Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 11/29/21: Omicron Variant, Bidensgiving, Kamala & Pete, Amazon, Hillary Clinton, Forever Pandemic, Kushner's $$$, Travel Bans, and More!

Episode Date: November 29, 2021

Krystal and Saagar talk about the Omicron variant of covid, Biden's Thanksgiving, Kamala and Pete joining forces, Amazon firing a homeless worker, Hillary Clinton still being out of touch, how Big Pharma and Bill Gates are perpetuating the pandemic, Jared Kushner's Saudi dollars, a scientific perspective on Omicron, 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/Abdul El-Sayed’s Newsletter: https://incision.substack.com/ Abdul El-Sayed’s Podcast: https://crooked.com/podcast-series/america-dissected/ Abdul El-Sayed’s Book: https://medicareforallbook.com/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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What do we have, Crystal? It's great to be back. Indeed we do. It does feel good to be back. We missed you guys. Hope you all had a happy Thanksgiving. Also, big change for me. While I was away, I am now officially 40 years old.

Oh, no. I'm joking. Emotionally coping with today. Honestly, actually, I think the flip to 30 was harder. That one's coming. That one's coming up for you. That one's coming in April. Because it changes your whole identity. You can no longer really think of yourself as a young person.

In my 20s, right. I'm doing okay with it. Big stories today. Obviously, we're going to talk a lot about that new variant that the World Health Organization has identified as a variant of concern. That would be Omicron. We're going to talk about it from a political perspective and what it might mean for your life. We also have Dr. Ahn who can tell us what we know, what we don't know, and what we should be looking for. We're going to be talking about how our president spent his Thanksgiving. Yes.

Very interesting details there. A terrible, terrible op-ed on CNN about how Kamala and Pete, instead of being rivals, they should actually team up together for the worst ticket of all time. So we'll talk to you about that. Some big news in the labor movement, also some big news with former presidential contender and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. You do not want to miss her latest comments. But we wanted to start with the latest, with that variant Omicron, first identified in South Africa. They have pretty advanced virus identification and contact tracing, so that's why it was identified there. The very first known incident of it was actually in Botswana.

It's already spread to all sorts of places around the world. Let's throw this Atlantic tear sheet up on the screen. I think at this point, and we are going to have Dr. Abdul Al-Sayed on to talk us through some of the specifics. At this point, what we know is that we don't know a lot. The reason that scientists are somewhat concerned about this is for a few things. First of all, it has a lot of mutations on that spike protein. And those mutations, which have been seen in other variants, in some instances have led to it being more transmissible. But you don't know how it changes things when you put them all

together. There's no way of really knowing how that impacts anything. We don't also know how severe the disease is that it causes. We don't know how it interacts with the vaccines that exist currently. The other reason that they were concerned and why the World Health Organization labeled it a variant of concern is because in a small population in South Africa, it seemed to be out-competing some of the other variants. So world leaders have reacted strongly. We'll talk about some of the Biden administration's moves in a moment. The stock market also kind of freaked out. We've got a CNBC tarot sheet here that we can throw up on the screen. The Dow tumbled 900 points on Friday, worst day of the year on fears of new COVID.

Very interesting which stock prices moved in which direction. So industrials linked to the global economy declined. Things like Cater caterpillar off by four percent chevron dropped energy stocks overall reacted on the flip side um big pharma doing quite well in the stock market pharma zoom peloton basically all of the everything that did well in the lockdown and that profits off of the pandemic those stocks are up we don't know the markets haven't opened yet this morning to say what it looks like this morning. But, you know, this is the big news. There's a

lot we don't know. Obviously, world leaders are concerned, some shutting down travel from the affected countries. It certainly looks like it's still in small numbers, but has spread to a lot of locations around the world, including some identified in the UK, some in Israel, Botswana, South Africa, obviously also in Hong Kong. Very likely there are some cases here already if it's already spread that widely. Yeah, it's almost certainly here in the United States. I want to say at the top, huge thank you to South Africa. They identified, they have a very, very advanced identification network there for the virology and they released it knowing that there would very likely be repercussions on their citizens and more. So thank you very much to the virologists and the doctors in South Africa who identified this variant and who published some of the

early data. There's a lot that we don't know, as you say, and I do find the freak out over this very dismaying. I'm not saying I'm against the travel ban or anything like that, but a way that I believe that a lot of the media and them are reporting this is by picking up different snippets and then pushing it to people who are scared, right? Who are wondering, are my vaccines going to work? Well, Boris Johnson yesterday speaking in the United Kingdom said, look, at least from what we can see, there does seem to be some transmissibility and more of type of a breakthrough infraction than we see with normal Delta and with COVID. At the same time, the doctor herself who actually identified it, this came out this morning from Reuters, she just gave an

interview, quote, looking at the mildness of the symptoms, there is no reason to be panicking as we don't see severely ill patients, quote, the hype that's been created out there in the media worldwide does not correlate with the clinical picture. That again is from the doctor herself who identified the variant in South Africa. So you put these things together, and the Atlantic headline basically sums it up. No idea what the hell is going on. Does that mean the market should be dropping 900 points and we should be preparing for lockdown and all this?

Unfortunately, that's the way that the media pushes it, and that is how also our policymakers are handling this. President Biden is going to be speaking later today. They say that we're on a two-week, like, get-to-know period about Omicron. So we'll see. We'll see what he has to say. Speed dating situation. Speed dating, a little two-week trial on the Omicron variant. But Dr. Fauci, of course, asked about this over the weekend on Sunday. And what he had to say, very concerning, specifically around lockdowns and other public health measures. Let's take a listen. Like to be seeing more lockdowns again, new lockdowns, more mandates?

You know, I don't know, George. It's really too early to say. We just really need to, as I've said so often, prepare for the worst. And it may not be that we're going to have to go the route that people are saying. We don't know a lot about this virus, so we want to prepare as best as we can. But it may turn out that this preparation, although important, may not necessarily push us to the next level. People talking about lockdowns, people talking about that. Let's see what the information that we're getting in real time tells us. And we'll make decisions based on the science and the evidence the way we always do. But you want to be prepared to do anything and everything. And

that's the reason why we're paying such close attention to this and why we're all over it. Mixed messaging there, Chris. I'll prepare for the worst at the same time. We're not necessarily going to it, but keeping the door open towards the most stringent public health measures. And I would say, I do not think that there's a correct public health posture. I think that there are two different ways you can handle this. Travels, bans, and looking at that and saying, okay, let's figure out what the hell's going on.

Try it in true face. Second time. While we also tell the public, listen, we have all of the tools at our disposal. We've got COVID pills. We've got vaccines. Many people are now getting their booster shots if they so feel.

And at the same time, we have to also be considering that this is probably what the future looks like. How many more Omicrons are there going to be? A lot. And this is what you're delving into in your monologue, which is that whenever you have a situation where Moderna is not giving up its IP to the African nations, and you are going to have an entire variety, both from the global South, which has mostly only had like Sinopharm to Chinese vaccines,

Russovax also not particularly good. And then you have an entire unvaccinated population in Africa, as well as very sparse uptake throughout the Islamic nations and in places like India. Well, we are going to be turning Omicron variants all for the next couple of years. And so we do have to learn to try and see what it means to live in an endemic COVID environment. So I would put these two things and say that even opening the door, especially on something where not one world leader, scientist, any person has said, this thing is more deadly. That is what you have to see. Is it more deadly, especially to the elderly, especially the people who are already vaccinated? So it's a very difficult balance that

they have to strike here. Yeah. No, on the continent of Africa writ large, the vaccination rate is 6% to 7%. 6% to 7%. So to your point, the best thing that they could possibly do is to force these pharmaceutical companies to give up their recipes. South Africa, which actually has one of the higher vaccination rates on the continent, something like 35%, they're trying to reverse engineer Moderna's recipe, Moderna's formulation for their vaccine so that they can create their own because they have realized that the wealthy world and the World Health Organization and all of these actors have completely failed them and effectively abandoned them. And you see with Omicron, look, we don't know whether this variant is ultimately going to matter and really impact your life or not.

