo and behold, some people were able to explore other options than whatever crappy low-wage job that they hated before COVID.

But our economy is so built on an assumption that workers will be completely desperate and so desperate that they'll just take whatever job is out there. Well, right at the moment, that assumption is not necessarily safe. And so I've always thought that we should be focused more on dealing with the fragility, with the just-in-time manufacturing, with the supply chain issues, with the monopoly issues, than worrying about, oh, my God, it's terrible that workers have a little bit more in their bank accounts or they're getting a little bit higher prices. Because ultimately, that helps rebalance the scales and makes it possible for workers to have a little bit more in their bank accounts or they're getting a little bit higher prices, because ultimately that helps rebalance the scales and makes it possible for workers to have a little bit more power in the society. If there's anything good that comes of this, I read a hilarious tweet, I don't know whose it was, but they said, you know, in the aftermath of 2008, people like us who were kind of coming of political age at that time became weirdly familiar with like derivative trades and, you know you know like, being like, oh like leverage and banks and like how much cash reserves they should have

and should banks be allowed to do these complicated financial maneuverings. My hope is that having lived through this, is that we all get a little familiar with terms like just-in-time and the supply chain, how container works, what exactly it means for cheap stuff from China in order to come over and actually get to your house through Amazon or whatever in six hours or something like something terrifying like that. If we have a little bit more knowledge, we can then demand stuff as a public to say, yeah, you know, just in time is fine. And it's, you know, it was a decent idea, but it has a lot of perils in the way that we end up living our lives if there's a major pandemic, so to speak, or another global supply disruption. It reveals how weak that we actually set up our economy, and we don't have to live that way. So that's my hope. Yes, indeed. All right, Sagar, what are you looking at?

Well, when Crystal and I went independent, we were so excited, and we had so many reasons as to why we should do it. In the yes column, no corporate control, be your own boss, build something new instead of complaining all the time. You guys know all the good ones. But in the no column was a single but important one. What if going independent removes the protection that we've had in the past, we get censored, or at the very least, we don't receive the same treatment we did when working at a major DC news organization? That last one, it weighed very heavily on us.

And while it was a real concern, we decided to do it anyways. That's why we built our business to be subscription first. But something that we always try to highlight to all of you is the very real reality of covering news as a business and highlighting why relying on advertising, and specifically YouTube or any one company, is impossible if you want to do it right and that's your only source of revenue. It brings us to what's happened to us in the last 72 hours.

Check this out. In our previous show, you may recall that we covered the story of Peng Shuai. She was a Chinese star tennis player who disappeared from the public eye for weeks after accusing China's vice premier of rape and sexual assault. Her post was removed from Chinese social media within minutes. She was effectively unpersoned in Chinese society for weeks. It's a worthy and important story, especially after Chinese state media released a hostage statement from Peng, where she supposedly disavowed her previous accusation. Now, the segment that we ran was

titled Chinese tennis star vanishes after rape accusations. And immediately after we uploaded accusation. Now, the segment that we ran was titled, Chinese Tennis Star Vanishes After Rape Accusations. And immediately after we uploaded it to YouTube, we were notified it would not be eligible for monetization. Now, this is something that we've told you guys about before. Content which could be incendiary, like 9-11 or the coverage of sexual assault, is automatically flagged by YouTube's monetization algorithm because it's a controversial topic. I get that. I really do. But here's the thing. We have been previously told by YouTube that in almost all cases, if we submit an appeal and upon human review,

if it is newsworthy, the decision will be reversed, which is why I was shocked when I checked our email the next day and I saw this. YouTube decided even after human review, that segment was not eligible. You see, that segment was as straightforward as a new segment as it gets. A recitation of the facts, reading Peng Shuai's original post, then her statement, then describing the facts as they happen. That's it. It also happened, of course, to highlight a story

deeply embarrassing to the very top of the Chinese regime. Now, because it's me, I tweeted it, and I posted about it on Instagram. A lot of people took notice, even some United States senators, which was surprising, and even the Republican-ranking member of the House Antitrust Committee. So YouTube reached out to explain the situation to me. Their explanation is that the segment had nothing to do with our criticism of China, but instead is not eligible for monetization because it focuses on a specific sexual assault allegation between two people, Peng Shuai and the former vice premier of China.