But we're playing Russian roulette here as we allow this virus to continue to circulate and continue to mutate and potentially develop more dangerous strains. So if there was one thing that we would want this administration to do to get on top of these things, not just from now, but for the future, it would be to force pharma to give up those formulations and to increase global production so that access wouldn't be an issue. Now, in some of these countries, there's also massive vaccine hesitancy. Well, South Africa. Doesn't have to do necessarily with supply, but there is absolutely no doubt that if it was available at a cheaper price and that there was widespread production, there would be more of the global population that was

ultimately vaccinated. You know, I would go maybe even a lighter touch than you. I personally think the travel bans are theater. I actually think that Biden, the first time around when Trump, you know, right away instituted the travel bans, I think his posture then was more correct to the point about Fauci and the mixed messages. So we just played him saying, look, we might be going back to lockdowns. I would be very skeptical because I just don't think there's the political will

either to lockdown or to compensate the population again, which you would have to do if you go back into lockdown mode. So he was asked on a different program, aren't we gonna just have to live with this thing? He's still reiterating this absurd, like, we need to get down to 10,000 cases, which he just, like, pulled out of his butt someday. But he also indicates that, yeah, we're probably just going to have to live with this virus. Let's take a listen to that. Asked that you would like to get under 10,000 infections a day in order to sort of live with COVID. We've heard people say, understandably, they're trying to look for a metric to give to the

public that we're going to have to start living with COVID. I believe that's the case because I don't think we're going to eradicate it. The best way you can get to where you want to go is to just say, we're going to vaccinate as many people as we can. We're going to get as many people boosted as we can,, we're going to vaccinate as many people as we can. We're going to get as many people boosted as we can. And we're going to get that level down. And I think that's going to have to be as low as less than 10,000. All right. That's crazy. The 10,000 thing is insane. The other stuff about, let's just say, listen, go get vaccinated, get your boosters, like take normal precautions.

If you see a surge. That's sensible policy at this point. And, you know, we've learned a lot throughout the course of this about what worked and what didn't. The school closures I think everybody can see now were an utter and complete disaster that didn't do much in terms of mitigating health impacts. Some of the stimulus programs were effective. Some of them weren't. It was all disproportionately weighted to the top of the income scale.

Like, we've learned a lot now. And we also, as you were indicating, are in a much different place in terms of having vaccines, in terms of having understanding how to care for this disease, and having medicine that more effectively treats it. So, while, of course, we're going to keep our eye on what goes on with Omicron and other variants that come out, it's also really important to remember that we are not where we were a year ago. Yeah. And I think that's what I wish that this was being specified more. You know, I even saw this in terms of people like, oh my gosh, we might need Omicron specific type boosters. I mean, for the elderly, 97, you know, 70 years old, okay. But for everybody else, I mean, if you're already vaccinated, and especially if you have a decent amount of antibody immunity, or like me, you both have vaccine immunity and natural immunity or just natural immunity, you're seeing here in terms of the symptoms and more, the case

number does not matter. What matters is the deaths. And whenever we see the fact that even in places like Gibraltar, which have 100% vaccination rate and still see a case load, which per capita would mean more than 10,000 here in the US, it's not feasible to get to that. If you have 5 million cases of the cold and nobody dies from the cold, then who cares? I mean, yes, I'm not going to say that it isn't unpleasant. I don't enjoy getting the cold, but that doesn't mean that you completely change and remake all of American society. And I realize I may be sounding like the just the flu people back in March of 2020. The difference now is that this is actually a lot more analogous to the flu. And in many cases, the flu is actually more dangerous to a lot of different populations,

specifically children. So you put all that together. We just need to reframe kind of how we are. And I wish that the administration and the government would reject this new mindset to people. Now, to your point around the travel restrictions, in a certain point, maybe it is kind of theater. Let's put this up there on the screen. U.S. will bar travelers from eight countries in Southern Africa. Well, we already know that we basically got Omicron almost certainly here in the U.S. Even Dr. Fauci said that it's all across the developed world. We saw in Delta how quickly that came here. And we also saw in terms of coronavirus itself. I mean, there were cases

in the West as early as November of 2019. So these things go very well below the radar before the confirmed cases even pop up. Will it even work? I mean, how feasible it is in the long term, I don't really know. As I was saying earlier, maybe part of living with an endemic disease is realizing that at a certain point, you just have to say, look, we've got great therapeutics. We've got the vaccine if you want it, if you want a booster and you think it's right for you, go ahead. But we just have to realize this is probably what the future looks like. And I'm very dismayed because as you're pointing to around South Africa, they have 35%. Well, if Africa's at six, getting six to 30 sounds pretty good, right? A little bit of a better, that's 20% of what? Hundreds of millions

of people. That's actually a lot. And it reduces the amount of churn and perhaps even the creation and where variants can jump. And then even then, you still have a bad situation where variants can evolve and create the future. So really what I'm saying is that this is actually a preview of the future, of Omicron, of what it looks like eventually living with an endemic disease. Most people on Earth are probably going to get COVID and have antibodies of some sort, having therapeutics, vaccines, boosters, and all that will make it so that it won't kill you. And I think that that's probably the best outcome that we can hope for. Sagar, you have done

international travel in the COVID era. Yes, twice. Just got back from Costa Rica. Because the provisions already in place are pretty stringent. So it's not like it's just all willy-nilly. Anyone can fly's like coughing and sneezing and has a fever. Tell people what the procedures are. So I can tell you, I just got back. What you have to do is you have to get a test. If you're vaccinated, you're allowed to get that test three days before you enter the United States. You have to give that to the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol.

They won't even let you board the flight. It depends. Whenever you're going to other countries, it's actually much more stringent. So I just went to Costa Rica. To enter Costa Rica, I had to upload my vaccination card to their government website. Then I had to show them a QR code whenever I entered their country, talk about contract tracing, exactly where I was sitting on the plane, every place that I've been to. When I went to France, obviously, they have the most stringent where you cannot even eat out in a restaurant. I was checked at

almost every, even in very small towns in France, like Amiens or something, way up north in a cafe or something. Everybody is checking your vaccination card against your passport, all of that. So yeah, I mean, look, we have pretty stringent procedures. If you're not vaccinated, then you actually have to have a test within 24 hours to enter the United States. And I think it might have to be a PCR. They won't even let you do like a rapid antigen test. So that's just, I've done it twice now in the COVID environment. This is what it's like. It is actually pretty stringent, you know, entering the US and other countries are even more stringent than us. I think, you know, maybe that's just how it's going to be from the future. I think that's okay. And there are

actually a decent amount of procedures in place. Many other countries are a lot more hardcore than us. I found that out in terms of mask wearing and procedure and all of that. So for those of you complaining, it could be a lot worse. It could be a lot worse. Well, a lot of people are pointing out, we'll just cover this here too. President Biden's stance towards travel bans is a little different now than back at the beginning of the pandemic. You can see him there on the right saying, this is when Trump instituted a travel ban right at the beginning of the pandemic. A wall will not stop the coronavirus. Banning all travel from Europe or any other part of the world will not stop it.

This disease could impact every nation and any person on the planet, and we need a plan to combat it. Of course, you know, and raised other concerns about the travel ban at the beginning. And frankly, I mean, he's kind of right at that point. Now the travel ban, a lot of experts are saying this is effectively theater. It's not really going to do anything. And you're ultimately punishing South Africa, which did the right thing and was very effective in sequencing and tracing these viruses so that they could alert the world to this new variant. So like I said, we're going to talk to Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, get his view on all of this, and he can break down for us more specifically

what we know about this thing. But this is the top line information that you need to know. Variant of concern, but we don't know a whole lot about it at this point is effectively where we are. There you go. All right. Interesting news from the president about his Thanksgiving. Well, we had to keep everybody updated. What is Joe Biden doing for Thanksgiving? Most of the time they go home. You know, he's actually been to Delaware. He goes

there all the time. No worries. You know, that's where he's from. But President Biden chose to spend Thanksgiving in a little bit of a different environment, more befitting a man of his stature. Let's put this up there on the screen. He has decided to spend his Thanksgiving meal at the $30 million Nantucket home of private equity billionaire David Rubenstein. Interesting. So the White House confirmed that Biden and his family would spend the long weekend at Carlisle Group co-founder David Rubenstein's $30 million property. He would be traveling abroad and he would not be at the dinner. So he went ahead and said, oh, well, Mr. President, you are very welcome to sit here at our Nantucket estate, of which we