That's their policy. Now, okay, maybe that's the policy, but consider this. By that same standard, Harvey Weinstein's story in 2017 would not be eligible for monetization. Or Matt Lauer. If you're a Democrat, do you want it so that news organizations on YouTube are not incentivized to cover a woman accusing Donald Trump of sexual assault or of Christine Blasey Ford's accusation against Brett Kavanaugh? And if you're a Republican, what about Tara Reade's accusations against Joe Biden or Juanita Broderick and Bill Clinton. Should news organizations be

able to cover this and have an incentive to do so? The obvious answer is yes, but it highlights a growing problem that Crystal and I are at least big enough to speak out about for a lot of other news creators out there. All of this invites either self-censorship or a sanitized version of facts if we want to play by the rules. For example, I know the fact that I said rape in the very first minute of this monologue means it will not make any money. But how else am I supposed to describe the experience of Peng Shuai, who says in her original social media post that she was crying and shaking as China's vice premier forced himself on her?

I bring you the news. All we have is our credibility and our ability to describe things in a most important way so that you know what's going on. We take that responsibility very seriously. I'll give you more mundane examples. I'm sure that if you watch normal YouTubers, they go a great pains in order to react to something without running afoul of copyright policy. But that's actually, in news, that's really hard. When we want to show you something or a snippet of something, we have to make the conscious decision every time. It means you will not make a single dollar from that video. Or as

we have highlighted previously, we get flagged when we cover 9-11. How are we supposed to cover the news on the month of September without talking about international terrorism? Or what about Jeffrey Epstein? Just so you guys know, we have never made one dollar off of our coverage of that, even though it has garnered by my count millions of YouTube views. I think it's important, so I just do it anyways. I could go on. Sometimes the news is bad. That's why CNN and Fox and MSNBC's advertisers, they don't get to choose when their commercials air. A key to Noam Chomsky's famous manufacturing consent was revealing institutional incentives within media that come together to produce manufactured content on behalf

of the powerful. Opening the kimono here is not going to make anyone happy over at YouTube, a platform which we literally depend on to distribute our content. And once again, we just don't care because I think it's important for all of you out there to understand not just what we have to deal with, but how the entire system itself is constructed and how that shapes the content that you get from every single person that you watch online. And by the way, since this segment is already not going to make any money, I might as well tell you about what's up with Peng Shuai. Chinese state media released a video of Peng where she was supposedly having dinner with friends,

and they made sure to mention the exact date, as everybody does when out to dinner with friends. It was so unsubtle, they might as well have made her hold up the newspaper while she was talking. The second video that they released was of Peng signing autographs. Chinese state media commented about the video, quote, Can any girl fake such a sunny smile under pressure? Those who suspect Peng under duress, how dark they must be inside. I feel for her. I truly do. Imagine going public about your claim of sexual assault, becoming a literal prisoner of the Chinese state, forced to smile like a puppet for the cameras so that pesky Westerners will shut up about criticism of China.

It's one of the most disgusting things I've ever seen. And because of the way that I'm talking to most of you right now, I am literally disincentivized from telling you about it. YouTube and all of us should think pretty long and hard about how we came to have such a system. And that's the thing, Crystal. Look, we built our business, so we don't have to care. It's fine. But it's still a conscious decision. And if you want to hear my reaction to Sagar's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com.