won't be at. It is completely at your discretion. These are the types of just ridiculous and naked displays where Biden feels as if he will suffer no consequence while people are having the most expensive Thanksgiving meal of their lives. And undoubtedly, I bet it was a topic of discussion. Hopefully, you all followed Crystal's lead and did not bring up anything annoying and political. That was controversial, by the way, that day. Oh, really? I'm surprised by that. I lived by it at my own meal. And I think it's very important, though, that people, what were people talking about? Inflation and gas prices, probably schools as well. If you put those three together, to the extent that anyone was talking about current events, it was those. And while he's doing that, he's dining at the home of this private equity billionaire. I'd also question, did he pay him rent? Because I seem to recall,

who was that idiot, the EPA administrator, Scott Atlas or whatever? No, not Scott. Sorry. Scott Pruitt, that was the name, the EPA guy who ended up staying in somebody's house and not paying him any rent. Anyway, when you're a government official, you're not supposed to actually take these types of in-kind benefits. Although I guess when you're the president, you're exempt as we found out under Trump. So I guess it's cool. But yeah, I mean, I think it's a pretty disgusting display of wealth to be in a $30 million mansion at the home of a private equity billionaire, not even in your own house, nakedly shoving it in people's faces. He was hanging out at all of these like rich stores in Nantucket. And look, once again, like if you're a private

citizen, fine, but you're the president of the United States. He's hanging out there with Hunter Biden and, you know, his grandchildren going to like these different shops. Clearly following in Obama's footsteps. Yeah, following, exactly. Obama actually lives on Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts. So, you know, it's the perfect display. And at the very same time, Crystal, the Politico, you know, put out kind of a Thanksgiving special. Let's put this up there on the screen. The Democratic brand is broken. Really? The infrastructure bill isn't fixing it.

I wonder why. Now, what I love here is that they focus on a focus group actually put together by Third Way. Now, as you said, you know, you may have an ideological difference with Third Way, but the focus groups are actually pretty good. And these are just direct quotes, you know, from people in suburban Virginia. And what they point to time and time again is that even with the Democrats, you know, expecting to lose their house and more is that it is going to be even worse than we could possibly imagine. Because what the focus group point to is that voters believe the economy is bad. No amount of stats can change their mind in terms of the White House and Kamala Harris, you know, putting out these ridiculous charts being like, actually, everything is fine.

They say jobs numbers, wage numbers, the number of people will put back to work. It does not move them. Instead, we should still talk about the things like more wages and back to normal, but realize that they don't have impact whenever people see help wanted signs all over Main Street, restaurant sections closed for lack of workers, rising prices and supply disruptions, even where things are getting better. Biden does not get the credit. And what they actually point to within is the disconnect between the stuff they feel is going on in your life and then all the stuff happening here in Washington. Cinema, tax increase on this, no carried interest loophole. Also, none of the social programs will really impact you all that much because of all the means testing, all that stuff. Very hard to understand. So irrelevant. At the same time, pump, more expensive. Gas station, more expensive. Exactly what's going

on in day-to-day life. I mean, I'm not the only guy who's seen this. You go all over this country, you can't go into a place without a help wanted sign or something like that. And it's just completely disrupting the way that life was supposed to be. Biden said we go back to normal. It's not normal. And you put that all together, especially with the lack of legislative vision from the White House. And what? I mean, he's been almost president for almost a year at this point. It's on you now, dude. Well, the funniest part is they said most of the voters Third Way spoke with in suburban Virginia focus groups, according to the report, quote, could not articulate what Democrats stand for. They could also not say what they are doing in Washington besides fighting.

The irony of Third Way putting out this report and doing these focus groups as they are part of the reason that Democrats stand for nothing, like their answer to this would be like, that's why they should do even less. That's why they should means test even more. But the insights for the voters are very interesting.

Look, as we've been saying here, the biggest problem for Democrats honestly is optics like Pelosi officiating the Ivy Getty wedding or Biden at a freaking private equity billionaire's house on Thanksgiving. I mean, you could not possibly write a better attack ad for how out of touch this man has become from the people that he was sent there to serve. And it's not as if Carlisle Group doesn't have impending business before the federal government. This is something that our friend David Sirota pointed out, which was quoted in this piece, quote, President Biden is vacationing at the Nantucket home of a billionaire whose private equity firm is right now lobbying to shape Biden's final Build Back Better bill. It's already very let them eat

cake for a president to hang out at a billionaire's Nantucket pad, but it is some real Gilded Age shit when the billionaire's private equity firm has all sorts of interests before the government right now. So it's not just the optics, it's also the corruption. It's also the fact that, I mean, this just underscores, again, who our political class actually serves, who they see themselves as part of their social circle, who they're socializing with. And human beings being how they are, those are then the views that end up shaping your thoughts and ultimately the legislation that is passed. That's why this is such a problem. And just to show you, I mean, Glenn Youngkin, who just got elected in Virginia, was a Carlyle Group executive for decades. Yes, I was just about to point this out. And Terry McAuliffe, who was running against him as the Democrat,

couldn't point it out because he had made massive investments in Carlyle Group. And they are just as nefarious as your average private equity firm. In fact, they first came to major public prominence thanks to Michael Moore. That's right. Fahrenheit 9-11. I'll never forget it. Pointing out that George Bush Sr. was on their board. They profited massively because they had these big investments in the defense industry when we decided to go to war on false pretenses in Iraq and also, you know, in Afghanistan to get the bad guys. So, yeah, those are the types of entities and individuals that both our parties love to surround themselves with and ultimately aspire to be part of that class rather than

aspiring, I don't know, to maybe serve you and make sure you can enjoy a nice Thanksgiving dinner as well. Yeah, you can't create a better uniparty meme than Glenn Youngkin, the recently governor-elect of the state of Virginia, being the former co-CEO of the Carlyle Group, while the Democratic president of the United States staying in the Carlyle Group founder's home in Nantucket. Oh, that's too good, right? I mean, that just goes to show you where we are. It's like you can't escape because these people have tentacles and hands in both parties, and they're making sure that their interests are absolutely represented whenever it comes to the table. And there's just nothing that you can really get. There's no way to skirt it on the national political stage, on the current environment.

And I really got to say, like with Biden, do you not think the man would have better political instincts in this? What is wrong with you? You know, if you go and you read like Bill Clinton, I read Bill Clinton's biography. He was having a really tough time in 93 in terms of his political environment. Very similar, actually. And they were like, look, sir, people think you're out of touch. People think that you're pushing stuff that is not in line with us. So we need to get your ass out west and put you on a horse. Really? Yeah. He did like a horse riding thing put you on a horse. Really? Yeah, he did like a horse

riding thing where he wore a hat. It looked ridiculous, okay? He's a Yale-educated Georgetown lawyer, which is fine. You know, he happens to have an accent. But at the same time, they at least tried to put him in, you know, to try, at least tried to make him seem as if he was more, you know, in tune with the average American. I mean, white working class people are the people who elected Bill Clinton too, ultimately. And so you look then at Biden and he just doesn't care. I mean, the pretense at the lowest point in your presidency to go and have vacation and hang out at a billionaire's house in Nantucket, I can't imagine, you know, in terms of the optics. It's such a dumb move.