Crystal, what do you take a look at? Well, guys, as we mentioned earlier, there is a remarkable piece in The Washington Post this morning spelling out how top Democrats are thinking about Biden's likelihood of running for a second term. First of all, this sort of open speculation about whether or not the president will be well enough or alive enough to put his name on the ticket, pretty astounding in and of itself. But this line from the piece left me absolutely gobsmacked. Quote, Barry Goodman, a Democratic donor who served on Biden's National Finance Committee for his 2020 presidential campaign, said many donors are, quote, praying that Trump runs. I think no matter who runs,

a Democrat beats him, he said of Trump. At the end of the day, people are not going to put that despot in office one more time. Wow. You people have literally learned nothing. Absolutely nothing. It might have been forgiven to think Trump would be an easy mark back in 2016. No one quite understood how politics had changed, how fervently a large chunk of the population would support him, how he would accelerate a realignment that ultimately has been pretty favorable for the Republican Party. Although anyone with a half-working brain could see what a bad candidate and terrible fit for the moment Hillary Clinton was. But now you're still underestimating him? Still praying that Trump runs again? That is completely insane, not to mention utterly delusional. With absolutely everything going for him,

Joe Biden still barely won by the skin of his teeth in 2020. Think about that. It took Trump's total callous indifference, contributing to the hundreds of thousands of American COVID deaths, and then failing to get a relief checkout in the final weeks of the campaign in order for Biden to eke out a win. It took a pandemic that allowed Biden to hang out in the basement, occasionally zooming into appearances and getting asked zero tough questions by the press for him to barely find a victory. It took every ball bouncing Biden's way and Trump working overtime to cook up his own demise for the pathetic Democrats to pull this thing off by fewer than 80,000 votes in a few key swing states. Now, if Trump had just encouraged his supporters to vote by mail,

rather than dismissing it as fraudulent, he would probably be president today. But the truth is, Democrats have even bigger problems than Trump. Their entire approach to politics and governing is a disaster that's stuck in a 1990s Clinton-era mentality. The neoliberal ideology of the Clinton era is a hollowed-out carcass that voters have rejected election after election after election. Voters thought that they were going to get something different with Obama, only to realize he was just a trailblazing Trojan horse for the same politics of the last several decades. As a result of this realization, voters tossed Democrats out of the House, the Senate, and decimated the party in

state houses and governor's mansions across the entire country. Since these slow-witted Democrats weren't getting the message, voters sent the clearest possible signal that they could have. In a direct contest between Clintonism and Jesus Christ anything but Clintonism, they went with anything but, picking an egomaniacal lunatic over another round of condescending neoliberalism and its attendant palliative care for the working class. Of course, rather than see the obvious, Democrats instead chose to believe in elaborate Russian conspiracy hoax. Now, this self-delusion led Democratic elites to think it'd be a fantastic idea to line up behind a neoliberal relic in Joe Biden, who has proceeded to govern like it is still 1993. Let's obsess over crap no one cares about, like process and civility.

Let's blow through nearly the entire first year of the administration, chasing down a few bipartisan votes, wasting time, and also crippling the end product in our attempts to appease a few Republicans. Let's hand our agenda over to a bunch of technocrats who will make it so complicated that few will benefit and even fewer will understand what we even passed. Can't help but look at Joe Biden's horrific approval ratings and the fact that not a single person in this country is excited about this man and think, we told you so. Those of us on the populist left tried to warn you not to dismiss Biden's obvious aging, his flagging energy, his halting ability to communicate. We tried to tell you that this man has been on the wrong side of virtually every issue his entire career.

It continues to fall on completely deaf ears that voters have rejected neoliberalism and are desperately searching around for a new vision and paradigm to replace the long dead Reagan era and to shake off the creeping sense that America's best days are over. To shake off that growing sense that our only real choices are between slow decline and rapid decline. But as bad as the political landscape is for Democrats under Joe Biden right now, they're likely to get much worse because the brainiac donors and consultants who run the party have decided to anoint some of the least popular people in America as the future of the party, namely Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg. Get this, Kamala stands at a 28% approval rating. Pete, he's only marginally better at a 37% approval rating. Basically, let's take the bad old idea of neoliberalism and couple it with the bad new idea of ultra-wokeness and moral panic politics.