Obama at least waited until he left office to start doing this type of stuff. But, you know, it's a mask off moment. It just shows us who these people really are. Indeed. Speaking of masks off and people being who they really are, CNN has a wonderful op-ed saying, you know, Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg, they should put all this infighting and tension aside and they should just join up together in what this individual describes as a dream ticket for the Democratic Party. Let's go ahead and throw this op-ed up on the screen. This is amazing. Just the brain worms that have infected people with influence in the Democratic Party. Let me read this tweet. Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg could agree to run together in 2024 if Biden does

not run again, giving the Democratic Party a very strong ticket that would seem like a natural continuation of Biden's first term. Some of the details here, I mean, it just is a perfect case study of the foolish direction that they have taken the Democratic Party in. So the case here is basically like, oh, well, they have these different demographic identities and, oh, they hail from different parts of the country. To the extent that any sort of ideology is brought up here, they're saying, look, the right wing has tried to paint Harris as being on the far left, but that attack never got much traction. So making the case that somehow Kamala and Pete are going to be the ideological dream ticket also of the nation at large, which reminded me of the study we covered from Jacobin, which said actually that lane they occupy of the woke corporatist is the worst possible lane that you could be in. When they asked all these different voters, like, do you like this candidate versus this candidate and gave them the messaging that was literally based on Kamala Harris. And I think it was Beto, not Pete Buttigieg, but based on Kamala and Beto, That was the type of candidate, the woke corporatist candidate, that people hated

the most. So they want to put them together on one ticket, which is incredible. He writes this individual, Lincoln Mitchell, Harris Buttigieg could turn out to be a dream ticket for the Democrats while simultaneously avoiding a potentially damaging dynamic, both within the administration and any possible Democratic primary. God forbid we have any democracy and let voters really have a say about who they may want to represent them next. We can't possibly have that. It's very important in order to highlight this stuff because people in Washington are becoming increasingly aware as they are leaking to the Washington Post as Joe Biden's own presidential campaign co-chair, Chris Dodd, and longtime friend in the Senate says that he may not, or he's like, I hope he runs again,

aka saying, you know, it's still a totally up in the air possibility. There are real discussions happening right now in DC, looking at the president's approval ratings, looking at his very obvious, you know, kind of checking out at the very top of the job and saying, okay, like we really, really have to prepare for the reality that he may not run again in 2024. Back in 2016, he chose not to run for personal reasons. It is not outside the realm of possibility. I mean, look, the man, I think last week turned like 79 years old. Like he's really old. And look, it's not an ageist thing to point to an actuarial table or point to statistics or point to the general knowledge that people are not generally functioning

at their best when they reach the very, very end of the bell curve whenever it comes to their life. And so Buttigieg and Kamala are very aware right now, this is their moment, the internal fight within the party. Crystal, you'll remember this, which is that in the post-Obama 2012 years, by 2013, it was clear Hillary was getting a lock on everybody. That was three years out from the nomination. She retires from the State Department, obviously Benghazi, all of that. The real moment for her is that she was going around, lining up every Democratic consultant, nuking any possible contender against her, lining up the right people. She had that testimony or whatever in front of the Benghazi hearing, and everyone was like,

yes, queen, even though I still don't really understand how that came out. And then that put her forward for the 2015 announcement that she's officially running for president. These things start years early. And that's exactly in the cycle of where we are. And Buttigieg, in particular, is trying to both play that game but also tell the White House, no, no, no, no, no, no. I don't have my hands on this. So let's put this up there. The Buttigieg presidential buzz hit the White House. Now, he wants you to believe his eye isn't on the future.

This is from Alex Thompson. He's a great reporter. And what he points out there is that he says, while Buttigieg says he's not contemplating the race, others are imagining it for him. Now, nobody in the West Wings currently shuts that down. It's very open. So that is very important, which is that Buttigieg is trying to signal to the White House, no, no, no, don't worry, I'm not running. But the people in the White House are much more open to his type of run as opposed to their own vice president, who is a total disaster. And what I also love is that the vice president's staff is playing all sorts of identity politics. Check this one out. The chatter has frustrated some staffers of color who see it as disrespectful to Kamala Harris and think senior

officials should tamp it down. I mean, it's not disrespectful to look at a public poll and say, this lady is not winning anything. And it ain't nothing to do because of the color of her skin. It's got a lot more to do with the fact that she just seems like an odious person and is a terrible politician. I mean, these are very, very longstanding problems that she has, not standing for anything, always trying to rebrand, just being and remaining probably one of the worst politicians on the national stage since Hillary Clinton. But the lockup, I don't think we can discount this, Crystal, for the people who are in politics, which is she could use identity politics to put a freeze on the race and on all

the consultants trying to accuse them of being racist or whatever to lock up her nomination. So this is a real battle that is happening right now in DC that prepares the stage for just wait. If he doesn't run in 2024, these are the very likely two options they're going to put forward. Kamala Harris can never fail. She can only be failed, according to her and her staffers. It's just always somebody else's fault. They're not supporting her enough. She's being treated poorly by the media. That was the most insane thing to me in the Democratic primary. They're like, the media is so mean to her. I'm like, what are you talking about? Like, they propped you up. They wanted to make you happen.

They tried so hard to make you happen. And people just weren't there for it. The White House clearly realizes, and Democratic operatives clearly realize they have a big problem here because they know Kamala Harris is a proven loser at this point. I mean, just the politics of that are what they are. Very hard to see how that gets turned around. And yet you do have this issue now of, you know, the moment you try to introduce an open primary and put forward, God forbid, Pete Buttigieg or whatever other terrible candidate they want to try to replace her with, that they are going to have an issue with people saying this is racist, this is sexist, that you're trying to push the first black woman vice president.

You're trying to push her aside in order to get your, you know, whoever your white guy candidate of choice is. And I guess Pete being, you know, the first gay president or whatever, I guess that's not enough to trump the identity. I mean, this stuff is all just so ridiculous. But the real problem is the fact that they are trying once again to shut down any sort of a democratic process for voters in a democratic primary to maybe sort out for themselves. That's true. Who they would like to ultimately have at the top of the ticket. The extremely depressing thing for me is that I

have been racking my brain for a single candidate that I would actually be like excited about. And it's pretty hard to come up with one. I mean, there are some that I'd be like, OK, they're OK. They're not bad. Like that would probably be a better direction than Pete or Kamala. But when we talk about what voters actually would like to see from the Democratic Party, and again, that Jackman study shows the sort of populist progressive, there's almost no one who occupies, like Bernie Sanders is like the only person who occupies that lane, and he's like 115 now.

I was going to say he's like 99. Yeah, so I mean, he's like the only one who fits that mold. You could maybe say Sherrod Brown. Yeah, maybe. You could possibly say John Fetterman, maybe, in Pennsylvania. He's very identitarian, though. I mean, he's trying to win the primary with these Philly suburban Y moms, so I get it. But, I mean, the man can't go a second without saying the word LGBTQ. He leans into that lane for sure.

And, again, from that study, it's not that you have to throw racial justice on it. Not at all. Actually, you know, support for civil rights and racial justice is very popular among gettable voters in the working class, including the white working class. But they want to feel like you're focused on those bread and butter issues that are really going to make a difference in their life. And I don't think that Kamala Pete is the dream ticket that apparently Democratic operatives have decided the nation is yearning for. Imagine having to choose between Kamala Pete and Donald Trump. That's what they're setting us up for. Okay.

All right. Yeah, if it's Kamala and Pete, I mean, Trump's going to give— He will be president. There's zero question about it. He's the favorite at this point. Who is going to— You know, I mean, even if Biden, even if they can like prop him up and roll him out again, his approval rating is such trash. If they redid the election today,

I think Trump would win. I think I easily think Trump would win. Yeah. I mean, I don't see any, any possible contender right now who could beat him. Although I do, and I have said this before, never underestimate Trump's stupidity and inability to screw things up. Right. He's also an old man. And so, you know, he portrays a lot more vigor, I would say, than Joe Biden does, but he is also up there on the actuary tables. Anyway, we have some more terrible news for you this time out of Amazon. This story is so atrocious and so egregious. We had to bring it to you. Listen, we have covered many times the abhorrent way that Amazon treats their

workers, especially their workers who decide they might want to agitate for a union. Just ask Chris Smalls, who we had on the program just, was that just last week that we had Chris on, to give us an update on the efforts there to try to unionize Amazon. So let's go ahead and throw this tear sheet up on the screen. A man named Daquan Smith, who is 25 years old and who has struggled in his life and is currently living in a homeless shelter, got a job at the Amazon warehouse on Staten Island. And he really worked hard to make it to that job. It took up to three hours on public transit from that homeless shelter in order to get to work. He was very enthusiastic about his job. He was also very enthusiastic about supporting unionization

efforts within that Amazon warehouse, something, again, that we just talked to Chris Smalls about last week. And so even though he's doing a good job at work and he's on time and he's working really hard and he's very enthusiastic, because he's, according to him, talking up unions as well and educating his fellow workers there about their rights and about the reasons why they should consider joining up with a union, he starts getting attention, negative attention, from his supervisors. They start pulling him aside. He starts getting criticized for the job that he's doing, even though, you know, by his account, he's doing everything by the book the way that they want him ultimately to do. It comes to a head on October 23rd. His supervisor asked to speak with him about his performance. He refused, Dequan Smith refused to meet with that supervisor unless another employee was present. He showed his supervisor a card listing his rights, the legal protections that guarantee unionized employees the right to union representation during an investigatory interview.

According to Smith, he said, I just let him know I had rights and you can't just talk to me like that. But he just looked at me and laughed at me and laughed at my union card. After that, the supervisor sent him home for the day. Three days later, he found he could not log into his account on Amazon and he had been fired. He says because he was trying to unionize. That is blatantly illegal. It is also not the first time that Amazon has been accused of this type of illegal retaliation against workers, including Christian Smalls, but not just him, other workers

at their plants across the country, because they are so desperate to keep anyone from agitating for a union at their warehouses. So how disgusting is that, that you have, and at the same time, they're out there saying, oh, we've got this labor shortage problem, et cetera, et cetera. We have a tear sheet of that, actually. We've got a tear sheet of that. This is one of their top executives, Dave Clark. He's the CEO of Amazon's worldwide consumer business, complaining about the tight labor market,

saying it poses a challenge for the world's largest online retailer. So they're not really in a position to just like willy-nilly fire people because they don't like what they're saying on the shop floor. That just shows you even more how desperate they are to tamp down any talk of unionization.

And so fortunately, this man, Dequan Smith, he was able to get another job, this one, I think, with FedEx. But the fact that he was fired when he's struggling to get back on his feet, commuting to work three hours from a homeless shelter, it's just absolutely disgusting and shows you how hollow all of their words about Black Lives Matter really are. Yeah. And you can see here, they claim that he was fired for excessive tardiness. And he says,

look, I mean, he and his lawyer, obviously they probably would say that, but they say that that's obviously not the case. But we saw in the specifics of the Smalls case that they can claim, oh, he was showing up to work. You know, he was endangering people from COVID. They don't actually have to prove anything. And then their own leaked documents show that things went all the way up to the head of the very top of Amazon and that they wanted to portray him as stupid and they thought that he wouldn't be taken seriously by the media and that it would become a war over, he said and Amazon said, and that they would probably prevail. Now, in that case, they weren't necessarily wrong, even though Smalls obviously did come out of it

and he's got now a thriving operation to try and unionize Amazon and all that. But how many people still talk about it? I mean, Amazon stock is up by what, like 2,000% or whatever since that happened? 200%, I think, since that incident occurred. Today, they know that all they have to do is claim that he was excessively tardy. They can say that this is a company policy. And imagine trying to prove it. How do you prove that? Because they'd have to take this multi, you know, trillion dollar company

almost at this point to the court and then prove, you know, with through discovery and all they would cost and they would drag it through court for a million years. And by that time, you know, the guy is literally homeless. I mean, like, what kind of power is he supposed to have? They're just going to completely brush him off. This is just the latest in a slew. Like, we cover a lot here of the great resignation, of increased worker power, of Target not opening on Thanksgiving, of Walmart not opening on Thanksgiving, of the ability for people to have mobile capital and have higher wages. And it's almost a blue-collar phenomenon. But people should not be mistaken that the deck is still very much in the favor of the boss class. We have a latest example.

We'll put this up there from Reuters, which is Kellogg is planning right now to permanently replace some workers as a strike enters its eighth week. So Kellogg openly trying to basically just say, screw you to their striking workers, who, once again, when you really look into what a lot of these people are asking for, it ain't much. Like we're talking in many cases around like a 10% raise.

What was it at McDonald's where everybody walked out? They were making like $9.75. They're like, all we want is $10.50. They wanted a quarter. I think it was $10. Okay, they wanted like a $10 wage. $10. Which the company then ended up having to pay in order to get another workforce hired.

I mean, just totally foolish stuff. And yeah, I mean, permanently hiring scabs to break this strike that has been ongoing. The big thing that these union members, as we've seen in other instances with John Deere and other places across the country, what they're concerned about is this two-tier employment system that says some workers get this package of benefits and wages and other workers that came in later get this package, which is intentionally designed. This was a terrible innovation of the 90s, as so many things were, in order to break solidarity so that you don't have one unified workforce. They've come together to say, we're done with this two-tier system. You made record-breaking profits last year. We think you can afford more. We know you can afford more, and we deserve better. And their response to that is just to

effectively replace them, permanently replace them. Yeah. I mean, it really is terrible. And it just goes to show you the lengths that these people are up against and what are they supposed to do? You know, in a lot of these cases, they are fighting, you know, in the Kellogg case for against the two-tier system where they have old workers who are grandfathered in to more generous benefits on strike because they want better benefits for everybody thinking that right now is the time. I will say this to Kellogg. Look, the public is not on your side. I mean, we saw this in John Deere. You should think about this. In places like Iowa and elsewhere in the Midwest, not necessarily places, you know, hotbeds of Democratic support

or whatever, the public support for the striking workers of John Deere was sky high. I mean, it was like two thirds. And many said, yeah, I don't care, you know, if we're not able to get our machines or whatever, it's messed up. These people are not being treated properly and are not ultimately getting their wage. And John Deere ultimately had to pay out big time to these workers very much at the support of the farming community and others who were around them. So I would caution Kellogg from thinking that this stuff will work out in your favor. But that doesn't mean that the deck isn't still stacked in their favor. Oh, absolutely.

And that they will probably get away with it. That's the sad part. You know, the interesting thing with John Deere is not only did the workers who were on strike, not only did they get a big raise and better benefits and they got rid of a third tier, so at least they're down back down to two tiers. But after the strike ended, John Deere also lifted the wages across the board. I think it was 8% of all of their salaried workforce as well. That's a big one. Because I'm sure the salaried workforce who were thrown into the a big one. Because I'm sure the salaried workforce, who were thrown under the front lines

and driving tractors into walls and stuff to try to break the strike, I'm sure they looked at the deal that the blue collar workforce got and said, hey, wait a minute, what about us? Why don't you cut us in on the deal as well? This is all just to show you that when labor stands in solidarity and wins gains, even if it's just

at one plant, it can ripple not just, you know, throughout that entire workforce, throughout that region, because other employers then have to compete with those wages. It lifts the floor for absolutely everyone, which is really important. But yeah, I mean, bottom line is the deck is still incredibly stacked. And it's not an accident that back when the union movement was much more pervasive and much more powerful, you also had a lot more class politics. Now there basically is no class politics in the country. I mean, the level of correlation between working class people voting together in any sort of unified way, I mean, that's basically been destroyed. It's not an accident that that decline has happened as the union movement has been decimated. So the last thing that they want to see is any sort of resurgent labor movement. And it looks for the first time in a long time like that is at least a possibility. I'm not going to say it's an inevitability or it's here, it's happening or anything like that. But at least there's a glimmer of possibility of a resurgent labor movement at this point. Very interesting.

Well, obviously, we're going to keep you guys updated as quickly as possible. Okay, let's move on to this. We always save the best segments for last. So two of our favorites, Hillary Clinton and Rachel Maddow came together. We always look to Hillary's very wise, astute political analysis. In Real Talk, though, this is a very important segment because it shows you the mindset of the Democratic elite blaming voters for not getting on their knees and thanking them enough for all of the supposedly great things that they have done. They are blaming voters for Biden's unpopularity and not taking any responsibility themselves. She's basically a mouthpiece for that mindset,

which is very much inside the White House right now. Let's take a listen. You know, democracy is messy. You know, a lot of people got, oh, I think kind of frustrated looking at the messy process of legislation. And they didn't really appreciate that within a year, the Biden administration has passed two major pieces of legislation through both the House and the Senate. They've passed another major piece through the House that will soon be in the Senate. By any measure, those are extraordinary accomplishments, and they really will help many millions of Americans with health care and prescription drug prices, as well as climate change and so much else. But because of the way we are getting our information today and because of the lack

of gatekeepers and people who have a historic perspective who can help us understand what we are seeing, there is a real vulnerability in the electorate to the kind of demagoguery and disinformation that, unfortunately, the other side is really good at exploiting. The other side is good at exploiting. It's the same old thing. It's a vast right-wing conspiracy. This is so weird. Every time you blame the voter, oh, they're getting frustrated because they see this and they don't appreciate it. They don't appreciate all he's done for them. Peasants, you know, throwing things at them. Here's the voter. Oh, they're getting frustrated because they see this and they don't appreciate it. They don't appreciate all he's done for them.