Let's center an entire party around the trailblazing aspirations of our hated politicians rather than say, I don't know, the aspirations of working-class Americans. Now, we recently covered a groundbreaking study here from Jacob and YouGov in the Center for Working Class Politics, which sought to identify the type of candidates who perform best with the multiracial working class. Progressive populists, who leaned into class rhetoric, did the best. Woke moderates, people like Kamala and Pete, who cloaked their corporate agenda in academic language, they did the absolute worst. So naturally, Democrats are leaning hard into the worst possible lane. It would be laughable in its absurdity if the situation wasn't so dire, because the hard reality is we are stuck with

these two parties as the only real options for the foreseeable future. The Republicans stand for nothing except for fealty to a maniac and endless sectarian culture wars. And the Democrats stand for world historic self-delusion about what the country wants, what the country needs, and who might actually deliver it. Sagar, when I saw that line about Trump, I thought my mind was going, I mean, you're praying for Trump to run. And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Joining us now for an update on efforts to unionize Amazon's workforce is Chris Smalls. He is an activist and an organizer.

Great to see you, Chris. Likewise. Thanks for having me. Of course. Always a pleasure. So just give us an update on your strategy and what's going on in Staten Island. Yes, absolutely. So, yeah, we're still in the beginning phases of our fight. I know it kind of was a bummer that we had to withdraw. But we had to withdraw because basically our time expired from the time we filed.

Just walk people through that a little bit because some people aren't familiar with the process that you have to collect a certain number of signatures and you have to file those signatures. So just take people from the beginning through the process. Absolutely. Yeah, so we filed on October 25th. We had the requirement, that 30% to file. We filed that number.

I don't want to give specific numbers because obviously that gives the company an advantage. But we filed what we thought was the bargaining unit and we met our requirements for that 30%. The NLRB then contacted me saying that Amazon wanted to push the hearing back two weeks.

So, of course, I said, no, we're ready to go. We were originally scheduled to go to court on November 15th. The NLRB then sent me another letter saying that Amazon has filed another motion to push it back. Please reconsider. I said no again, but the NLRB is allowed to give them a two-day extension, which they did. So they changed the date from November 15th to November 17th. Then the NLRB said, you know, hey, you need a couple more hundred signatures. So I said, okay, no problem.

We're allowed two days extended to get that amount. So we met that requirement, bought them a couple hundred more signatures within the 48 hour. But within the 48 hour, Amazon also filed another motion for the NLRB to actually do a card check because they didn't believe that our cards were legitimate. So during that card check, the NLRB determined that we needed more cards, which I went back to the NLRB office a second time and dropped off more cards so we met the requirements multiple times but still when it came to uh determination they determined that we needed to get more cards but a lot of the folks that signed up uh during the seven month campaign no longer work for the company.

Got it. See, this is very important, Chris. Our time is fight. We were doing this because we want people to understand the exact mechanics of how this stuff actually works and some of the things

that you're up against whenever you're trying to unionize. We've got some reporting here from Status Coup. Let's put this up there on the screen about leaked audio of Amazon's union busting meeting showing HR officials pushing workers against unionizing. Can you just describe to us a little bit about what was revealed there?

Yeah, absolutely. You know, they're doing a captive audiences. Obviously, since we filed, they were preparing for an election because they knew that we had the requirement, but unfortunately it didn't go in our favor to get to that point. But they still have held these meetings and a lot of the members of ALU have been recording these meetings and disrupting them, not only just recording them, but they've been disrupting them. Yes, they're bringing 50 to 60 people into these classrooms at a time um and they're pretty much spreading a bunch of lies you know that they're allowed to do that illegally which i don't agree with but they're just spreading lies creating doubt you know saying that we're going to take money saying that we're inexperienced um they're

trying to say that you know we're some third party we're not actual amazon workers that's the way they they uh try to throw their information out there and and basically that amazon is going to take care of all their associate needs which we all know that is a lie you know that amazon does not really care about folks uh they just replace them so that's what we're up against right now um we're in that phase where we have we have the onslaught of these captive audiences. But I can say in our favor, because we've been disrupting them so well, they actually suspended them. So that's where we're at right now currently. Got it. Chris, talk about the decision to form a new union, ALU, Amazon Labor Union, rather than down in Bessemer,