Peasants, you know, throwing things at them. Here's the thing. What did we just hear from former President Barack Obama? Which is, hey, the other side's worse. You know, you people aren't appreciating enough. 2016, you didn't come out to vote whenever I told you to vote. I said my name was on the ballot. Y'all didn't show up. Y'all are getting tired.

I mean, every time. Will any of these people take responsibility? Why can't Biden come out and say, look, I know you guys are frustrated. I know it feels like what's happening right now in Washington is disconnected from your life. And here's what I'm going to try and do about it. X, Y, and Z. Just saying, I understand why you're frustrated, would lift people's spirits and at least make them feel as if the country isn't just completely in chaos. And yet, that's the problem. I mean, and meanwhile, he's hanging out in Nantucket billionaire's house for Thanksgiving. It's like,

I don't know what these people are doing, but this is the mindset, all the very top of the Democratic Party right now. She is the queen of blame shifting. I mean, this is really, like the Democrats, this is something they really excel at. Never having to ever reassess what they're doing. And Hillary Clinton and her husband, I mean, they are the authors of this style of democratic politics that we are still living in. So I think that's why she's become so good in a certain way at always having some excuse of why this failure is not our fault. The fact that we've gotten decimated in rural America, that's really not our fault. The fact that we lost in Virginia state that Biden just won by 10, that's really not our fault. The fact

that we're going to lose the House and probably the Senate coming up in the next midterm election is really not our fault. It's that the voters don't appreciate how great we ultimately are when I mean, we just read the third way focus groups. Voters don't even know what you're doing other than fighting with each other. And don't care about the things that they do know. Yeah, I don't care about that. Right. And so, I mean, at some point, don't you have to do a little self-reflection about like, oh, maybe our priorities aren't right. Maybe we're not selling this in the right way. Maybe we took what was an incredibly popular package of things that actually would have benefited people and week after week, like shot the most popular provisions in the head

to the point that what's left is, yeah, not really going to land with much of anything for voters. Like, you know, infrastructure, that's good. It's important. Of course, what they passed is still wildly insufficient for actually our needs. But in terms of helping people right now today, they've abandoned some of their most popular promises that would have actually impacted. So, you know, it's this whole idea of like, oh, we've tried nothing and it hasn't worked. What else can we do? It's completely absurd.

There was another part I actually listened to this whole interview, by the way. You're welcome, guys. I'm so sorry. And I have to say, so my first instinct is always just like, oh, I don'd have to hear from this individual. But to your point, I actually think it's really important because she does have her finger on the pulse of a certain type of democratic elite and their thinking. And she says things out loud that sometimes they're more skilled at sort of couching in different language. One of the things that she said in an endless like back and forth between her and Rachel about disinformation and misinformation, Russia and whatever, is she said that people who support Trump, they don't like the world we're living in. And I just really thought about that. And it connected for me back to

after she lost and said, oh, the places that are doing well, they voted for me. As if that was a good thing that you are losing all of the people who feel like they don't like the world that we're living. They feel like they're not doing well, that they're not succeeding. Those are the people that are supposed to be gravitating towards the Democratic Party. Those are the people you're supposed to have an answer for, of how you're going to make the world better. There are lots of good reasons why people may not like the world that we're living in when they see the billionaire class, you know, getting away with everything and getting tremendously rich. And they see year after year, their own household budgets stagnant or shrinking, less and less hope for their own children, all of those things. So I also thought that was the sort of

profoundly interesting comment and revealing comment that she made there too. Well, it's true. And look, I can't find it right now. I was just looking for it. But our, you know, Batya Sargon, who we've had on the show, she just tweeted out a piece from the New York Times where they're talking exactly about this. And what they point to specifically is that the world is working if you are upper middle class and educated in college, specifically a top 50 or so university. Your world's actually not that bad for you. You can buy a house, you have money, you have a decent amount of savings, all that. The problem is for the rest of the people who didn't attend or at

least graduate a four-year college degree institution or are straight up working class. That's like two thirds of the entire country. Zero representation in media, pop culture, economy, democratic elites, anywhere. By the way, not in the Republican elites either, just to be very specific. And that's the problem, which is that when she points to people don't like the world that we're living in, you people run that world. So no, no, no, no way. Of course they don't like the world that you're living in. And even worse, that's why they blame you. People elected Biden for a very specific reason. They thought he's not like the rest of those people. He's so old. He actually is part of that old type establishment and talks in this way that, you know, pretended at least to

hear us out. And we felt if we had some kinship with the man. Now, obviously he's degraded significantly there over time. And, you know, he's rolled out, you know, very every once in a while on all of that. But when you put it together, his core strength was, I care about people like you. That's actually probably the most significant and important question in all of politics. What did we cover more recently in the Politico poll where they actually tested Biden's personal favorability? And whether you like it or not, this stuff matters a lot. And his, I care about people like you, had dropped by like 15 points since the day

that he was elected. And it's for this reason, is that people don't feel he's taking responsibility for the main problems within their life, or they're not even taking responsibility, even pretending to do anything about it. So this is just going to continue to be the pervasive mindset. They could lose like 90 seats in the House of Representatives, and they would still blame the voters, Crystal. I'm really convinced of that. And they're all praying that Trump runs again. Yeah, they are. Because so many Democratic elites and cable news pundits, first of all, they got tremendously wealthy. They got famous.

They wrote books. Like, it was great for them. There were a lot of books. Personally. But also for someone like Hillary Clinton. Oh, it's an amazing excuse. When Trump runs, well, you don't have to do anything but say, well, we're not Trump. You know, that's the way they feel about it.

It's like this gets us off the hook from actually having to deliver anything. And then if people choose Trump, well, we just turn around again and blame the voters. It's their fault. They're bad. They're evil. Has nothing to do with us and our complete failures to live up to any of the promises that we've been making for literally decades to you people. 100%. Crystal, what are you taking a look at? Well, guys, as we've been discussing, the World Health Organization has officially designated Omicron as a variant of concern, and it's already triggering travel bans and reeling the stock market. This new variant was first flagged in South Africa, and the earliest

known case was identified in Botswana, but it has now shown up in places as widespread as Hong Kong, Israel, and the UK. Now, experts are saying it's way too early to panic about Omicron. We just don't know enough to say much about its transmissibility, its severity, how effective the existing vaccines will be in combating it. But there is one thing we can say for certain. The pandemic villains of Big Pharma and Bill Gates have left us much, much more vulnerable to new dangerous variants, potentially keeping us locked in a cycle of forever pandemic. What do I mean? Well, if you were a pharma exec looking to be as evil and greedy as possible without giving a single care about human life, what would you do to maximize the money into your

pockets? You'd make a vaccine that actually works, and then you'd sell it nearly exclusively to the rich world at premium prices. The efficacy of the vaccine would lead to high demand and mean that places like the U.S., Europe, and wealthy nations in Asia would shell out big bucks to secure it for their own population. Meanwhile, the global South, well, they'd be more or less priced out of that market, allowing the virus to continue to circulate rapidly and dramatically increase the chances of new variants that make the original vaccine less effective.

New variants mean new products and endless profits from a rich world, buying up boosters and eventually new vaccine formulations to combat whatever might emerge that leaps the existing vaccines. This, of course, in spite of the fact that taxpayers in some of those rich countries, primarily the U.S., funded the vaccine technology and development to start with. Now, if you were that evil pharma exec, you would see the rich world as your endless piggy bank and the poor world as your endless petri dish, churning out new variants that allow you to cash in on the pandemic indefinitely,

effectively using the unvaccinated developing world as guinea pigs for a sort of natural gain-of-function research on a massive scale. And wouldn't you know it, that's exactly the scenario we're facing right now. Of course, given the gravity of the situation, everyone involved in that heist would need a decent cover story so that public outrage would not spoil their plan. Big Pharma would need a fig leaf of generosity to hide behind so that it wouldn't just be blatantly obvious that they intended to say screw you to most of the world population. Enter one Bill Gates. Now, as we've covered before, Gates, with his billions, effectively runs global public health. No one wants to cross him because they do not want to lose access to his dollars.