they were trying to join an existing union. Why did you decide to go that route? Well, you know, I visited Bessemer and I brought a lot of Amazon workers with me when I went down there. And we saw a lot of missed opportunities that we thought that wouldn't benefit workers if we went that route. You know, the reason why we chose to decide to start something worker led is because we know the engine of the company more than the third party or the established union. We know the issues. We know the grievances. And we felt like organizing workers from within will resonate more than trying to bring the established union that has to pretty, that doesn't resonate with the workers, the way workers talking to each other that been with the company for several years, like myself and others up here in New York City. We know we have a bigger influence on our coworkers and it's been working in our favor. And I believe that, you know, this is the way to go

when it comes to Amazon. You know, I understand that there's other unions that have resources that can spend money and match Amazon in certain capacities. But I believe the way it's going to get done is if workers start to organize themselves. What are the sort of questions that you're getting from workers? What are the concerns or the pushbacks that you're having to address? Well, most of them be about the dues. You know, Amazon is trying to calculate our dues for us, but Amazon doesn't know this process either. They're just guessing and making up things. They don't know how to create a union like who creates the union in uh 2021 right so they're just creating they're just creating a bunch of lies and uh and talking about our dues um but as if they know what our dues want to be but the thing about this union is we don't have

because we're a brand new union and we want to have a democratic process to decide what the union dues will be once we get to that point. So my rebuttal to that is that, hey, I'm the elected president at the moment, and I don't want any dues. All I want to do is get to an election, and then when it's time to cross that bridge, we'll all democratically decide what the union dues will be. And then on the other side, what are some of the chief concerns you're hearing from workers that would lead them to join the union that make them feel like they need to join together and have that representation? Oh, wow. Well, this goes on and on about that. Obviously, safety is the number one concern. You know, we've been watching our coworkers get dragged out by Amazon pretty much every other day. Unfortunately, somebody just passed away two days ago.

It's just a lot of safety issues with Amazon. And COVID-19 is still a thing over there in JFK, especially. They get COVID cases every single day. The same thing I was fired for speaking up. A lot of people know my story there. So this is home base for me. And, you know, these conversations lead to, of course, accommodations as well. They don't accommodate people that have medical issues.

They force people into these medical leaves with no pay. So people end up quitting the job or losing their job. And, um, of course, uh, just the, just the commute that these, uh, workers have to have to travel every day, two and a half hours, three hours, uh, each way. And, uh, Amazon doesn't provide any type of shuttle service for them to get to, uh, the ferry station, uh, where most, where most workers travel in from Manhattan. Yeah. Well, Chris, we know you're going to continue to fight.

Tell people where they can support your efforts. Absolutely. Please, please, please. We're telling everybody to donate to our GoFundMe. It's on our Amazon Labor Union on Twitter, amazonlaborunion.org. You can find links on my Twitter handle as well, at shut underscore down Amazon.

Please support us. It's very grassroots. And every dollar, every penny goes towards, you know, feeding workers, helping workers for various reasons and helping out organizing that effort. So please, thank you and continue to support us. Yes. And we'll put the link to that down in the description so people can find it easily. We're always so grateful for your time and all the work and the

heart and the hustle that you're putting in. Thank you, Chris. Thank you, Chris. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Take care. Absolutely, man. We'll see you later. Thank you guys so much for watching. We really appreciate it. I mean, I went over it in my monologue. Now you guys know exactly what we have to deal with in terms of demonetization. And when we want to bring you the best show possible, it is directly against the financial interests of just relying on YouTube or ad revenue generally. That's why we built subscription first. So if you can help us out, the link is down in the description.

We deeply appreciate it. Thank you guys. Love you guys. Have a fantastic day and we'll see you back here tomorrow. 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

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