And because he's a famous billionaire, he has an incredibly influential megaphone to drive public policy whatever direction he ultimately chooses. He also happened to have made his billions by building a monopoly through abuse of our patent protection laws and therefore has an invested ideological interest in patent protections. So, rather than advocate for the vaccine formulas to be a global public good, enabling mass production at low prices, he instead pushed for the utterly failed COVAX program at the World Health Organization. Now, COVAX is truly Bill Gates' baby from start to finish. Two days after COVID was declared a pandemic, Gates was already meeting with 12 different pharma executives to plan the response.

A Gates-funded nonprofit drove COVAX's creation. It is run by a consortium of Bill Gates-funded nonprofits, the World Health Organization, and UNICEF. Gates personally took a hands-on approach in its development. According to the New York Times, Gates personally fundraised for COVAX from world leaders. He spoke regularly with Fauci. He collaborated with Mitch McConnell and his foundation gave millions to pay McKinsey consultants to staff the whole effort. I cannot possibly overstate how influential this man is in driving global public health right now in this moment. His deep industry ties, his money, his access, his star power, they have all made him the unelected dictator of poor country vaccine access. Even the original

goal of COVAX was wildly insufficient. They wanted to fund enough vaccine doses to vaccinate 20% of the population in poor nations. Ultimately, they would not even come close to achieving that extraordinarily low achievement. And that brings us to the present day. The new variant was first detected in South Africa and Botswana, countries with 35% and 30% of their adult populations vaccinated respectively. And actually, those rates are among the highest on a continent where only 7% of people are fully vaccinated. That is a crime, a crime that was committed by greedy pharma executives, brokered by Bill Gates, and enabled by the cowardice of world leaders. Speaking of which, Joe Biden has offered more hollow words in support of lifting vaccine patent protections. First of all, pretty late to be pushing for something which should have been

obvious from the very beginning. But second of all, his words are just that, words. The U.S. has declined to support a vaccine patent waiver proposal put forward by India and South Africa at the World Trade Organization, failing to put our ample muscle behind a text which has support of 100 countries, Nobel laureates, and human rights organizations. The U.S. has also failed to negotiate a new proposal that might replace that existing proposal to move the process forward. And most importantly, the U.S. has also failed to pressure the European nations, places like Germany, that have been standing in the way

of lifting these protections. Biden can say whatever he wants, but his actions have supported the morally unconscionable status quo. Now, in desperation, South Africa is actually spearheading an effort to recreate Moderna's successful vaccine, trying to use publicly available information to reverse engineer the Moderna formula. Unfortunately, with companies hoarding the secret technology we U.S. taxpayers helped them to create, it will likely take years for the South Africans to be able to crack that code. And so here we are, with the disease spreading unchecked in vast corners of the globe, playing Russian roulette with a deadly pandemic, hoping that the next variant won't send us right

back to square one of the pandemic, all so that a handful of pharma execs can keep their golden goose forever. Sometimes the most shocking and sickening conspiracy theories are the true ones. As I started to research this, you know, we've been covering Bill Gates and his influence. He is even more powerful and influential. 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, the most frustrating part about politics today is selective outrage, especially selective outrage where people have a point. A lot of Democrats actually had a pretty good point during the Trump years. Having the president's son-in-law and daughter work in the White House and major sway over U.S. policy is an outright violation of the spirit of anti-nepotism laws. That their foreign business

entanglements actually were a massive conflict of interest. The problem was, you know, their point evaporates in the eyes of the public when Hunter Biden's business dealings are put in the spotlight. If you can't care about both and see that children of presidents like Chelsea Clinton, Hunter Biden, Ivanka Trump, and other unsavory figures like Jared Kushner are part of a much bigger problem, you're mostly full of crap and you're a partisan actor. I actually care a lot about Hunter Biden's business dealings with China. I believe strongly that it, at least in part, has affected or could affect our president's behavior towards China. However, it is also a massive conflict of interest because there's a lot of folks on the right who during the Trump years and now want to turn a blind eye to Jared Kushner's corruption.

And so to fully establish that this show does not care what party you belong to, if you're corrupt, let's lay out the details. Jared Kushner has apparently been flying all over the Middle East in recent months trying to raise money for a new fund. And he's not just courting money from private individuals. Jared is explicitly trying to get investments from the sovereign wealth funds of Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and the government of Saudi Arabia. Now, this is particularly insane because Jared Kushner actually ran Middle East policy under

the Trump administration and was known for having an incredibly close relationship with Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. So months after the de facto top diplomat to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, Jared Kushner, is now turning around and asking them for tens of billions of dollars to invest, which he, of course, will get a hefty cut of from management fees. This is called straight up pay pay-to-play corruption, no matter what you think, especially given the fact that Trump is almost certainly going to run and probably win again in 2024. This could honestly be worse than Hunter Biden. Hunter, at least, does not have a direct role in the Biden administration. I've actually been to Jared Kushner's office whenever Trump was president.

It is the closest office in the West Wing to the president of the United States for a major aid. And if you consider any of the so-called accomplishments of the Trump administration, Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, letting people out of prison, and the Abraham Accords, all three of those had Jared having a personal role in all of them. Per the New York Times reporting, which has not been denied by Jared, the Emiratis, the Qataris, or the Saudis, the Saudis are actively considering whether or not to invest in Jared's fund, despite his abysmal business record before the White House. Now, why oh why would Saudi Arabia be keeping their options open to invest in Jared? It certainly ain't because he's a good businessman. And here's the worst part. Kushner is not the only player in Trump's direct orbit

who has been profiting off of his time in the White House. Those of you who watched this on Rising might remember when I covered this story of former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin pulling the same move as Kushner, starting a $2.5 billion private equity fund, including with money for the Saudi Arabian government. Mnuchin, of course,

was probably the second most powerful economic official in all of Washington for four years. And months after leaving office, he's padding his $400 million net worth with money from the Saudis. Even worse, while he was Treasury Secretary, he made it a point to attend Saudi Arabia's investment conference called Davos in the Desert multiple times, only skipping it when they were known as a pariah state for like six months after the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. He scratched their back while he was in office. They scratch his now. The difference is they're a medieval kingdom. We're supposed to be a representative democracy. Now what's worse is Mnuchin and Kushner both got Secret

Service protection for six months after leaving office, meaning that both of these gentlemen were being protected on the government dime while they were leveraging their former office status to raise money from the Saudis to make themselves even more wealthy. Look, for the Trump people watching, you should really consider that next time you want to elect a president. You don't just elevate that man, you elevate the coterie of the people around him. Many of you seem to understand that when it comes to Biden. It's not just Biden, right? It's Kamala Harris and Pete and a bunch of other woke idiots who work for him. Well, the same principle applies under Trump.

The president can't possibly run everything. And Trump at this point has proven to have probably some of the worst personnel judgment of any person who's held the office since George W. Bush, and yes, on par with Joe Biden. These are the people that he personally trusted in government, and by proxy, he extended them the public trust. Look at how abuse of that trust to their own personal financial gain is so naked in the open. Keep in mind, in both of these cases, we are already talking about men worth more than $100 million each before they even took office. They could not work a day in their life if they had to. They'd be completely fine, but that's not enough. They always need more. Now look, that's fine if you're in business,

but when it comes to using public connections to earn even more than it's an abuse of power, sadly, I know most of the people on the right won't care about this. They have been too conditioned from liberal hypocrisy. And I get it. But take it from somebody who cares about Hunter Biden too. This type of stuff is poison.

It tells foreign governments like the Saudis, the Emiratis, and the Chinese, our people are for sale. It doesn't matter the administration. It doesn't even matter if it's the guy who chanted drain the swamp when it came to winning the White House. If you really believe in that message, as I did, then you have to care about this type of corruption. And that's the thing, Crystal. I mean, look, it's naked. It's pay to play. There's no other way to describe it. He was friends with the Saudis. And if you want to hear my reaction to Sagar's monologue,

become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Joining us now, we have Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. He is, he has a lot of accolades. He is a public health doctor. He's former director of the Detroit Health Department. He's host of a podcast called America Dissected. He's a sub-stack writer of Incision, professor, a CNN contributor, and also a Bernie bro. Great to see you, doctor. Great to see you, Crystal. Of course. So we just wanted you to sort of break down for our audience what we know at this point about Omicron. Well, we know that this variant has enriched itself extremely quickly in South

Africa, its country of origin, now two weeks from when it was first identified. And enrichment is a fancy way of saying how fast it has become the dominant variant of coronavirus. This is faster than we've seen any variant yet, which suggests to us that it's more transmissible. And if you look at the virus itself, the spike protein, which I'm sure folks have heard a lot about now, this is basically the docking protein where the virus can infect your cells. And it has a number of really concerning mutations on it. In fact, 50 of them borrowing both from Delta, which make it more transmissible, and also from Beta, which can make it more transmissible and potentially more vaccine resistant. Now, a couple of things I want folks to understand. We still don't really know much about how vaccine resistant this variant is. There are studies being done right now to figure that out. And then beyond that, there is no likelihood where it's going to

be fundamentally fully vaccine resistant, that the vaccines are going to be ineffective. It just may make them less effective. The important thing right now is that it is spreading. It's been discovered now in at least 12 countries, including on our own doorstep in Ontario. The high probability is that if it hasn't gotten here, it probably will. And so we really need to be vigilant about this virus. But nothing fundamentally is different today than it was five days ago before we knew about Omicron. You still should be getting your third dose if you haven't gotten it. You should still be wearing masks in public indoor settings. You should still be focused on washing up and keeping distance if you can. But this is concerning and there are several reasons why.

So I'm curious, doctor, in terms of the transmissibility and all that. We said the White House saying they're going to take two weeks. What exactly are we going to be looking for in terms of benchmarks within the virus itself? And what are the policy implications of that? Well, I told you a little bit about the transmission capacity and the efficiency with which this virus enriched in South Africa. Now, in South Africa, there wasn't a high caseload to begin with at the time that Omicron first emerged. What we're going to be looking at is the efficiency of enrichment in other countries that have far higher COVID-19, specifically Delta caseloads. And as we learn more about the transmission of this, we're going to also

want to learn more about the impact of our vaccines. The third question I haven't really quite raised, right? So we talked about transmissibility, we talked about vaccine resistance. The third question I haven't raised yet is severity. There is some circumstantial evidence and yet to be rigorously looked at, but circumstantial evidence that this may not be as severe as Delta, which would be ultimately very good news, given that the key outcomes that we want to prevent aren't just transmission, but also hospitalization in deaths. Those really are the key things. And so we have yet to learn more about this. From a policy standpoint, we should be doing the things that we should have been doing for a while. We can't forget the fact that only about 35% of folks in South Africa specifically have been vaccinated, far less in the seven other countries that have been targeted by the U.S. travel ban. And our failure to get vaccines out there quickly gave disinformation a head start

when it came to convincing people about whether or not to be vaccinated. And we're seeing, unfortunately, history repeat itself. This isn't the first time that there has been a pandemic in South Africa. The first time in recent memory was HIV AIDS. And again, our failure to get antiretrovirals out there or to equip people in those countries to manufacture their own had dire circumstances. We're seeing the same thing here. And then from from a bigger perspective, there are tools that we just haven't used or made good use of in the United States, whether it's genomic surveillance, whether it's mass testing, whether it's it's it's tracing contact tracing people who have been infected, and we should be doing a lot more of those. And from a policy perspective, getting more people vaccinated and investing in those capacities are going to be critical. Yeah, I mean, we talked earlier about the continent of Africa. Overall, South Africa has maybe the highest vaccination rate, certainly among the highest. Overall, the continent has a

six or seven percent vaccination rate. There's a lot of problems, but one of them is the fact that these pharmaceutical companies are keeping secret their formulation. So right now there is an effort in South Africa to try to reverse engineer Moderna's successful vaccine. And if Moderna would actually help them in that process, they could move that forward a lot more quickly and have more production capacity so that people could get vaccinated and that the prices would be much lower than they are currently. That's absolutely right, Crystal. And here's the brutal irony of it. When they were testing their vaccine, Moderna tested in South Africa. The fact that they have not given doses to that country and to the

region is, I think, just a moral travesty and an ethical failure. And you're speaking to a bigger point here, which is that we have not, as a society, decided that the lives of people are more important than the patents of large corporations. And that is keeping millions of people from getting access to vaccines that we know save lives, that we know are safe and effective. And it is contributing to the speed with which Omicron can potentially spread in those societies. And so we have to understand that we are in this thing together. This is a global pandemic after all, and we need to start acting like it. So, so far from a policy perspective, the president has announced travel ban from South Africa and seven other African countries.

Do you think that that's an effective approach from a public health standpoint? Unfortunately, no. This is more, it seems, about PR than it is about public health because these bans are only on foreign nationals. People with U.S. passports are allowed to come through. And as many capacities as Omicron has, I'm rather sure that discriminating by passport is not one of them. And so what's happening right now is that people in South Africa with U.S. passports are scrambling to come home and potentially bring Omicron here. And that's not to say that we should be banning U.S. nationals from coming home. That is to say that we've got to be a lot more thoughtful about our policy when folks get home. Rather than a blanket ban, perhaps we should have been instituting the

kind of policy that they've had in New Zealand, in Australia for a long time, which is to say, when you get off an airplane from another country, you're going to spend 10 to 14 days in quarantine at an offsite location, and then be allowed to enter the general population. That is the kind of policy that really can prevent a new variant and frankly, COVID generally from entering this country by way of plane. And the fact that we have not done that and the fact that we are sort of knee jerk reflexing to banning people from a certain part of the world that we have not done the work of getting vaccines in the first place. That to me, I think is part and parcel of the same kind of unfortunate PR focused reaction and that I think has kept us from getting the vaccines where they need to go and unfortunately

is probably not going to work to keep Omicron from entering our shores. Well, you know. One other question for you on the transmissibility, because I know that was one of the things that really caused concern was how quickly it was able to, they said, out-compete Delta. Now, my understanding was that those numbers were fairly small. And as you were indicating, there wasn't a lot of Delta to be had in South Africa just because their case numbers were small right now. So just talk to us about those numbers and the level of certainty around the transmissibility of this particular variant. Yeah, look, nothing right now is certain.

We really ought to step back and just wait for the science to pan out before we make any conclusions about Omicron. That being said, obviously, what we've learned about COVID is that you've got to act early and you've got to act quickly. I think smart public health-based actions are what we need right now rather than PR driven actions. But what I will say is that we'll learn a lot more about transmissibility as Omicron starts to spread, unfortunately, in a number of societies where you do have a far higher transmission rate of Delta than you did in South Africa. In South Africa, this emerged in a time when COVID cases were relatively low. It did cause a major spike and it did overall out-compete the other variants rather quickly within two weeks from when we identified it. But we're going to learn a lot more as we watch this spread in other European countries and

unfortunately, probably our own and where we do have significant delta spread, that efficiency is going to be put to the test. That being said, if you do look at the biomechanics of this virus, there's a lot of reason to believe that the capacity for transmission is justified. But we'll be learning more, and the science is yet unclear on this particular variant. Well, we really appreciate you joining us, doctor. Actually, it really helps in terms of me wrapping my own head around it. I hope it'll help the audience. So thank you very much, sir. Appreciate it. Yeah, thanks for having me. Absolutely. All right, everybody, thank you so much for watching. I hope you had a wonderful

Thanksgiving holiday. It's really just great to be back. And really, I was just thinking about how awesome it is to have done this show. You know, we're coming up on exactly six months since we met, which is crazy, crazy for that to be the case. You guys showed up for us in a big way. And we continue every single day after the show talking about the big plans that we have here. If you can help us with those plans, we deeply appreciate it. Premium link is down there in the description. It's not just about the benefits and all that stuff that we offer you. It's about how we can create the best show and spread the

word to as many people as possible and really gear up for the midterms. We're just getting started. Yeah. That's really all it is. That is absolutely right. All right. We love you guys. Have a great day. We'll see you back here tomorrow. See you 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

Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. 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, 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. A lot of times big economic forces show up in our lives in small ways. Four days a week, I would buy two cups of banana pudding. But the price has gone up, so now I only buy one. Small but important ways. From tech billionaires to the bond market to, yeah, banana pudding. If it's happening in business, our new podcast is on it.

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